Heres a look at our prime time lineup. Coming up at 7 p. M. Eastern, Michelle Gillespie discusses her dual biology. Then at 7 45, max brooks recounts the first africanamerican regiment to fight in world war i known as the harlem hell fighters. At 8 45, michael malice looks at the life and continued influence of kim jungil. At 10 p. M. On after words, Patrick Tucker discusses how large streams of data are changing how we think about the future. And we conclude our prime time programming at 11 eastern with richard vigueri and his examination of the size of the federal government. That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. Jared orsi is next on booktv. He recounts the life of zebulon pike. This is about an hour, 15 minutes. Thank you all for coming out. So im going to talk, as jen mentioned, about a book that ive recently published on zebulon pike, came out month before last in january, and i have some slides for you. Most of them are images that i took, and i did the best i could to try and get to the spot where pike was on the same day of the year. Theres one where i cheated, and i have, i have him in the winter time in a shot i took in june. So theres one that didnt work out, but most of them are on or near the exact day he was there. The other caveat i want to offer before we get started is that some of the slides are a little bit texty, that is, theyve got a lot of words on them, and i dont thats by design. I dont necessarily envision that youll read every single word, but i wanted to give readers in the book and also you all here tonight a sense of the kind of language that he used and a feel for the language of the time that ive been countering in my sources. And so dont worry about reading every last word. Im not going to stand up here and read them to you. But if theyll kind of convey an impression of the language of the time, and ill paraphrase kind of the most important points that you need to understand. So if you cant read all of it, dont worry about that. So let me jump in. Im going to talk for about 45 minutes, and then ill be glad to take questions and answers as long or as short as youre interested in it, and theres after the introduction theres two parts to the talk. One will be about pikes early life and young adulthood, the other will be about his adventures in the Rocky Mountains, probably the most famous part of his expedition. So lets begin on january 27th excuse me, january 20th, 1807. Pike was the commander of a u. S. Military expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, and the expedition had become badly lost, and they had wandered about in the Rocky Mountains for several weeks. And on this day pike found himself near here in the Wet Mountain Valley of colorado near the southwest of pueblo. And the expedition was in a desperate situation. The men were too weak to go on, but they were too imperilled not to. They were cold and hungry and inadequately clothed, and they didnt know where they were. On this particular day, pike discovered that two of his men john sparks and Thomas Doherty had frostbite so bad that they could not walk any longer. And so furnishing them with as much ammunition and food as he could spare, he exhorted them to resist their fate with fortitude, and with that he left them, abandoned, crippled men alone in the wilderness. And i want you to recall in this word, fortitude, right there, because this is going to be a word that has powerful meaning for pike and that well come back to repeatedly throughout the event this evening. So two weeks later from the safety of a small fort that he built on the yonder side of the forbidding mountains in the san luis valley, he sent a rescue party back to retrieve sparks and doherty, and the rescuers found sparks and doherty alive but still unable to travel. And so they returned to pike on february 17th, and in a dark and desperate gesture, they had removed some of the bones that the cold had separated from their toes and sent them back with the rescuers begging pike, by all that wassay celled, not to leave them sacred not to leave them alone in the wilderness. How little did they know of my heart if they could suspect me of conduct so ungenerous, and he vowed to do whatever was necessary to deliver them to their, quote, grateful country. And that a concept of gratitude as something that a nation owes people who sacrifice for it physically is another concept that we will come back to. So what are we to make of all this . So what are we to make of all this . Who was pike, is the question i want to ask today. Was he an intrepid explorer whose heartiness in the face of difficulty opened the west to the nation, or was he a reckless commander whose poor Decision Making exposed his men to unnecessary danger . Or perhaps, as some have speculated, was he a spy whose secret orders to reconnoiter santa fe impelled him onward even in the face of extreme danger . Pike left us few records of his early life, and as a result, most historians who have tried to figure him out have looked solely at his official military journals and reports which are two big, thick volumes. Theyre very unwieldy, even contradictory documents. And as a result, were left with those contradictory images of him that i mentioned a moment ago. But what my book tries to do is to employ some new strategies for understanding pike. One of the things that i did was i hired a genealogist who compiled a whole bunch of documents that no pike historian had ever looked at before. Another thing that i did was to look at some letters. Hes only left us other than his official military reports, or hes only left us 14 letters in his own hand. But i, i wrung as much meaning out of those 14 letters as i could reading between the lines and trying to read them in the context of the time. And whereas previous historiansing have kind of dropped in quotes on their work on pike in the past, i really took them seriously from an analytical perspective. I tried to figure out what do they tell us about his character. Tear all from the time period of his finish theyre all from the time period of his young adult life, so they give us a glimpse of him at a formative moment. Another thing that ive done is ive Read Everything that pike read. We have about a dozen different books that he said he read or was influenced by, and ive gone back and read all those things in order to try to get a sense of what kind of information about his culture and world did he have available to him. And then finally as youll see, i pay close attention to the natural environment, especially the mens bodies, sparks and dohertys toes, and other aspects of their physical experience of exploration and of the landscape. And after doing all of this, im convinced that above all pike was a nationalist. Thats the single best word to characterize his personality and his ideas, is nationalism. Now, this wasnt a given at the time. Because america at this time was a young and fragile nation. We didnt foe it was going to know it was going to succeed as a great democratic experiment as we know today. Many at the time believed that it would not and perhaps even should not survive. Not everybody decided to cast their lot with the nation. But early in life pike became persuaded that the best way to advance his considerable ambitions was to sacrifice physically for his nation, and his actions in the Rocky Mountains need to be read in this light, i think. So lets turn to pikes early life. He was born in 1779. This is the middle of the american revolution. His father is a soldier, and pike grows up at Frontier Army posts like this one which is down on the ohio river a little bit east of its confluence with the mississippi. And as products of the person revolution, military forts like this one are markers of a his forric shift in his forric shift in historic shift. For the first time in the middle and late part of the 18th century, its no longer unanimously accepted that the only way to get ahead in life is to be born to high social station, that you can actually advance, you can raise your social status through virtuous behavior. This is an increasingly widely accepted idea at the end of the 1700s. So pike, like many Young Americans of the day, was interested in this concept of virtue. What did virtue entail . Well, a few stuffy old englishmen thought that it had to do with manners, and in particular it had to do with bodies and how you carried yourself and how you behaved in public was displayed your virtue. So a gentleman should never be caught lolling supinely or sitting with a stiff immobility of a bashful booby. George washington was famously made by his tutor to copy the 110 precepts of the rules of civility from which he learned such wisdom as not to spit in the fire when other people are trying to grill meat. Advice like this was ever present, a thriving advice literature sprung up on both sides of the atlantic to counsel young men especially men. There was a pair rell lit parallel literature for women. But to counsel young men on how they had to behave, often bodily, in order to get ahead in life. So these advice givers canceled against excessive shivering or scratching or snapping of pingers or drumming fingers or drumming of tabletops, rubbing of hands, biting of nails and tapping of toes. It seemed that no bodily position, no matter how minute, was too small to escape the attention of those who would read into that bodily position evidence of its owners virtue. And at this point i would like, im going to try and fiddle with this for just a second to see if i can get rid of that thing. Apparently not. There we go. All right. So that was distracting me. Well let that go. At this point, id like you to think about bodies as the point of Human Experience where the cultural intersects with the natural. So when we talk about bodies, it often brings to find lots of things like status and wealth and beauty, occupation, desire, things we might call cultural. So tonight im dressed up, and you all or were able to come more casually. That signals the different roles we may in tonights event. This is we play many tonights event. This is how the english mannerists thought bodies as markers of ones social position. But bodies, if you think about it, are also part of the natural world. Were organisms that eat and drink and sleep and seek pleasure and try and avoid anxiety and sense pain, we get sick. Were born and live and die and decompose. We produce waste. We need energy and warmth and water and security. So all of these things we might call, we might describe as being part of the natural world. And so my talk tonight in a nutshell if you boil it down to its core is that pikes life is a story of the decisions that he made, what he decided to do when his body met the culture of the early republic and the nature or the environment of the flop tier the frontier, the ohio valley that he grew up in, and the result, the consequences of those decisions that he made and how they affected his activities in the Rocky Mountains. Im going to say that again. That came out kind of garbled. His life is a story in many ways of what he decided to do when his body met culture of the early republic and the environment of the frontier simultaneously. And how those life decisions that he made shaped his behavior in the Rocky Mountains. All right. So pikes letters suggest that as a young man like most americans he eat this manners stuff up. His favorite advice track seems to have been this little book called economy of human life by a fellow whos one of the most important and influential english publishers of the middle of the 18th century. And like the other mannerists, he talked a lot about bodily position, and he condemned people who used their body to draw attention to themselves. But one wonders how a Frontier Youth like pike who was in no danger of having the financial means to let fancy clothes or public parading sully his virtue, how he would have read such counsel. Writers of this literature imagined their readers would be sitting by firesides in philadelphia parlors and things like that. But remember that pike is reading this out on the ohio frontier in forts. And on the ohio frontier, life was far from comfortable. Pike joined the army if 1795 in 1795 at the aim at the age of 15, and for the next decade he spends most of his time as a river runner. Hes transporting military supplies up and down the ohio river and its tributaries to keep the towns and the frontier posts well provisioned. But travel on the rivers in this day was muddy, messy, difficult, unpleasant sorts of work. So when the current was high, it tested the strength, the muscles of the men on the lives. When the current was too low, they had to worry about, they had to guard against the danger of shoals and snags. When it got really low, they had to take all the supplies off the boats and portage all of the goods, including the boats themselves, on the backs of men and animals. So what sway with do you think could the english mannerists admonition against excessive shivering, for example, have held with men who waded into the early spring ohio river water with chunks of ice floating by . For pike and the dozens of men that he often commanded on the river, most of the time that they spent transporting supplies they were too hot, hungry, tired, cold, sunburned, mosquito bitten or simply just exhausted. And in this environment bodily discipline involved or considerably more endurance and suffering tan simply remembering not than simply remembering not to scratch or walking at a measured pace. So frontier life battered mens bodies. And pike occasionally considered quitting the army. He saw the example that it set for older officers including his father who was mentally and physically significantly debilitated by the time he reached the aim of 50, and pike thought the age of 50, and pike thought i dont want this life. This is going to beat me up and chew me up, and illkicked out of the army when im no longer useful. But he didnt quit, and here doddley provides us some clues, perhaps, about why he didnt. He devoted an entire section of his book to the concept of fortitude which, as you can see from these quotes, he meant in quite a physical sense. The volume was filled with aphorisms exhorting young men like pike to show fortitude in the the face of hardship. This is the same word, recall, that he used in exhorting sparks and doherty to resist their fate, with fortitude. Ask if pike was as and if pike was as taken by this kind of advice as he appears to be with the rest of doddsley, he could have reasoned himself into accepting the armys promise of physical suffering and called it a great virtue. Now, all of this was also reinforced by some high profile examples, one of which is George Washington n. 1796 while pike is running the ohio river with boatloads of supplies, George Washington voluntarily steps down from the presidency and declines to run for a third president ial term to which he almost certainly could have been elected. Doddsley but not everybody could sacrifice in the way a president could, by giving up a third term in office. Now, doddsley, never the less, he said all are not called to guide armies and nations. Not everybody is called to be a general or a president. But that doesnt mean that everybody is not called to be virtuous. Everyone has something they can sacrifice, and you can be virtuous, humbler people than president s and generals can be virtuous in, quote, doing well in that which is committed to thy charge. So doddsley is calling everybody to virtuous sacrifice. The question is, what does pike have . A man of no reputation, no wealth, no honor, no education, no propertier what does somebody like pike have that he can sacrifice . Well, one day if one of the margins in one of the margins of a page of doddsleys book next to the entry of sincerity, which i think is telling in this case, pike scribbles this. So thats what pike can sacrifice for his nation; his life. His body. But its not just his own body that hes going to disbritain for the nation discipline for the nation. He also, once hes an officer, begins to discipline the men under his charge. So one quick story. Cold morning, december 1803. Hes crew of 70 men and a 10craft fleet nascarlying supplies that is carrying supplies down a new fort near the mouth of the hes river. The fleet consisted of supply boats which were very heavy carrying all the goods and Company Boats which were much lighter that carried simply the men and maybe some of their personal supplies. And at dawn after the sound of the revelly, pikes soldiers hustle out of their tents and start packing up, and then they start scrambling for the Lighter Company poets to avoid boats to avoid the toil of having to pull the heavily laden supply boats. Pike was incented s and he picks incensed, and he picks up a stillsmoldering log and flings it at the slackers, and he picks up another and another. Very quickly, order is restored. To pike, shirking a physical duty is the worst kind of dishonor. Its a violation of the code of selfsacrifice for the nation, ask it calls for and it calls for bodily discipline, in this case through pelting of firewood. So life at the frontier forts gave pike lots of opportunities to discipline other peoples bodies, and soon he would get his own opportunity to discipline, to test his own fortitude. So one day in late 1803 Meriwether Lewis came to the fort where pike was stationed. Meriwether lewis was looking for a few men hearty in body, soul and spirit to acane him on a grand accompany him on a grand adventure all the way to the pacific ocean. Now, he had already selected his lieutenant for that trip, a man from a prominent kentucky military family. His name was william clark, so you know of lewis and clark. So pike was not under consideration for this particular expedition, but lewis had an intriguing suggestion or proposition for pike. He said that president Thomas Jefferson was planning to send out several more expeditions to explore the recent hiacquired recentlyacquired louisiana territory, and he wants them to be led by, quote, the armys most capable officers. Did pike want to lead one, lewis asked . Well, you betcha, he sure did. So in the spring of 1805 when pikes orders came to lead an expedition to the headwaters of the mississippi, he was ready to embrace the physical sacrifice that exploration would require. And sacrifice, he did. His orders said to come home by december 1, 1805, but he overreached those orders. He stayed up in the minnesota wilde