Table of Contents

Prologue Coming of Age in the Revolution
Ch 1 "The Happiness of a Free and Independent People": A Family and a Nation Seek Liberty, 1635-1794
Ch 2 The Bargain of Independence, 1794-1805
Ch 3 "A Barrier to Their Trade": Establishing Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1805-1806
Ch 4 "Young Warriors" of the "Great American Father": Crossing the Plains, July- November 1806
Ch 5 "Frozen Lads": Into The Rockies, November 1806-February 1807
Ch 6 A Comfortable Captivity: Traveling through New Spain, February-July 1807
Ch 7 Citizen Soldier: Pike's Final Search for Independence, 1807-1813
Epilogue From "Frozen Lads" to "Purple Mountain Majesties": Pike's West and American Nationalism, 1813-1893
Notes
Bibliography

About the Author

Jared Orsi is Associate Professor of History at Colorado State University. He is the author of the prizing-winning Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles.

Reviews

"[An] engaging, readable, and insightful biographical history..."--Ohio Valley History
"In bringing the tools of environmental history to bear on themes that have long engaged scholars of the early republic, Orsi gives us a fresh take on Pike's life and the spaces he explored....[Citizen Explorer is] a boundary-crossing model worth emulating."--Western Historical Quarterly
"As Orsi demonstrates in this nifty environmental biography, the true state of Pike and his nation was in flux....Orsi's environmental biography invites further contemplations, large scale and small."--Jon T. Coleman, Environmental History
"This interesting and well-researched book fills the information gap concerning Pike....In Citizen Explorer Jared Orsi, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, finally presents the complex and almost-quixotic life of Pike....In his impressive collection of primary and secondary sources, Orsi was able to discover the hidden life of a simple soldier who rose to the role of brigadier general."--Journal of American History
"With thorough research and clear prose, Jared Orsi insightfully recovers the dramatic life and violent death of a military hero and western explorer of the early republic. In an unstable age of competing regions, Zebulon Pike pioneered a national style of manhood which flourished in, and gave shape to, the American West."--Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
"Shifting his lens between grand politics and the nitty-gritty of early American life, Jared Orsi gives us a wonderfully real Zebulon Pike, grounded in the material realities that determined personal and social choices in the evolving West. He presents us with Pike as a man of his times, caught by the promises of a nation that couldn't yet deliver on them."--Anne F. Hyde, author of Empires, Nations, and Families, A New History of the American West,
1800-1860