keep an eye on him.” So vague was the wording that Smith did not notice its import and did nothing to act on it. The tone was not so much a warning from someone anxious about possible insurrection as insurance by someone concerned to protect his own back. Should war come, and Burr encourage secession in Kentucky and Tennesee, General Wilkinson could at least claim to have alerted the government.
Yet the general remained troubled. In December 1805, he contacted his old friend John Adair, fishing for information about Burr’s secessionist plans. Adair sent a teasing reply. “You observe to me,” he wrote in January 1806, “that I ‘have seen Colonel Burr, and ask me what was his Business in the west?’ Answer. Only to avoid a prosecution in New York. Now, Sir, you will oblige me by answering a question in turn for I know you can, Pray how far is it, and what kind of way from St. Louis to Santa Fe, and from thence to Mexico?” The answer he received sounded boastful on first reading, but more cautious on the second. “Do you know that I have reserved these places for my own triumphal entry,” Wilkinson declared, “that I not only know the way but all the difficulties and how to surmount them? I wish we could get leave, Mexico could soon be ours.”
Since Jefferson’s policy was to avoid the expense of fighting, no leave was given for attack. In the absence of war, Wilkinson would not move. As a result, Aaron Burr and his chief of staff, Jonathan Dayton, were forced to resort to blackmail.
DESPITE FAILING TO GET any encouragement for his plans from Governor Harrison, Burr immediately set about fund-raising on his return to Philadelphia. During the winter he was promised more than fifty thousand dollars, ostensibly to buy land west of the Mississippi on the Ouachita River. Burr’s son- in-law, Joseph Alston, governor of South Carolina, provided substantial financial guarantees, but the most generous supporter was Jonathan Dayton, who personally lent twenty thousand dollars. He did so on the specific understanding that the commanding general would be an active participant. Dayton had known Wilkinson since 1794 and was well-informed about his connection to the Spanish Conspiracy. But he had not been in contact with the general since their meeting at Cincinnati in June 1805.
Apart from a note sent shortly after Burr left St. Louis, Wilkinson had in fact ceased to communicate with the leaders of the conspiracy. “Nothing has been heard from the Brigadier since October,” Burr wrote in exasperation in April 1806. By contrast Burr had written several times to Wilkinson to keep him in touch with the conspiracy’s development. “On the subject of a certain speculation, it is not deemed material to write till the whole can be communicated,” Burr told him guardedly in December. And in April 1806 when it appeared that not enough funds were available, he announced, “The execution of our project is postponed till December: want of water in Ohio [i.e., money] rendered movement impracticable other reasons rendered delay expedient. The association is enlarged, and comprises all that Wilkinson could wish.”
The general’s silence clearly alarmed Burr and Dayton. They needed war with Spain, and when it failed to materialize, they realized that he would have to be forced to cooperate. As early as December 1805, Burr wrote suggesting that had war broken out earlier in the year, “[General] Lee would have been commander in chief: truth I assure you.” A month later in another letter, he retailed the gossip of Washington insiders that a road that Wilkinson claimed to have built through Tennessee had never really existed—“One, professing to be your friend, whispered to me soon afterwards that this conversation was calculated to do you injury”— but, Burr added innocently, Jefferson knew all about the allegation, “and I could not perceive that any inference unfriendly to you was drawn from the fact.”
The direction of the hints was always the same— Wilkinson could no longer depend on Jefferson’s support. When the letters drew no response, Dayton took more drastic action. In the summer of 1806, he financed a Kentucky newspaper,
Not entirely by coincidence, the governor’s enemies in St. Louis began to step up their attacks. During the winter of 1805–6, Bruff and Hammond had sent repeated complaints about his behavior to Congress and petitioned for his removal. Once the allegations of the
WILKINSON WAS NOWHERE MORE VULNERABLE than in his concern about Jefferson’s commitment to him. The most consistent feature of his time as governor of Louisiana was neither his friendship with the Creoles nor his vendetta with the settlers, but his unstinted efforts to cement his personal relationship with the man who’d appointed him. His behavior suggested something akin to the emotional seduction that he once displayed toward his generals.
Early in September 1805, just before Burr’s arrival, Wilkinson sent east a stunning array of gifts designed to appeal to the president. Packed into a wooden trunk were twenty-seven mineral samples—iron ore from the Platte and Osage rivers, lead and galena from the upper Missouri, pumice stone from the Yellowstone, crystallized gypsum and salt rock from the Arkansas— evidence of enough wealth beneath the earth, he explained, “to employ Thousands of Hands, and to produce Millions of Dollars.” With the help of a Ricara or Pawnee chief, named Ankedoucharo, who spoke seven languages including the lingua franca of the Plains Indians, sign language, the governor also assembled for the president a rough census of the eight thousand Plains Indians living southwest of the Missouri. Finally and most enticingly of all, he sent Jefferson a Native American map drawn on buffalo hide showing the courses of the Platte and Yellowstone rivers and what might have been a geyser in the area of what is now the Yellowstone National Park, thirteen hundred miles to the west.
Nothing was better calculated to earn Jefferson’s gratitude than a gift of Indian lore. But Wilkinson’s sumptuous offering also had an official justification. In addition to making him governor of Louisiana Territory, the president had appointed Wilkinson to be commissioner for Indian affairs, and therefore responsible for putting into practice Jefferson’s policy of relocating Native Americans away from land wanted by settlers. In a report sent with the specimens, Wilkinson suggested that northern Louisiana could be made a repository for Native Americans living in the more desirable south, although this would be “opposed by busy and short- sighted politicians” in the Louisiana Territory. Because it was important to keep white settlers out of land intended for Indians, he urged the president to prevent “Aliens and Suspicious Characters mingling with the Natives, and to suspend all Commerce with them at your discretion.”
On the document Jefferson’s firm tick of approval can be seen beside the paragraph with Wilkinson’s proposals, indicating that president and commissioner were at one on the future of the Louisiana Territory. Recognizing that the policy would not be popular, Wilkinson promised to carry out his president’s instructions “without regard to personal consequences.”
Although it was impossible to read Jefferson’s sphinxlike mind, he clearly valued what Wilkinson could offer. The general had kept the army loyal, shown a passion for western exploration, defied unpopularity to carry out the president’s Indian policies, justified the Red River expedition, and written the new Articles of War, which were about to receive congressional approval. The reward had been the decision to entrust him with almost unlimited power in the west. But Wilkinson’s anxiety to earn Jefferson’s good opinion only increased.
To satisfy the president’s desire for knowledge about the west, he sent off a series of expeditions to explore the unknown country beyond him. Led by Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, the first departed northward a few weeks after the governor’s arrival in St. Louis with a mission to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi and clear any British fur traders from the area. Pike fought his way through the swamps and pine forests of northern Minnesota and spent a hard winter near Cass Lake, which he identified as the source of the river— Lake Itasca, the real source, is about thirty miles away—before returning in April 1806. While he was away, Wilkinson dispatched two other lieutenants to explore the country to the west: George Peter was sent up the Osage River, accompanied by the fur trader Pierre Chouteau; and Wilkinson’s son, James Biddle, was directed to the upper Missouri, an enterprise cut short after a soldier was killed in a skirmish with Kickapoo warriors.
Like the maps that had first caught the president’s attention, all this activity was for Jefferson’s benefit. “My last breath, my last drop of blood shall be for Him,” Wilkinson assured Samuel Smith in March 1806, “would that I had more to give.” Yet, whatever he did, the evidence of his treachery was all around.
While the Red River expedition was being planned on the basis of Wilkinson’s maps, Casa Calvo was advising the acting governor of Texas, in accordance with Wilkinson’s “Reflections,” that Spain should “drive back every illegal usurpation toward the region of Texas.” Consequently, when Wilkinson’s old associate Thomas Freeman led
