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Departure from Fort Bellefontaine

Name: Departure from Fort Bellefontaine
Start: 1806-07-15
Location: Fort Bellefontaine

When: 15 July 1806
Where: Fort Bellefontaine
Part of: Pike Expedition departs Fort Bellefontaine for the American West

Lieutenant Zebulon Pike led his expedition from Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis on July 15, 1806, to explore the American West.

The military party departed Fort Bellefontaine to map the western Louisiana Purchase. Pike, age 27, was ordered to find river headwaters and contact Native Americans. This was the first official American effort to explore the western Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in present-day Colorado.

Sources

Pike Expedition Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-19
Zebulon Pike Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-24

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.