Unruly Waters: A Social and Environmental History of the Brazos River by Kenna Lang Archer (review)

The Brazos River winds some 840 miles from northeastern New Mexico to the Llano Estacado into Texas, across the Blackland Prairie, and down to the Gulf of Mexico. It is an unruly river, prone to raging floods and frequent droughts. In this brief but deeply researched account, Kenna Lang Archer follows the efforts of Texas boosters and government agencies as they sought to bring the Brazos under control.

After setting the geological stage and sketching the river’s place in cultural memory, Archer starts her journey up the Brazos, beginning with the early efforts to integrate the lower Brazos into the global economy through dredging and improved navigation. In the early twentieth-century, the action moved to the middle Brazos, where locks and dam projects promised to bring prosperity to the region. By the mid-twentieth century, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Brazos River Authority were moving forward with a series of multiple-purpose dams that would generate electricity and moderate the river’s flow. In each case the river’s silt, unstable soils, and erratic flows spoiled these plans and thereby undermined the “technocratic faith” (111) that Archer finds at their heart. Finally, in one last surge, boosters proposed a series of inter-basin diversion projects, the scale of which still staggers the imagination. Technology, money, unyielding will, and water from either Canada or the Mississippi, they believed, would finally reshape the Brazos to fit their expectations.

The sheer number of projects proposed for the river is staggering, and Archer’s ability to navigate them all is no less impressive. In a field that often mourns the taming of rivers and the unintended consequences that followed, Unruly Waters offers an environmental history of a river that stubbornly refused to be tamed. Even more importantly, the book offers a cautionary tale about the economic and environmental costs of Texas boosterism. State and regional leaders committed themselves to developing the Brazos River as the “Mississippi of Texas” (74)—a comparison that bordered on the absurd. The river had to be developed, they believed, no matter how much silt clogged the river’s mouth, how underused the locks remained, or how over budget the dams went. The river had to be made navigable, tame, and useful. Why? Their technocratic faith is certainly part of the answer. Yet there appears to have been more than faith in technology or even economic opportunism driving journalists, politicians, engineers, and landowners to improve the river. Developing the Brazos was also about pride—pride that persistently collided with the sad fact that Texas’s longest river could not bear the weight of booster’s dreams. The river embarrassed them. When they sought to improve it, the river disappointed them. Archer has written an engaging and much needed tale of this deep and pervasive frustration along a Texas river.