July 29, 2025 • 53 mins
Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U.S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with a bigger party and twice the congressional appropriation of Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis suffered a very different fate, one that assigned them to the dustbin of American history and made Jefferson’s “Grand Expedition” a forgotten western story.
Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.
Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men"
Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
When Thomas Jefferson acquired the eight hundred million acre Louisiana purchase,
he launched a second major exploring expedition into the West,
one with an entirely different outcome than Lewis and Clark's,
an outcome that shines a new light on what Lewis
and Clark's journey really meant for America. I'm Dan Flory's
(00:22):
and this is the American West, brought to you by
Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer
just in time for the season that calls us home.
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers
to protect public lands, waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Jefferson's
(00:56):
other Lewis and Clark. On a gray Tuesday in November
of the year eighteen oh five, with a chill wind
scattering autumn leaves into the puddles of Washington's muddy streets,
White House staff admitted a caller for a private dinner
(01:18):
with the President of the United States that November evening.
Thomas Freeman must have felt his future was made. Thomas
Jefferson was about to offer him a plum appointment. The
leadership of one of his prized explorations into the Louisiana purchase,
(01:40):
one of the most fascinating parts of the globe for
scientific study. With Meriwether Lewis and his party already on
the shores of the Pacific, Jefferson was turning to Freeman,
a civilian astronomer who'd immigrated from Ireland, to lead an
exploring party into southwestern America. Jefferson and call this new
(02:01):
probe the Grand Expedition, and he was aiming it at
the Red River of the South, which natural history titan
Alexander von Humboldt had assured the President would take American
explorers into vast deserts and the southerly ranges of the
Shining Mountains. Along with Humboldt, Jefferson had canvass a number
(02:21):
of scientists who'd been gathering information about the Southwest, and
he was fascinated. The young United States had geopolitical reasons
for exploring Louisiana, but at heart, Jefferson was a naturalist
who dug fossils and written his own book about Virginia.
His informants about the Southwest told him wonderful stories about
(02:44):
volcanoes and tigers and herds, of wild horses, among innumerable
buffalo and wolves. He knew that camels, what he called
the yama or paca of Peru, still existed in similar
country in South America, and since there was already evidence
of elephants in America by then Charles Wilson Peel had laboriously,
(03:08):
if badly, reassembled the skeleton of one for his museum
in Philadelphia, elephants might still be in the West. Two
Meriwether Lewis had shipped enough reports and specimens back from
the Missouri River that science was already buzzing about animals
and birds never seen in the Eastern States, and Jefferson's
(03:28):
hope was that America's most famous naturalist, William Bartram, would
accompany Freeman into the Southwest. Bartram was in his late sixties, though,
so instead promoted Alexander Wilson, soon to be America's first
great bird painter, as Freeman's naturalist. Jefferson instead chose a
young Virginian whose family he knew well. Thus did a
(03:51):
University of Pennsylvania medical student named Peter Custis become the
first scientist trained in an American university to when a
posting as a naturalist to the west. Congress had come
up with twice the funding for this expedition, as it
had for Lewis and Clark. So when his private dinner
(04:12):
with the President concluded, Thomas Freeman stepped into the Washington
Knight holding seven pages of exploring instructions written in Jefferson's
clear handwriting. He knew, he wrote, a friend, the hazards
of travel in the neighborhood of Santa Fe. A great
many difficulties, in some personal danger will attend the expedition,
(04:33):
but I will stick or go through the more danger,
the more honor. Jefferson's instructions, which Freeman must have scanned repeatedly,
still exists in the Library of Congress. They include intriguing
directions that also appeared in the exploring instructions the President
had given Meriwether Lewis. The following objects in the country
(04:55):
adjacent to the rivers along which you will pass will
be worthy of notice. The animals of the country generally,
and especially those not known in the maritime states. And
the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed extinct.
The western half of North America then was the country,
and the eighteen hundreds was the century that ultimately answered
(05:20):
many fundamental questions about America's destiny. With the Louisiana purchase,
Jefferson's administration had affected a continental future for the US,
Like a stone rolling down a mountain. The US in
the eighteen hundreds would claim and buy and seize much
more of the continent. Eventually, everything from southwestern deserts to
(05:41):
Alaska on tundra what had been and could have remained
Native America or French, British or Mexican territory over the
next sixty years would become part of the US. Thus
did the West become ours? There was that intriguing final
line in Jefferson's Natural History Instructions too, about one of
(06:04):
the grand scientific questions of the age, was extinction real?
Were camels and elephants still out there? Or had they, somehow,
for some unknown reason, vanished from America? Could living creatures
really entirely disappear on a planet Christianity had long believed
was designed as perfection by a creator. How could species
(06:28):
God had placed on Earth vanish, leaving us with only
their enigmatic bones and skeletons. These questions, and many others,
were why Jefferson aimed a second major exploring expedition at
the West. It's a foregone conclusion that everyone listening to
this has long known about Lewis and Clark, America's most
(06:51):
famous explorers. I would wague that the chances are almost
non existent, though, that you've ever heard of Thomas Freeman
or doctor Peter Custis own about an eighteen oh six
American probe into the West that was known as the
Grand Expedition. Yet two centuries and two decades ago, a
party of superbly equipped American explorers was working its way
(07:14):
up the Red River of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma,
painstakingly mapping the country, holding councils with all the local tribes,
and making collections of plants, wildlife, and geology. Both President
Jefferson and the party's leaders thought of this as the
Southwestern counterpart to the Lewis and Clark Party, which in
(07:35):
that same summer was returning from a successful exploration across
darkest North America to the Pacific by intent. Freeman, an engineer, surveyor,
and cartographer, and Custis, a student of Benjamin Smith Barton
in America's best university at the time, should today be
(07:56):
as famous as any historical figures who aren't President Sir
Jeah Generals, Jefferson had picked them the lead a scientific
reconnaissance across the Great Plains to the Rockies as far
as legendary Santa Fe. We ought to have heard about
them in junior high school social studies the way we
hear about Neil Armstrong's one giant Leap for mankind on
the Moon, but then once so wrong with Jefferson's second
(08:20):
expedition to the West that it's now invisible in American history.
In a master plan Jefferson had set down in eighteen
o three, America's third president, had outlined four major expeditions
he hoped to send into the New Louisiana Purchase. In
a precient prediction of the future destiny of the US,
(08:43):
Jefferson believed an expedition into the southern parts of the Purchase,
aimed at what we today called the Southwest, was almost
as critical as having Lewis and Clark search for the
Northwest Passage. Fundamentally, American exploring parties in the West would
establish a national presence on North American geography that Jefferson
(09:03):
hoped both European powers and Native people would acknowledge, and
as with his questions about extinction, Western exploration represented the
Jefferson administration's official support of cutting edge science. What was
out there? What new wonders existed on this last continent
that humans had found on Earth? But Lewis and Clark
(09:26):
would leave those questions unanswered for an enormous stretch of
the Louisiana purchase. So, in an exchange of letters with
Meriwether Lewis in eighteen oh three, Jefferson had told Lewis
that the object of your mission is single, the direct
water communication from sea to sea. I will also send
(09:46):
a party up the Red River to its head, then
cross over to the head of the Arkansas and come down.
That this will be attempted distinctly from your mission. So
what's Lewis and Clark underway? In eighteen oh four, Jefferson
devoted the time he had for expiation to two years
of detailed planning and a budget of five thousand dollars
(10:09):
from Congress to send his next grand expedition into the
heart of the West. The problems for this second expedition began, though,
with the choice of rivers. Jefferson told a friend that
he regarded the Red River of the South as next
(10:31):
to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the Mississippi.
But unfortunately he was smitten by the Red in part
because he misunderstood it. Soon after his purchase of the
Louisiana territory, Jefferson had made known his belief that its
proper southern boundary was actually the Rio grand River. That
(10:52):
startling claim meant that the upstart United States believed it
now possessed not merely the French colonies in Louisiana and Missouri,
but also Texas and New Mexico, where Spain had settlements
that dated back to the early sixteen hundreds. Spain's diplomat
to the US responded that this was absurd reasoning, but
(11:15):
Jefferson had alarmed Spain, which was already struggling to hold
on to its American colonies. The Spanish monarchy was highly
suspicious of America's claim that, as a democratic republic, it
represented the future for North America. Jefferson's claims unnecessarily rile Spain,
(11:35):
and unfortunately, his attempts to regroup and turn the Red River,
where he was able to document far more French activity
than on the Rio Grande, into a compromise boundary failed
to appease the Spanish government. But in the world of
the Southwest and its geography, how feasible was an expiration
up the Red River and then down the Arkansas. Anyway?
(11:58):
The essential first question of this pairing was where would
the Red River lead American explorers. Jefferson assumed that major
rivers had in mountain ranges, and that, given its lower
course and size, the Red must have its origins somewhere
in the southern ranges of the Shining Mountains, near the
tantalizing destination of Santa Fe. That assumption appeared to be
(12:23):
corroborated by recent maps, particularly a brand new one drawn
by the famous Prussian naturalists himself Alexander von Humboldt, and
based on his map work in Mexico City's archives. Humboldt
knew that Lower Louisiana was bisected north and south by
a river the French called River Rouge that flowed from
(12:45):
the west, and he knew that from the high Rockies
near Santa Fe, a reddish river flowed eastward. Surely, the
river the Spaniards saw, and one thousand miles later Fritchman saw,
was the same one the Americans who are now calling
the Red so that's how Humboldt drew it. Just as
Lewis and Clark were to open an economic route up
(13:08):
the Missouri to the northwest, the Red appeared poised to
do the same with a proto Santa Fe trailed trade
route between Louisiana and New Mexico. If in fact, the
Southern Rockies was where the Red River headed. Jefferson issued
a call to the American scientific community for more information
(13:30):
about the Southwest, and he got it. A New York
nationalist named Samuel Mitchell told the President the Red was
supposed to be navigable for one thousand miles above the
last French town on it century old Nakanish, and that
it penetrated a country of immense prairies with alligators, buffalo tigers, wolves,
(13:51):
and innumerable herds of wild horses. The Scottish expatriate scientist
Sir William Dunbar wrote of the Redd's long course and
its sources in what he called salt Mountains. Dunbar dangled
wonderful stories of wonderful productions, including possibly unicorns on the
(14:12):
southern prairie, and in the wake of a recent mastodon
skeleton excavation in Kentucky. Giant water serpents too, he thought
might be in the Southwest. Dunbar also reported vague stories
of masses of metal venerated by the Indians and assumed
to be silver ore, and more of those. In the
(14:33):
next episode from his Indian agent in Nacrish, doctor John Sibley,
Jefferson learned one other critical bit of information. As the
gateway to New Mexico, the Upper Red, was controlled by
the horticultural Pawnees, actually the Wichitas as we know them today,
under their forceful leader Awahakai, and a buffalo hunting people
(14:57):
sibly referred to as the Aton, who we now know
as the Comanches. These Indians, who had fond memories of
the days when Spanish and French traders had competed for
their friendship, were openly expressing interest in the Americans. That
was music to Jefferson's ears. While the natural history particulars
(15:17):
the President was hearing were vaguely real, the geography, unfortunately,
was not. There were those who knew the truth about
the Red even this early in the seventeen eighties and
seventeen nineties. The Spanish government had dispatched French and Spanish
explorers to link the towns of Saint Louis, Nacotish, and
(15:39):
San Antonio with distant Santa Fe. Some of them traveled
the Red River, and they knew it did not lead
them to Santa Fe. But what had caught the attention
of Spanish officials was acclaimed by one of them, Pierre Vial,
in seventeen ninety three, that it was possible to journey
from Saint Louis to Santa Fe in little more than
(16:00):
three weeks. The revolutionary Americans were that close. That was
far too close. Among Jefferson's informants, there was one who
gave the President accurate information about his choice of a river.
A scheming and controversial general named James Wilkinson presented the
President with a twenty two page letter about the Southwest,
(16:23):
designed to excite the presidential eye. As Wilkinson put it,
among the various details about the natural history of this
wonderful country, there was actually an accurate description of the
Upper Red River, one almost certainly based on the travels
of a young American horse trader named Philip Nolan, a
(16:45):
man worthy of a fuller treatment in a later episode
of this podcast above the Wichita villages. The Red River Fort.
The right hand fort flowed through a mountain ridge to
the west, but the left hand for which was the longer,
spilled off an open plain, Wilkinson said, so extensive as
(17:07):
to require the Indians four days in crossing it. Beyond
that high plain there was a river running south, and
beyond that very high mountains disappearing into northern distances. Had
the Americans understood this description, which accurately portrayed the headwaters
of the Red River in Great Canyons eroded into the
(17:29):
Yano Wes Tocado or the Stake Plain, with the Pecos
River flowing south beyond that, and with the Rockies in
Santa Fe still many days to the northwest, they would
have understood that the Arkansas River, not the Red, was
the correct route to the Rockies. The Arkansas would also
have had the added benefit that the Missouri did for
(17:50):
Lewis and Clark. It would have gotten American explorers farther
away from Spanish forces sent out to stop the Americans
from examining the West. The truth was that Jefferson's insistence
on the Red for his second Big Western expedition was
ill start, and the result was that Freeman's and Custos's
chances at becoming American heroes like Lewis and Clark were
(18:13):
about to evaporate. The letter of exploring instructions Jefferson had
given him in November of eighteen oh four included a
line also in the Lewis and Clark letter that would
prove far more significant in the Southwest. If at any
time a superior force, authorized or not authorized by a
nation should be arrayed against your further passage and inflexibly
(18:36):
determined to arrest it, you must decline its further pursuit
and return. So Freeman, it turned out, would neither stick
nor go through. In fact, he was about to bounce
right out of American history, With both Spain and Native
(19:01):
peoples like the Osages making threatening noises about Americans penetrating
the Southwest. Jefferson personally selected Captain Richard Sparks, familiar to
him via Lewis, as one of the best woodsman, bushfighters
and hunters in the army, to head a military contingent
to accompany the two scientific leaders. Now in the spring
(19:21):
of eighteen oh six, all was haste in procuring French
and Native guides and laying in supplies so that the
Grand Expeditions specially designed barges could take them up river
as far as the Wichitaa villages, whence they planned to
explore westward by horseback. Freeman directed the purchase of a
camera obscura to produce topographic images, a high quality chronometer
(19:45):
for fixing longitudes, and a portable barometer for taking elevations,
along with an acrochromatic telescope to help fix latitudes by
observing the eclipses of Jupiter's moons. Custus brought a shotgun,
plant presses, and various traps and preservation equipment, plus a
library of natural history reference volumes. By mid April of
(20:08):
eighteen oh six, the bulk of the exploring party had
assembled in Natchez, Mississippi, where they conducted a last round
of outfitting. Sparks selected two non commissioned officers and seventeen
privates for their general good health and robust temperaments. As
with Lewis and Clark, there was an African American member
of the expedition who may have arrived with Peter Custis.
(20:30):
Unlike York, we don't know his name. This party entered
the mouth of the Red River on May the first,
anticipating a year long probe taking them some thirteen hundred
river miles into the western interior. But despite their high spirits,
they couldn't miss the warning signs on the Spanish border.
As Custius would confide in his journal, this expedition seems
(20:54):
to have thrown their whole country in the commotion because
the Red River was got nearly so distant from Spanish
power as the Missouri Madrid got active in a hurry,
it quickly dispatched not one but two bodies of troops
to intercept Freeman and Cussis. One with two hundred cavalry,
commanded by Captain Francisco Vianna, left Nacadochus in East Texas
(21:17):
to confront the Americans on the Lower River. The other,
which Zebulun Pike, who mistakenly thought he was its target,
described as the most important expedition ever sent out from
the province of New Mexico, was the Insurance Policy, commanded
by Lieutenant Ficundo Melgari's. It left Santa Fe bound for
the Red in early June of eighteen oh six, With
(21:41):
that time and the summer of eighteen oh six merely
waited out the geopolitical rendezvous. When Jefferson's explorers arrived in Nacotash,
the last American outposts on the Red, and heard of
the ominous Spanish troop movements, the two questions they must
have been asking themselves were how far are we going
to get? And will I live through this? Nonetheless, this
(22:04):
was the President's own mission. Now brought up to fifty
men with French and two Indian guides and a total
of seven craft, making it the largest American exploring party
of the age. Freeman's stick or go through aphorism was
about to be tested. Confronting only nature, the aphorism worked.
(22:26):
In the course of their five month exploration, the party
would confront many remarkable phenomena of the Red Rivers in
natural ecology. One of those was the Great Raft, a
thousand year old logjam that entirely blocked the river for
more than one hundred miles. To get their boats around
this massive obstacle, they had to detour through a swamp
(22:46):
land that likely rivaled today's ok Finoki Swamp. For naturalist custos,
the Great Swamp was a botanical treasure. For everyone else,
it was pure misery. Fourteen days of incep sent fatigue,
toil and danger, doubt and uncertainty, as Freeman put it.
Beyond the route, Freeman got a first opportunity to try
(23:08):
out his diplomatic skills on the Indians, whose country they
now entered, an ancient but reduced population of mound builders,
the Catto Confederacy. For two weeks the Americans treated with
de Heehuitt, hereditary chief of the Caddos, to whom Freeman
presented US flags and solicited Catto endorsement of the exploration.
(23:29):
Custus meanwhile observed and wrote of Catto and customs and skills.
Their talents with the bow, he said, put him in
mind of stories from the Iliad, and he posted a
twenty six specimen botanical collection downriver for Custis. The beautiful
Red River Valley seemed the paradise of America, as he
called it. The naturalists Eden Jefferson and Promise the image
(23:52):
of Freeman and Custus ill starred as they were that
I savor Is, then proceeding upriver in July of eighteen
oh six, busily studying the river valley, made aware by
the Caddos that a Spanish force four times their number
was shadowing them in the undulating hills to the west.
Guided by the Caddos, cut Finger and grand Ose Ages,
(24:13):
the party engaged in a series of minor adventures, at
one point ascending a small mountain prominent in the Caddo
creation myth and consuming a bottle of whiskey with their guides.
By the twenty second of July, they had rounded the
Great Band of the Red near present Texarkana and were
heading due west. On July the twenty seventh, the Caddoes
(24:34):
told them that they had reached the former location of
Bnard de la Harp's early eighteenth century trading post that
had been the most westerly French settlement on the Red River,
beyond which Spain now insisted that the southwest belonged to
their monarchy. There was another alarming development too. After ascending
(24:55):
the river for two weeks without a thunderstorm, the water
in the Red was dropping fast. Still two to three
weeks from the Wichital villages, and whatever horses they could
purchase with their flags and gifts, the explorers were having
to drag their barges, their hulls grinding on channel gravel
up the river. As for the movements of the Spanish
(25:15):
troops sent to oppose them, they were direct and purposeful.
After angrily cutting down the American flag he found flying
into heehus Cadat village, Captain Vianna had marched his force
north to the Red taking a position on a bluff
that's been known ever since as Spanish Bluff, near the
present boundary between Oklahoma and Arkansas, sending a post to
(25:39):
his superior saying that he knew the irremedial damage that
would result to this province if the Union is accomplished
of the expedition of the United States with the faceless
Wichitaal Indians and the Comanches. Vianna wrote that he would
confront the Americans above the old French posts, as this
territory is ours. Lacking a successful exploration, Freeman very well
(26:03):
might have ensured his name in American history had he
opted for armed conflict, but there was no violent encounter.
When the Americans rounded a bend in the river and
faced a Spanish force four times their size arrayed across it,
Vianna politely but firmly refused to allow the Americans to pass,
(26:25):
and Freeman, with Jefferson's instructions in hand, if at any
time a superior force, authorized or not authorized by a nation,
should be arrayed against your further passage and inflexibly determined
to arrest it, you must decline its further pursuit. In return,
he made the mature decision the confrontation called for. The
(26:45):
date was July thirtieth, eighteen oh six. They had ascended
the Red River, six hundred and fifteen miles to the
edge of the black Land Prairies and the Great Plains,
but still only halfway to the Great Mystery of the
Red Sources. So Freeman agreed to turn back rather than
proceeding on. As Lewis and Clark often began their journal entries,
(27:07):
the Grand Expedition turned around in a young country like
the US, anxious about its reputation and longing for heroes
to celebrate. Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis and their mates,
on a presidentially authorized attempt to explore the West, return
to a country that quickly turned away and forgot them.
(27:30):
For a total expenditure at last of eighty seven hundred dollars,
Jefferson had launched an expedition that another power had forced
to retreat. Peter Custis's natural history work on the red
was highly intriguing. He had cataloged twenty two mammals, thirty
six birds, seventeen reptiles, fishes and amphibians, fifty eight trees,
(27:52):
and one hundred and thirty flowering plants, twenty six of
which he collected for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
The meager geographic results meant that everyone involved understood, having
failed to penetrate the great planes and reached the rockies
in Santa Fe, the expedition was a failure. There was
just no other way to spend it. The President's public
(28:26):
reaction was clear enough. He preferred to concentrate on the
triumphant return of Lewis and Clark and to say as
little as possible about his second expedition. There are historians,
in fact, who have called this expedition a headstrong decision
that put in danger the lives of Americans pursuing an
impossible goal, and it does appear that Jefferson's own stubbornness embarrassing.
(28:49):
There was also an undercut of public suspicion. At least
one prominent newspaper would editorialize that the ferment with Spain
in eighteen oh six was not caused by Aaron Burr's
plot to invade the Southwest, as newspapers favorable to Jefferson's
administration tried to spin it, But by Jefferson's secret expeditions,
(29:10):
secret orders, and secret plans of exploration. The fate of
Freeman and Custis does beg another question, what if the
Spaniards who sent out two different expeditions to find Lewis
and Clark had also succeeded and blocked them. I suspect
the Freeman and Custis expedition provides us with an answer.
(29:32):
What happened to their expedition? Seems to argue that America's
destiny in the West didn't truly rest on successful Jeffersonian exploration.
Despite their failures, US traders carrying American goods and even
US flags still traveled among the Indians of the Southwest
in the years following, and more of this in the
next episode. By eighteen nineteen, the Red River to the
(29:55):
hundredth Parallel did finally become the boundary between Spain and
the US, and Mexico did revolt successfully against Spain to
create its own democratic republic. In eighteen twenty one. American
expansionist policies in the three decades after Jefferson still brought Texas,
New Mexico, and the far Southwest into the American orbit.
(30:19):
Had Spain similarly intercepted Lewis and Clark, The analogy provided
by Freeman and Custis argues that even without their expedition,
the history of the Northwest likely would have turned out
just about the same as it did. In the big picture,
other currents of nineteenth century history were more powerful than
Jeffersonian explorers. So remove Lewis and Clark from the American
(30:43):
story just as the Spanish force removed Freeman in Custice,
and probably not much would have changed geopolitically. But I
should emphasize geopolitically, a successful Lewis and Clark expedition was
a truly important historical event for America. What we would
have lost without Lewis and Clark in our history then
(31:04):
and now is our awestruck reaction towards New worlds. Lewis
and Clark gave us a carefully recorded ultimate camping trip
in a dream world that lay at the end of
sixty thousand years of human trekking out of Africa and
around the Earth. Behind us lay our footprints in the
(31:25):
American West of eighteen oh four to eighteen oh six.
We got one last glimpse, through Lewis and Clark of
what the whole earth had been in the deep past,
as our robot rovers tremble across Mars and send us
photographs that are analogues of their maps of America from
only two hundred years ago. We see expiration as a
(31:46):
specific American legacy, but that legacy is common to humanity everywhere.
Any human who doesn't live to see our footprints on
Mars is going to experience the kind of regret I
feel that Freeman and Custus didn't get to emulate Lewis
and Clark and explore the West, a regret that intrigued
me into once writing in a book I called Horizontal Yellow,
(32:09):
a little novella The River that Flowed from Nowhere that
imagines Freeman and Custis continuing up the Red River into
a Southwest beyond all of Thomas Jefferson's fantasies.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
How did you How did you first become aware of
the Grand Expedition until I encountered it with you?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah? Never heard of it?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Never heard of it?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, and I don't think most people have ever
heard of it. I encountered it for a very simple reason.
I was getting a master's degree at Northwestern State in
Louisiana and there was an archivist there named Catherine Bridges,
(33:10):
and she was inquiring of me, So, what are you
interested in? What do you want to, you know, maybe
write a master's thesis about? And I said, well, you
know what I'm interested in. I mean, I'm interested in
Lewis and Clark in the fur trade, and you know,
all this kind of classic early Western stuff. And she
(33:33):
looked at me for a second and she said, so,
I'm going to tell you something I'm pretty sure you
don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Stephen randaller a on it.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Stephen and Randall lead this expedition.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One day there will be born.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, So she said, I'm going to tell you something
I bet you don't know. Thomas Jefferson sent a second
expedition out two years after Lewis and and he sent
it right up the Red River, and Red River flows
right through Nacolus, right through town.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Oh really, yes, yeah. And I grew up within about
where you were at that moment.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Where I was that moment, that's where I was curious
about eight miles from there.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
I was curious whether you'd gotten on this because it
was a local store, local.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Story, and you hadn't even heard of it.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
No, I hadn't heard of it, nor had anybody else.
And I will say that now, back in northwestern Louisiana,
you know, I mean, there are all kinds of people
who called me up and email me and text me
with these detailed questions, sort of like people do for
Lewis and Clark about this expedition. Because once people learned
(34:41):
about it back there, suddenly they were just all over it.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Oh do you think they saw this rock? Do you
think they camped under this big tree?
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Well, I mean an archaeologist found a button from one
of the jackets at one of their camps about twenty
five years ago, and that was national news. By publication
of the book was not national news. The button from
the camp was national news. But anyway, I said, so,
you know, you've got to be kidding. She said, no,
(35:10):
there's a there was an expedition. It went right through here.
It didn't ultimately, I said, well, so I farted they
get She said, well, they didn't get very far. They
got about six hundred and fifty seven hundred miles up
the Red River, and they got turned around by a
Spanish army. So that's why hardly anybody knows about it.
Because the United States was a young country, it was
looking for heroes to celebrate, didn't want to really celebrate,
(35:33):
you know.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Some group that chickens.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, European country had sort of whisk back home. So
I said, well, is there any account of it? She said, yeah,
we've got a microfilm of it. And so what she
showed me was a microfilm of the official government report
of this expedition in eighteen oh seven, the year after
(35:55):
the expedition took place, and that official government report was
written by somebody else. I finally discovered when I was
doing the book. A guy named Nicholas King was hired
by the administration to redact their original journals into a
single account. And this guy, Nicholas King, he not only
(36:19):
redacted the journals into a single account, so you couldn't tell,
for example, whether it was Freeman talking or it was
Custos talking. He converted it into third person rather than
in the first person of their journals. And the final
thing he did is I started looking closely at it
I was gone, I mean, there's this all this rich
natural history in this expedition, and I start trying to
(36:42):
figure out, so what was this tree? Shit? I can't
find anything that looks like it's named that. And what
I began to realize, and finally when I found the
original in the letters of the War Department where the
original accounts, journals and all were stored, and I found
the originals, I realized that this guy, Nicholas King, evidently
(37:04):
he couldn't read Peter Custis's handwriting, and so he just
destroyed all the Latin binomials of all the plants and
over and stuff. And so one of the things that
happened is the result of that is that Custice kind
of emerges from it with the American scientific community going,
what in the hell this guy? He's from the University
(37:26):
of Pennsylvania. He has said under Benjamins a bit of Barton,
and he doesn't know any of the scientific names of
the plants and animals. And in fact it was the
guy who redacted it. So what I did, ultimately when
I wrote the book was I found the original accounts,
and that's what I ended up, you know, I mean,
(37:47):
it's a big thing with the Lewis and Clark journals
that you published, the original journals of the account. So
once I found Freeman and Custis's stuff, I was able
to put together a story of it where the proper
stuff was a tribute to each one of them, and
all the scientific nomenclature was correct. And so it turned
it suddenly into two hundred years later, two hundred frigging
(38:12):
years later, into a really worthwhile scientific expedition that just
got cut off before they really could quite get out
to the great planes and start seeing all that stuff
that Lewis and Clark saw, all those new animals. They
stopped just short of that by about two days.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
One of the things you see in especially popular history
is there's a tend towards these hypotheticals of like what
if Patten had sent the tanks this way or that way,
or what if so and so, you know never wrote
this book, and then there's sort of this hypothetical.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I think that's occurring in your mind.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
Oh no, I think this is I think there's all
kinds of like TV show. I feel like this account
manterfactual as calls yeah, counterfactual. Yeah, Like there are all
these questions of like counterfactuals in history, and in this
case you highlight that what if Lewis and Clark never
made it to the Pacific, you have sort of the
actual counterfactual here that suggests that probably things would have
(39:18):
been folded very similarly to the way in which they
did with the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And so I think that's one of the really interesting
aspects of this story. You often, I think when I
when I read about the Lewis and Clark expedition, you
read about sort of all the natural science that they
brought back, and you read about sort of the Lewis
(39:42):
and Clark as ethnographers, and Lewis and Clark in terms
of adding to our knowledge of this place. But you
here able to answer question of what is the actual
significance in terms of territorial expansion.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, and I think know at least if the Freeman
and Custis expedition is indicative if the Spaniards and they tried,
by the way, they sent two expeditions up to the
Missouri River to try to find Lewis and Clark, but
they it's just too big a country. They couldn't find
them that if they had managed to stop them and
(40:19):
turn them around, and had Lewis and I've had, you know,
I mean, there are a lot of uh Marriwether Lewis's
an American hero. He would have never stopped for a
bunch of Spaniards. He would have just plowed right on.
He would have never stopped. But had they been stopped,
I think, judging by the Freeman and Custis expedition, things
(40:41):
probably would have been folded in the Northwest pretty much
as they did anyway. But you know, as I was
trying to point out what we would lose though, is
that incredible description of the early American West that those
guys did, and that you know, nobody wants to sacrifice.
To me, that's the real contribution that those guys made.
(41:04):
I don't think they you know, they didn't find the
Northwest Passage for sure. I mean, they tried to cross
the bitter Root Mountains and think that was going to
lead them to the Northwest Passage, you know, and it
didn't didn't do it at all. I mean, there's not
even a Northwest Passage kind of highway across the bitter
Root Mountains these days. So they didn't find that they
kind of actually failed in their ultimate goal of finding
(41:26):
a northwest passage. But and they didn't really you know,
their presence on the Pacific coast was important for that
winner of eighteen oh five, but eighteen oh five, eighteen
oh six, but you know, Astoria's Fort was probably more important.
And even that fort got taken away by the Brits
in the War of eighteen twelve. But it's it's those
(41:49):
journals and all that description of the landscape and the animals,
and the ethnographic stuff on the native people, you know,
however flawed. Sometimes it might have been Jesus Man. That
stuff nobody. I certainly don't want to ever lose that.
Lewis and Clark count count.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I want to hear more about the Big Raft, the
Great Raft, a thousand year old log jam.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, the Great Raft is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I presume it's not there anymore.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
It's not there anymore, but it took the invention of
nitroglycerin in the eighteen seventies to remove it.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
How many miles long was it?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Well, when it was finally removed, it was one hundred
and forty miles long.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
I just want people to picture what we're talking about.
It like if if you've seen just like picture, you're
on a creek and you know, at the end of
spring runoff or whatever, and there's a bunch of logs
piled up like toothpicks or match sticks, all jumbled up,
you know, and there's usually that a be or cooler
in a bottle and someone's dog toy floating there because
(42:49):
it can't get by. But then the next year it
floods and washes it out, washes it out, and it's
you know, but you see them pop up and go away.
But the fact that one of those ad a thousand
years and accumulated over one hundred miles of logs, and yeah,
not only totally obstructed any kind of navigation.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Completely obstructed navigation, and not only that it was climbing
the river. It started out we think a thousand years ago,
down at the mouth of the Red River, and when
Freeman and Custis encountered it, they were like about two
hundred and fifty miles up the river. So it had
receded for two hundred and fifty miles up river as
(43:30):
the bottom end had rotted off and it had been
swept away by floods. But every time there was a
big freshet out on the plains, the upper end stacked
up again, and so it was just climbing the Red
River like a snake. And by the time of.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Year, that was a frustrated many a cat fisherman.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Ohnot of structure, though, it frustrated, you know, So on
the Missouri once we had steamboats, I mean you could
go up the Missouri and you could you know, you'd
haul back bison ropes, heavy stuff from the planes. But
on the Red River you could not navigate that thing
until the eighteen seventies and they.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Blasted it out of there.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
They blasted it out. Our guy named Captain Henry Shreve
from the US Army Corps of Engineers used nitro glycerin.
It took him about ten years to blast.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh that's all I was gonna ask. So he didn't
find like some magical pinch point. No, you just kept
doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Just kept blowing it out, doing it. I mean, I've
got photographs of it in that book. I mean, it's
kind of unbelievable. And people said, you could be walking
out on the ground what you thought was just the ground,
and you'd cock your ear and damn, there's water running
(44:47):
under my feet, and they would realize, shit, we're standing
on the great raft and underneath us the Red River
is flowing, but it's timber coming out of where ultimately
it's coming from, primarily the woods upstream on the Red River.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Oh okay, so it's cottonwood logs. Yeah, some of my
mind I was picturing. Yeah, some of them were Jennifer
picturing like like a coniferous tree of some sort or
I got you.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, there were there were. There was a big expanse
of junipers on the middle Red not rocky mountain junipers,
but there were Virginia junipers and they were really tall,
really big.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
People compared it was mostly cottonwoods tipping into the river.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
It was mostly cotton woods. And of course cottonwoods that's
why it would rot away, is because you know, they're
soft and kind of easily damaged by water. And so yeah,
this thing was just climbing the river.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Were there are there oral traditions that I mean, it
seems like this sort of thing that's just so grand
and strange, and I wonder like if there if we
have any sort of sense of how native people in
that area described.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
It, well, I don't have a good native account, but
I can tell you this. In two thousand and six,
the two hundredth anniversary of this expedition, Lsu Shreetport put
on a three day symposium celebrating the Freeman and Custis expedition.
(46:19):
And so they had me back there to do a
keynote and do various other things. And while I was there,
there was a group of Catto Indian guys and they
came up to me and they said, so, you know
where Chikhania is, don't you? And I said, yeah, I
(46:40):
do and Chakanie and I I mentioned in the podcast
that Freeman and Custis climbed this little small mountain in
southwestern Arkansas with their two guides and drank a bottle
of whiskey in order to converse with the Great Spirit.
And these Caddos who were removed from Louisiana by treaty
(47:01):
in eighteen thirty five and they were relocated to western
Oklahoma around a lot in Oklahoma, they had had kind
of oral traditions of this mountain that was supposed to
be part of their origin story, but they didn't know
where it was. And somebody told them, I don't know
(47:24):
if they told them at that conference or they already
knew about it when they came. But they came to
me and said, so, you know where Chickny and aias
And I said yeah, because I had gone up and
found it and climbed the mountain and you know, I
didn't drink a whole bottle of whiskey, but I drank
some whiskey up on top of it. And I said yeah.
(47:46):
And they said, well, can you show us where it is?
I said, well, absolutely, yeah, I can take you there.
So I took these four cattle guys, one of them
was really pretty old, he was in his eighties probably,
and went up to this mountain that was there as
part of their creation myth story. That was very cool.
(48:08):
I don't know who owned the hill. Uh, there were
there was nobody really living very close to it. And
so sort of like the way you and I did,
uh a blackwater draw A blackwater draw, we had a
self tour and I did a self guided tour up
on top of that. Now. Yeah, just climbed up there
(48:31):
and uh yeah. So these guys, uh And since then,
and this happened within the last year, I've had another
guy who tells me. He's a cat Oak historian, and
he's wanting me to show him where it is and
take him out there. Of course I don't ever really,
my parents are gone. I've got aunts and uncles and
things back in Louisiana. But yeah, so yeah, I actually
(48:56):
sent him a you know, I took a photograph of
a USGS seven point five quad and sent it to
him and showed him the road that went by, a
little dirt road two track that went by, and circle
it and said, this is where it is. That's right here.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
So the expedition had they not been turned around, what
name brand features would they have?
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Like?
Speaker 2 (49:19):
What things that people today are? Where might they have been?
Like holy cologe of that? Like what would they run into?
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, they would have. They would have been out on
the equivalent of the Mandan Lakota country farther south. I mean,
Lewis and Clark of course, get up to the Mandan
villages and they've already passed some Lakota bands, and then
they go from the Mandan villages to the Rockies and
they don't really see anybody, but they would less Freeman
(49:47):
Custis would have been amongst a similar group of people
farther south. But in this case it was Pawnees, a
group we call the Wichitas now, and they had It's
the same group, by the way, that Carnado when he
was going to Quavera, was trying to find. And when
Carnado went to try to find them, they were living
(50:07):
up on the Arkansas River, but they had moved down
to the Red River, I don't know, fifty or sixty
years before Freeman Incussus. And so that's where they were going,
and they were gonna leave their craft there, those seven
boats they had, and they were gonna purchase horses from
the Wichitas and head up the river. And as I
said when I was trying to describe how that river works,
(50:29):
you would reach a point maybe one hundred miles beyond
the Wichita villages, where it would fork, kind of like
a three forks thing, except depending on which way you went.
The right hand one would go through the Wichita Mountains
in the Quartz Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma, and it really
wouldn't go much farther than that. It wouldn't get you,
for example, to the front range of the Rockies. The
(50:53):
left fork, though, and this is the one that everybody
thought that's the one that's going to go to Santa Fe.
That fork would actually take you to the canyons of
the eastern escarpment of the Aano Estacata. And so in
the primary one is Paalo Duro.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Can they would have been in a commanche country.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Yeah, they would have been in Commanchee country with the.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
Commandche have demolished them.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
You know, I don't think so. No, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
I mean, at that time, it wouldn't have been hostile.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Yeah. The next episode I'm going to do is about
a guy, a trader named Anthony Glass who two years
after Freeman Custis are turned around the Jefferson Administration, Indian
Asia and Nacolas shown Sibley. They give this guy the
responsibility of going out and make the diplomatic arrangements with
(51:44):
the Wichitas and the command She take American flags out,
give them American flags, tell them they're now, you know,
part of the Great Father in Washington's tribes and we're
going to start trading with him and all that. And
that guy he was among the Wichitas and the Comanches
for about ten months and he didn't ever really experience
any kind of danger. And what it was, I think
(52:06):
is if you were a trader, if you had trade
goods and they were, they were a okay with you.
And Glass of course took trade goods out with him,
so I don't think the Comanches would have screwed around
with him. They didn't screw around with the Long Expedition
fifteen years later. They just let them go through. They
(52:28):
didn't really have any reason yet, I think to be
hostile and who they became who the Commanches became hostile
towards by the eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties was
the Texans, and they distinguished between Texans and Americans. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Well, I look forward to that episode coming up. Man,
that's gonna be great.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
It'll be fun because there's a it's got a little
Oh Henry twist to it. Think you
Speaker 2 (53:02):
To the game when Moses the vis
When Thomas Jefferson acquired the eight hundred million acre Louisiana purchase,
he launched a second major exploring expedition into the West,
one with an entirely different outcome than Lewis and Clark's,
an outcome that shines a new light on what Lewis
and Clark's journey really meant for America. I'm Dan Flory's
(00:22):
and this is the American West, brought to you by
Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer
just in time for the season that calls us home.
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers
to protect public lands, waters and wildlife enjoy responsibly. Jefferson's
(00:56):
other Lewis and Clark. On a gray Tuesday in November
of the year eighteen oh five, with a chill wind
scattering autumn leaves into the puddles of Washington's muddy streets,
White House staff admitted a caller for a private dinner
(01:18):
with the President of the United States that November evening.
Thomas Freeman must have felt his future was made. Thomas
Jefferson was about to offer him a plum appointment. The
leadership of one of his prized explorations into the Louisiana purchase,
(01:40):
one of the most fascinating parts of the globe for
scientific study. With Meriwether Lewis and his party already on
the shores of the Pacific, Jefferson was turning to Freeman,
a civilian astronomer who'd immigrated from Ireland, to lead an
exploring party into southwestern America. Jefferson and call this new
(02:01):
probe the Grand Expedition, and he was aiming it at
the Red River of the South, which natural history titan
Alexander von Humboldt had assured the President would take American
explorers into vast deserts and the southerly ranges of the
Shining Mountains. Along with Humboldt, Jefferson had canvass a number
(02:21):
of scientists who'd been gathering information about the Southwest, and
he was fascinated. The young United States had geopolitical reasons
for exploring Louisiana, but at heart, Jefferson was a naturalist
who dug fossils and written his own book about Virginia.
His informants about the Southwest told him wonderful stories about
(02:44):
volcanoes and tigers and herds, of wild horses, among innumerable
buffalo and wolves. He knew that camels, what he called
the yama or paca of Peru, still existed in similar
country in South America, and since there was already evidence
of elephants in America by then Charles Wilson Peel had laboriously,
(03:08):
if badly, reassembled the skeleton of one for his museum
in Philadelphia, elephants might still be in the West. Two
Meriwether Lewis had shipped enough reports and specimens back from
the Missouri River that science was already buzzing about animals
and birds never seen in the Eastern States, and Jefferson's
(03:28):
hope was that America's most famous naturalist, William Bartram, would
accompany Freeman into the Southwest. Bartram was in his late sixties, though,
so instead promoted Alexander Wilson, soon to be America's first
great bird painter, as Freeman's naturalist. Jefferson instead chose a
young Virginian whose family he knew well. Thus did a
(03:51):
University of Pennsylvania medical student named Peter Custis become the
first scientist trained in an American university to when a
posting as a naturalist to the west. Congress had come
up with twice the funding for this expedition, as it
had for Lewis and Clark. So when his private dinner
(04:12):
with the President concluded, Thomas Freeman stepped into the Washington
Knight holding seven pages of exploring instructions written in Jefferson's
clear handwriting. He knew, he wrote, a friend, the hazards
of travel in the neighborhood of Santa Fe. A great
many difficulties, in some personal danger will attend the expedition,
(04:33):
but I will stick or go through the more danger,
the more honor. Jefferson's instructions, which Freeman must have scanned repeatedly,
still exists in the Library of Congress. They include intriguing
directions that also appeared in the exploring instructions the President
had given Meriwether Lewis. The following objects in the country
(04:55):
adjacent to the rivers along which you will pass will
be worthy of notice. The animals of the country generally,
and especially those not known in the maritime states. And
the remains and accounts of any which may be deemed extinct.
The western half of North America then was the country,
and the eighteen hundreds was the century that ultimately answered
(05:20):
many fundamental questions about America's destiny. With the Louisiana purchase,
Jefferson's administration had affected a continental future for the US,
Like a stone rolling down a mountain. The US in
the eighteen hundreds would claim and buy and seize much
more of the continent. Eventually, everything from southwestern deserts to
(05:41):
Alaska on tundra what had been and could have remained
Native America or French, British or Mexican territory over the
next sixty years would become part of the US. Thus
did the West become ours? There was that intriguing final
line in Jefferson's Natural History Instructions too, about one of
(06:04):
the grand scientific questions of the age, was extinction real?
Were camels and elephants still out there? Or had they, somehow,
for some unknown reason, vanished from America? Could living creatures
really entirely disappear on a planet Christianity had long believed
was designed as perfection by a creator. How could species
(06:28):
God had placed on Earth vanish, leaving us with only
their enigmatic bones and skeletons. These questions, and many others,
were why Jefferson aimed a second major exploring expedition at
the West. It's a foregone conclusion that everyone listening to
this has long known about Lewis and Clark, America's most
(06:51):
famous explorers. I would wague that the chances are almost
non existent, though, that you've ever heard of Thomas Freeman
or doctor Peter Custis own about an eighteen oh six
American probe into the West that was known as the
Grand Expedition. Yet two centuries and two decades ago, a
party of superbly equipped American explorers was working its way
(07:14):
up the Red River of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma,
painstakingly mapping the country, holding councils with all the local tribes,
and making collections of plants, wildlife, and geology. Both President
Jefferson and the party's leaders thought of this as the
Southwestern counterpart to the Lewis and Clark Party, which in
(07:35):
that same summer was returning from a successful exploration across
darkest North America to the Pacific by intent. Freeman, an engineer, surveyor,
and cartographer, and Custis, a student of Benjamin Smith Barton
in America's best university at the time, should today be
(07:56):
as famous as any historical figures who aren't President Sir
Jeah Generals, Jefferson had picked them the lead a scientific
reconnaissance across the Great Plains to the Rockies as far
as legendary Santa Fe. We ought to have heard about
them in junior high school social studies the way we
hear about Neil Armstrong's one giant Leap for mankind on
the Moon, but then once so wrong with Jefferson's second
(08:20):
expedition to the West that it's now invisible in American history.
In a master plan Jefferson had set down in eighteen
o three, America's third president, had outlined four major expeditions
he hoped to send into the New Louisiana Purchase. In
a precient prediction of the future destiny of the US,
(08:43):
Jefferson believed an expedition into the southern parts of the Purchase,
aimed at what we today called the Southwest, was almost
as critical as having Lewis and Clark search for the
Northwest Passage. Fundamentally, American exploring parties in the West would
establish a national presence on North American geography that Jefferson
(09:03):
hoped both European powers and Native people would acknowledge, and
as with his questions about extinction, Western exploration represented the
Jefferson administration's official support of cutting edge science. What was
out there? What new wonders existed on this last continent
that humans had found on Earth? But Lewis and Clark
(09:26):
would leave those questions unanswered for an enormous stretch of
the Louisiana purchase. So, in an exchange of letters with
Meriwether Lewis in eighteen oh three, Jefferson had told Lewis
that the object of your mission is single, the direct
water communication from sea to sea. I will also send
(09:46):
a party up the Red River to its head, then
cross over to the head of the Arkansas and come down.
That this will be attempted distinctly from your mission. So
what's Lewis and Clark underway? In eighteen oh four, Jefferson
devoted the time he had for expiation to two years
of detailed planning and a budget of five thousand dollars
(10:09):
from Congress to send his next grand expedition into the
heart of the West. The problems for this second expedition began, though,
with the choice of rivers. Jefferson told a friend that
he regarded the Red River of the South as next
(10:31):
to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the Mississippi.
But unfortunately he was smitten by the Red in part
because he misunderstood it. Soon after his purchase of the
Louisiana territory, Jefferson had made known his belief that its
proper southern boundary was actually the Rio grand River. That
(10:52):
startling claim meant that the upstart United States believed it
now possessed not merely the French colonies in Louisiana and Missouri,
but also Texas and New Mexico, where Spain had settlements
that dated back to the early sixteen hundreds. Spain's diplomat
to the US responded that this was absurd reasoning, but
(11:15):
Jefferson had alarmed Spain, which was already struggling to hold
on to its American colonies. The Spanish monarchy was highly
suspicious of America's claim that, as a democratic republic, it
represented the future for North America. Jefferson's claims unnecessarily rile Spain,
(11:35):
and unfortunately, his attempts to regroup and turn the Red River,
where he was able to document far more French activity
than on the Rio Grande, into a compromise boundary failed
to appease the Spanish government. But in the world of
the Southwest and its geography, how feasible was an expiration
up the Red River and then down the Arkansas. Anyway?
(11:58):
The essential first question of this pairing was where would
the Red River lead American explorers. Jefferson assumed that major
rivers had in mountain ranges, and that, given its lower
course and size, the Red must have its origins somewhere
in the southern ranges of the Shining Mountains, near the
tantalizing destination of Santa Fe. That assumption appeared to be
(12:23):
corroborated by recent maps, particularly a brand new one drawn
by the famous Prussian naturalists himself Alexander von Humboldt, and
based on his map work in Mexico City's archives. Humboldt
knew that Lower Louisiana was bisected north and south by
a river the French called River Rouge that flowed from
(12:45):
the west, and he knew that from the high Rockies
near Santa Fe, a reddish river flowed eastward. Surely, the
river the Spaniards saw, and one thousand miles later Fritchman saw,
was the same one the Americans who are now calling
the Red so that's how Humboldt drew it. Just as
Lewis and Clark were to open an economic route up
(13:08):
the Missouri to the northwest, the Red appeared poised to
do the same with a proto Santa Fe trailed trade
route between Louisiana and New Mexico. If in fact, the
Southern Rockies was where the Red River headed. Jefferson issued
a call to the American scientific community for more information
(13:30):
about the Southwest, and he got it. A New York
nationalist named Samuel Mitchell told the President the Red was
supposed to be navigable for one thousand miles above the
last French town on it century old Nakanish, and that
it penetrated a country of immense prairies with alligators, buffalo tigers, wolves,
(13:51):
and innumerable herds of wild horses. The Scottish expatriate scientist
Sir William Dunbar wrote of the Redd's long course and
its sources in what he called salt Mountains. Dunbar dangled
wonderful stories of wonderful productions, including possibly unicorns on the
(14:12):
southern prairie, and in the wake of a recent mastodon
skeleton excavation in Kentucky. Giant water serpents too, he thought
might be in the Southwest. Dunbar also reported vague stories
of masses of metal venerated by the Indians and assumed
to be silver ore, and more of those. In the
(14:33):
next episode from his Indian agent in Nacrish, doctor John Sibley,
Jefferson learned one other critical bit of information. As the
gateway to New Mexico, the Upper Red, was controlled by
the horticultural Pawnees, actually the Wichitas as we know them today,
under their forceful leader Awahakai, and a buffalo hunting people
(14:57):
sibly referred to as the Aton, who we now know
as the Comanches. These Indians, who had fond memories of
the days when Spanish and French traders had competed for
their friendship, were openly expressing interest in the Americans. That
was music to Jefferson's ears. While the natural history particulars
(15:17):
the President was hearing were vaguely real, the geography, unfortunately,
was not. There were those who knew the truth about
the Red even this early in the seventeen eighties and
seventeen nineties. The Spanish government had dispatched French and Spanish
explorers to link the towns of Saint Louis, Nacotish, and
(15:39):
San Antonio with distant Santa Fe. Some of them traveled
the Red River, and they knew it did not lead
them to Santa Fe. But what had caught the attention
of Spanish officials was acclaimed by one of them, Pierre Vial,
in seventeen ninety three, that it was possible to journey
from Saint Louis to Santa Fe in little more than
(16:00):
three weeks. The revolutionary Americans were that close. That was
far too close. Among Jefferson's informants, there was one who
gave the President accurate information about his choice of a river.
A scheming and controversial general named James Wilkinson presented the
President with a twenty two page letter about the Southwest,
(16:23):
designed to excite the presidential eye. As Wilkinson put it,
among the various details about the natural history of this
wonderful country, there was actually an accurate description of the
Upper Red River, one almost certainly based on the travels
of a young American horse trader named Philip Nolan, a
(16:45):
man worthy of a fuller treatment in a later episode
of this podcast above the Wichita villages. The Red River Fort.
The right hand fort flowed through a mountain ridge to
the west, but the left hand for which was the longer,
spilled off an open plain, Wilkinson said, so extensive as
(17:07):
to require the Indians four days in crossing it. Beyond
that high plain there was a river running south, and
beyond that very high mountains disappearing into northern distances. Had
the Americans understood this description, which accurately portrayed the headwaters
of the Red River in Great Canyons eroded into the
(17:29):
Yano Wes Tocado or the Stake Plain, with the Pecos
River flowing south beyond that, and with the Rockies in
Santa Fe still many days to the northwest, they would
have understood that the Arkansas River, not the Red, was
the correct route to the Rockies. The Arkansas would also
have had the added benefit that the Missouri did for
(17:50):
Lewis and Clark. It would have gotten American explorers farther
away from Spanish forces sent out to stop the Americans
from examining the West. The truth was that Jefferson's insistence
on the Red for his second Big Western expedition was
ill start, and the result was that Freeman's and Custos's
chances at becoming American heroes like Lewis and Clark were
(18:13):
about to evaporate. The letter of exploring instructions Jefferson had
given him in November of eighteen oh four included a
line also in the Lewis and Clark letter that would
prove far more significant in the Southwest. If at any
time a superior force, authorized or not authorized by a
nation should be arrayed against your further passage and inflexibly
(18:36):
determined to arrest it, you must decline its further pursuit
and return. So Freeman, it turned out, would neither stick
nor go through. In fact, he was about to bounce
right out of American history, With both Spain and Native
(19:01):
peoples like the Osages making threatening noises about Americans penetrating
the Southwest. Jefferson personally selected Captain Richard Sparks, familiar to
him via Lewis, as one of the best woodsman, bushfighters
and hunters in the army, to head a military contingent
to accompany the two scientific leaders. Now in the spring
(19:21):
of eighteen oh six, all was haste in procuring French
and Native guides and laying in supplies so that the
Grand Expeditions specially designed barges could take them up river
as far as the Wichitaa villages, whence they planned to
explore westward by horseback. Freeman directed the purchase of a
camera obscura to produce topographic images, a high quality chronometer
(19:45):
for fixing longitudes, and a portable barometer for taking elevations,
along with an acrochromatic telescope to help fix latitudes by
observing the eclipses of Jupiter's moons. Custus brought a shotgun,
plant presses, and various traps and preservation equipment, plus a
library of natural history reference volumes. By mid April of
(20:08):
eighteen oh six, the bulk of the exploring party had
assembled in Natchez, Mississippi, where they conducted a last round
of outfitting. Sparks selected two non commissioned officers and seventeen
privates for their general good health and robust temperaments. As
with Lewis and Clark, there was an African American member
of the expedition who may have arrived with Peter Custis.
(20:30):
Unlike York, we don't know his name. This party entered
the mouth of the Red River on May the first,
anticipating a year long probe taking them some thirteen hundred
river miles into the western interior. But despite their high spirits,
they couldn't miss the warning signs on the Spanish border.
As Custius would confide in his journal, this expedition seems
(20:54):
to have thrown their whole country in the commotion because
the Red River was got nearly so distant from Spanish
power as the Missouri Madrid got active in a hurry,
it quickly dispatched not one but two bodies of troops
to intercept Freeman and Cussis. One with two hundred cavalry,
commanded by Captain Francisco Vianna, left Nacadochus in East Texas
(21:17):
to confront the Americans on the Lower River. The other,
which Zebulun Pike, who mistakenly thought he was its target,
described as the most important expedition ever sent out from
the province of New Mexico, was the Insurance Policy, commanded
by Lieutenant Ficundo Melgari's. It left Santa Fe bound for
the Red in early June of eighteen oh six, With
(21:41):
that time and the summer of eighteen oh six merely
waited out the geopolitical rendezvous. When Jefferson's explorers arrived in Nacotash,
the last American outposts on the Red, and heard of
the ominous Spanish troop movements, the two questions they must
have been asking themselves were how far are we going
to get? And will I live through this? Nonetheless, this
(22:04):
was the President's own mission. Now brought up to fifty
men with French and two Indian guides and a total
of seven craft, making it the largest American exploring party
of the age. Freeman's stick or go through aphorism was
about to be tested. Confronting only nature, the aphorism worked.
(22:26):
In the course of their five month exploration, the party
would confront many remarkable phenomena of the Red Rivers in
natural ecology. One of those was the Great Raft, a
thousand year old logjam that entirely blocked the river for
more than one hundred miles. To get their boats around
this massive obstacle, they had to detour through a swamp
(22:46):
land that likely rivaled today's ok Finoki Swamp. For naturalist custos,
the Great Swamp was a botanical treasure. For everyone else,
it was pure misery. Fourteen days of incep sent fatigue,
toil and danger, doubt and uncertainty, as Freeman put it.
Beyond the route, Freeman got a first opportunity to try
(23:08):
out his diplomatic skills on the Indians, whose country they
now entered, an ancient but reduced population of mound builders,
the Catto Confederacy. For two weeks the Americans treated with
de Heehuitt, hereditary chief of the Caddos, to whom Freeman
presented US flags and solicited Catto endorsement of the exploration.
(23:29):
Custus meanwhile observed and wrote of Catto and customs and skills.
Their talents with the bow, he said, put him in
mind of stories from the Iliad, and he posted a
twenty six specimen botanical collection downriver for Custis. The beautiful
Red River Valley seemed the paradise of America, as he
called it. The naturalists Eden Jefferson and Promise the image
(23:52):
of Freeman and Custus ill starred as they were that
I savor Is, then proceeding upriver in July of eighteen
oh six, busily studying the river valley, made aware by
the Caddos that a Spanish force four times their number
was shadowing them in the undulating hills to the west.
Guided by the Caddos, cut Finger and grand Ose Ages,
(24:13):
the party engaged in a series of minor adventures, at
one point ascending a small mountain prominent in the Caddo
creation myth and consuming a bottle of whiskey with their guides.
By the twenty second of July, they had rounded the
Great Band of the Red near present Texarkana and were
heading due west. On July the twenty seventh, the Caddoes
(24:34):
told them that they had reached the former location of
Bnard de la Harp's early eighteenth century trading post that
had been the most westerly French settlement on the Red River,
beyond which Spain now insisted that the southwest belonged to
their monarchy. There was another alarming development too. After ascending
(24:55):
the river for two weeks without a thunderstorm, the water
in the Red was dropping fast. Still two to three
weeks from the Wichital villages, and whatever horses they could
purchase with their flags and gifts, the explorers were having
to drag their barges, their hulls grinding on channel gravel
up the river. As for the movements of the Spanish
(25:15):
troops sent to oppose them, they were direct and purposeful.
After angrily cutting down the American flag he found flying
into heehus Cadat village, Captain Vianna had marched his force
north to the Red taking a position on a bluff
that's been known ever since as Spanish Bluff, near the
present boundary between Oklahoma and Arkansas, sending a post to
(25:39):
his superior saying that he knew the irremedial damage that
would result to this province if the Union is accomplished
of the expedition of the United States with the faceless
Wichitaal Indians and the Comanches. Vianna wrote that he would
confront the Americans above the old French posts, as this
territory is ours. Lacking a successful exploration, Freeman very well
(26:03):
might have ensured his name in American history had he
opted for armed conflict, but there was no violent encounter.
When the Americans rounded a bend in the river and
faced a Spanish force four times their size arrayed across it,
Vianna politely but firmly refused to allow the Americans to pass,
(26:25):
and Freeman, with Jefferson's instructions in hand, if at any
time a superior force, authorized or not authorized by a nation,
should be arrayed against your further passage and inflexibly determined
to arrest it, you must decline its further pursuit. In return,
he made the mature decision the confrontation called for. The
(26:45):
date was July thirtieth, eighteen oh six. They had ascended
the Red River, six hundred and fifteen miles to the
edge of the black Land Prairies and the Great Plains,
but still only halfway to the Great Mystery of the
Red Sources. So Freeman agreed to turn back rather than
proceeding on. As Lewis and Clark often began their journal entries,
(27:07):
the Grand Expedition turned around in a young country like
the US, anxious about its reputation and longing for heroes
to celebrate. Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis and their mates,
on a presidentially authorized attempt to explore the West, return
to a country that quickly turned away and forgot them.
(27:30):
For a total expenditure at last of eighty seven hundred dollars,
Jefferson had launched an expedition that another power had forced
to retreat. Peter Custis's natural history work on the red
was highly intriguing. He had cataloged twenty two mammals, thirty
six birds, seventeen reptiles, fishes and amphibians, fifty eight trees,
(27:52):
and one hundred and thirty flowering plants, twenty six of
which he collected for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
The meager geographic results meant that everyone involved understood, having
failed to penetrate the great planes and reached the rockies
in Santa Fe, the expedition was a failure. There was
just no other way to spend it. The President's public
(28:26):
reaction was clear enough. He preferred to concentrate on the
triumphant return of Lewis and Clark and to say as
little as possible about his second expedition. There are historians,
in fact, who have called this expedition a headstrong decision
that put in danger the lives of Americans pursuing an
impossible goal, and it does appear that Jefferson's own stubbornness embarrassing.
(28:49):
There was also an undercut of public suspicion. At least
one prominent newspaper would editorialize that the ferment with Spain
in eighteen oh six was not caused by Aaron Burr's
plot to invade the Southwest, as newspapers favorable to Jefferson's
administration tried to spin it, But by Jefferson's secret expeditions,
(29:10):
secret orders, and secret plans of exploration. The fate of
Freeman and Custis does beg another question, what if the
Spaniards who sent out two different expeditions to find Lewis
and Clark had also succeeded and blocked them. I suspect
the Freeman and Custis expedition provides us with an answer.
(29:32):
What happened to their expedition? Seems to argue that America's
destiny in the West didn't truly rest on successful Jeffersonian exploration.
Despite their failures, US traders carrying American goods and even
US flags still traveled among the Indians of the Southwest
in the years following, and more of this in the
next episode. By eighteen nineteen, the Red River to the
(29:55):
hundredth Parallel did finally become the boundary between Spain and
the US, and Mexico did revolt successfully against Spain to
create its own democratic republic. In eighteen twenty one. American
expansionist policies in the three decades after Jefferson still brought Texas,
New Mexico, and the far Southwest into the American orbit.
(30:19):
Had Spain similarly intercepted Lewis and Clark, The analogy provided
by Freeman and Custis argues that even without their expedition,
the history of the Northwest likely would have turned out
just about the same as it did. In the big picture,
other currents of nineteenth century history were more powerful than
Jeffersonian explorers. So remove Lewis and Clark from the American
(30:43):
story just as the Spanish force removed Freeman in Custice,
and probably not much would have changed geopolitically. But I
should emphasize geopolitically, a successful Lewis and Clark expedition was
a truly important historical event for America. What we would
have lost without Lewis and Clark in our history then
(31:04):
and now is our awestruck reaction towards New worlds. Lewis
and Clark gave us a carefully recorded ultimate camping trip
in a dream world that lay at the end of
sixty thousand years of human trekking out of Africa and
around the Earth. Behind us lay our footprints in the
(31:25):
American West of eighteen oh four to eighteen oh six.
We got one last glimpse, through Lewis and Clark of
what the whole earth had been in the deep past,
as our robot rovers tremble across Mars and send us
photographs that are analogues of their maps of America from
only two hundred years ago. We see expiration as a
(31:46):
specific American legacy, but that legacy is common to humanity everywhere.
Any human who doesn't live to see our footprints on
Mars is going to experience the kind of regret I
feel that Freeman and Custus didn't get to emulate Lewis
and Clark and explore the West, a regret that intrigued
me into once writing in a book I called Horizontal Yellow,
(32:09):
a little novella The River that Flowed from Nowhere that
imagines Freeman and Custis continuing up the Red River into
a Southwest beyond all of Thomas Jefferson's fantasies.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
How did you How did you first become aware of
the Grand Expedition until I encountered it with you?
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Yeah? Never heard of it?
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Never heard of it?
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah, yeah, and I don't think most people have ever
heard of it. I encountered it for a very simple reason.
I was getting a master's degree at Northwestern State in
Louisiana and there was an archivist there named Catherine Bridges,
(33:10):
and she was inquiring of me, So, what are you
interested in? What do you want to, you know, maybe
write a master's thesis about? And I said, well, you
know what I'm interested in. I mean, I'm interested in
Lewis and Clark in the fur trade, and you know,
all this kind of classic early Western stuff. And she
(33:33):
looked at me for a second and she said, so,
I'm going to tell you something I'm pretty sure you
don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Stephen randaller a on it.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Stephen and Randall lead this expedition.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One day there will be born.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, So she said, I'm going to tell you something
I bet you don't know. Thomas Jefferson sent a second
expedition out two years after Lewis and and he sent
it right up the Red River, and Red River flows
right through Nacolus, right through town.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Oh really, yes, yeah. And I grew up within about
where you were at that moment.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Where I was that moment, that's where I was curious
about eight miles from there.
Speaker 3 (34:15):
I was curious whether you'd gotten on this because it
was a local store, local.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Story, and you hadn't even heard of it.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
No, I hadn't heard of it, nor had anybody else.
And I will say that now, back in northwestern Louisiana,
you know, I mean, there are all kinds of people
who called me up and email me and text me
with these detailed questions, sort of like people do for
Lewis and Clark about this expedition. Because once people learned
(34:41):
about it back there, suddenly they were just all over it.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Oh do you think they saw this rock? Do you
think they camped under this big tree?
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Well, I mean an archaeologist found a button from one
of the jackets at one of their camps about twenty
five years ago, and that was national news. By publication
of the book was not national news. The button from
the camp was national news. But anyway, I said, so,
you know, you've got to be kidding. She said, no,
(35:10):
there's a there was an expedition. It went right through here.
It didn't ultimately, I said, well, so I farted they
get She said, well, they didn't get very far. They
got about six hundred and fifty seven hundred miles up
the Red River, and they got turned around by a
Spanish army. So that's why hardly anybody knows about it.
Because the United States was a young country, it was
looking for heroes to celebrate, didn't want to really celebrate,
(35:33):
you know.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Some group that chickens.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah, European country had sort of whisk back home. So
I said, well, is there any account of it? She said, yeah,
we've got a microfilm of it. And so what she
showed me was a microfilm of the official government report
of this expedition in eighteen oh seven, the year after
(35:55):
the expedition took place, and that official government report was
written by somebody else. I finally discovered when I was
doing the book. A guy named Nicholas King was hired
by the administration to redact their original journals into a
single account. And this guy, Nicholas King, he not only
(36:19):
redacted the journals into a single account, so you couldn't tell,
for example, whether it was Freeman talking or it was
Custos talking. He converted it into third person rather than
in the first person of their journals. And the final
thing he did is I started looking closely at it
I was gone, I mean, there's this all this rich
natural history in this expedition, and I start trying to
(36:42):
figure out, so what was this tree? Shit? I can't
find anything that looks like it's named that. And what
I began to realize, and finally when I found the
original in the letters of the War Department where the
original accounts, journals and all were stored, and I found
the originals, I realized that this guy, Nicholas King, evidently
(37:04):
he couldn't read Peter Custis's handwriting, and so he just
destroyed all the Latin binomials of all the plants and
over and stuff. And so one of the things that
happened is the result of that is that Custice kind
of emerges from it with the American scientific community going,
what in the hell this guy? He's from the University
(37:26):
of Pennsylvania. He has said under Benjamins a bit of Barton,
and he doesn't know any of the scientific names of
the plants and animals. And in fact it was the
guy who redacted it. So what I did, ultimately when
I wrote the book was I found the original accounts,
and that's what I ended up, you know, I mean,
(37:47):
it's a big thing with the Lewis and Clark journals
that you published, the original journals of the account. So
once I found Freeman and Custis's stuff, I was able
to put together a story of it where the proper
stuff was a tribute to each one of them, and
all the scientific nomenclature was correct. And so it turned
it suddenly into two hundred years later, two hundred frigging
(38:12):
years later, into a really worthwhile scientific expedition that just
got cut off before they really could quite get out
to the great planes and start seeing all that stuff
that Lewis and Clark saw, all those new animals. They
stopped just short of that by about two days.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
One of the things you see in especially popular history
is there's a tend towards these hypotheticals of like what
if Patten had sent the tanks this way or that way,
or what if so and so, you know never wrote
this book, and then there's sort of this hypothetical.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
I think that's occurring in your mind.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
Oh no, I think this is I think there's all
kinds of like TV show. I feel like this account
manterfactual as calls yeah, counterfactual. Yeah, Like there are all
these questions of like counterfactuals in history, and in this
case you highlight that what if Lewis and Clark never
made it to the Pacific, you have sort of the
actual counterfactual here that suggests that probably things would have
(39:18):
been folded very similarly to the way in which they
did with the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And so I think that's one of the really interesting
aspects of this story. You often, I think when I
when I read about the Lewis and Clark expedition, you
read about sort of all the natural science that they
brought back, and you read about sort of the Lewis
(39:42):
and Clark as ethnographers, and Lewis and Clark in terms
of adding to our knowledge of this place. But you
here able to answer question of what is the actual
significance in terms of territorial expansion.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, and I think know at least if the Freeman
and Custis expedition is indicative if the Spaniards and they tried,
by the way, they sent two expeditions up to the
Missouri River to try to find Lewis and Clark, but
they it's just too big a country. They couldn't find
them that if they had managed to stop them and
(40:19):
turn them around, and had Lewis and I've had, you know,
I mean, there are a lot of uh Marriwether Lewis's
an American hero. He would have never stopped for a
bunch of Spaniards. He would have just plowed right on.
He would have never stopped. But had they been stopped,
I think, judging by the Freeman and Custis expedition, things
(40:41):
probably would have been folded in the Northwest pretty much
as they did anyway. But you know, as I was
trying to point out what we would lose though, is
that incredible description of the early American West that those
guys did, and that you know, nobody wants to sacrifice.
To me, that's the real contribution that those guys made.
(41:04):
I don't think they you know, they didn't find the
Northwest Passage for sure. I mean, they tried to cross
the bitter Root Mountains and think that was going to
lead them to the Northwest Passage, you know, and it
didn't didn't do it at all. I mean, there's not
even a Northwest Passage kind of highway across the bitter
Root Mountains these days. So they didn't find that they
kind of actually failed in their ultimate goal of finding
(41:26):
a northwest passage. But and they didn't really you know,
their presence on the Pacific coast was important for that
winner of eighteen oh five, but eighteen oh five, eighteen
oh six, but you know, Astoria's Fort was probably more important.
And even that fort got taken away by the Brits
in the War of eighteen twelve. But it's it's those
(41:49):
journals and all that description of the landscape and the animals,
and the ethnographic stuff on the native people, you know,
however flawed. Sometimes it might have been Jesus Man. That
stuff nobody. I certainly don't want to ever lose that.
Lewis and Clark count count.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I want to hear more about the Big Raft, the
Great Raft, a thousand year old log jam.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, the Great Raft is really interesting.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
I presume it's not there anymore.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
It's not there anymore, but it took the invention of
nitroglycerin in the eighteen seventies to remove it.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
How many miles long was it?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Well, when it was finally removed, it was one hundred
and forty miles long.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
I just want people to picture what we're talking about.
It like if if you've seen just like picture, you're
on a creek and you know, at the end of
spring runoff or whatever, and there's a bunch of logs
piled up like toothpicks or match sticks, all jumbled up,
you know, and there's usually that a be or cooler
in a bottle and someone's dog toy floating there because
(42:49):
it can't get by. But then the next year it
floods and washes it out, washes it out, and it's
you know, but you see them pop up and go away.
But the fact that one of those ad a thousand
years and accumulated over one hundred miles of logs, and yeah,
not only totally obstructed any kind of navigation.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Completely obstructed navigation, and not only that it was climbing
the river. It started out we think a thousand years ago,
down at the mouth of the Red River, and when
Freeman and Custis encountered it, they were like about two
hundred and fifty miles up the river. So it had
receded for two hundred and fifty miles up river as
(43:30):
the bottom end had rotted off and it had been
swept away by floods. But every time there was a
big freshet out on the plains, the upper end stacked
up again, and so it was just climbing the Red
River like a snake. And by the time of.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Year, that was a frustrated many a cat fisherman.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Ohnot of structure, though, it frustrated, you know, So on
the Missouri once we had steamboats, I mean you could
go up the Missouri and you could you know, you'd
haul back bison ropes, heavy stuff from the planes. But
on the Red River you could not navigate that thing
until the eighteen seventies and they.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Blasted it out of there.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
They blasted it out. Our guy named Captain Henry Shreve
from the US Army Corps of Engineers used nitro glycerin.
It took him about ten years to blast.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Oh that's all I was gonna ask. So he didn't
find like some magical pinch point. No, you just kept
doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Just kept blowing it out, doing it. I mean, I've
got photographs of it in that book. I mean, it's
kind of unbelievable. And people said, you could be walking
out on the ground what you thought was just the ground,
and you'd cock your ear and damn, there's water running
(44:47):
under my feet, and they would realize, shit, we're standing
on the great raft and underneath us the Red River
is flowing, but it's timber coming out of where ultimately
it's coming from, primarily the woods upstream on the Red River.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
Oh okay, so it's cottonwood logs. Yeah, some of my
mind I was picturing. Yeah, some of them were Jennifer
picturing like like a coniferous tree of some sort or
I got you.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, there were there were. There was a big expanse
of junipers on the middle Red not rocky mountain junipers,
but there were Virginia junipers and they were really tall,
really big.
Speaker 2 (45:24):
People compared it was mostly cottonwoods tipping into the river.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
It was mostly cotton woods. And of course cottonwoods that's
why it would rot away, is because you know, they're
soft and kind of easily damaged by water. And so yeah,
this thing was just climbing the river.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Were there are there oral traditions that I mean, it
seems like this sort of thing that's just so grand
and strange, and I wonder like if there if we
have any sort of sense of how native people in
that area described.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
It, well, I don't have a good native account, but
I can tell you this. In two thousand and six,
the two hundredth anniversary of this expedition, Lsu Shreetport put
on a three day symposium celebrating the Freeman and Custis expedition.
(46:19):
And so they had me back there to do a
keynote and do various other things. And while I was there,
there was a group of Catto Indian guys and they
came up to me and they said, so, you know
where Chikhania is, don't you? And I said, yeah, I
(46:40):
do and Chakanie and I I mentioned in the podcast
that Freeman and Custis climbed this little small mountain in
southwestern Arkansas with their two guides and drank a bottle
of whiskey in order to converse with the Great Spirit.
And these Caddos who were removed from Louisiana by treaty
(47:01):
in eighteen thirty five and they were relocated to western
Oklahoma around a lot in Oklahoma, they had had kind
of oral traditions of this mountain that was supposed to
be part of their origin story, but they didn't know
where it was. And somebody told them, I don't know
(47:24):
if they told them at that conference or they already
knew about it when they came. But they came to
me and said, so, you know where Chickny and aias
And I said yeah, because I had gone up and
found it and climbed the mountain and you know, I
didn't drink a whole bottle of whiskey, but I drank
some whiskey up on top of it. And I said yeah.
(47:46):
And they said, well, can you show us where it is?
I said, well, absolutely, yeah, I can take you there.
So I took these four cattle guys, one of them
was really pretty old, he was in his eighties probably,
and went up to this mountain that was there as
part of their creation myth story. That was very cool.
(48:08):
I don't know who owned the hill. Uh, there were
there was nobody really living very close to it. And
so sort of like the way you and I did,
uh a blackwater draw A blackwater draw, we had a
self tour and I did a self guided tour up
on top of that. Now. Yeah, just climbed up there
(48:31):
and uh yeah. So these guys, uh And since then,
and this happened within the last year, I've had another
guy who tells me. He's a cat Oak historian, and
he's wanting me to show him where it is and
take him out there. Of course I don't ever really,
my parents are gone. I've got aunts and uncles and
things back in Louisiana. But yeah, so yeah, I actually
(48:56):
sent him a you know, I took a photograph of
a USGS seven point five quad and sent it to
him and showed him the road that went by, a
little dirt road two track that went by, and circle
it and said, this is where it is. That's right here.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
So the expedition had they not been turned around, what
name brand features would they have?
Speaker 1 (49:19):
Like?
Speaker 2 (49:19):
What things that people today are? Where might they have been?
Like holy cologe of that? Like what would they run into?
Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, they would have. They would have been out on
the equivalent of the Mandan Lakota country farther south. I mean,
Lewis and Clark of course, get up to the Mandan
villages and they've already passed some Lakota bands, and then
they go from the Mandan villages to the Rockies and
they don't really see anybody, but they would less Freeman
(49:47):
Custis would have been amongst a similar group of people
farther south. But in this case it was Pawnees, a
group we call the Wichitas now, and they had It's
the same group, by the way, that Carnado when he
was going to Quavera, was trying to find. And when
Carnado went to try to find them, they were living
(50:07):
up on the Arkansas River, but they had moved down
to the Red River, I don't know, fifty or sixty
years before Freeman Incussus. And so that's where they were going,
and they were gonna leave their craft there, those seven
boats they had, and they were gonna purchase horses from
the Wichitas and head up the river. And as I
said when I was trying to describe how that river works,
(50:29):
you would reach a point maybe one hundred miles beyond
the Wichita villages, where it would fork, kind of like
a three forks thing, except depending on which way you went.
The right hand one would go through the Wichita Mountains
in the Quartz Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma, and it really
wouldn't go much farther than that. It wouldn't get you,
for example, to the front range of the Rockies. The
(50:53):
left fork, though, and this is the one that everybody
thought that's the one that's going to go to Santa Fe.
That fork would actually take you to the canyons of
the eastern escarpment of the Aano Estacata. And so in
the primary one is Paalo Duro.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
Can they would have been in a commanche country.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
Yeah, they would have been in Commanchee country with the.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
Commandche have demolished them.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
You know, I don't think so. No, I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
I mean, at that time, it wouldn't have been hostile.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Yeah. The next episode I'm going to do is about
a guy, a trader named Anthony Glass who two years
after Freeman Custis are turned around the Jefferson Administration, Indian
Asia and Nacolas shown Sibley. They give this guy the
responsibility of going out and make the diplomatic arrangements with
(51:44):
the Wichitas and the command She take American flags out,
give them American flags, tell them they're now, you know,
part of the Great Father in Washington's tribes and we're
going to start trading with him and all that. And
that guy he was among the Wichitas and the Comanches
for about ten months and he didn't ever really experience
any kind of danger. And what it was, I think
(52:06):
is if you were a trader, if you had trade
goods and they were, they were a okay with you.
And Glass of course took trade goods out with him,
so I don't think the Comanches would have screwed around
with him. They didn't screw around with the Long Expedition
fifteen years later. They just let them go through. They
(52:28):
didn't really have any reason yet, I think to be
hostile and who they became who the Commanches became hostile
towards by the eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, eighteen sixties was
the Texans, and they distinguished between Texans and Americans. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Well, I look forward to that episode coming up. Man,
that's gonna be great.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
It'll be fun because there's a it's got a little
Oh Henry twist to it. Think you
Speaker 2 (53:02):
To the game when Moses the vis
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.