Citizen Explorer: The Life of Zebulon Pike by Jared Orsi (review)

He’s the guy Pike’s Peak is named after, right? But nobody knows anything else about him?” This, from my fourteen-year-old, sums up the challenge not only for Jared Orsi but other biographers of the early American republic. Yes, familiar places, battlefields, holidays are named for these people—and clearly they did something at some point, but it was a long time ago in a different world.

In this engaging, readable, and insightful biographical history, Jared Orsi uses Zebulon Montgomery Pike to show skeptical modern Americans like my son why such now-forgotten lives matter. Early Americans worked through values of nation, valor, honor, and loyalty as they wrestled with mundane, ever-present, and exhausting physical challenges. From Pike’s boyhood in a family that fought to create a nation, through his explorations of the upper Mississippi and the continental interior, to his death during the War of 1812, he struggled to come to terms with material demands and the ideals of patriotic service.

Orsi’s argument is fundamental, but too often overlooked. As early Americans sought to balance calories with energy expenditure, labored to overcome bodily fatigue and climatic extremes, dealt with the frustrations of military boredom and distance from spouses, saddled horses or struggled up mountains (or birthed babies or tended sick children—or bore the lash of slave drivers) many of them worked through their relationships to their growing nation. Orsi shows that for people like the ambitious young Lieutenant Pike, who agreed eagerly first to one exploring expedition up the Missouri River then to another out near the headwaters of the Colorado, Arkansas, and Red rivers, service to the American nation was a profound moral commitment. Enduring hardship as he trudged upriver in cold winters (a hardship created in part through his own questionable decisions), Pike braced himself to trek on because that was what strong men did and what a nation demanded of its soldiers. Bewildered to find himself a prisoner of the Spanish but also treated well by them, Pike struggled unconvincingly in his memoir to shore up republican virtue and education against a caricature of despotic rule.

In tracing what physical hardship meant for Americans like Pike, Citizen Explorer stands as a part of a new environmental physical history, bringing an understanding of the material relations of peoples and places to our once-fusty understanding of the early Republic. Orsi frames his book as a set of transects, offering his discussions of the people and events touched by Pike as a historical equivalent of the lines ecologists stretch between two points to understand ecosystems. This biography argues that a crucial struggle of the early nineteenth century was controlling energy better—from the metabolic energy of heaving bodies to the mechanical energy of ships and engines.

The significance of Pike’s journeys lies not in the maps he made or in the negotiations he conducted—few of which were well-informed or successful. Rather, Orsi focuses on Pike’s conviction that hardship in the service of his nation would shape him into the man he needed to be. Orsi shows how Pike’s understanding of virtues of national service and self-improvement shaped his military career, for this is largely a military biography. Such virtues may seem charmingly old-fashioned to many contemporary Americans. Many of us might do well to remember that for military families today, the same values inspire service members on active duty and bolster fortitude among those who remain at home. Values are no less powerful for being immaterial: they are embodied in our time no less than in Pike’s. Orsi’s insistence on how Pike enacted those values is a central insight of his history.

Connections between material world and ideals enable Orsi to exonerate Pike. In 1806 and 1807, Pike blundered about in the Rockies, built a fort, and hoisted the American flag over Spanish territory. Pike had been sent on this mission by...