beauty of mountain, vale and stream, appears to have had a good eye for female loveliness. He invariably notices the ladies he met; his general comment being, that, though a trifle too heavy as to weight, they certainly had the finest eyes in the world. Pike seems to have been a great favorite also with the worthy padres of the country, who labored many a time and oft for his conversion to the Catholic religion.

It was on the first day of July, 1807, when, all his wanderings and sufferings and delays past, Pike reached Natchitoches, Louisiana, the point for which he had set out a year before. Here he closes his journal with the words:

"Language cannot express the gayety of my heart when I once more beheld the standard of my country waved aloft! All hail! cried I, the eversacred name of country, in which is embraced that of kindred, friends, and every other tie which is dear to the soul of man."

In a letter to General Wilkinson, Pike once said:

"Did not an all-ruling passion sway me irresistibly to the profession of arms and the paths of military glory, I would long since have resigned my sword for the rural cot, where peace, health and content would at least be our inmates."

His desire for advancement was gratified, and he was soon promoted to be major of infantry.

In 1812, five years after Pike's return from the West, the war with Great Britain broke out. It was a stupid war, brought about by the insufferable bullying of the British government, which at that time seemed determined to mix in everybody's affairs, and provoke the united hostility of all creation. We were illy prepared for war. Our leading military men were a lot of old humbugs left over from the Revolution: such was Hull, who surrendered at Detroit; such was Wilkinson, who mismanaged

everything. As a result, the enemy burned our capital, while Admiral Cockburn ravaged the hen-roosts of the Chesapeake. On the water we had generally good success, and modified considerably the opinion that "Britannia rules the waves." On land, our men sometimes stood, as at New Orleans, and sometimes they scampered off, as at Bladensburg. We succeeded in making some generals out of young men like Winfield Scott before the war was over, and so saved ourselves from total disgrace.

Pike hailed the war with enthusiasm. In 1810 he had been placed in command of a regiment of regular infantry, which he drilled after a fashion of his own, in three ranks -the third rank being armed with short guns and pikes, an idea their commander probably got from the lancers he saw in Mexico.

In a short time, though only thirty-four years of age, he was a brigadier-general on the northern frontier.

If you go to the Kansas State library you will find in the dingy, narrow pages of old Hezekiah Niles's Register for the year 1813, the following dedication:

IN TESTIMONY

OF

RESPECT TO THE MEMORY

OF

ZEBULON MONTGOMERY PIKE,

BRIGADIER GENERAL,

WHO FELL GLORIOUSLY BEFORE YORK, IN UPPER CANADA,
AND

JAMES LAWRENCE,

CAPTAIN IN THE NAVY,

KILLED ON BOARD THE CHESAPEAKE, FIGHTING THE SHANNON, THIS VOLUME OF THE WEEKLY REGISTER IS DEDICATED. The former happily expired on the conquered flag of the foe: the latter died exclaiming, "DON'T GIVE UP THE SHIP!"

The story is soon told.

Our troops and fleet, the latter under command of Commodore Chauncy, lay at Sackett's Harbor. On the 25th of April, 1813, the fleet took on board 1,700 men, and sailed for York (now Toronto), a fortified post commanded by General Roger H. Sheaffe, who, by-the-way, was a native of Boston. Pike was in immediate charge of the troops, and, on the morning of the 27th, watched their debarkation from the deck of one of the vessels. Our men, on landing, were met by a sharp fire from a body of British riflemen and Indians. Pike, witnessing the fray, said, “I can't stand this any longer," jumped into a boat, ordering his staff to come on, and pulled for the shore amid a shower of shot. As soon as he reached the shore he formed his line and drove the enemy before him, demolishing a portion of the Eighth Grenadiers, who formed to check him. In a little while Pike reformed his line, and moved on the outer line of works. A heavy battery in front was carried at once. In the meantime a British battery further back was giving some annoyance, and Pike ordered his men to lie down until a couple of light guns could be brought up to silence the enemy's fire. This was done in a few moments, and everything was quiet, awaiting the surrender of the place. Pike had just aided in removing a wounded man, and was seated conversing with a prisoner, when there was a tremendous explosion; the light of day was shut out by a pall of smoke, and the air seemed to rain missiles. The British magazine had been fired. Pike was crushed to the earth by a huge stone; his aid, Capt. Nicholson, was killed by his side, and the forms of two hundred and thirty-two dead and wounded men strewed the ground when the smoke had lifted.

Pike, horribly crushed, but conscious, was taken on board one of the vessels of the American fleet. In time, the British garrison flag, which had been hauled down, was brought to him. He motioned to have the conquered banner placed beneath his head. It was done, and in a moment, the brave young fellow, who first in a Kansas wilderness flung the bright flag of his country to the breeze, and bade a horde of savages to know it and respect it, had passed away.

He was buried with every demonstration of grief and respect, at Sackett's Harbor.

And now, having finished his brief story, let us turn to the wilderness he traversed, and of the future of which he had so little hope, and mark the successive steps of empire.

Pike had lain in his quiet grave six years when the wild woods of the Missouri were startled by a new sound, and the turbid waters of the sullen stream parted before the prow of the first steamboat. Five years more, and as waters rush in when a mill-gate is lifted, the trains moved out on the great road, eight hundred miles long and two hundred feet wide, leading from the Missouri to Santa Fé. Then the wilderness began to blossom, not with roses but with men, soldiers, hunters, explorers, teamsters. In 1827 the drums of the Third Infantry greeted the sun on the beautiful bluff at Leavenworth. Pike's flag had come to stay; and from Fort Leavenworth, like Roderick Dhu's fiery cross, it was carried over the Plains in every direction, by Leavenworth, by Dodge, by Riley, and many more whose names now dot the Western country. In 1842 came Fremont, the Pathfinder, and to the southward the flag rose, a silent reminder to the Osages, at Fort Scott. After the flag came the cross, borne by the Jesuit

fathers, even now quiet old men, spending the evening of their days at Osage Mission. Then came '49, the rush for California; camp-fire answered to camp-fire for a thousand miles, and with the moving throng came Mr. Pike and Mrs. Pike and the children, and "Buck" and "Bright," and "Tige” and “Golden”— and you know the rest.

I cannot close without saying a word more about my hero. His was a most heroic soul. The day before he sailed across Lake Ontario to meet his fate, he wrote to his father:

"I embark to-morrow in the fleet at Sackett's Harbor, at the head of 1,500 choice troops, on a secret expedition. Should I be the happy mortal destined to turn the scale of war, would you not rejoice, oh, my father? May heaven be propitious, and smile on the cause of my country. But if I am destined to fall, may my fall be like Wolfe's-to sleep in the arms of victory."

A writer who has visited that quiet spot on the lake shore, where so many years ago they laid him down to sleep, describes the wooden monument erected to his memory and the memory of those who died with him, as a worn, defaced, shattered, broken and forgotten thing. And yet he has another monument, an eternal monument, erected by the hand of God; and may we not hope that in our day, when old stories are being retold; when men are recalling the brave days of old; when history is being written as it never was before, that the name of PIKE may emerge from the mists of forgetfulness, even as comes at sunrise from out the darkness, the brightness and the whiteness, the beauty and the glow of the Peak that bears his name.