An 1806 exploration of the Red River following the Louisiana Purchase was the biggest, costliest and best-equipped expedition of the first decade of the nineteenth century. President Thomas Jefferson chose surveyor Thomas Freeman and medical student Peter Custis to lead the journey, intending to find the source of the Red River.
Departing on April 19, 1806, the party numbered about fifty when it reached the immense blockage of the “Red River Raft,” forcing them to portage for two weeks before reaching a clear channel to continue afloat. They encountered Creek and Caddo Indians in late June and early July who warned that Spanish soldiers intended to intercept them.
The Spanish troops, four times the size of Freeman and Custis’s group, caught up with them on July 28 and following Jefferson’s orders to not confront a larger force, they turned back two days later, having traveled six hundred fifteen miles up the thirteen hundred sixty-mile river. The Red’s source would not be found for another seventy years.
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Read the Encyclopedia entry at Freeman and Custis Red River Expedition - Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
