Anthony Nau's Map of the Red River (English)

A portion of Anthony Nau's map of the "Red River of the Mississippi."

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The First Part of Captn. Pike's Chart of the Internal Part of Louisiana, 1807.
From Donald Jackson, ed., The Journals of Zebulon Pike: With Letters and Related Documents
(2 vols., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966) I.

he point at which the Grand Excursion was turned back by Spanish forces is indicated by hash-marks across the river, just west of its northernmost bend, and by the note "The exploring party stopped here." Beyond that point Nau shows the Red River flowing from the southwest, which is of course incorrect. Nau borrowed some of his information from William Dunbar, and some from the explorer Zebulon Pike (1779-1813), who in turn had relied upon explorer Alexander von Humboldt's best guess, based upon what Spanish consultants in Mexico City thought they knew. Compare Nau's map with"From the Mississippi to Santa Fe."

Clark's own draft of his best-known map, the one that was published with Nicholas Biddle's edition of The Journals of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark in 1814, included part of Freeman's map of the Red River, but Biddle chose to delete all of it south of St. Louis.

In July of 1806, under orders from General James Wilkinson, the governor of Upper Louisiana, Zebulon Pike set out on an expedition to find the headwaters of the Red River, which were presumed to be in the vicinity of Santa Fe. Pike marched through present-day Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, crossed the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and reached the Rio Grande, which he mistook for the upper Red River. There he was captured by Spanish soldiers, taken to Santa Fe, then to Chihuahua, and escorted back to Natchitoches the following June.

Based on Flores, J&SE, 297, and Carl I. Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West (2 vols., San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1948), 21.

--Joseph Mussulman