The next section, however, led Jefferson astray. “West of this high plain,” Wilkinson went on, “my informants report certain waters (which run to the Southward) probably those of the Rio Bravo, and beyond these they report a ridge of high mountains extending North and South.” What made this misleading was that it compressed the actual geography, narrowing the distances involved. The Pecos River was confused with the Rio Bravo (alternatively named the Rio Grande), and the Sangre de Cristo mountains merged with the Rockies farther to the west.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the arrival of the distinguished German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in Washington that summer made it possible to compare Wilkinson’s information and sketches with the first authoritative map of the region. While in Mexico City, Humboldt had been given the rare privilege of examining the government’s closely guarded charts and atlases and, from them, had produced his magisterial
When he appeared in Washington in June 1804, Jefferson questioned Humboldt closely, then invited Wilkinson to dinner so that he and the German could compare information. Unfortunately, a fever required Wilkinson to be bled so heavily the day before that he was unable to leave his bed. By way of apology, the next day he sent Jefferson two souvenirs of the Southwest, a buffalo hide with an Osage drawing of a horned toad, and the leaves and fruit of a cotton tree.
His absence hardly mattered because at the president’s urging Humboldt later met Wilkinson in person and let him borrow his precious chart. For Jefferson, the information it contained was intoxicating. What it showed was indeed that the Red River rose in the high plateau, as Wilkinson had described; that the narrow ridge of the Rockies lay a little farther west; and that on the other side of the ridge the land sloped down to California and the Pacific Ocean. In other words, it appeared that the Red River would take an explorer almost to the watershed between the Mississippi basin and the Pacific, with a clear run down to the ocean on the other side.
That Humboldt’s chart should have confirmed the information from Nolan so closely makes it probable they had both studied the same Spanish maps, the Irishman presumably having had access to copies in the offices of the governors who found him so delightful. Alternatively, Humboldt may have incorporated data from Wilkinson’s inaccurate sketches into the map shown to the president. Whatever the explanation, the coincidence confirmed Wilkinson in Jefferson’s estimation as an utterly reliable source of information about the west.
The discovery that the Red River offered a clear route toward the Pacific prompted the president to immediate action. He commissioned the Scottish scientists William Dunbar and George Hunter to make a preliminary study of its lowest reaches and, in the fall of 1804, began to organize a much larger expedition led by Thomas Freeman, Wilkinson’s old ally against Ellicott, to explore the river to its source. This was to be the southern counterpart to Lewis and Clark’s northern exploration of the upper Missouri, and Congress was asked to set aside five thousand dollars to fund it. The Red River expedition was born out of Jefferson’s passion, but was made possible by Wilkinson’s information. Shortly afterward the president gave tangible proof of the value he attached to the general’s unsurpassed knowledge of the west.
In November, Jefferson announced to Congress that the Louisiana Purchase was to be split into two, the southern portion being known as the Orleans Territory, and the rest to be called the Louisiana Territory. Before the end of 1804, William Claiborne, already governor of New Orleans, had his power extended to cover all the southern part of the Purchase. At the same time, the president appointed as governor of the Louisiana Territory, General James Wilkinson.
21
BURR’S AMBITION
WHAT PREOCCUPIED THE THOUGHTS of every westward- looking American were signs of the imminent collapse of the Spanish empire. As Spain was squeezed harder between Napoleon’s army and Britain’s navy, the fantastic three- hundred-year- old machinery of its colonial administration began to seize up. The fleets carrying silver from Peru and Mexico still sailed twice a year to Cadiz, but soldiers went unpaid for longer, local officials were left unsupervised, and Madrid’s slackening grip was sharply evident in Casa Calvo’s unilateral decision to divert twelve thousand dollars of Mexico’s revenue to Wilkinson without Spain’s direct permission. In similar circumstances in 1787 Miro had not felt able to do more than make the American a loan, while Carondelet’s payments were possible only because they were in line with the existing policy of the royal council. The empire’s shuddering edifice positively invited outsiders to think of what might replace it.
According to Alexander von Humboldt’s recollection of his conversations in 1804, Jefferson speculated that after the Spanish empire disappeared the republic of the United States would become the model for a still larger project, “a future division of the American continent into three great republics which were to include Mexico and the South American states.” But while Jefferson dreamed of the spread of republican virtue, other Americans, inspired by Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan-born liberationist and veteran of the Revolution, imagined a general Creole uprising leading to an independent South American empire. The remainder, including Wilkinson and perhaps most adventurers, found it hard to think beyond the mother lodes of silver ore that surfaced repeatedly in the western range of Mexico’s Sierra Madre.
Although Wilkinson shared his information about the different roads to Mexico with President Jefferson, he had already discussed it with another would- be adventurer, the vice president, Colonel Aaron Burr. “To save time of which I need much and have little,” Wilkinson wrote urgently in May 1804 immediately after landing in Charleston, “I propose to take a Bed with you this night, if it may be done without observation or intrusion—Answer me and if in the affirmative I will be with [you] at 30 after the 8th Hour.”
A clandestine meeting, set up without preliminaries, indicated that Burr and Wilkinson already knew each other’s mind, but that their thoughts needed to be kept secret. Since Burr’s house in Richmond Hill lay on the road from Charleston to Washington, it was easy for Wilkinson to break his journey unobserved. The nature of their discussions was never divulged, but they must have concerned the opportunities that Burr might find in the west. In particular, Wilkinson wanted the youthful Claiborne replaced as governor of Louisiana, and his eagerness to meet Burr suggested that the vice president was his preferred candidate as successor.
The timing of their encounter was significant. Burr had another ten months before his term of office ended, but no obvious political future. He had just been defeated in the race for governor of his home state, New York, a result he blamed on the scurrilous allegations about his financial probity made by his bitter political rival Alexander Hamilton. Burr was in a dangerous mood when he met Wilkinson. As Charles Biddle reported, the vice president was ready “to call out the first man of any respectability concerned in the infamous publications concerning him.”
The provocation came just six weeks after his meeting with Wilkinson Hamilton’s comment that Burr was “a dangerous man unfit to be entrusted with the reins of power” was enough for the challenge to be issued, answered, and shots exchanged on the hillside of Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River. What destroyed Burr’s political career, in the north at least, was the report that Hamilton had intentionally fired wide before the colonel deliberately shot his opponent in the gut.
With a warrant issued for his arrest in New York, Burr took refuge with Charles Biddle in Pennsylvania. Lacking any obvious outlet for his energies, he returned to the topic that Wilkinson had raised. During the rest of the year, they exchanged ciphered messages and held occasional meetings From these emerged the outline of what became known as the Burr conspiracy.
THE CONSPIRATORS MADE AN INCONGRUOUS PAIR. The general growing stouter, increasingly rosy and swollen in the face, and addicted to ever more Ruritanian uniforms; the colonel, tall, elegantly dressed, an eighteenth-century aristocrat, who took it as a truth that “a gentleman is free to do whatever he pleases so long as he does it with style.” John Adams wrote that he had “never known, in any country, the prejudice in favor of birth, parentage, and descent more conspicuous than in the instance of Colonel Burr.” Marriage had made Wilkinson part of the Biddles’ influential circle, but Burr, grandson of the great Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, “was connected by blood,” as Adams put it, “to many leading families in New England.” Wilkinson had never been to college, and most of his life had been spent on the frontier or in the coarse world of licentious soldiery, while Burr, the successful New York attorney and brilliant politician who came within a single vote of being the third president, had been educated at Princeton and had never strayed far from the Atlantic coast, rarely even beyond its law courts and drawing rooms.
