Dan Flores

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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 over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Gunfighters · Ep. 39: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part II | The American West · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

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 tablelands 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.

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 two mornings 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 Yon before the great cold winds from the north swept the exposed plain, but that he and Captain Sparks, with Talapoon and Tadasuk and our Aiton 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 fingering the eastern sky in a most regular pattern

resembling the spokes of a wheel.

At one point, Captain Sparks wrote 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 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.

We use up this day riding the great western precipice of Elyon, I 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 flower bracts 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 Llan as if the world were aught but plain and sky.

No one was allowed to straggle or even hunt during these crossings for fear 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.

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