William Montgomery Pike (1814 - 1846)

Born 8 Dec 1814 in Dearborn County, Indiana, United States

Husband of Harriet Frances (Murphy) Pike — married 29 Dec 1842 in Clark County, Missouri, United States

Died 21 Oct 1846 at age 31 in Truckee River, Nevada Territory

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William Pike was involved in the westward expansion of the USA. Westward Ho! Join: Trails and Wagon Trains Project Discuss: wagon_trains_and_trails

William Pike was one of 81 pioneers in the Donner Party wagon train to California that became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in 1846.

Biography

This profile is part of the Pike Name Study.

William Pike was a member of the Donner Party. See Donner Party.

William Montgomery Pike was born in 1814 in Dearborn County, Indiana. He was the illegitimate son of James Brown Pike and Mrs. Wolfries; the grandson of Zebulon Pike, a Revolutionary War officer; and the nephew of explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike, for whom Colorado's Pike's Peak is named.

William was working on a river boat that the Murphy family was traveling on when it was trapped by ice. He and his buddy, William Foster fell in love with two Murphy sisters and were married by the time the ice melted.

William married Harriet F. Murphy on December 29, 1842 in Clark County, Missouri. They had the following children:

1. Naomi L. Pike
2. Catherine Pike

William and Harriet set out with her family West to California. They were part of the ill-fated Donner Party which, having taken the Hastings Cut-Off ended up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in a snow storm, trapped. William died October 1846 in Truckee River, Nevada Territory in an unfortunate gun accident before he experienced the horrors that the rest of the party were to face. He was accidentally killed by his best friend, William Foster.

Sources

• Find a Grave - William Montgomery Pike - Burial -Murphy Cabin Donner PartyCemetery Truckee ,Nevada County, California, USA Find A Grave Memorial# 12805846

• Donner Party - The Murphy Family

• Dixon, Kelly, Shannon Novak, Gwen Robbins, Julie Schablitsky, Richard Scott , and Guy Tasa (2010), "Men, Women, and Children are Starving: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp". American Antiquity 75(3):627-656

• McGlashan, Charles (1879). History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra Nevada: 11th edition (1918), A Carlisle & Company, San Francisco

• McNeese, Tim (2009). The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey, Chelsea House Publications. ISBN 978-1-60413-025-6

• Rarick, Ethan (2008). Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-530502-7

• Rehart, Catherine Morison (2000), The Valley's Legends & Legacies III, Word Dancer Press, ISBN 978-1-884995-18-7

• Stewart, George R. (1936). Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party: supplemented edition (1988), Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-61159-8

• Unruh, John (1993). The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60, University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06360-0