adds Pike in his own account of this bitter disappointment, "I ordered my flag to be taken down and rolled up, feeling how sensibly I had committed myself."
He was right; the Spaniards had come out to make the intruders their prisoners, for New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas had not yet been ceded to the United States. In vain Pike pleaded that he had been acting in ignorance; he and his people were compelled to accompany the escort to Santa Fé, and though they were treated most courteously and hospitably, rather as guests than as captives, all hope of reaching the Red River had to be abandoned.
After a detention of some months at Santa Fé, already a fine city, situated among the Rocky Mountains on a plain 1,047 feet above the sea-level, the Americans were sent back to their own territory by a circuitous route through New Mexico and Texas, which, though then as now tenanted by the wild and predatory Navajoe, Apache, Utah, Comanche, and other tribes, they found to be traversed by fairly good roads made for the use of missionaries and miners, who had now for more than two centuries been at work in these western wilds.
Pike arrived at Natchitoches on the Red River on the 1st July, after an absence of one year from the United States, and we hear no more of him as an explorer. The work done by him was, however, but the prelude, or rather—as much of it was simultaneous with that of the heroes we are now about to join—the accompaniment of the more extensive expedition under Captains Lewis and Clarke, sent out by the American Government in May, 1804, with orders to explore the Missouri, the chief of all the affluents of the Mississippi, to its source, and then to make their way by the shortest route to the first navigable water on the western side, which they were to trace to the shores of the Pacific.
The new expedition, consisting of some forty-five members—sixteen only of whom were, however, to go the whole distance—and provided with one keel-boat and two open boats, started up the Missouri on the 16th May, 1804. The French outposts of St. Charles and La Charette, in the present state of Missouri, were passed, the exact positions of the mouths of the Osage, Kansas, and Platte tributaries were noted, and the unknown districts occupied by the Ottoe Indians were entered in July. Here the American explorers held a meeting with a number of Ottoe chiefs, who expressed themselves pleased that their land now belonged to the white men from the East instead of the French, and added the naïve hope that their father, President
