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
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 Natchitoches, 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 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
But 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 letter of exploring instructions to Thomas Freeman on was,
in terms of where the Red River had its headwaters and where this expedition was going to lead them was a map that had been done in 1804 in the Mexican archives 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 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 farther than that.
Showing 1241–1260 of 4,468 · page 63 of 224
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