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In August, 1805, Pike turned his face towards the head-waters of the Mississippi, his purpose being both to explore the sources of that river, and to show to the Indians, and to the British fur traders among them, that the United States was sovereign over the country in fact as well as in theory. He started in a large keel boat, with twenty soldiers of the regular army.
Here round the Roman Ratæ, the predecessor of our Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle English, while a small body pushed farther southward, and under the name of "South Engle" occupied the oölitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and to have pushed westward to its head-waters.
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.
After a toilsome and painful march of many days, the party reached the Seneca village, upon the head-waters of the Alleghany, near what is now called Olean Point. On their arrival the chief, their conductor, who was distinguished by the name of the Big White Man led his prisoners to the principal lodge.
What can determine this limitation of the range of the species? It cannot be latitude, since trout are found in Pennsylvania and Virginia. It is not longitude, since they occur in the head-waters of the Iowa rivers.
Some wild-eyed and imaginative youth sees at sunset a canoe far down the horizon. Immediately the villages are abandoned in haste, and the entire community moves up to the head-waters of streams, there to lurk until convinced that all danger is past. It does no good to tell these benighted savages that they are safe from vengeance, at least in this world.
Reaching at length the head-waters of the Euphrates, they waded across, and there found themselves in such deep snow and facing such fierce winds that many slaves and draught-horses died of cold, together with about thirty soldiers. Some of the men lost their sight from the snow-glare; others had their feet badly frosted; food was very scarce; the foe was in their rear.
Anthony, Pike held a council with the Sioux, and got them to make a grant of about a hundred thousand acres in the neighborhood of the falls; and he tried vainly to make peace between the Sioux and the Chippewas. In his search for the source of the Mississippi he penetrated deep into the lovely lake-dotted region of forests and prairies which surrounds the head-waters of the river.
He recommended two plans, either to follow the Missouri River to its head-waters or to push a chain of trading-posts gradually westward until the continent should be crossed. The former plan was the one actually carried out, eighty-three years later, by the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, which crossed the Rockies and followed the Columbia River to the ocean.
A vast horde of Celtic barbarians had for some time been collecting around the head-waters of the Adriatic. Influenced by hopes of plunder they now overran Macedon to the borders of Thessaly, defeating Ptolemy Ceraunus, then King of Macedonia, in a great battle.
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