The American Transition

The Red River expedition of 1806 reached Natchitoches in late May: a surveyor, Thomas Freeman, a naturalist, Peter Custis, and an Army escort. Resupplied, it pushed upriver with eight boats and fifty men, poling and dragging them around the Great Raft, a logjam about 160 miles long, in roughly three weeks. Near present-day New Boston, Texas, about 200 Spanish troops under Captain Francisco Viano blocked the way on July 28, and Captain Richard Sparks turned back. The trip cost twice as much as Lewis and Clark's, and Custis identified the bois d'arc tree.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchitoches Historic District — 0.6 mi
  The riverfront blocks of the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase, founded in 1714 at a Natchitoches village, with a brick-paved Front Street, Cane River frontage and the largest bousillage construction in the South.
• Fort St. Jean Baptiste State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A reconstruction of the 1716 French fort beside the Natchitoches village, with a palisade of nearly 2,000 pine logs, a chapel and storeroom, and living-history programs, open Wednesday to Sunday.
• Cane River Creole National Historical Park — 8.5 mi
  Oakland and Magnolia, two Cane River cotton plantations kept as they stood, told through the enslaved families who worked them, the 1864 and 1804 freedom seekers and the tenant farmers who stayed into the 1960s.
• Los Adaes State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Spanish presidio that was the capital of Texas from 1729 to 1770, some 15 miles from French Natchitoches, now an archaeological site where Native pottery is the most abundant find.

More markers nearby

• Site of Fort Claiborne — steps away
• Ducournau Building — steps away
• Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — steps away
• The Natchitoches Parish Old Courthouse — steps away