The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, July 1984 - April, 1985 Page: 38
476 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
in the administration paper, National Intelligencer and Washington
Advertiser, which "explained" the near war with Spain over Louisi-
ana. (Neither did the president protest the incident, even though he
continued to insist that the Red River lay wholly within Louisiana.)71
When a compilation of western reports-Discoveries Made in Explor-
ing the Missouri, Red River, and Washita-was published late in 18o6,
the Freeman and Custis report was not yet ready for inclusion. The
widely read Discoveries instead featured John Sibley's unscientific and
secondhand report on the Red River. A narrative version of the Free-
man and Custis reports, redacted by Nicholas King, who also drew the
official map of the survey, appeared in March, 1807, but in an ex-
tremely limited run and with no promotion.72
The King version confused the organization of Custis's reports,
making it impossible to tell where on the river many species had been
sighted, and, worse for Custis's reputation, badly garbled most of the
binomials. The only other published notice of Custis's work appeared
in 18o6 in The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, where Bar-
ton entered the June report as "Observations Relative to the Geogra-
western explorations.
71In 1816 Jefferson was still instructing John Melish to draw his maps to show that
the Red River was well within the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase. The former
president suggested that the Rio Grande was the western boundary of the Purchase in
a Dec. 31, 1816, letter to Melish. See Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmisstsszppi West
(San Francisco, 1958), II, 64.
An examination of Spanish documents leaves no real question that the exploration was
the catalyst for the Spanish troop mobilization in the summer of 18o6. See, for example,
in the Bexar Archives, Nemecio Salcedo to Jos6 de Yturrigaray, Dec. 3, 23, 1805; Francisco
Viana to Cordero, May 29, 18o6; Salcedo to Cordero, July 14, Aug. 14, 18o6. In the rash
of excitement attending Aaron Burr's simultaneous preparation and descent of the
Mississippi, however, the explosive situation on the border was popularly attributed to
Burr's conspiracy. A National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser (Washington,
D.C.) article of January 1g, 1807, capitalized on the public fascination with Burr, and
so successful was this explanation of the crisis on the border that only one other news-
paper (and that five years later) ever suggested that, instead, Jefferson's exploring ac-
tivities had precipitated the near war See the Louissana Gazette (New Orleans), May
16, 1811.
72[Jefferson], Message from the President of the United States, Communicating Dis-
coveries Made in Exploring the Missouri, Red River, and Washita. It is not known how
many copies of [King], An Account of the Red River, zn Louisiana, apparently printed
in the offices of the Natzonal Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, were actually
published, but the number must have been very small. If one were done for each
member of Congress, about 175 to 200 would have been printed, but the figure may have
been much smaller; only ten originals exist in libraries today. Morton, "Freeman and
Custis' Account of the Red River Expedition," 436. Morton lists nine copies, but a
tenth, at the Yale Library of Western Americana, is not on his list. The copy sent to
the Library of Congess is said to have been bound to the back of King's redaction of
Pike's 18o5 Mississippi River account, under cover of a letter from Dearborn dated
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, July 1984 - April, 1985, periodical, 1984/1985; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101210/m1/60/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.