LSUS to mark Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition bicentennial

(LSUS Museum of Life Sciences: Snakes and spiders and insects, Oh, My!)

Julianna Petchak
Beginning in elementary school, children are taught the legend of Lewis and Clark. Few know, however, that a similar expedition took place in the area now called Caddo Parish.

In three years, the LSUS Museum of Life Sciences will host a bicentennial celebration of the Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition, commonly called the “Lewis and Clark Expedition of the South.”

Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson authorized several expeditions to explore the newly acquired territory. Thomas Freeman, an engineer, and Peter Custis, a University of Pennsylvania botanist, led the 1806 expedition, which Jefferson referred to as the “Grand Expedition.” The expedition was designed to explore the Red River in search of its headwaters.

In April 1806, the exploration party began the ascent of the Red River from its junction with the Mississippi. Halfway to their objective of the headwaters of the river, the Spanish Army forced the expedition to turn back. The expedition crossed unexplored land, including the Great Raft, riverside prairies, cedar forests and canebrakes. They found and described Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Carolina Parakeets and previously unknown plant species, such as the prairie gentian.

The LSUS celebration in 2006 will feature a national conference for biologists, ecologists, environmental scientists and other scholars. The aim of the conference will be to reconstruct, as far as possible, the 1806 environment of the middle Red River area using the Freeman-Custis account and to document changes that have occurred in the flora and fauna during the two centuries since the Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition.

The Red River Education & Development Foundation, Inc., has awarded the museum a planning grant to help support development of the Bicentennial Conference. Scholars from universities in several states have already confirmed their participation. Publication of symposium research papers by the museum will contribute to a lasting body of scholarly work on the Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition and the area environment prior to European settlement.

The Red River Expedition of 1806 provides the first scientific view of the natural environment of the Red River Basin. Custis’ collections went to the Barton Herbarium, now housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

The Freeman & Custis Expedition’s 615 mile trip up the Red River was the first such American expedition to include a trained naturalist and was the first biodiversity survey of the upper West Gulf Coastal Plain. During the expedition, 267 species of plants and animals were documented.

Almost two centuries later, as the bicentennial of the expedition approaches, researchers at the LSUS Museum of Life Sciences are continuing the biodiversity started by the expedition.