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..Photos by Gregg Trusty/LSUS News

1806 – 2006
Freeman & Custis +200

Dr. Dan Flores (left), a professor of history at the University of Montana, chats with (continuing from left) Dr. Vincent Marsala, LSUS chancellor; Dr. Paul Sisson, dean of the LSUS College of Sciences; Dr. Laurence “Mac” Hardy, professor of biology emeritus, and Dr. Archie McDonald, professor of history at Stephen F. Austin University, at the LSUS Symposium, “Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition of 1806: Two Hundred Years Later.” Hardy chaired the symposium’s planning committee. Flores, the leading expert on the Red River Expedition, and McDonald, a noted local historian, were the symposium’s keynote speakers. This year is the bicentennial of the ill-fated and long-forgotten (Thomas) Freeman & (Peter) Custis Red River Expedition. In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson charged Freeman and Custis to lead an expedition up the Red River in search of its headwaters, then thought to be in the vicinity of Santa Fe. The expedition was unique: For the first time a naturalist was on board (Custis was a botanist), and before the explorers could locate the headwaters, they were turned back by the Spanish. Subsequently, official accounts of the expedition were suppressed by Jefferson as an embarrassment. Nonetheless the explorers traversed unexplored land between Natchitoches and southern Arkansas, including the Great Raft, riverside prairies, cedar forests, and cane brakes.