A log jam on the Arkansas River -- probably the first time I have heard of one of those -- is frustrating boaters in the Brown's Canyon section:
The blockage, below Hecla Junction and downstream of the Seidel’s Suckhole rapid in lower Browns Canyon, stretches for 100 yards, and anyone using the river is required to portage around it. Nobody should try to cross the debris raft or try to remove parts of it, state officials said, as the floating wood is unstable.
You never know, maybe some of those young guys who throw axes in taverns might equip themselves with caulk boots, buffalo plaid shirts, and peavey poles, and try to clear it. Probably best to leave the job to the spring run-off though.
The source of these logs is not mentioned. No large fires have burned above that spot recently. I am open to suggestions,
Now if you want a real big log jam, try the "Red River Raft." Miles long, many years old.
The raft removal project, initiated by Captain Henry Shreve in the 1830s, opened new territory in Louisiana and East Texas for settlement and agriculture. Its engineering audacity inadvertently reshaped the geology of the Lower Mississippi River watershed.
The "Red River Raft" came to the US government's attention in 1806 when it was blocked the upstream progress of the Freeman and Custis "Red-River Arkansas" expedition. It was centuries old and nearly a hundred miles long.
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| The Louisiana Purchase, more or less (Wikipedia) |
All three expeditions were devoted to exploring our 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, which supposedly covered all French land claims in the Mississippi drainage.
The problem was that Spain claimed some of that territory too. In fact, President Jefferson thought that a frontier war with Spain was a distinct possibility.
The Spanish tried twice to intercept Lewis and Clark on the prairie but were too late both times. As is well-known, they did shadow the Pike expedition along the Arkansas and captured his little group (who probably were in fact spying as well as exploring) in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in February 1807.
The Freeman-Custis Expedition, the most purely scientific, was an easy snatch for the Spanish. As Dan Flores writes,
The Spaniards had no intention, then, of letting the Americans treat with Comanches and groups like that, and so for their own reasons, the Spaniards were determined to make every effort to block these American expeditions. . . . the Red River of the South was easily accessible to those Spanish troops, and so Spain, in the spring of eighteen-six, began to put together a plan for stopping this Southwestern Expedition. It decided—the Spanish government in Madrid, and in Cuba—decided to, first of all, alert the authorities in New Mexico and in Texas of the impending American expedition.
Collecting specimens and mapping, the expedition (with Caddo Indian guides) had to pole their boats through streams and swamps to bypass the Great Raft. But then on July 29, 1806, on roughly today's Arkansas-Oklahoma border, they encountered about two hundred Spanish cavalry troopers. Oops.
No blood was shed. The Spanish commander, Capt. Francisco Viana, was firm with them.
He said, my instructions are, you cannot proceed beyond this point. He said, this is as far as the French ever established settlements and posts the Americans had passed an old French post about two days before. And the Spaniards had set up their blockade of the river just about fifty miles upstream of that old French post, and Viana said, this is as far as the French ever proceeded on the Red River, the country above this is ours, and you are going to have to retrograde to American territory.
Thomas Freeman, the expedition leader, was a civil engineer, not a soldier like Zebulon Pike or Meriwether Lewis, although some American soldiers were present for protection. This was not a military probe of hostile territory. President Jefferson had given Freeman written instructions that if they encountered hostile forces, they should turn around. And so they did.
Flores has several reasons why no one remembers the Freeman-Custis Expedition:
This expedition, blocked by the Spanish army in 1806, simply doesn’t play into the idea of American expansion across the Southwest. Now, it may be, in our own time, as the history of the West becomes more multicultural, that Hispanic-Americans in the Southwest will look upon the outcome of this expedition as sort of one of their victories in blocking American imperialist expansion into the West. But, I think in terms of American national history, this is one of those events that can’t be fitted comfortably into the story of a successful kind of migration of the American people across the continent.
Another thing that makes it an invisible expedition to a certain extent is that the scientific results were relatively meagre, and they were undermined really by how the expedition was reported by the Jefferson administration. The map that resulted from the expedition was a remarkable map, but it didn’t really explore very far into territory that the French hadn’t already explored. So it didn’t provide much in the way of new geographical discoveries.
Peter Custis’s work, on the other hand, I think, had things played out a little differently, might have made the expedition very well known and famous, but the way, in fact, Custis’s work did pan out, it made the expedition even more ill-starred. What happened was that Custis wrote descriptions of more than two hundred and sixty-seven plants and animals that he described on this four-and-a-half-month expedition. It’s a remarkable ecological kind of time machine into what the Red River was like in 1806.
But the the publication was fumbled: you can read more here.
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