Immediately after (and to be frank, also during) the negotiations to purchase Louisiana Territory, questions of the land's extent spurred much speculation. According to the deal, the land it included was all that contained between the western rivers that drained into the Mississippi basin. As the French had always hoped to find the elusive "northwest passage," perhaps the Louisiana Territory was so vast as to reach the Pacific? And, who lived there? And, even if it didn't reach the Pacific, what kind of trading opportunities could the Louisiana Territory offer?
The Jeffersonian administration was eager to find out. It organized four expeditions through the Army Corps of Engineers, each called a "Corps of Discovery." Their purpose was to :
a) record some astronomical positions to help map the land;
b) act as representatives to the United States for native tribes they'd encounter;
c) describe and identify the geology, flora, and fauna;
d) and follow rivers to their sources.
The Corps of Discoveries
Of all of the expeditions in the Corps of Discovery, only the "Lewis and Clark Expedition" of 1804 is referred to in general U.S. history textbooks and documentaries, mainly because it was actually successful as it discovered the Missouri River and its people, reported on the Continental Divide, and made its way to the Pacific Ocean. It also featured the added bonus of a fifteen year-old girl, who carried an infant throughout the trip and could speak Shoshone.* And, it returned safely! Zebulon Pike's expedition into the interior of the Great Plains would have also been successful had he not made the turn south to find the Red River (after burying his foot soldiers knee deep in snow), but was subsequently arrested by New Spain/Mexico's military as he actually was at the Rio Grande River. William Dunbar and George Hunter traversed the Ouachita River (spelled Washita River, Dunbar and Hunter explored the river into Arkansas).
The Ouachita River expedition was the first to complete its mission. Its descriptions of the people, villages, and sights encountered made Jefferson recognize the economic, geographic, and diplomatic importance of the southern Louisiana Purchase.
For Jefferson, the most important Corps of Discovery of the Louisiana Purchase was the expedition up the Red River of the South of 1806, which was to be led by Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis (a relative of both Jefferson and George Washington's wife Martha), under a military escort by Captain Richard Sparks. The hope was that the Red River of the South, the southern-most river to empty into the Mississippi and thus, considered the southern boundary of the Louisiana Territory, extended into Santa Fe. If it did, could the U.S. claim this important trading center? And if it could, what might that mean for its relationship with New Spain? And even if it didn't, the Red River of the South was admittedly the most populated of the rivers in the Louisiana Territory. How far west did these population centers extend? If it was suitable for French colonialism, could it also be suitable for American colonialism?
Thomas Jefferson, newly re-elected due to the high from the success of the Missouri River Expedition (1804-1805), outfitted the Red River Expedition extremely well: the administration purchased new and improved instruments, commanded a small military expedition to join them, and ensured that its boats were shallow and sturdy enough for the western waters.
And the best thing? The two principles, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis, recorded many of their observations in journals, which are recounted here!
Up the Red River
The expedition began in May of 1806 at Fort Adams on the Mississippi River on the eastern bank near the confluence with the Red River, about 40 miles south of Natchez. At its mouth, the Red River was a half mile wide and rimmed by pecan, oak, and willow trees, and what Peter Custis called "cotton trees" -- I'm assuming it's the Cottonwood Tree. He also recorded large red cypress, dogwoods, sweet gums, and other native species. The journey was fairly easy, even as they traversed the rapids at today's Alexandria. They called the French settlement at Alexandria "rapide Courthouse." Thomas Freeman described that the rapids could easily be avoided by cutting a parallel channel into the soft clay of the Red River.
The expedition encountered several villages inhabited by the native people whom John Sibley had enumerated and described in his 1805 report. In fact, the expedition referred to Sibley's descriptions many times to help them navigate the Red River, which split into three channels just south of Natchitoches -- the Red River, choked by a log jam; the Cane River, also obstructed by a log jam; and the Little River, a channel called by locals the "Riviere de Petit Bon Dieu" ("River of Little Good God," a joking reference to a local priest who got lost there at one point). It was through Little River that the expedition entered Natchitoches.
Throughout their journey, the expedition encountered villages and settlements of people, described as "mixtures of French, Spanish, Indian, and Negro blood, the latter often predominating."
Entering Natchitoches
The area around Natchitoches was described as water logged, but the town itself was on high banks and surrounded by hills and deciduous trees that Custis and Freeman recognized from their native state, Virginia, like the Paw Paw. They also recorded new species, like the mimosa tree, and observed red iron deposits everywhere.
It only took Freeman, Custis, Sparks, and their men twenty days to reach Natchitoches from the mouth of the Red River. Once there, they were wined and dined by John Sibley, who had become familiar with the Red River above the Grand Ecore (the high bank behind which Natchitoches sat). North of Natchitoches, the river was one vast stretch of bayous and lakes, all made possible by the Great Raft, and a place where persons unfamiliar with the landscape could easily become lost. Sibley, with the help of American traders and government coffers, outfitted the expedition with additional men, weapons, and boats. At least one of the men was a knowledgeable hunter, trader, and guide named Talapoon, who may have had Panis (Wichita; perhaps Taovayan) kinship. He knew the landscape well and could speak the "sign language" that had developed between the native and colonial peoples. Another guide was a man named Touline, or Francois Grappe, who was born at la Harpe's Nassonite Post and grew up hunting and trading with the Caddos above the raft.
According to Dan Flores's research, the Spanish government, who had sympathetic traders at Natchitoches, were informed of the Corps of Discovery and wanted to prevent another incursion like Zebulon Pike's, who had planted an American flag on Mexican territory along the Rio Grande River. Five years earlier (1801), the Mexican military had killed another American interloper, Phillip Nolan. The military authorities decided to head towards the Red River to intercept the Americans.
Entering the Great Raft
North of Natchitoches at the Grand Ecore, the Red River was wide and deep, with recognizable banks. But that soon changed when the Corps discovered the first of many rafts. Peter Custis described as consisting "of the trunk of large trees, lying in all directions, and damming up the river for its whole width, from the bottom, and about three feet higher than the surface of the water. The wood lies so compact that large bushes, weeds, and grass cover the surface of the raft."
The expedition encountered many of these rafts, some large, some smaller, and had to fight their way through. Within the rafts were the trunks of red cedars "from 1 to 3 feet in diameter, and 60 feet in length." This raft left "the country intersected with swamps, lakes, and bayous, communicating with and running into each other, for perhaps 6 or 8 miles on each side of the river." The expedition was led by the local guides through Bayou Dutche (the word meaning "bear gnawing on wood") northward into Lake Bistineau (Big Broth Lake).
Solar Eclipse and the Coushatta Village
The party camped at the shores of Swan Lake, north of Lake Bistineau, where they observed the Solar Eclipse (according to the geographical readings, they were at today's Red Chute, Bossier Parish). As the passage was becoming impassable through a great, mired swamp, a guide had been sent via land to the Coushatta village. The expedition did not wait on assistance but pushed through, and finally entered the main channel of the Red River at today's Shreveport. Freeman described it as a "beautiful stream of 230 yards wide, 34 feet deep, and running a gentle current... bordered by lofty trees... on the right side of the river, ascending... the land rises to the height of 50 feet above the banks... on the left it is level and very rich; a large prairie extending for several miles... beyond this prairie is a large lake (identified by Dan Flores as Soda Lake, which interconnected with today's Cross and Caddo lakes.)
The arrived at the the Coushatta Village, which stood on the eastern shore of the river near today's Gilliam (Caddo Parish). The Coushatta Village was a newer settlement in 1806; the inhabitants were members of the Alabama-Coushattas, who were kin to the Creek tribe and had been pushed westward by territorial take-overs. Their settlement consisted of log cabins at the foot of the aptly named Coushatta Bluff on the right (east) bank of the Red River. The expedition spent much of the summer of 1806 in the village.
The Coushatta village was within the boundaries of ancient Caddoan homelands, who had lived and worshiped and traded within the Red River Valley for over five thousand years. Along the Red River, from Louisiana into Arkansas to the Great Bend and into eastern Oklahoma and Texas, the Caddos had erected thousands of mounds, some for funerary purposes and others, as the seats for their religious and political leaders. The villages were not laid out in perpendicular fashions like settlements of today. Instead, they hugged the river in long stretches, interspersed by corn, squash, pumpkin, and bean fields. The homes were made of wood and thatch and each occupied a mound, or even several mounds. The mounds (flood control?) were so numerous that American settlers, twenty years later, referred to the area throughout Northwestern Louisiana and southwestern Arkansas as "Mound City."
The Caddo Chief
In the vicinity of the now-drained Soda Lake stood the "principle village of the Caddos," which sources have described as being called Shu-childni'ni (Timber Hill). The location of this village, which may have been a newer settlement, has never been positively identified, but the chief explained he had a a "large, elegant and well furnished house" that he wished he could bring the Americans to. Historians believe that the Caddos were forced southward due to incursions by the Osages; otherwise, they had originally lived north, across today's Louisiana/Arkansas border.
Chief Dehahuit came with an entourage into the Coushatta Village to greet the Americans. The men exchanged messages of peace, but the Chief told the expedition to be wary of the Osages; he'd pray the Americans would kill them; and if were killed by Osages, the Caddo Chief swore vengance. Then, after these pleasantries, everyone got drunk and danced.
Northward into the Great Bend
Chief Dehahuit designated three men as guides to accompany the expedition through the Caddo homeland. They passed by the Sulphur River (which they called the "lower Little River") and were impressed by the high bluff at the confluence - within a few years, the bluff would become home to the Indian Factory, a trading post and seat of the Indian Agent for the Caddos. The expedition also noted that an ancient trading trace passed through here, where the river was shallower and easier to ford. They also came upon Battle Mound, the site of an important Caddo village that had been raided and destroyed by the Osages (close to today's Garland City, Arkansas). A bit further east of Battle Mound stood a high hill, called Boyd's Hill today, which was the site of the Caddo people's most ancient and foundational cities. Remnants of the earthen pyramids that ringed this place still remain, mainly in the ancient oxbow lakes of the eastern shore of the Red River.
Thomas Freeman described the Red River Valley between the "lower Little River" (Sulphur River) and the "upper Little River" (Little River at the Great Bend at today's Fulton, Arkansas) as "one of the richest and most beautiful [valleys] imaginable. [The Valley] is from 6 to 10 miles in width, and except for a few days in the year, is all elevated above the water in the river. It cannot be succeeded in fertility or beauty, by any part of America, or perhaps the world." What impressed Freeman and Custis the most was the sight of gargantuan cypress and red cedar groves, which stood like giants surrounding lush and fertile prairies and hugged the Red and Little rivers, separated from the channel by impenetrable stands of cane. Historian Dan Flores mentions that these trees were logged and destroyed in the 1890s by the Texarkana & Shreveport Railroad.
Spanish Bluff
West of the Great Bend, the expedition encountered a few more log jams and then, a Caddo ghost town that still exhibited cedar posts and destroyed thatch roofs. They crossed over White Oak Shoals, a year-round ford, and thereafter came to the old Nassonite Post, which had been established by Bernard de la Harpe in 1719 inside a Caddo village and abandoned by 1806. The small French military garrison that accompanied the trading post was known as Las Poste des Cadodoquious, which was abandoned around 1778.
When the expedition learned from the Caddo guides (who learned from fellow Caddos passing through) that a Mexican army was headed towards the Red River to meet them, they hid their instruments and other gear at a lake to retrieve later -- they did not want to engage in any sudden acts with the Spanish. And sure enough, they encountered the Spanish army at a tall outcropping in today's Bowie County, Texas -- now, aptly named Spanish Bluff.
The American expedition observed at least 150 Spanish troops under the command of Captain Francisco Viana. Both parties met across the bluffs on the northern shore of the Red River, where the Spanish declared that they could not let the Americans move further westward. The Americans were quite unhappy but did not want to antagonize the superior military force, and turned back eastward.
Traveling down a river that they now knew allowed the Red River Corps of Discovery to return to the Natchitoches by late August 1806. Unable to document the Caddos, Panis, Wichitias, and Comanches along the Red River as it climbed to its birthplace inside Palo Duro Canyon, the Americans left a large swath of the Red River unrecorded. The river's source was finally mapped in 1852 by Captain Randolph B. Marcy, whose expedition can be considered the final Corps of Discovery of the Louisiana Purchase.
Links to maps:
The journal was transcribed and annotated in Southern Counterpart to Lewis & Clark, The Freeman & Custis Expedition, edited by Dan L. Flores. University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.
*Sacagawea, the sole woman on the Missouri Expedition, was the forced second wife of a French trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, who had purchased her from the Mandan tribe that had enslaved her. She may have been sexually exploited during the voyage by Charbonneau, who had no qualms about selling "access" to her. This is a fact that is not revealed in general history books. Her abilities to speak Shoshone, and her mere presence as a mother, provided the expedition the necessary diplomatic opportunities to secure passage over the Rocky Mountains. She later visited and William Clark's family in St. Louis, who adopted her son and daughter and probably, purchased her freedom from Charbonneau. Clark became the governor of Missouri Territory, and Merriweather Lewis was appointed Governor of Louisiana Territory in 1807. However, he was accused of using this position to increase personal wealth and subsequently became bankrupt. As he traveled to Washington DC in order to seek to restore his name and payments due to him, he either committed suicide or was murdered while traversing the Natchez Trace.
