18061776 Club
Pike leaves Fort Bellefontaine with twenty soldiers; Washington still has no map of its own territory
Wilkinson orders the lieutenant to chart the Great Plains and find the headwaters of the Red River, three years after the Purchase doubled the nation's size.
Three years after the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, nobody in Washington actually knew what was out there. On July 15, 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike left Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis with twenty soldiers and fifty Osage hostages to return home, ordered by General James Wilkinson to chart the Great Plains and find the headwaters of the Red River. He would spend the next year mapping, negotiating with Native nations, and eventually being captured by Spanish soldiers and taken to Chihuahua for interrogation before it ended…
