Ep. 07: Jefferson’s "Other" Lewis & Clark | The American West

Despite Lewis and Clark’s singular fame, Thomas Jefferson never intended their expedition to be the sole U. S. scientific exploration into the country’s new Louisiana Purchase. Just as compelling to him was a second major expedition into the southern reaches of Louisiana, for which he chose two leaders – Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis – who had a similar opportunity to become famous early American explorers into the West. Dispatched up the Red River of the South in 1806 with a bigger party and twice the congressional appropriation of Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis suffered a very different fate, one that assigned them to the dustbin of American history and made Jefferson’s “Grand Expedition” a forgotten western story. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. 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.

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  When Thomas Jefferson acquired the 800-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 Flores, 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.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Jefferson's Other: Lewis and Clark.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  On a gray Tuesday in November of the year 1805, 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.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  That November evening, Thomas Freeman must have felt his future was made.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  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 called 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

• 3:19Speaker 02

  of the Shining Mountains. Along with Humboldt, Jefferson had canvassed 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'd 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.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  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, too.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  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 60s, 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

• 5:00Speaker 02

  scientist trained in an American university to win 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 night, 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 and some personal danger will attend the expedition, but I will stick or go through. The more danger, the more honor."

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Jefferson's instructions, which Freeman must have scanned repeatedly, still exist 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."

• 6:15Speaker 02

  The western half of North America then was the country, and the 1800s 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 1800s would claim and buy and seize much more of the continent, eventually everything from southwestern deserts to Alaskan tundra. What had been and could have remained Native America, or French, British, or Mexican territory over the next 60 years would become part of the US. Thus did the West become ours.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  There was that intriguing final line in Jefferson's Natural History Instructions II 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.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It's a foregone conclusion that everyone listening to this has long known about Lewis and Clark, America's most famous explorers. I would wager that the chances are almost nonexistent, though, that you've ever heard of Thomas Freeman or Dr. Peter Custis are known about an 1806 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.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  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 presidents or generals? Jefferson had picked them to 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." What then went so wrong with Jefferson's second expedition to the West that it's now invisible in American history?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  In a master plan Jefferson had set down in 1803, America's third president had outlined four major expeditions he hoped to send into the new Louisiana Purchase. In a prescient prediction of the future destiny of the US, Jefferson believed an expedition into the southern parts of the Purchase, aimed at what we today call 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

• 10:15Speaker 02

  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?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  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 1803, 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 once Lewis and Clark were underway in 1804, Jefferson devoted the time he had for

• 11:07Speaker 02

  exploration to two years of detailed planning and a budget of $5,000 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

• 11:50Speaker 02

  that its proper southern boundary was actually the real 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 1600s. 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.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  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 compromised boundary, failed to appease the Spanish government. But in the world of the Southwest and its geography, how feasible was an exploration 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

• 13:20Speaker 02

  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 naturalist himself, Alexander von Humboldt, and based on his mapwork in Mexico City's archives. Humboldt knew that Lower Louisiana was bisected north and south by a river the French called "Rivière 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 a thousand miles later, Frenchmen saw, was the same one the Americans were now calling the Red.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  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 Trail trade route between Louisiana and New Mexico. If, in fact, the southern Rockies was where the Red River headed.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Jefferson issued a call to the American scientific community for more information about the Southwest, and he got it. A New York naturalist named Samuel Mitchell told the president the Red was supposed to be navigable for a thousand miles above the last French town on it, century-old Nakarish, 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 Red's long course and its sources in what he called "Salt Mountains." Dunbar dangled wonderful stories of wonderful productions,

• 15:13Speaker 02

  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 Nakarish, Dr. 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,

• 15:58Speaker 02

  and a buffalo-hunting people Sibley referred to as the Aitens, 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.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  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 1780s and 1790s, the Spanish government had dispatched French and Spanish explorers to link the towns of St. Louis, Nacogdoches, 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 a claim by one of them, Pierre Viardot in 1793, that it was possible to journey from St. Louis to Santa Fe in little more than three weeks.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  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 22-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

• 17:49Speaker 02

  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 fort, 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.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Had the Americans understood this description, which accurately portrayed the headwaters of the Red River and great canyons eroded into the Yanowestecado, or the Staked Plain, with the Pecos River flowing south beyond that, and with the Rockies and 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

• 19:06Speaker 02

  for his second big Western expedition was ill start. And the result was that Freeman's and Custis'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 1804 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.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  In fact, he was about to bounce right out of American history.

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• 22:39Speaker 02

  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 1806, all was haste in procuring French and native guides and laying in supplies so that the grand expedition's specially-designed barges could take them upriver as far as the Wichita villages, whence they planned to explore westward by horseback. Freeman directed the purchase of a camera obscura to produce topographic images, a

• 23:22Speaker 02

  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. Custis brought his shotgun, plant presses, and various traps and preservation equipment, plus a library of natural history reference volumes. By mid-April of 1806, 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

• 24:07Speaker 02

  arrived with Peter Custis. Unlike York, we don't know his name. This party entered the mouth of the Red River on May 1, anticipating a year-long probe taking them some 1,300 river miles into the western interior. But despite their high spirits, they couldn't miss the warning signs on the Spanish border. As Custis would confide in his journal, this expedition seems to have thrown their whole country into commotion.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Because the Red River was not 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 Custis. One with 200 cavalry commanded by Captain Francisco Viana, left Nacogdoches in east Texas to confront the Americans on the Lower River. The other, which Zebulon 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 Melgaris, it left Santa Fe bound for the Red in early June of 1806.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  With that, time and the summer of 1806 merely waited out the geopolitical rendezvous. When Jefferson's explorers arrived in Nacogdoches, the last American outpost 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 50 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.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  In the course of their five-month exploration, the party would confront many remarkable phenomena of the Red River's natural ecology. One of those was the Great Raft, a thousand-year-old log jam that entirely blocked the river for more than 100 miles. To get their boats around this massive obstacle, they had to detour through a swampland that likely rivaled today's Okefenokee Swamp. For naturalists, Custis, the Great Swamp was a botanical treasure. For everyone else, it was pure misery. "14 days of incessant fatigue, toil, and danger, doubt, and uncertainty," as Freeman put it.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Beyond the raft, 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 Caddo Confederacy. For two weeks, the Americans treated with De Heyhuet, hereditary chief of the Caddos, to whom Freeman presented US flags and solicited Caddo endorsement of the exploration. Custis, meanwhile, observed and wrote of Caddo and customs and skills, “Their talents with the bow,” he said, put him in mind of stories from the Iliad, and he posted a 26 specimen botanical collection downriver. For Custis, the beautiful Red River Valley seemed “the paradise of America,” as

• 27:26Speaker 02

  he called it, “the naturalist Eden Jefferson in promise.” The image of Freeman and Custis, ill-starred as they were, that I savor, is them proceeding upriver in July of 1806, 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 dosages, 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 22nd of July, they had rounded the Great Band of the Red, near present Texercana, and were heading due west.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  On July 27, the Caddos told them that they had reached the former location of Binard de la Harpe’s early 18th-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 Wichita 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.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  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 in De Hayhoo's Caddo Village, Captain Viana 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 Wichita Indians and the Comanches, Viana wrote that he would confront the Americans above the old French post as this territory is ours.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  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. Viana 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."

• 30:19Speaker 02

  He made the mature decision the confrontation called for. The date was July 30, 1806. They had ascended the Red River, 615 miles, to the edge of the Blackland Prairies and the Great Plains, but still only halfway to the great mystery of the Red's 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.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  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, returned to a country that quickly turned away and forgot them. For a total expenditure at last of $8,700, 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 catalogued 22 mammals, 36 birds, 17 reptiles, fishes and amphibians, 58 trees,

• 31:31Speaker 02

  and 130 flowering plants, 26 of which he collected for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. But the meager geographic results meant that everyone involved understood. Having failed to penetrate the Great Plains and reach the Rockies in Santa Fe, the expedition was a failure. There was just no other way to spin it.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  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 embarrassed him. There was also an undercut of public suspicion. At least one prominent newspaper would editorialize that the ferment with Spain in 1806 was not caused by Aaron Burr's plot to invade the Southwest, as newspapers favorable to Jefferson's

• 32:44Speaker 02

  administration tried to spin it, but by Jefferson's secret expeditions, secret orders, and secret plans of exploration.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  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 1819, the Red River to the Hundredth Parallel did finally become the boundary between Spain and the US.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  And Mexico did revolt successfully against Spain to create its own democratic republic in 1821. 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 19th-century history were more powerful than Jeffersonian explorers.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  So, remove Lewis and Clark from the American story, just as the Spanish force removed Freeman and Custis, 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 60,000 years of human trekking out of Africa and around the Earth. Behind us lay our footprints.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  In the American West of 1804 to 1806, we got one last glimpse through Lewis and Clark of what the whole Earth had been in the deep past.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  As our robot rovers trumble across Mars and send us photographs that are analogues of their maps of America from only 200 years ago, we see exploration 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 Custis 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 Floated From Nowhere, that imagines Freeman and Custis continuing up the Red River into a Southwest beyond all of Thomas Jefferson's fantasies.

• 36:12Speaker 01

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• 36:40Speaker 00

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• 38:34Speaker 00

  How did you, how did you first become aware of the Grand Expedition until I encountered it with you?

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Never heard of it?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Never heard of it.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  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,

• 39:22Speaker 02

  and the fur trade, and, you know, all this kind of classic, early Western stuff. And she's 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.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Stephen Randler on it.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Stephen and Randall lead this expedition.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  One day there will be born.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So she said, I'm gonna tell you something I bet you don't know. Thomas Jefferson sent a second expedition out two years after Lewis and Clark. And he sent it right up the Red River and Red River flows right through Natchitoches, right through town.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. And I grew up within about-

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Like where you were at that moment?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Where I was at that moment and I grew up about eight miles from there.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  I was curious whether you'd gotten on this because it was-

• 40:14Speaker 02

  A local story.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  A local story. You hadn't even heard of it?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  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 call 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.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Do you think they saw this rock? Do you think they camped under this big tree?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, an archaeologist found a button from one of the jackets at one of their camps about 25 years ago, and that was national news. My publication of the book was not national news. But the button from the camp was national news. But anyway, I said, so you know, you gotta 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 how far did they get? She said, well, they didn't get very far. They got about 650, 700 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, some group that-

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Chickens.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, a European country had sort of whisked 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 1807, the year after the expedition took place. And-

• 41:56Speaker 02

  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 Custis 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 gonna, I mean, there's this, all this rich natural history in this expedition. And I start trying to figure out, so what, what was this tree?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  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 animals. Oh, really? And stuff. And so, one of the things that happened as a result of that is that Custis 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 studied under Benjamin Smith Barton.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And he doesn't know any of the scientific names of the plants and animals? And in fact, it was the guy who, 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 publish the original journals of the accounts. So, once I found Freeman and Custis's stuff, I was able to put together a story of it where... The proper stuff was attributed to each one of them.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  And all the scientific nomenclature was correct. And, and so it turned it suddenly into 200 years later, 200 frigging years later, into a really worthwhile scientific expedition that just got cut off before they really could quite get out to the Great Plains 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.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  One of the things you see in especially popular history is there's a tend towards these hypotheticals of like, what if Patton had sent the tanks this way or that way? Or what if so and so, you know, never wrote this book? And, and then there's sort of this hypothetical. I think that's occurring in your mind. Oh, no, I think this is, I think there's all kinds of like TV show. It, I feel like it's a.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Counterfactual it's called.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  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? Uh, you have sort of the actual counterfactual here that suggests that probably things would have unfolded 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, 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

• 45:41Speaker 03

  in terms of adding to our knowledge of this place. But you here are able to answer a question of what is the actual significance in terms of territorial expansion?

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think, you 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 him and turn him around and had Lewis, and I've had, you know, I mean, there are a lot of, uh, Mary Rhonda Lewis is an American hero. He would have never stopped for a bunch of Spaniards. He would have just plowed right on through.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Shot his way through there.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, he would have, he would have never stopped. But had they been stopped, I think, judging by the Freeman and Custis expedition, things probably would have unfolded 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 that. 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 Bitterroot Mountains and think that was gonna lead them to the Northwest Passage, you know, and it didn't,

• 47:11Speaker 02

  didn't do it at all. I mean, there's not even a Northwest Passage kinda highway across the Bitterroot 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 winter of 1805, but, 1805, 1806, but, you know, Astoria's fort was probably more important. And even that fort got taken away by the Brits in the War of 1812. But, it's, it's those journals and all that description of the landscape and the animals and the ethnographic stuff

• 47:52Speaker 02

  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 account.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  I wanna hear more about the Big Raft.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  The Great Raft?

• 48:07Speaker 00

  A thousand-year-old log jam.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, The Great Raft is really interesting, actually.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  I presume it's not there anymore?

• 48:13Speaker 02

  It's not there anymore, but it took the invention of nitroglycerin in the 1870s to remove it.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  How many miles long was it?

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Well, when it was finally removed, it was 140 miles long.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I just want people to picture what we're talking about. Like, if you've, 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 matchsticks all jumbled up.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  You know, and there's usually like a beer 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

• 48:49Speaker 02

  washes it out.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  washes it out and it's, you know, but you see them pop up and go away. But the fact that one of those lasted a thousand years and accumulated over a hundred miles of logs.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  And yeah, not only that-

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Just totally obstructed any kind of navigation.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  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 250 miles up the river. So it had receded for 250 miles up river as the bottom end had rotted off and 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 their-

• 49:42Speaker 00

  That must have frustrated many a cat fishermen.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Oh, it did, man.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  A lot of structure, though.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  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 could haul back bison ropes, heavy stuff from the plains. But on the Red River, you could not navigate that thing until the 1870s.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  And they blasted it out of there.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  They blasted it out. A guy named Captain Henry Shreve from the US Army Corps of Engineers used nitroglycerin. It took him about 10 years to blast it.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Oh, that's what I was gonna ask. So he didn't find like some magical pinch point?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  He just, he just kept doing it?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Just kept blowing it up. I mean, I've got photographs of it in, in that, 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.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  But it's timber coming out of where ultimately?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  It's coming from primarily the cottonwoods upstream on the Red River.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. So it's cottonwood logs.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Some in my mind, I was picturing.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, some of them were.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  I was picturing like, like a coniferous tree of some sort or, yeah, I got you.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were, there were, there was a big expanse of junipers on the middle red. Um, not Rocky Mountain junipers, but there were Virginia junipers and they were really tall, really big.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  People compared.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  It was mostly cottonwoods tipping into the river.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  It was mostly cottonwoods 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.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, this thing was just climbing the river.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  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, I wonder like if there, if we have any sort of sense of how native people in that area described it.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have a good native account, but I can tell you this and in 2006, the 200th anniversary of this expedition, LSU Shreveport 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 Caddo Indian guys and they came up to me and they said, so you know where Chakanina is, don't you?

• 52:33Speaker 02

  And I said, yeah, I do. And Chicanina, 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 1835, 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, their origin story. And, but they didn't know where it

• 53:17Speaker 02

  was. And somebody told them, I don't know if they told them at that, that conference, or they already knew about it when they came, but they came to me and said, so you know where Chicanina is? And I said, yeah, because I'd 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 Caddo guys, one of them was really pretty old. He was in his eighties, probably.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  And went up to this mountain that was their, as part of their creation myth story.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  That must've been cool.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  That was very cool.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Who owned the hill?

• 54:05Speaker 02

  I don't know who owned the hill. There were, there was nobody really living very close to it. And so sort of like the way you and I did.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, a Blackwater draw.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  A Blackwater draw.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  We had a self tour, self guided tour.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  And I did a self guided tour up on top of that mountain. Yeah, just climbed up there. And yeah, so these guys, and since then, and this happened within the last year, I've had another guy who tells me he's a Caddo 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.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Except son of a pen.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So yeah, I actually sent him a, you know, I took a photograph of a USGS 7.5 quad and sent it to him and showed him the road that went by, a little dirt road, two track that went by and circled it and said, this is where it is. It's right here.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  So the expedition, had they not been turned around, what, what name, brand, features would they have, like what things that people today are aware of, might they have been like, holy cow, look at that? Like, what would they run into?

• 55:21Speaker 02

  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, Freeman and Costas would have been amongst a similar group of people farther south. But in this case, it was Pawnees, a group we call the Wichita's now. And they had, it's the same group, by the way, that Coronado, when he was going to Quavira, was trying to find. And when Coronado went to try to find them, they were living up on the Arkansas River. But they had moved

• 56:06Speaker 02

  down to the Red River, I don't know, 50 or 60 years before Freeman and Costas. And so that's where they were going. And they were gonna, they were gonna leave their craft there, those seven boats they had, and they were gonna purchase horses from the Wichita's 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 100 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 and 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.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  And this is the one that everybody thought, that's the one that's gonna go to Santa Fe. That fork would actually take you to the canyons of the eastern escarpment of the Anoastacado.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  And so, and the primary one is Palo Duro Canyon.

• 57:08Speaker 00

  It would've been the Comanche country.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would've been a Comanche country.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Would the Comanche have demolished them?

• 57:14Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think so.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  No?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I don't think so. I mean.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  At that time, it wouldn't have been hostile.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  No.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  The next episode I'm gonna do is about a guy, a trader named Anthony Glass, who, two years after Freeman and Custis are turned around, the Jefferson administration, Indian agent and actor Sean Sibley, they give this guy the responsibility of going out and make the diplomatic arrangements with the Wichitas and the Comanches. 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 gonna start trading with them and all that. And that guy, he was among the Wichitas and the Comanches for about 10 months, and he didn't ever really experience any kind of danger.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  And what it was, I think, is if you were a trader, if you had trade goods, man, they were, they were A-OK with you.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  And Glass, of course, took trade goods out with him. So, I don't think the Comanches would've screwed around with them. They didn't screw around with the long expedition 15 years later.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Uh, they just let them go through. Um, they didn't really have any reason yet, I think, to be hostile. And who they became, who the Comanches became hostile towards by the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s was the Texans. And they distinguished between Texans and Americans.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  So do I.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Well, I, I look forward to that episode coming up, man. That's gonna be great.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be fun, cause there's a, it's got a little O. Henry twist to it.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 59:08Speaker 00

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