Lost with Lieutenant Pike by Edwin L. Sabin - HTML preview

FOOTNOTES

[A] This was the celebrated Pike’s Peak, of Colorado, later named for Lieutenant Pike, first white man to tell about it.

[B] The fort was near present Pueblo, Colorado. Lieutenant Pike’s squad marched up the west side of Fountain Creek.

[C] They had climbed Cheyenne Mountain, height 9,407 feet, south of Pike’s Peak, which is 14,109 feet in height.

[D] The Lieutenant’s measurement was wrong only about 1,000 feet. The height of the plain where they had been camping was some 4,500 feet, and Pike’s Peak rises 9,600 feet above.

[E] They had met near where present Canyon City, Colorado, is located, on the Upper Arkansas River at the mouth of the famous Grand Canyon of the Arkansas. The gap between the cliffs was the Royal Gorge, in the Canyon.

[F] If this stream was the South Platte River, as the Lieutenant thought, then they had entered into the western part of Central Colorado’s great South Park; very far indeed from any Red River.

[G] That was the remarkable and disappointing fact. From the heads of the Platte River they simply had passed southwestward to the head of the Arkansas, had fought their way down through the Grand Canyon of the Arkansas to the Royal Gorge, and crossing around this were completing a big circle to the Cañon City region again.

[H] These Great White Mountains of Lieutenant Pike are the Sangre de Cristo Range of Southern Colorado. They extend from the Arkansas River above the Grand Canyon clear into New Mexico, and are a noble snowy range indeed. The early Spanish explorers from the south named them Sangre de Cristo, or Blood of Christ, because when first sighted they were bathed red in the reflection from a New Mexico sunset. And this frequently is their sunset coloring today. From the block-house beyond present Cañon City north of the Arkansas River the Pike men had marched south across the river, and probably had followed up Grape Creek, which descends from the east slope of the Sangre de Cristo—the Great White Mountains.

[I] All the Rio Grande River which flows southward through south central Colorado into New Mexico was Spanish territory. The Lieutenant Pike party had crossed the Sangre de Cristo Range and had struck the Rio Grande near present Alamosa in the southern half of Colorado’s great San Luis Park or Valley. The largest of the White Mountains, on the east, was Sierra Blanca (“White Mountain” today), altitude 14,390 feet, ranking third among the peaks of the Rockies. From the camp at the river the Pike men had travelled south, and built their stockade about five miles up the Conejos (Rabbits) River, which enters the Rio Grande from the west. Did he know this to be the Rio Grande del Norte, or did he really think it to be the Red River? Why did he stop in what was certainly Spanish territory? Did he wish to be captured? Or did he only take a chance? Historians have puzzled over this ever since.