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Lost with Lieutenant Pike

by Edwin L. Sabin

This story takes the adventure trail of that young soldier-explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who was lost in the mountains of southern Colorado one hundred years ago.

The southwestern boundary was uncertain. The United States claimed clear to the lower Rio Grande River, across Texas; Spain, which had owned Louisiana Territory before the United States bought it from France, claimed north even to the Missouri River. Some said that the Arkansas River of southern Colorado should be the boundary, there; some said the Red River, further south—which was confused with the Canadian River. And when Lieutenant Pike was started out, the United States soldiers and the Spanish soldiers of Mexico faced each other across the Sabine River of the western border of Louisiana State.