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

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 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 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 of the Red River and realized we were approaching the eastern edge of the Great Tableland.

The plunging vertical drainages here possessed springs of good water and small copses 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 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, seven 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 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 30 hours after it commenced, and clouds of stars then appeared in the intense 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.

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.

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