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

In the 1870s, the same decade that Sir Richard Burton tracked the Nile to its sources in Lake Victoria in darkest Africa, an Army Corps of Topographical Engineers officer named Ernest Ruffner finally figured out the Red River, long one of the great geographical riddles of the West.

But if the outcome of Jefferson's Red River expedition had been different

Here is what I think his naturalist, Dr. Peter Custis, would have told the president and American history about a river and a western setting whose full exploration might well have made him famous.

Peter Custis' Reports on the Upper Red River

1806, 1807.

Pawnee villages on the Red River, 97 degrees, 37 minutes, 30 seconds west of Greenwich, September the 10th, 1806.

Dear President Jefferson, obedient to your instructions, sir, you will have from Mr. Freeman's hand

another description of our ascent of the river to this point, including a fuller account of the diplomatic arrangement entered into by our party and Captain Viana, who commanded the Spanish force sent out from Texas to arrest our exploration of the river.

I will note only Mr. Freeman's and Captain Sparks' agreement with the Spanish representatives that in our further progress upriver journey,

We confine ourselves

sensible to the president's own orders to an examination of the Red River only and no other major waters flowing from the Mexican mountains.

And per the agreement with Captain Viana that we locate our encampments and examine the country only on the north side of the main river until such time as a formal agreement delineating an accepted boundary between the possessions of the King of Spain

and those of the United States can be made.

Fortunately to this arrangement, thus far in our journey, the country lying to the south of the river has not presented a face materially different from that to the north.

Indeed, the most interesting topographical variations we have seen in the extensive meadows that characterize the first thousand miles above the river's mouth have appeared on the north bank.

While one division of the Indian village where we have been encamped since the first instant of the present month does lie south of the channel, the two larger divisions, including the lodge of Awadkai, the main chief of these peoples, are fixed on the north bank.

Our tents, space for which was cleared by the women of these tribes, contrary to assumption, there are four different though related peoples in this village, now sit comfortably on a rise of ground well north of the riverbed, in part to escape the sandstorms that frequent winds of this region stir up from the channel.

Mr. Freeman, Captain Sparks, and myself, meanwhile, were invited into the lodge of the great chief

where we want for nothing.

Agreeably to the orders of the President and Mr. Dunbar, our advisor in Natchez, as with my four previous missives, I've attached a list of species observed.

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