“ONE OF THE GREAT CHRONICLES OF AMERICAN PIONEERING ACHIEVEMENT”: PIKE’S EXPLORATORY TRAVELS THROUGH THE AMERICAN WEST

PIKE, Zebulon Montgomery. Exploratory Travels through the Western Territories of North America: Comprising a Voyage from St. Louis, on the Mississippi, to the Source of That River, and a Journey Through the Interior of Louisiana, and the North-Eastern Provinces of New Spain. Performed in the years 1805, 1806, 1807, by Order of the Government of the United States. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811. Quarto, period style full speckled calf gilt, red morocco spine label, marbled endpapers.

First English edition of this marvelous “chapter in the annals of human daring,” Pike’s explorations of parts of Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, with two engraved maps (one folding).

Pike’s account ranks with that of Lewis and Clark as the most important of the early works on the exploration of western North America. On July 15, 1806, just weeks after completing an eight-month exploration of the high Mississippi and while Lewis and Clark were still wending their way homeward from their journey to the Pacific, 27-year-old Zebulon Pike began his heroic expedition to the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red Rivers and the Spanish settlements of New Mexico. He and his team traveled up the Arkansas River to the site of what is now Pueblo, Colorado, exploring the area and the peak that now bears his name. At the Rio Grande they were captured by the Spanish, who took them to Santa Fe and then to Chihuahua before finally releasing them at the border of the Louisiana Territory. The account of this expedition was first published in a much smaller format in Philadelphia in 1810, but “was so badly organized that in 1811 an English editor, Dr. Thomas Rees, ‘undertook to bring something like cosmos out of this chaos… by weaving as much as he could of the matter of the Appendixes into the main text, or into the footnotes thereto, thereby greatly reducing the bulk of the appendical texts” (Wagner-Camp). “Pike’s narrative marks the beginning of serious American interest in Texas… [The explorers] ‘wrote a chapter in the annals of human daring… and added a volume of abiding worth to the literature of New World exploration” (Basic Texas Books, 163A). The first map shows the interior of Louisiana with a part of New Mexico; the second is a map of the Mississippi River, from its source to the mouth of the Missouri. Bound without the half-title. Wagner-Camp 9:2. Graff 3292. Streeter Texas 1047A. Sabin 62837. Field 1218. Early owner signatures on title page— one of Sir Joseph Sawle Graves-Sawle of Penrice, County Cornwall.

Very faint foxing. A near-fine copy.