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

And he's a young man who says, and I found a letter in the research I did on him, where he says that he wants to use his share of the family inheritance to pay for a liberal arts education at a top American university.

And so he goes to the University of Pennsylvania, which is,

At the time, I think you could probably argue that University of Pennsylvania may have been the top university in the country.

And it particularly was in terms of natural history because it had a very famous early American natural historian named Benjamin Smith Barton.

And that's who Custis went to study with.

Now, when you studied natural history in the 18th and 19th centuries,

what you got a degree in was medicine.

You got an MD degree because medicine used botany, what was known as Materia Medica, in order to cure people.

And so Custis went to the University of Pennsylvania, studied under Benjamin Smith Barton.

I actually, in doing research on him, was able to find another student's lecture notes

about the lectures that Benjamin Smith Barton gave to the classes when Peter Custis was taking classes with him.

And so I knew that Barton, he was a promoter of Linnaeus

and Linnaean natural history.

I mean, he was very up to date on all of his scientific work.

And so he prepared Custis, I think, really well.

The way Custis got this appointment, he hadn't yet graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with his MD degree, but Jefferson was casting about for a naturalist, and he first tried William Bartram, the guy who had written Travels.

why don't you take the post of naturalist on my Red River expedition?

And William Bartram was 66 years old.

So he said, well, I feel like maybe I shouldn't go.

But he recommended a young man named Alexander Wilson, who was, of course, Audubon's predecessor as the first great bird ornithologist guy, wrote the first big book on American birds.

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