Ep. 39: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part II | The American West

When the U. S. acquired the West with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched two scientific expeditions to explore it. Lewis & Clark became legendary. The historical fiction that follows indicates that with a different outcome, Freeman and Custis would have been famous westerners, too. Here, then, is Part II. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:31Speaker 02

  Like Apollo 13 in the 1970s, Thomas Jefferson's 1806 Red River Expedition into the West was a failure. This is part two of how their story should have gone. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  The river that flowed from nowhere, part two.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  January 15, 1807, Nakodish, Dr. Sibley's home. "My dearest President Jefferson." And so our journey continued. On the 30th of September, with the Red River commencing to flow from a northwest direction and the unfamiliar mountains gathering their strange shapes around us, we came to a considerable stream of water coming in from the west. Directly exiting the mountains, its waters salty but less so than the main river. Here, our Pawnee guide Tattasuk advised us that this was the last point for several days where the river's waters could be drunk. That we must ascend this west fork called the Tulee

• 2:58Speaker 02

  with our pack mules to where the water became sweet and fill every skin bag we possessed for continuing the journey up the main river.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Mr. Freeman thus split the party, leaving eighteen at a camp at this place while nine of us followed the Tulee into its mountain fastness. Wholesome and sweet water was obtained within five miles of travel up this little stream, and our skin bags were soon filled to brimming. But so weird and oddly enchanting was the country that it drew us onward. And with one of the Indians and Mr. Talapoon, Mr. Freeman and I decided to explore further this narrow and most interesting defile.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  This was our first experience with a kind of scenery which became frequent, though never common to our eyes during the next months of our travel. A scenery, if I may, never before known within the confines of the United States. The majority of the views we here submit to the presidential eye, recorded with our camera obscura box, are of these canyons and of the rock mountains along the River Dunbar. Yet, I must add the sensible fact that none of the profiles we recorded can give an adequate impression of this country, which would require all the imagination and skill of Europe's best painters of landscape to capture.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It's now four months since I've returned from this region, yet its fantastical shapes and hues of its coloring linger in my mind like the faint impressions of a dream. Had I not seen it all with my own eyes, I would not believe such a place as the region about the head sources of the Red River exists.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  The chasm of the Tulee, which is called by those familiar with the country a canyon, continued for another 10 miles beyond the point where we left the pack mules. The reading with our instruments was taken far up it in a grassy basin surrounded by astonishing freestanding columns of red sandstone rock, but short of its ultimate source. Here was the first place in more than 15 miles that the canyon could be crossed by horse, and through it, a large and well-traveled Indian road was found. Remarkable as this place was, however, it paled in comparison to a point past the day before.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  This place, which we called the defile, for stirring the mind of thoughts of awe exceeded any view we had during the entire journey. In this defile, the opposing red-brown sandstone walls, filled with pebbles and shells, closed to less than 60 feet apart one from the other, and rose sheer and vertical to giddy heights. Strange lyrical bird song and the roar of a spring that gushed from a rock amphitheater filled the canyon with sound. Owing to some superstition, Tattasuk was struck by a sudden desire to escape this spot. And finding some footholds carved into the north face,

• 6:14Speaker 02

  he attempted an ascent which I accompanied with the barometer. A two-hour climb brought us to the crest of one of the surrounding peaks. Yet imagine my astonishment when we found ourselves not atop a mountain as I had supposed. While the defile we had traveled was visible to the east, westward, we stepped onto the margins of an open prairie, so flat, extensive, and glaring in the sun that coupled with the stupendous rent in the earth from which we had escaped, produced in me several moments of utter disorientation. "El Yano Stacado," Tattasuk said to me simply.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  "A plain so flat, it appeared staked at the edges like a hide." The barometer showed an elevation of 3,400 feet above the sea and a difference of 800 feet from the floor of the defile.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  On returning from this journey on October the 7th, we found our main camp well-supplied with meat from the fortuitous appearance of buffalo, which had been almost absent since we had left the Pawnee villages, but now presented mixed herds of cows and bulls in the throes of the rut. Swirling dust tornadoes obscured tremendous battles between bulls for the favors of the cows, the grunting and roaring of their violent jousts joining the mournful all-night serenades of the wolves to fashion a very symphony of the primeval.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Provision now by these distracted herds, on the 8th, we once again turned our horses up the main or Jefferson Fort and began to follow its wide sandy bed in a north-northwest direction. As the river wound deeper into the surrounding mountains, which now gathered a mile distant from the river on both sides of our passage, the strangeness grew daily. The colors of the cliffs and raw earth growing brighter, with brick reds and oranges, yellows, chocolate, and myriads of other hues, sometimes laid one atop the other in striped mounds that appeared and disappeared and appeared again.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  It was a place so bizarre to the experience of civilized man that the language to describe it fails. Of all of us, I believe Mr. Freeman was most astonished at the country, finding it so utterly unlike the misty Ireland of his youth, and wondered aloud more than once whether this was the same hemisphere as that fabled isle.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  During the time when Mr. Freeman and I had ascended the Tulee, our waiting party had found much sign of Indians, and on several occasions, we observed smokes at a distance. Having traveled the entire distance from the Pawnees without meeting Indians, although signs of their camps were abundant, we daily expected an encounter. These expectations grew as we encountered truly astonishing numbers of buffalo, their ranks sometimes barely parting sufficiently to allow us to pass. Throughout the days, they poured in brown streams down from the mountains on every side, thousands in view at a glance.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  We had the impression that in entering this gathering passageway, we had stumbled onto the very sanctum sanctorum of the buffalo tribe. On October the 12th, having traversed in a rare morning fog a most fantastical and colorful part of the narrowing defile we were ascending, the course of the stream turned abruptly to the west. Now began a journey through a different setting. Springs gushing from the walls grew abundant, the water became sweet, and the winding canyon became clothed with a forest of cedars,

• 10:26Speaker 02

  some low and rounded like hedges with berries blue on some, red on others. Against the cliffs, another kind of cedar grew, as tall and pointed and massive of trunk as the cedars above the Koshata Village 1,200 miles down river. Our way now much blocked by boulders falling from the rocky realms above us, on the 14th, discovering a trail leading up through an opening in the rocks, we ascended to the cliffs above and once again found ourselves confronted by the great plain. Apart from Mr. Freeman and myself and a few others, most of the party had yet to witness this phenomenon.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  And great were the exclamations of surprise when the summits of the mountains yielded to a featureless yellow plain extending into a jiggling infinity of heat waves, the dried stalks of the soap plants, the only vertical objects.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Except for its exposure to the sun and the occasional drain running into the canyon below, the Great Plain presented no obstacle to travel. We were thus moving more rapidly than heretofore when one of the Pawnees appeared with word that a very considerable camp of Iowans was fixed in the defile some miles before us. By late afternoon, we were inside of their tents, gleaming whitely in the sun and scattered about the canyon floor just below a place where the stream cascaded down several very picturesque waterfalls.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Captain Sparks sent Tattasuk and Talapoon forward to announce us, and before sunset, we again descended into the canyon where we entered a camp of 120 tents, almost 1,000 persons, hundreds of very noisy dogs, and roundabout which grazed several thousand horses and mules that were constantly coming and going to pastures at some distance from the main camp. This camp had more than one chief, for it was made up of several divisions, but we were escorted to the tent of its generally acknowledged leader, a man who appeared near

• 12:47Speaker 02

  50 years of age, extremely fit, with a bright eye, and, as we were soon to learn, a quick mind. Wary at first, for they had been in the country upon the Arkansas and had heard nothing of our coming, he soon inclined, as some others were not, towards greeting us in friendly fashion, and inside a spacious hide tent, copiously fitted, he bade us smoke with him. Through our interpreter Talapoon, who spoke with him in both signs and the Iowan language, a tongue entirely unrelated to that of the Pawnees, Mr. Freeman explained the nature of our journey.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  When he began to speak, he said he was known to the Spanish as Cordero, but that in his language he was Isom Bondi, meaning handsome wolf. Isa, the Iowan word for wolf, was a common cognomen among their warriors. His people were the Cotsoticas, or buffalo hunters, he said, and they traded in both Santa Fe and San Antone, where the Spaniards called them by the name Comanches. The Iowans, or Comanches, he said, were as numerous as the stars and owned all the country from San Antone to Santa Fe and north to the Arkansas.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  He told us frankly and with a prim satisfaction that it was good that the great mystery had placed a forest towards the sunrise to hem the Comanches in, for if there were prairies and buffalo and horses in that direction, he would fear for the people of the United States, as the Comanches would surely overrun us. He said they were at peace with the Spaniards, who traveled and traded among them freely, and whom they suffered to raise horses for them. He called the river we were on Kicheakehono, meaning Burrowing Squirrel River, for the countless numbers of the towns of these animals along it.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  He said the traders from Santa Fe called this canyon Palo Duro. On specific inquiry to Mr. Freeman's questions, Cordero added to doubts already growing among us. This river would not take us to near Santa Fe, he said. Beyond the great table land was a river that came down from the Spanish peaks near Santa Fe, but it took a course almost due south. A few days' ride to the north of us was another river that came out of the snowy Sierra in the country of one of their divisions called the Yamparica. Told of our instructions to locate only the head sources of this river we were on, he

• 15:40Speaker 02

  remarked again that it and the river to Santa Fe were not a part of the same water, but said he would show us all the waters of any rivers we wished to see. Cordero accepted Mr. Freeman's offer of a United States flag and showed it utmost respect. He said they welcomed our traders among them, but that Nakalish was too far to come to trade. He did not like the idea of a trade factory in their country. Thus embarked a period of near to a month when a significant portion of these Indians traveled with us, a circumstance not entirely pleasing to us because of the inclination of

• 16:22Speaker 02

  their young men to make off with our horses and goods. With apology, Cordero returned or replaced what he could, yet the annoyance sometimes strained our daily intercourse. The Iowans, or Comanches, are a large people, heavier than many Indians, with broad faces and slow movements until they alight their horses, at which horse and rider achieve a remarkable unity of movement and activity. Watching their feats of horsemanship in their home country, and more especially the flair with which they pursue and drive their arrows entirely through the buffalo whilst riding

• 17:03Speaker 02

  at full gallop, I was put in mind of the cavalry of the Tartars on the steppes of Mongolia. Like the Mongols, they are herders of horses, yet they rarely eat of them; their horses are a means to hunt, and they also trade them widely. They live exclusively in buffalo-skin tents, the covers and poles of which they are endlessly replenishing, but which endure the constant winds which sweep this open country and are dissembled so rapidly by their women that a camp can be broken to search for fresh pasture for their herds in moments.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  The men have as many horses as they can accumulate and as many wives as they can care for, the younger of which accompany them on their hunts and raids. Comanche women engage daily in the labor of processing animal skins, the results of which are exceedingly handsome. But among these hunters, they do not appear to share political power to the extent the Pawnee women do. The Comanches are at war with the Osages and the Apaches, but were at this very time in the process of making peace through intermarriage with their neighbors, the Kiowas.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Beyond any expectation, Indians from other tribes and a great many Spaniards captured as children are found among them, living as Comanches and apparently wishing for no other life.

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• 19:19Speaker 00

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• 21:35Speaker 02

  I befriended one of their physicians, a man of particular influence among them, who instructed me in their materia medica. Particularly interesting are three of their cures. The first, a plant which he said inhibits a woman's ability to conceive of child. They also have a method of curing toothache, or the common aching head, viz by the chewing of the stems of the ordinary willow. The third cure came from a kind of small cactus, which they have only recently learned the use of, and which grows far to the south.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  They consume it in a ceremony as a general tonic of good health, he said, and to speak with the great spirit. He wore the skin of a very large spotted leopard of their country, and on seeing my interest, said the living creature was fierce and preyed on colts and buffalo calves and sheep in the high mountains. In Spanish, he called it "El Tigre." I think it must be the large cat Linnaeus calls "Jaguar," and named "Felis Anka." On the morning of October the 17th, having remained here as long as we thought prudent,

• 22:55Speaker 02

  we commenced our journey up the river, now finding it to dwindle rapidly inside, accompanied by Cordero and more than a hundred of their warriors and young women. We now found ourselves traveling through a shallow, canyon-like valley, set 200 feet below the surface of the immense plain. As we moved west, various other shallow drains joined the main fork, but Cordero directed us to one with the best water, although scarcely a trickle, which he called "Terra Blanca." It contained a highway along its banks, fully the equal of the road across the Cumberland.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  On the 22nd, at a spring below one of the last of the rocky bluffs that had defined this valley for many miles, Cordero bade us fill our bags full and gave us to understand that we were now not far from the sources of our river. The stream water, found only in some holes at intervals during the previous day, now gave out entirely, as did the white rock strata above the drain, and the bed became merely a low, winding depression across the plain. This plain was thick with buffalo and herds of gazelle goats as far as the eye could

• 24:21Speaker 02

  penetrate, their forms very often appearing outrageously distorted in the wriggle of the heatwaves. Our hunters had endured merciless hilarity from the company when reporting the difficulties of shooting buffaloes walking on 20-foot stilts, but now had the satisfaction of confirmation atop the shimmering El Llan. Thus it was, that at midday on the 23rd of October, 1806, the depression we had been following, almost fading into the general surface of the great plain, one of the men gave a shout that he saw some break ahead, and within an hour, we had all gathered on

• 25:05Speaker 02

  the brink of a tremendous precipice falling 1,000 feet below us to the west, its cliffs stretching as far as we could see southwest and northeast. Before us to the west lay outliers broken off from the enormous table land over which we had come, those outliers composing a country of flat-top mountains extending away into the opulent distance. It was the grandest sight I ever beheld in these United States, but the snowy peaks said to stretch north from Santa Fe were nowhere in view.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Our readings indicated a position of west longitude 103 degrees 30 minutes and an elevation of the headwaters of the Red River of 4,975 feet above the sea, proof that the immense plain had been steadily rising as we had tracked west. Mr. Freeman asked of the Indians if there were a route to Santa Fe through the tortuous country below us, and how far. They answered yes, that only two days' ride west was a river running south that came from the high mountains above Santa Fe, but that the sun rose and fell 10 times between here and the Spanish towns.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  During the rest of this day, Mr. Freeman took no counsel, but consulted his written orders by lamp well after dark. A huge golden moon rose out of the plain to the east this night, illuminating the prairie in a silvery blue cast when one walked away from the fires, and lighting the gashes and throwing immense shadows across the wild table lands west of us. The wolves sang and the buffaloes bellowed across a country wilder and more remote than any man in our party, save for the Indians, had ever witnessed or even imagined.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Before I retired, Mr. Freeman came to my tent and told me with very evident regret and not a little heat, that given the specificity of his orders from the president's own mouth, our outward journey was now at an end, that I should prepare for the return journey to morning's hence. That because the Spanish force from Santa Fe might still be searching for us, he and Captain Sparks agreed we should attempt to return by a more direct route to the Pony Villages and descend the river with our barge as soon as water and weather permitted. That the Indians with us were in any case urging escape from the surface of El Llan

• 27:55Speaker 02

  before the great cold winds from the north swept the exposed plain. But that he and Captain Sparks, with Talapun and Tatusuk and our Aitken escort, had thought to ride along the precipice on the morrow and welcomed my company. We rose with the moon low in the sky to the west, and rode from camp along the precipice as the glow began in the east. Notwithstanding that our course lay away from the sunrise, over the next hour, we repeatedly reined in our horses to observe a phenomenon of these immense deserts, the sun's rays

• 28:36Speaker 02

  fingering the eastern sky in a most regular pattern resembling the spokes of a wheel. At one point, Captain Sparks rode up to tell me that the hunters referred to this singular occurrence by the name "Prairie Aurora." Given Mr. Dunbar's interesting studies of the rainbow, I preserved an image of it with the camera obscura. Although the rays of the aurora lack a prismatic effect, I suppose that refracted sunlight must account for it. The Indians had no interest in this explanation, but made much of the phenomenon, and when

• 29:16Speaker 02

  it finally faded, at the moment the dazzling orb crested the horizon, I observed Cordero to face the sun with outspread arms and perform a small ceremony, immersing himself, horse and weapons, in smoke.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  We used up this day riding the great western precipice of El Yon, eye collecting plants and mineral samples in the declivities of the steep and dry sandstone mountains below the brink, Mr. Freeman and Captain Sparks in taking readings at the head of a more southerly headwater drain of the river than we ascended, one called Frio. It was here that I saw the new species of dwarf pinus, collected the delicate little pea shrub, I believe a new genus, and found the silvery shrub of the aster family, growing with and in appearance very like the feathery artemisia of this country, but with flowerbracks

• 30:19Speaker 02

  blooming a most vivid yellow. I believe it a new genus. These were among many other species of an alien world. On October the 25th, we reluctantly turned our faces eastward once again, and began to follow a trace to the northeast that Cordero's people led us along, with the broken lands below the plain sometimes visible and close, while at other times we crept across the stupendous, flat surface of El Yon, as if the world were aught but plain and sky. No one was allowed to straggle or even hunt during these crossings, for fear

• 31:03Speaker 02

  of losing them in a country of no landmarks. The plain is dotted at intervals with shallow ponds, round like plates, of cracked mud trampled by the surrounding herds, but when watery these ponds are frequented by animals and by such an array of ducks, geese, waders, and a species of gray crane, that viewed from afar, we first thought the air above them suspended vortexes of bee swarms, when we finally heard the cries of the geese and the cranes. I and others of the men found this enormous plain, swept by constant strong

• 31:42Speaker 02

  winds, monotonous in its scenery, entirely lacking an echo, to be oddly stirring. This is undoubtedly one of the largest plains in the world, and it has the kind of stern, self-assured grandeur of a great ocean. We made the crossing from the sources of the Jefferson Fork to the head gullies of the north, or Dunbar Fork, in six days of riding, always angling towards particular springs and camps known to the Indians. At the second of these, there occurred an interesting encounter at a most fascinating spot, an alcove carved

• 32:25Speaker 02

  by sweet water gushing from a spring, and a rock amphitheater that was covered top to bottom in various painted and carved Indian symbols. These were many, and varied, some painted in red ochre, some including what appeared to our eyes as a Spanish bull in black charcoal. In the midst of these frescoes, and extending the length of the alcove, was a large and remarkable serpent, painted in red ochre and capped by a single horn on its forehead. Whilst in investigation of these interesting symbols, a party appeared in

• 33:07Speaker 02

  sight, and within an hour disembarked near our encampment. They proved to be traders, some Spanish, the greater part Indians from the New Mexico towns and the Indian pueblo of Saint Domingo. They were much astonished to see us, with two rickety and noisome carts, filled with breads, vegetables, blankets, and wares, they were bound for a "rescate", or "trade fair," they said, at a place along the eastern precipice of El Yon they called "Quitaque." Here was presented an interesting opportunity, and so I engaged them through

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Talapun's translation as to the meanings of the symbols on the wall behind us, particularly with respect to whether the great serpent depicted some creature not known to science. Their response was that the serpent did indeed represent a creature, which they called "Ganado," the great horned serpent that protected the waters, and that because of its appearance on this wall, weary travelers could always find water here. To further inquiry, they said that Ganado appeared only in dreams or ceremonies, but that the rattlesnakes were

• 34:28Speaker 02

  his familiars and common emissaries. This group accompanied us for two days before turning southeast to their rendezvous with certain Aitén bands. One of them was a Spaniard from a town called Teos, on the waters of the Rio Bravo, a man of about forty years, who was not only literate, but literary. We made ourselves known to one another using Latin terms and phrases, and he gave me to understand that he had been born in Galacia, where he studied some law and had immigrated to New Mexico in search of adventure and

• 35:08Speaker 02

  wealth, that the former had found him, but that he had eluded the latter entirely. His name was Trujillo, and he expressed a most interesting view of the surrounding country and its potential. It was his opinion that the Spanish approach to these vast plains and mountains would be the more workable than ours, for they would leave the country a grazing commons, and the only harm would be to the wild herds. But we Americans, with our zeal for possessing the world, would try to turn these lands into a place of individual grasping, and having no tolerance either for the wild beasts nor the Indians would entirely

• 35:52Speaker 02

  banish both. To my protest, he wondered good-naturedly if I had read "Cervantes," and gave me to understand that our two nations jousting for this region was an affair of the windmills, that nature had ever owned these expanses and ever would. Among the other interesting particulars of our short acquaintance, he showed us his method of hunting el cibola, the buffalo, from horseback with a lance. Mounting their fastest horse, he proceeded to run at one of the herds that constantly surrounded us in this region, and within a space of minutes had plunged a steel-tipped lance deep into the vitals of two fully grown

• 36:37Speaker 02

  buffalo running flat out across the prairie. It was as daring a display of courage and skill pitted against large, dangerous beasts as I've ever witnessed. He told us he had learned the technique, emulating bullfighters as a child in Spain. Before they left us, they told us that a party of Kiowas they had met the week before related that other Americans, led by a man named Pike, known to Captain Sparks as a favorite of General Wilkinson, were ascending the Arkansas River north of us. On the afternoon of October the 31st, we suddenly came within view of the head gullies of the northern branches

• 37:22Speaker 02

  of the Red River, and realized we were approaching the eastern edge of the great table land. The plunging vertical drainages here possessed springs of good water and small copsees of the cotton tree, and their sides were rich in the bright hues of rock and mineral we had seen on the main Red River. This, Cordero assured us, were waters of the mountainous river we had named the Dunbar Fork on our outward journey. Here we experienced a most astonishing occurrence never witnessed. For a full day, we rode through a migration

• 38:01Speaker 02

  of hundreds of massive, teacup-sized spiders, their bodies brown, legs black, and hair covered, all traveling northward, although I could not discern the object of their journey. The barometer here indicated an elevation of 3,200 feet above the sea, at a longitude of 101 degrees 7 minutes west of Greenwich. During the night of November the 4th, having rested and provisioned ourselves for beginning our exploration of this Dunbar Fork of the Red River, we were struck by the first of the great north winds of which the Indians

• 38:42Speaker 02

  had spoken with such awe and urgency. Nowhere in the eastern states, save during a hurricane along the Carolina shore, have I ever experienced the equal of this wind. The thermometer, which had stood at 67 degrees Fahrenheit the evening before, had dropped to 6 degrees Fahrenheit by morning. All day the wind blew relentlessly from the northwest, pushing before it a fine yellow dust that coated us as if with volcanic ash. It sensibly slackened some thirty hours after it commenced, and clouds of stars then appeared in the intense

• 39:22Speaker 02

  night cold. The night was then filled with a cacophony of strange flutings and weird cries from unfathomable numbers of birds passing over, heading south.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Four days' journey down this little river and passing through immense numbers of buffalo, all drifting southward, we left the last outliers of the strange, flat-top tablelands. The next morning, Captain Sparks, riding ahead with the Indians, spied the blue uplift of conical mountains on the eastern horizon. And by that afternoon, we made camp in a place where the river cut directly through the most westerly range of them. These ranges of peaks, for there are several scattered one from the other across the plain,

• 40:17Speaker 02

  are not a spur of the western Sierra or Mexican Mountains, nor are they lofty. We ascended to the topmost points of several of them, including the highest peak in the main cluster, and measured an elevation by barometer of 2,400 feet. The peaks of these mountains thus lie below the lowest surface we measured on the tablelands of the Ano. They present the appearance of immense piles of granite blocks, a mineral not seen elsewhere on Red River. Their vegetable clothing is oaks and cedars only, though the main range preserves on

• 40:59Speaker 02

  its height spacious meadows glowing orange in the sun of the knee-high bunch grass of this country. We found elk and buffalo plenty about these mountains, but no animal caught our attention in this region so much as the droves of wild horses, here in vast numbers. Knowing the President's fascination with the subject, I took special pains to observe them. In its wild state, the horse naturally segregates into droves, or maniadas, as the old horse catcher, Talapone, calls them, each ruled by a stallion whose chief occupation seems

• 41:40Speaker 02

  the difficult work of keeping his harem together and adding to it by theft and seduction, if he can. Ungroomed, the wild horse presents a striking sight: its mane flowing below its neck, its forelock extending to its nostrils, and its tail sweeping the ground. The eye is glowing and alert, though small, many appeared exceedingly well-made, and they present all the colors of hounds in a Virginia kennel, the tan with black mane and tail predominating. Given the value of horses in the United States, these immense droves are already being sought

• 42:23Speaker 02

  out by our hunters, who stealthily avoid the Spanish patrols and corral them or trade metalware to the Indians for them. A famed horse catcher named Nolan drove thousands of these prairie steeds to the States before losing his life to the Spaniards. Irrespective, descending the river, we thrice met with hunters engaged in the wild horse trade. On November the 14th, following a night when the north wind lay four inches of snow across the country, our descent of the mountain fork of the Red River took us to its confluence

• 43:03Speaker 02

  with the mainstream and to our own campsite of September the 18th to 20th. Here, Cordero and his people, anxious to join their companions wintering in the deep canyons far up the river, begged to take their leave of us. Notwithstanding certain minor frictions which had developed from so long a travel together, Mr. Freeman honored them with a feast and dance which lasted for some until the morning planet glowed a molten silver in the rose sky. Anxious now to descend the river before winter set in, we proceeded rapidly for the Pawnee Villages, encountering nothing noteworthy except that for some weeks we had observed

• 43:46Speaker 02

  that the plains round about us were seen to be on fire. These fires the Indians had set to direct the movements of the buffalo, freshen the grass for their horses, and to burn up the snakes and annoying insects. This practice seems to confirm Mr. Dunbar's assertion that these immense and grassy plains exist because of fire, a view in which Mr. Freeman concurs. I am not so certain. The rising elevation of the country up the river, which is seen to correspond sensibly with the diminution of the grass and oaks and other common species, should not be dismissed.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  But I'm anxious to discuss with Mr. Dunbar my theory that the spread of grasslands and the dwarfing of vegetation are related instead to a sensible and gradual decrease in atmospheric precipitation as one journeys into the interior of Louisiana. Consequently, the country about the sources of the Red River can never beckon the farmer. It's a region the architect of nature has instead fitted perfectly for wild beasts. We were greeted warmly at the Pawnee Villages on the 23rd, finding our craft and stores left with them in good shape.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  We remained there, awaiting a rise in the river until the second instant of December. During that time, with Sampson's assistance, as he has become very skilled in these tasks, I was able to dry and repackage my specimens from the sources of the river: a total of 41 vegetables, 13 used as cures by the Indians, 15 grass, shrub, and tree specimens, and a collection of 17 birds and 11 quadrupeds. The last includes the skins and horns of the hopping deer, a skin and skull with fangs of the large leopard cat of this country, and a necklace of four imposing claws of

• 45:59Speaker 02

  the giant white bears said to be numerous farther into Louisiana. Also, live specimens of a curious lizard beset with projecting horns and knobs, and an active, vividly colored iguana from the Palo Duro. The greater part of these I believe to be new species and several new genera. Also, 18 ink sketches of the country upriver, done with the camera obscura, to which notes have been added indicating coloration in hopes that paintings may be worked up from them, although I dare not speculate on the receptivity of our nation to an art of such scenery as exists on our western borders.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Three boxes of minerals representing the geological strata we met with accompany the collection as well. Those who may be inclined to doubt our reports as to the astonishing hues of much of western Louisiana may there satisfy themselves. On the second, we pushed off into the river and began our descent to the village of the Cachadas, where Mr. Freeman planned to leave the barge until the high water of the spring enabled a more favorable penetration of the great swamp. The voyage down river was made without incident. We passed the great southward swing in the river the day before Christmas 1806 and made the Cachada Village five days after.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  There being insufficient horse to transport the party overland to Natchitoches, Mr. Freeman left the major portion under command of Captain Sparks to march the road eastward around the Great Raft and the Great Swamp, while he and I rode in advance. We reached Dr. Sibley's home in Natchitoches on the fifth day of the New Year. I should be in New Orleans in February after reporting to Dr. Dunbar in Natchez. With respect to the country up the Red River, it is unnecessary to say more. It is so entirely unlike any other in the United States, a scenery of vast horizontal

• 48:10Speaker 02

  spaces and stupendous defiles of bizarrely colored earth, that is so strange, nay even alien to the eye, that one wonders now what our people would ever make of it. Neither the country nor the course of the river turned out upon examination to bear a resemblance to what the President expected. Many of us, although Mr. Freeman refuses to concede the idea, wonder whether the Spaniards permitted our exploration precisely because they knew this, which explains why the Spanish commander never referenced Santa Fe or the snowy mountains in transmitting his government's

• 48:52Speaker 02

  demands with respect to our course of travel. Indeed, some among us believe this region might best be left to the Indian, the hunter, the buffalo, and wolf and wild Mustang forever. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, Peter Custis.

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• 52:07Speaker 05

  Dan, it's good to be with you as always.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, Randall, good to see you, man.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Today, we are talking about the second part of your sort of counterfactual account of the Freeman and Custis expedition written from sort of a first, it's a letter to Jefferson, essentially, explaining what they're finding as they go up to seek out the headwaters of the Red River. And at the end, I'm going to start at the end. At the end of this, it closes with a line about the headwaters not being what the president expected.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:50Speaker 05

  And that leads me to wonder, given that you're the expert on this expedition, what, did they have an understanding of what Jefferson anticipated they'd find? Was it just a blank spot on the map? Or did they, was there actually a vision against which they were sort of, they would have measured their findings?

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a great question to start this out. And let me say that what prompted my sitting down and writing this, what is in effect, historical fiction, what would have happened had Freeman and Custis not been stopped by a Spanish force in the summer of 1806, and had continued into the Southwest and gotten to explore, was being at Monticello, I don't know, it was 20 years ago probably, and walking into the receiving room of Jefferson's home and seeing, because they had tried to, they had tried to do it

• 53:56Speaker 02

  as sort of a period presentation, seeing on the wall of his receiving room, a map of the West, post Lewis and Clark, that showed the Columbia River, Missouri River, the Northern Rockies, all of that route mapped out with William Clark's map, and showing some of Zebulon Pike's trek across the plains in 1807, and he returns after having been captured by the Spaniards in 1810. But the Red River itself, which Jefferson said several times

• 54:36Speaker 02

  in his, his letters to various people, was to him, next to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the Mississippi. The Red River itself is unexplored. It is shown on the map only as far as the old French town of Nacalish, which is about 300 miles, 250 miles up the river, in what is now central Louisiana. And beyond that, the whole Southern Plains and Southwest is terra incognita. Santa Fe is represented way south, down the Rocky Mountains, and way out beyond the plains. But it's a blank. And so, I realized, right until the time of Jefferson's death, because the Red River doesn't finally get explored

• 55:21Speaker 02

  to its headwaters until the 1870s, right up until the time that Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, he still didn't know what was up the Red River. The American cartography, mapmakers still didn't know, and weren't going to know for a long time. And so, of course, they would have known, had Freeman and Custis gotten to proceed to the sources of the river. What Jefferson based his, his letter of exploring instructions to Thomas Freeman on, in terms of where the Red River had its headwaters and where this expedition was going to lead

• 55:59Speaker 02

  them, was a map that had been done in 1804, in the Mexican archives, that by Alexander von Humboldt. And von Humboldt visited Washington in 1805, and gave Jefferson a copy of this map. And using the archives in Mexico, von Humboldt had basically combined two rivers to create the Red River. He had combined the Pecos River, which takes its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains above Santa Fe, with the Red River, which is what Jefferson and von Humboldt and mapmakers at the time, assumed was one continuous stream. So Jefferson's

• 56:44Speaker 02

  instructions to Thomas Freeman, given to him at a private dinner in November of 1805, were that he was to explore to the headwaters of the Red River, because he wanted to map out, what he wanted to do was to map the Louisiana Purchase, and see what all he had acquired. But he told Freeman, I want you to go only as far as the headwaters of the Red River extend. No further than that. And he was very explicit, evidently both orally and in the written instructions about where Freeman was supposed to end his expedition, at the headwaters of the Red River. Freeman later, a couple of weeks after the meeting

• 57:29Speaker 02

  with, the private dinner with Jefferson, wrote a friend of his, and said, I'm going to lead an expedition into the environs of Santa Fe. How would you like to be my cashier in that country, he says to his friend. I'm not sure what that line meant.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  But what's obvious is that Freeman thought the Red River was going to take him to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And there may have been some supposition that what they were going to do was to try to open the later Santa Fe Trail.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Which only 20 years later is going to actually open up between Missouri and New Mexico. In any case, didn't happen. Spanish army stopped the expedition when it had gone about 650 miles up the Red River. And so, we didn't get what we got with Lewis and Clark. I mean, just imagine, because the Spaniards wanted to stop Lewis and Clark, too. If Lewis and Clark had been stopped, say, at the Mandan villages, and had to turn around at the Mandan villages, and go back home, and never proceeded across the plains, saw the Rockies, saw the Pacific coast, the Pacific Ocean, that's kind of what, on a smaller scale, what we lost. And so, this is what I wanted to recreate.

• 58:45Speaker 05

  And Jefferson's instructions to stop at the head of the Red River, I can assume, are shaped by, or in order to avoid, his desire to avoid confrontation with the Spanish. And nonetheless, they still run into that.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, they still, still run into that, because the, Spain sends out a force, both from New Mexico, and a second force from Texas. And of course, you know, and I think I said this when we were talking about part one in the last episode, it's fairly easy to stop somebody who's exploring a river.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  I mean, all you do is just aim for landing upstream of them, on the river, and then array of force across the river. And the only reason, because Spain did send expeditions out to stop Lewis and Clark, the only reason they didn't manage to do that with Lewis and Clark, is that the Missouri River, of course, tracks, as they're ascending it, it tracks far to the north, up into the Dakotas, into North Dakota and Montana. And sending out a military force from Texas or New Mexico, they never could actually ever get to the Missouri River. They always, the two expeditions that were sent out to stop Lewis and Clark, turned around and returned before they ever got to the Missouri. But the Red River, it was close, and so they managed to pull it off.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  In this, in this part of the story, you also reference kind of a fascinating aspect of this part of the country, of this history, which is the horse trade that unfolded very early on, in, in the American West, Southwest. And Jeffers, this is another thing that Jefferson's very interested in, and it's something that you've written about. So I kind of wonder if people weren't aware of this phenomenon, what, what do you mean, if you're referring to the horse trade?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I did, one of the early episodes of the podcast was on this.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  I think I called it Bringing Home All The Pretty Horses. And it was out of a piece of Wild New World, that I had written about the horse trade. And there's also actually a chapter in American Serengeti with that title. So, in contrast to the Northern West, where the fur trade is the predominant

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Sort of extractionist kind of trade that Americans are interested in with the fur trade companies and with mountain men and all that. On the southern prairies and in the southern, in this canyon country where I have Freeman and Custis going, the primary animal that interests Americans with an eye on making money out of the West is the wild horse. And the reason they're interested in these horses is because one thing, the horses are basically running free on the plains and all you have to do is just capture them or trade for them from the Indians. And the Comanches and groups like that are big traders of horses to Americans who go

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  west. But the, the desire for horses, the market for them back home is from the advancing American frontier across the South and the Midwest. As the frontier advances, they don't, they simply don't have enough horses. And so a horse trade begins actually before the fur trade ever does in the northern west. It begins as early as 1790, long before Lewis and Clark ever go up the Missouri River. A horse trader named Philip Nolan is going west from Natchez, Mississippi and going out onto the plains in this country that I'm describing that Freeman and Custis explore and trading for horses and capturing horses.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  And so it becomes the primary commercial kind of animal from the whole southern plains and southwest for the period, really from about 1790 up until essentially the middle of the 19th century. It's a major trade.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  And that you touched on something I also wanted to bring up here, which is, as I was reading this, there's, there's a certain gravity in, maybe in the middle of this piece when it comes to the descriptions of the Comanche.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  And it's a name that's familiar to a lot of people, but the Comanche have a really unique history. There's a book, Comanche Empire, that's sort of a landmark work.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  But I wonder if you can give, give the listeners sort of an overview or of an impression of what makes the Comanche sort of exceptional or, or unique in terms of this broader story of competing and contesting empires on the plains.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, one of the lines, I have the Comanche leader that they, they treat with and who actually travels with them for a couple of months and guides them to the headwaters of the Red River. His name, and he's a real figure in history. He was known as Cordero to the Spaniards, but his real name was Isom Bonbi. And in the Comanche language, that meant handsome wolf. He was a man of about 50 years of age, whenever Freeman and Custis would have gone into the southwest up the Red River. And he, I have him use a line which I, I invented, but I don't think it's out of character

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  whatsoever for the Comanches and these Comanche headmen in particular. He tells Freeman and Custis, "It's good for you Americans that there are not, there's not a continuation of plains and buffalo and horses out in the direction where you come from, because if there were, I fear my people would overrun you." I mean, that's the way the Comanches looked at the world. They did create an empire. They were a Uto Aztecan people that had come to the southwest only about a hundred years before this. This is said in 1806. And they had come to the southwest because they regarded it as the origin of horses.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  As horses were traded up the Rocky Mountains to various tribes from the Utes, the ancestors of the Comanches, who were in probably southwestern Wyoming, northeastern Utah. They were sort of Shoshonean like people and related to the Shoshones and Utes. But when they got horses, they basically came south and they took the southern plains from the Arkansas River all the way down to the Rio Grande, down to the Mexican border. Basically took the country away from the Apaches who had owned it for two or 300 years

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  and set up an empire that traded horses that sort of raided Spanish ranches for cattle and horses to trade to the Americans. This was known as the Comanchero trade. John Wayne did a movie about it, in fact. And they were a kind of, the analogy of the Lakotas from the northern plains. The Comanches were that group on the southern plains.

• 1:06:32Speaker 05

  And a major power player at the same time that the United States and Spain are figuring out who's, who's taking what out there. The Comanches are, are holding strong. I wonder, there's another, there's another point here that you, similar to the first question I asked about Jefferson's expectations, but there's a debate that, that's raised in the course of this chapter. I feel like whenever I'm reading historical fiction, I wonder what's, where, what's, what has a seed in the, in the evidence base and what is the invention of the author. But there's a debate about the origins of the plains.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  Whether it's caused by aridity or whether it's caused by fire. And I feel like most people today have a, have a sense of that, right? But there's also the, you can't ignore the fact that native people used fire all the time. And so you could understand how sort of a new arrival to the plains might make that, make that assumption. But I wonder if you can just sort of speak to where that, where you pulled that from and, and how Europeans or Euro Americans arriving on the plains perhaps imagined its, its natural history.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another good question. And I, I think, you know, one thing you have to sort of understand about the character I tell this story through, Peter Custis, who is the, he's the, in effect, the, the naturalist on the expedition. Thomas Freeman is an astronomer, so he's a scientist as well. He's the one who's doing the maps and all. But Custis is the naturalist. And so he's interested in all the things to do with, because Jefferson has told them in his instructions, "I want you to pay particular attention to everything you see new that's

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  not in the maritime states," as Jefferson puts it in his instructions. And so one of the things Custis is doing, of course, is that he's recording the presence of new animals that he's seeing for the first time. I have him discover, you know, at least evidence that there are jaguars in the southwest. He gets the talons of a grizzly bear. He doesn't see a grizzly bear, but he gets the talons. And of course he sees mule deer and pronghorns and all these various creatures and plants. But one of the things he's noticing as they're going west, and he comments on it from the very beginning, even, he even does so in the first episode that I devoted to the first

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  part of, of this story, that as they go west, the trees are getting shorter. The same tree species will continue over a couple of hundred miles, but as they go west, the trees keep getting shorter and shorter.

• 1:09:31Speaker 05

  Gradient of.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  It's a gradient until he finally, when he's, they're close to the headwaters of the Red River, approaching the edge of the, the Yano Estacado Plateau and the canyon country they're about to enter. He talks about, "We're in oak trees that are only knee high." And he had been traveling through oak trees down the Red River that were 100 feet tall. And so he's wondering why this is happening and he's noticing that the same thing is happening with grass. And so it leads him to challenge what was then the existing idea about how the Great Plains came to be. And there were two competing ideas and he had heard both of them from William Dunbar

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  back in Natchez, who along with Jefferson was who had sort of outfitted the expedition and told them what to look for and what sort of topics to take up. Because Dunbar had said, "There are two competing explanations for these plains," which of course Americans are just now seeing. They're not, haven't seen them before. And here they're entering this wholly new landscape of wide open grasslands. And Dunbar says, "The two explanations are the plains are the remnants of ancient lake beds, or they're caused by fires burning across them all the time." And of course, I have them on the return trip.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  They see a fire burning. They see the plains burning. But Custis, who has observed this, this gradient of diminishing height of various plants, returns and says, "I think maybe the explanation has to do with the diminishing precipitation as you go west." So it's, I have him do kind of a first American take on aridity. As you go west, it gets drier and drier, and that's the effect it produces. And of course, people living in the east, this is not a concept that has ever occurred to them. So anyway, that's, that's where that came from.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  Cool. Well, Dan, it's always fun to chat.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was a fun one, Randall. I appreciate your questions.

• 1:11:49Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

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