$29.95

Hardcover

Published: 01 January 2014

392 Pages | 53 illus.

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780199768721

Also Available As:

Paperback

Paperback

$37.95

17 January 2017

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Citizen Explorer

The Life of Zebulon Pike

Jared Orsi

The first modern account of Zebulon Pike's life of astonishing adventure
Examines his explorations through an environmental lens

$29.95

Hardcover

Published: 01 January 2014

392 Pages | 53 illus.

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

ISBN: 9780199768721

Also Available As:

Paperback

Paperback

$37.95

17 January 2017

Ebook

This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider.

Bookseller Code (02)

Citizen Explorer

The Life of Zebulon Pike

Jared Orsi

Description

It was November 1806. The explorers had gone without food for one day, then two. Their leader, not yet thirty, drove on, determined to ascend the great mountain. Waist deep in snow, he reluctantly turned back. But Zebulon Pike had not been defeated. His name remained on the unclimbed peak-and new adventures lay ahead of him and his republic.

In Citizen Explorer, historian Jared Orsi provides the first modern biography of this soldier and explorer, who rivaled contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Born in 1779, Pike joined the army and served in frontier posts in the Ohio River valley before embarking on a series of astonishing expeditions. He sought the headwaters of the Mississippi and later the sources of the Arkansas and Red Rivers, which led him to Pike's Peak and capture by Spanish forces. Along the way, he met Aaron Burr and General James Wilkinson; Auguste and Pierre Couteau, patriarchs of St. Louis's most powerful fur-trading family, who sought to make themselves indispensible to Jefferson's administration; as well as British fur-traders, Native Americans, and officers of the Spanish empire, all of whom resisted the expansion of the United States. Through Pike's life, Orsi examines how American nationalism thinned as it stretched west, from the Jeffersonian idealism on the Atlantic to a practical, materialist sensibility on the frontier. Surveying and gathering data, Pike sought to incorporate these distant territories into the republic, to overlay the west with the American map grid; yet he became increasingly dependent for survival on people who had no attachment to the nation he served. He eventually died in that service, in a victorious battle in the War of 1812.

Written from an environmental perspective, rich in cultural and political context, Citizen Explorer is a state-of-the-art biography of a remarkable man.

Citizen Explorer

The Life of Zebulon Pike

Jared Orsi

Reviews and Awards

2015 Colorado Book Awards Finalist

"[An] engaging, readable, and insightful biographical history..."--Ohio Valley History

"In bringing the tools of environmental history to bear on themes that have long engaged scholars of the early republic, Orsi gives us a fresh take on Pike's life and the spaces he explored....[Citizen Explorer is] a boundary-crossing model worth emulating."--Western Historical Quarterly

"As Orsi demonstrates in this nifty environmental biography, the true state of Pike and his nation was in flux....Orsi's environmental biography invites further contemplations, large scale and small."--Jon T. Coleman, Environmental History

"This interesting and well-researched book fills the information gap concerning Pike....In Citizen Explorer Jared Orsi, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, finally presents the complex and almost-quixotic life of Pike....In his impressive collection of primary and secondary sources, Orsi was able to discover the hidden life of a simple soldier who rose to the role of brigadier general."--Journal of American History

"With thorough research and clear prose, Jared Orsi insightfully recovers the dramatic life and violent death of a military hero and western explorer of the early republic. In an unstable age of competing regions, Zebulon Pike pioneered a national style of manhood which flourished in, and gave shape to, the American West."--Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832

"Shifting his lens between grand politics and the nitty-gritty of early American life, Jared Orsi gives us a wonderfully real Zebulon Pike, grounded in the material realities that determined personal and social choices in the evolving West. He presents us with Pike as a man of his times, caught by the promises of a nation that couldn't yet deliver on them."--Anne F. Hyde, author of Empires, Nations, and Families, A New History of the American West, 1800-1860