ALBERT PIKE: DAWN TO SUNSET

LeRoy V. Brant, 32 degree  K.C.C.H., San Jose, Calif.

The past and present geography of the life of Albert Pike is to be set forth in this article.  It will trace the place where Pike was born, the places where he spent his boyhood, the long trail he followed to the West as a young man, his adventures in the Mexican and Civil Wars, his activities in the State of Arkansas, and his final days in Washington, D. C., as the Grand Commander of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.  It will speak of the landmarks still left from the days of this Masonic hero.

In this article Pike will be neither deified nor glorified.  Masonry needs no trappings with which to surround her leaders. Those who gain ascendancy and hold it do so only by virtue of the greatness of their ideas and ideals, and not by telling of improbable stories of supernatural things.  I shall write of Albert Pike as I could piece his story together in more than 10,000 miles of direct travel over the trails that his feet trod in the bygone days.

I had read Pike's Morals and Dogma for more than thirty years.  I had followed his magnificent settings of the Degrees of the Scottish Rite for that length of time, and, inasmuch as it has been my lot to sit on the organ bench throughout the conferring of the Degrees from the 4th to the 32d for those long years, I have become, perhaps, highly conversant with the language and, I hope, with the meanings of the Degrees.  Through those years an increasing respect for the mind of Albert Pike has grown upon me, a reverence for the greatness of intellect which could clothe the basic Masonic truths in such magnificent verbal habiliments, and within my breast was born long ago the desire to learn what I could firsthand of this man of Masonry and of God.

The summer of 1949 saw the fruition of long planning, saw my wife and I setting forth, one early July morning, on the odyssey which more than a century ago had been that of the greatest Mason of all ages, Albert Pike. The geography of my own trip was not coincident with that of the life of Pike since I began my travels in California, while he opened his eyes to this world in Boston.  For the sake of chronological clarity I shall write of my trip as if the two trails were coincident.

Albert Pike was born in Boston, Massachusetts, December 29, 1809.  No trace of his early residence in that city remains, so far as I was able to determine.

This is hardly surprising, for the city itself has changed radically since 1809.  To mention only one instance of those great changes, the site of the Boston Tea Party is now almost a quarter of a mile from water, for the harbour where certain Masonic Brethren dumped the hated tea long years ago has been filled in until now one finds block upon block of warehouses standing where the salty tea water- once astonished the fishes.

Nevertheless, there are landmarks which Pike must have seen, at which he must have wondered and pondered in his childhood.  There stands Faneuil Hall, as it stood in the days of the Revolution, Old South Church, Old North Church in the tower of which hung the lanterns-"One if by land, and two if by sea"-which lighted the path of Paul Revere so long ago, and which he carried spiritually to light the path of the whole world.  In passing, it is worthy of comment that Paul Revere was a Mason, and that his old home is a mecca for tourists in the city of Boston.  Pike must have seen it many times. I photographed these hallowed relics in colour, as I did the entire Pike journey, so far as I could find objects worthy of the camera.

North of Boston lies the country where Pike spent his boyhood. The family moved to Newburyport and young Albert grew up there and in Byfield where relatives lived.  Again, no certain traces of the family remain, but I photographed a few of the old houses in Newburyport, standing there since long before the Pike calendar began,

an old inn in Byfield where the adult Pikes and their friends must often have gathered to talk over the matters of the day - perhaps the progress of the War of 1812, the new song written by a man named Francis Scott Key, beginning "O say, can you see by the, dawn's early light." Young Albert must often have played about this old inn when he accompanied his grandfather about the town of Byfield.  The ancient village is today not much larger, and is still as sleepy as it was a hundred years ago.

What with his schooling at Newburyport and at Byfield Albert Pike attained a certificate to teach in the public schools of Massachusetts, and did so teach for some seven years, having attended Harvard for one session.  He desired to attend Harvard further, but could not meet the tuition fees.  All records of schools where he taught seem to have vanished.  In those early days, more than a hundred years ago, people were less careful of school records than they now are.  Worthy of perpetuation in coloured slides and especially beautiful is the old common at Newburyport, with its swan-pond, where I well recall I found the most voracious mosquitos met in more than fifty years of intimate experience with those pests.

Pike heard of fortunes to be won in the West and, in 1831, set forth to seek his. We know that he went west by way of St. Louis, and that he followed in general what is today called the Santa Fe trail.  He visited the city of Santa Fe, where he must have been profoundly interested in the oldest capital city and the oldest capital building in the United States.  The city, as the capital, and the building, as a museum, still together with the oldest church building in the United States.  All these Pike undoubtedly saw and, with his keen mind, studied. All I considered well worthy of preservation on slides as a portion of the Pike pictorial history.

From Santa Fe, Pike went north to the old Indian pueblo of Taos, and thither we followed him, to see the thousand-year-old homes of the Pueblo Indians, as Pike saw them in his day; to see the ruins of the old Franciscan Mission Church, which in Pike's day had not yet fallen into decay; to see the upper reaches of the Rio Grande, which Pike had followed, as the Franciscans had done more than two hundred years before him, and the Indians perhaps a thousand or more years before them.

 Passing through the old Indian Territory, now the State of Oklahoma, one finds the ruins of old Fort McCullough which was established by Albert Pike during the Civil War.  It was about 8 miles from the town of Caddo, named after the Indian tribe of that district, on what is known as Nails' Crossing. Still living in Caddo is Jim Nails, son of the Nails after whom the ford was named.  Nails Senior was a personal friend of Albert Pike, and Nails Junior, whose striking picture, I have in the Pike collection, remembers countless stories told him by his father before the latter's demise, stories of the days of the war and of Pike.  Jim Nails, a fullblooded Cherokee, is now almost eighty years old.  His body is as straight as the proverbial arrow, but his memory is perhaps a shade on the apoeryphal side, at least so I judged.

 Finding no fortune in New Mexico, Pike drifted south to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and again we followed him.  Only a portion of the old fort remains today, but it was all there, when Pike passed through.  The portion which was the old arsenal we photographed, standing near the river as Pike saw it in 1832.  Fort Smith today boasts of one of the two Consistories of the Scottish Rite in the State of Arkansas, the other being in Little Rock.

 North of Fort Smith lies Fayetteville, where Pike taught school for a time.  The old schoolhouse, moved from its original site but not far, is today used as a Pike museum and is an Arkansas State Monument. It was dedicated as such some years ago by the Grand lodge of the State of Arkansas. The building is a two-room affair, with an attic where Pike slept over the schoolroom. The front of the two rooms, the schoolroom proper, is filled with early Arkansiana, much of it, unfortunately, having nothing to do with Pike.  There stands the old stove he used, however. Certain pictures of Pike hang on the walls, and old cooking utensils, from heaven only knows where, grace certain shelves.

 The back room contains one of the finest collections of early American glass in existence, the cases being illuminated, of all things, with fluorescent lights! The glass is wonderful, although what it may have to do with Pike is a matter too esoteric for my understanding.  Since it was there, however, I photographed it, together with the front room and the grounds surrounding the building.