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.
Trend
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. 38: The River That Flowed From Nowhere, Part I | The American West · 21 Jul 2026
podcast
41 additional botanical observations and 28 new specimens properly dried and packed in a leather cartouche sealed with bear grease for delivery by messenger into Mr. Dunbar's hands.
This accompanies a description of 11 additional trees not found below the place where we treated with the Spaniards.
We have surely entered a new and very different country from that of the river below.
My measurements, descriptions, and proposed scientific names for several species new to science are also enclosed, although I will take occasion here to mention a few of the more remarkable.
From the point where we met the Spanish army to this, a distance of 380 river miles measured by line and approximately half that distance in a straight tangent, according to Lieutenant Humphrey's calculations, required a full six weeks travel on the river.
While in no wise a challenge approaching that presented by the mazes of the Great Swamp earlier in the summer, this part of the Red River affords its own obstacles to navigation, chiefly in the form of low water at this season of the year.
On separate occasions, our party were obliged to encamp for multiple days awaiting thunderstorms, which occur but infrequently in this country, but fortunately discharge astonishing quantities of precipitation when they do, in order to raise the level of the river sufficiently to float our barges.
Thus did we proceed to this spot, stopping, waiting, with appreciated opportunities to hunt and botanize, then hurrying upriver with the freshets.
The Indian agent in Natchitoches, Dr. Sibley, was undoubtedly correct when he represented the Pawnee villages as the upper limit of navigation on this river.
As to the nature of the country, if the river between the head of the Great Raft and the bluff where we encountered the Spaniards appeared to me as the paradise of the world, awaiting only our countrymen to claim its fertility,
The country since has presented equally a garden, but of a very different kind.
It is not like anything I have seen before, and indeed unlike the descriptions we have received of it, causing me to wonder if it can properly be described by first-hand observers to people who have never seen its analog.
Its transformation begins almost immediately beyond the point where we met the Spanish force.
The cause of the gradual change from tall woods to vast open meadows is not yet obvious to me, but direct observation seems to refute the notion expressed in the recent literature that the prairies of the interior of Louisiana are the dried beds of ancient lakes.
nor can the soil be faulted for its fertility, for it is so rich, black, and even greasy to the hand that we followed the hunter's custom of calling this region the Black Prairies.
The first evidence for the alteration appeared two days upriver from our encounter with the Spaniards when, with our Caddo guides Cutfinger and Grand Osages, Mr. Freeman and I left the boats
under command of Captain Sparks, and ascended out of the sandy margins of the river and the cotton tree bottoms to look over the uplands on the right bank.
What immediately demanded attention was that the tree growth of the hills, although composed of many of the same species as those downriver, was here sensibly dwarfed in size.
species of oaks of which there are several which were 60 feet high in the vicinity of the raft, here at full maturity, possessed a height of no more than 35 feet.
Nor was this a local phenomenon of soil for the same dwarfing extended to many other common species and was observed across all the face of the country we traversed.
Showing 1401–1420 of 4,468 · page 71 of 224
← Previous
Next →