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Book Review
| Southern Counterpart to Lewis & Clark: The Freeman & Custis Expedition of 1806. By Dan L. Flores. Revised edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. xxi + 386 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $19.95.
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| Given the hoopla surrounding the anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Oklahoma has decided to reprint Dan Flores's 1984 study (original title: Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration) of a less well-known Jeffersonian venture into the West. Recounting the 1806 expedition that cartographer Thomas Freeman and botanist Peter Custis led up the Red River, Southern Counterpart brings together Flores's account of the mission's political context with the expedition's journals and Custis's catalog of the flora and fauna encountered along the way. |
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Better-funded and with a more pressing diplomatic agenda than Lewis and Clark, Freeman and Custis's exploits nonetheless were left uncelebrated by the Jefferson administration after the explorers were turned back by Spanish troops in present-day Bowie County, Texas. Flores convincingly argues, though, that the expedition deserves attention from historians. Freeman and Custis left a glimpse of the early nineteenth-century Louisiana borderlands at least as valuable as the one Lewis and Clark provided for the upper Missouri. The surviving accounts of the exploration are nearly as complete as its more famous partner's. They include a redaction of Freeman's journal, some excerpts of the original, and four manuscript reports sent in by Custis. Flores creates a narrative account of the expedition by splicing these sources into chronological order. |
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Southern Counterpart is really three books under a single cover, though. Making good use of French, American, and particularly Spanish records, Flores opens with a survey of the diplomatic circumstances surrounding the expedition. That and his concluding assessment of its regional impact make a solid introduction to the politics of the Louisiana frontier. At the same time, Flores hopes the accounts Freeman and Custis provide of the Red River's landscape, flora, and fauna will give environmental historians an appreciation of the region's "natural" ecology. It is at times an awkward combination. Flores's narrative cuts off at the expedition's departure, from which point readers follow its progress through terse journal entries. Flores then returns to the traditional narrative to review the expedition's impact and later disappearance from American memory. Environmental historians also may regret that Flores does not match his study of the expedition's political context with a broader analysis of the Red River's early nineteenth-century environment. He provides this instead through detailed explanatory notes to the two explorers' journals, as well as through species-by-species notes to Custis's natural history catalogs. This "third book" of footnotes is as well-researched and informative as the first two, but still cumbersome to use. |
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Yet despite an unwieldy structure, Southern Counterpart brings together a wealth of information that historians of the southern frontier and of southwestern environmental history will welcome. |
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Reviewed by Lynn Nelson, associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University. Mr. Nelson is the author of Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of an American Farm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming). |
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