00:00:01 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 00:32:38 Speaker 2: How did you How did you first become aware of the Grand Expedition until I encountered it with you? 00:32:45 Speaker 1: Yeah? Never heard of it? 00:32:47 Speaker 2: Never heard of it? 00:32:47 Speaker 1: 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, 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 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. 00:33:39 Speaker 2: Stephen randaller a on it. 00:33:43 Speaker 1: Stephen and Randall lead this expedition. 00:33:47 Speaker 2: One day there will be born. 00:33:49 Speaker 1: 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. 00:34:07 Speaker 2: Oh really, yes, yeah. And I grew up within about where you were at that moment. 00:34:12 Speaker 1: Where I was that moment, that's where I was curious about eight miles from there. 00:34:15 Speaker 3: I was curious whether you'd gotten on this because it was a local store, local. 00:34:19 Speaker 2: Story, and you hadn't even heard of it. 00:34:21 Speaker 1: 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 about it back there, suddenly they were just all over it. 00:34:44 Speaker 3: Oh do you think they saw this rock? Do you think they camped under this big tree? 00:34:49 Speaker 1: 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, 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, you know. 00:35:34 Speaker 2: Some group that chickens. 00:35:35 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 00:38:31 Speaker 3: 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. 00:38:52 Speaker 2: I think that's occurring in your mind. 00:38:54 Speaker 3: 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 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 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. 00:39:58 Speaker 1: 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 00:42:07 Speaker 2: I want to hear more about the Big Raft, the Great Raft, a thousand year old log jam. 00:42:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, the Great Raft is really interesting. 00:42:15 Speaker 2: I presume it's not there anymore. 00:42:17 Speaker 1: It's not there anymore, but it took the invention of nitroglycerin in the eighteen seventies to remove it. 00:42:23 Speaker 2: How many miles long was it? 00:42:25 Speaker 1: Well, when it was finally removed, it was one hundred and forty miles long. 00:42:29 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:43:07 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:43:46 Speaker 2: Year, that was a frustrated many a cat fisherman. 00:43:48 Speaker 1: 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. 00:44:09 Speaker 2: Blasted it out of there. 00:44:10 Speaker 1: 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. 00:44:20 Speaker 2: Oh that's all I was gonna ask. So he didn't find like some magical pinch point. No, you just kept doing it. 00:44:26 Speaker 1: 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 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. 00:45:02 Speaker 2: 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. 00:45:12 Speaker 1: 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. 00:45:24 Speaker 2: People compared it was mostly cottonwoods tipping into the river. 00:45:26 Speaker 1: 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. 00:45:40 Speaker 3: 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. 00:45:58 Speaker 1: 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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. 00:49:09 Speaker 2: So the expedition had they not been turned around, what name brand features would they have? 00:49:19 Speaker 1: Like? 00:49:19 Speaker 2: What things that people today are? Where might they have been? Like holy cologe of that? Like what would they run into? 00:49:24 Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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 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. 00:51:11 Speaker 2: Can they would have been in a commanche country. 00:51:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, they would have been in Commanchee country with the. 00:51:14 Speaker 2: Commandche have demolished them. 00:51:17 Speaker 1: You know, I don't think so. No, I don't think so. 00:51:20 Speaker 2: I mean, at that time, it wouldn't have been hostile. 00:51:22 Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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. 00:52:44 Speaker 2: Well, I look forward to that episode coming up. Man, that's gonna be great. 00:52:50 Speaker 1: It'll be fun because there's a it's got a little Oh Henry twist to it. Think you 00:53:02 Speaker 2: To the game when Moses the vis