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epilogue
- University of Virginia Press
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epilogue the continent from on high Among the highest and easternmost of the Rocky Mountains , Pikes Peak provides a picturesque backdrop to the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Visitors to the mountain each year number fewer than half of those to the nation’s founding documents, the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives’ rotunda; still, the peak draws droves of tourists—more than any other mountain in North America. An estimated half-million people reach the summit of Pikes Peak each year by foot, automobile , or cog railway. Some race up the mountain in annual events such as the Pikes Peak Marathon or the Pikes Peak Auto Hill Climb. Others enjoy the scenery as they sit comfortably in specially designed Swiss railcars for the roundtrip that lasts just over three hours. Typical rail passengers spend thirty minutes on the summit before re-boarding for the descent. During that time, many have their picture taken in front of the sign proclaiming that they are 14,110 feet above sea level. If it is cold—as it often is, even in August—they seek shelter in the Summit House Restaurant. There they can eat one of the ‘‘world famous high altitude donuts . . . made fresh at 14,000 feet!’’ If they are lucky, they first happened to find a coupon on the Internet, making their donut free.∞ The first attempt by a U.S. citizen to climb Pikes Peak occurred two centuries ago and provides a reminder of how technology has annihilated distance. In 1806, Zebulon Montgomery Pike led an expedition ostensibly charged with exploring the southwestern borders of the Louisiana Purchase. Near the site of modern-day Pueblo, Colorado, he decided to make a side trip with two other soldiers and a civilian doctor ‘‘to the high point of the blue mountain, which we conceived would be one days march.’’ After camping there, they would ascend to the ‘‘summit of the Grand Peak.’’ But the distances proved greater than they first appeared and the going more di≈cult than anticipated. It took two full days just to reach the edge of the 318 ) Epilogue plains, and then the men were ‘‘obliged to climb up rocks sometimes almost perpendicular.’’ After four days, the ill-clad foursome made it through waistdeep snow to the top of a minor, 10,000 foot sub-peak. Regarding their ultimate goal, Pike concluded that, under the circumstances, ‘‘no human being could have ascended to its pinical.’’ The four men hastily retreated down a steep gully and took ‘‘shelter under the side of a projecting rock, w[h]ere we, all four, made a meal on one partridge, and a piece of deer’s ribs, the ravens had left us, being the first we had eaten in that 48 hours.’’≤ They could only dream about free donuts. Pike’s foray toward the summit that ultimately bore his name provided just a small bit in the barrage of geographic information coming to light in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pike himself had just returned from an exploration of the mysterious headwaters of the Mississippi . Mapmakers no longer had to hide the region behind cartouches inserted where the river tantalizingly veered to the northwest. Nor did they sketch the northern part of America’s western coast veering sharply eastward after the voyages of Cook and Vancouver roughed out the true extent of Canada and Alaska. The forbidding nature and great extent of much of the interior West became apparent when Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark returned to St. Louis in the same year that Pike finished his exploration of the Mississippi’s headwaters. Lewis and Clark had forged their way up the Missouri River; struggled across the Continental Divide; and traveled west along the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia rivers to the Pacific. In the process, they made clear that hopes for a transcontinental water route were dead and that the formidable presence of the Rocky Mountains could not be ignored. The mortar in the geographic assumptions of the eighteenth century eroded away. The imagined continent, once seen as the natural underpinning of a national community by virtue of its manageable interconnectedness, no longer existed. Yet as anybody familiar with ‘‘manifest destiny’’ knows, geopolitical visions for the United States remained as vigorous as ever in the nineteenth century. Even as the continent’s true contours became known, the United States expanded relentlessly. Zebulon Montgomery Pike’s life and the cultural significance of the peak that...