LSUS to host Freeman & Custis bicentennial symposium
05/26/06

Click to see: Schedule -- Brochure

The LSUS Museum of Life Sciences and the James Smith Noel Collection are sponsoring “Freeman & Custis Red River Expedition of 1806: Two Hundred Years Later,” a symposium to be held mainly on the LSUS campus June 14-17.

The symposium, a bicentennial celebration of the ill-fated and long-forgotten Freeman & Custis Expedition, will include anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, geographers and historians. It is design to review, as far as possible, the 1806 environment of the middle Red River and surrounding area, “the description against which we much judge all subsequent changes,” explained Dr. Laurence M. “Mac” Hardy, LSUS professor of biology emeritus and chair of the symposium, “and against which we must base reconstructions of an environment long since vanished.”

Headlining the distinguished assembly of scholars who will speak at the symposium are Dr. Dan Flores, University of Montana, the leading authority on the Red River Expedition, and Dr. Archie McDonald, Stephen F. Austin University, a noted historian. The four-day symposium also features speakers from LSUS, Northwestern State University, LSU-Eunice, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forestry Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington University (St. Louis) and other historical organizations.

The symposium will culminate on Saturday, June 17, with a trip on the Red River aboard the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ luxury barge. A box lunch on the river trip costs $15. Lunches at LSUS are $10 on Thursday and $15 on Friday. There is no other registration fee for the symposium.

For information or to register, call 318-797-5222 or see the symposium brochure and schedule on the LSUS Media Relations Web site at www.lsus.edu (click on News & Events).