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

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Gunfighters · Ep. 38: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part I | The American West · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Years ago, with dogwoods and redbuds firing the first bolts of color through the drab late winter woods of Virginia, I stood looking westward across the Blue Ridge Mountains on Thomas Jefferson's veranda atop the small mountain where he built his experimental home of Monticello.

I'd just spent an hour touring the home and domestic world

of the American president whose fascination with what lay towards the sunset brought the American West into the country's future.

I'd looked with a kind of numb amazement at the bed Jefferson rolled out of as soon as the morning light was strong enough to see the hands on a clock near a writing table where so many graceful sentences tumbled from his mind.

But the thing that had riveted me the most was to find hanging on the West Wall

appropriately, of Monticello's receiving room, a map of the continent as cartography had understood it two centuries ago.

The two rivers Jefferson regarded as the most intriguing rivers of Western destiny, the Missouri of the North and the Red River of the South, were there, their confluences with the Mississippi fixed on the map by mathematical coordinates.

By the time he died in 1826, Thomas Jefferson felt he knew the Missouri, its course and its marvels.

Lewis and Clark had made the Missouri and the Columbia on the other side of the Rockies live in his mind.

But the red?

His receiving room map showed the old French city of Natchitoches on the red, true enough.

Beyond that, this river he thought of as next to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the West, angled off on this map into blankness, a runeless unknown.

That featurelessness hadn't been filled in wasn't from lack of trying.

As I described in Episode 7 of The American West with a script called Jefferson's Southwestern Counterpart to Lewis and Clark,

The president's attempt to explore the Red River was a fully engaged and valiant one.

But like the Apollo 13 mission's failure to reach the moon through circumstances beyond its control, equally valiant Spanish opposition to Jefferson's second major probe into the west brought the Red River expedition to a halt after it journeyed only 615 miles into the southwest.

Disappointingly for Western history, especially given the expedition's rather mysterious destination, plus the quality of an expedition leader like Thomas Freeman, who had the training and ability to have brought that world to life, Jefferson's probe ended short of where the real West began.

and especially in Dr. Peter Custis, Jefferson's 25-year-old naturalist, whose medical degree under famous professors at the University of Pennsylvania made him the first American-trained scientist ever appointed to a Western exploring party, the Red River Expedition had included a writer who could have given us an account on a par with Meriwether Lewis's Western journals.

Standing there in Jefferson's receiving room, looking up at that map he must have experienced some regret about more than once, I decided I couldn't resist.

I knew well that despite at least two other government attempts to find the sources of the Red River, this was a geographic mystery that wasn't finally resolved until three quarters of a century after Jefferson's attempt.

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