By Claudia Houston, New Bern Historical Society
At the beginning of the 19th Century and many years thereafter, Dr. Peter Barton Custis practiced medicine in New Bern, where he married and raised a large family. Few know that when Peter Custis was a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, he was chosen by President Thomas Jefferson to help lead an expedition to the unchartered territory of the Red River.
In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase added 838,000 mostly unexplored square miles to the United States’ area. Jefferson began to plan expeditions to assess these unknown areas for scientific purposes and to determine disputed boundaries with Spain. The most famous expedition was the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was considered a great success.
Jefferson began planning an expedition to study the Red River from the Mississippi River to its headwaters and spent months searching for a trained naturalist for this exploration. He had been criticized because no professional naturalist or scientist had accompanied Lewis and Clark, nor were there visual images of what had been seen. The premiere academic naturalist at the time, Benjamin Smith, recommended his protégé, Peter Custis, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. Custis was interested and skillful in the natural sciences, especially botany.
Custis was selected along with Thomas Freeman, a young engineer, surveyor, and cartographer from Philadelphia, for an essential role in this long-forgotten expedition that President Thomas Jefferson called the “Grand Excursion.” It became better known as the Freeman-Custis expedition.
Custis was the first trained naturalist appointed to a United States government exploration party to explore the American West. This was also one of the first civilian scientific expeditions to explore the Southwestern United States.
Besides searching for the headwaters of the Red River, the expedition was tasked with contacting Native Americans for trading purposes and persuading them to pledge their allegiance to the US government. They were to collect flora, fauna, and topography data, map the country and the river, and assess the land for settlement.
After months of careful planning, on May 2, 1806, the men pushed their boats into the mouth of the Red River, and Custis began recording his observations.
The expedition encountered several Native American tribes, such as the Coushatta and Cado, and exchanged friendship gifts on behalf of the United States. Custis took every opportunity to document species of wildlife, plants, and geological features. One of the phenomena the expedition encountered on the Red River was the Great Raft, a 180-mile logjam that dated back to 1200 A.D.
Locating the southeastern and western borders of the Louisiana Purchase was of great importance, as Spain claimed some of the land, but President Jefferson clarified that the expedition would turn back if it encountered resistance from a foreign power. In July, the Spanish Cavalry confronted the group, and Freeman obeyed Jefferson’s orders to turn back rather than risk any lives or lose any information gathered.
Because Jefferson tried to mitigate the risk of war with Spain, he downplayed the expedition, and despite its discoveries, it was deemed a failure. Sadly, the information from the expedition was put into a report buried within government offices until recently, when it was rediscovered.
In 1808, Dr. Peter Barton Custis moved to New Bern and established his medical practice. He married twice and helped raise eleven children. Dr. Custis died in 1842, outliving all other explorers involved in early expeditions of the Louisiana Purchase. He is buried in a family vault in Cedar Grove Cemetery.
Dr. Custis never received fame from his participation in this exploration. However, after being hidden for over two centuries, the information that Custis recorded during the Freeman-Custis Expedition has been uncovered. While much of Custis’s information was lost, his notes on species of plants and animals inhabiting the Red River Valley are an invaluable reference for environmental history today.