The historian McMaster thinks that Pike was ordered to descend into Mexico as a part of this plot. But Pike himself denied any knowledge of such motives, and it seems certain that whatever Wilkinson's intentions were, Pike was entirely innocent. There is a certain mystery over the reasons for this invasion of Spanish territory.

Whatever the exact facts were, the result was the arrest of Pike and his party on February 26 by a Spanish force. It was done under the guise of a polite invitation to visit the Spanish governor at Santa Fé. Pike was taken into Mexico as a prisoner, but after many journeys he was escorted through Texas and delivered to his countrymen at Natchitoches, Louisiana, on July 1, 1807.

Thus the expedition had an unfortunate ending. But the value of Pike's explorations of the central part of the Purchase will always be an honor to his memory.1

1 In the War of 1812 he was made a brigadier general. He died in battle, killed when storming the batteries of York, the capital of Upper Canada.

CHAPTER XXI

ROUTES OF EXPLORATION

The great water ways. Importance of the Missouri. The Santa Fé, Overland, and Oregon trails. The fur trade the chief industry. Its effect on exploration.

After these pioneer American explorations came the extension of the fur trade, the earlier expeditions to Santa Fé, the overland journey to Astoria in 1811-1813, the exploits of leaders like William H. Ashley, and the journeys. of Wyeth and others. But before the story of exploration is followed farther it will be helpful to note the beginning of regular routes from the great central valley to the vague confines of Louisiana and beyond to the sea.

Nature did much for the explorers and builders of the West in offering them passage on the great rivers flowing from the mountains to the central valley of the continent. Man,

following in the footsteps of buffalo and elk along land routes where nature had smoothed

the

EMIGRANT TRAIN CROSSING THE PLAINS

way and cleft the mountains, wore deeper the pathways, which became historic trails.

Sometimes the paths of animals, of hunters, trappers, gold seekers, and emigrants, became the route of the railroad, a route with an almost forgotten history.

Without the water routes the exploration and later development of the vast interior known as Louisiana would have been a different story. The Great Lakes offered a highway for the French. The Wisconsin River led them to the first explorations of the Mississippi and the discovery that it flowed to the Gulf of Mexico and not to the western sea. In the early Spanish history the navigation of rivers played an insignificant part, but for French explorers, trappers, and traders the water ways were all-important.

East of the Mississippi the Ohio was the greatest of the historic water ways. It was down the Ohio and other tributaries of the Mississippi that there poured the wave of pioneer conquest which was to sweep away any foreign possession of Louisiana.

West of the Mississippi there were the Osage, the Kansas, the Arkansas, the Red