Dan Flores
speaker
4,468 appearances
23 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Aug
Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Gunfighters · Ep. 39: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part II | The American West · 28 Jul 2026
podcast
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.
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 Anca.
On the morning of October the 17th, having remained here as long as we thought prudent, we commenced our journey up the river, now finding it to dwindle rapidly in size, 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 Tierra Blanca.
It contained a highway along its banks, fully the equal of the road across the Cumberland.
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 penetrate, their forms very often appearing outrageously distorted in the wriggle of the heat waves.
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 Elyon.
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 the brink of a tremendous precipice falling a thousand 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-topped mountains extending away into the opalescent 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.
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 ten times between here and the Spanish towns.
Showing 1101–1120 of 4,468 · page 56 of 224
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