The Red River Bridge War: A Texas-Oklahoma Border Battle by Rusty Williams (review)

In light of the general speed and efficiency of modern automotive transportation systems, it is hard to conceive of the significant obstacles that a toll bridge placed before rural Americans during the Great Depression. The seventy-five cents that the Red River Bridge Company (RRBC) charged to travel between Durant, Oklahoma, and Denison, Texas, could and did frustrate local residents and slow regional economic development. For some, the inability to move agricultural products across the Red River freely meant potential starvation. At a time in both Texas and Oklahoma when the idea of allocating public funds for sustainable roads and bridges was in its infancy, ambitious politicians found the money to modernize travel by building a free bridge between Durant and Denison. However, this decision triggered a significant loss of income for the RRBC, whose toll bridge was barely fifteen years old when the new free bridge was completed and which enjoyed legal and historical roots in the Chickasaw Nation. The conflict between the toll bridge and the new free bridge exposed an underlying tension between private enterprise and public works that plagued the New Deal for much of the 1930s.

The battle itself was decidedly less dramatic than its sobriquet might indicate: this war played out in July 1931 in the federal court system, not on the sandy plains between Texas and Oklahoma. However, the issues caused deep emotional and philosophical discord for local residents and travelers alike, who found themselves embroiled in a conflict between private enterprise and government initiative. Eccentric politicians, including Oklahoma governor William H. Murray and Texas governor Ross S. Sterling, blended their personal ambitions with those of their constituents to mixed reviews. Sterling supported the temporary injunction against opening the Texas Highway Commission's free bridge by placing barricades on the Texas side of the structure. The ever-mercurial Murray argued that the entire bridge belonged to Oklahoma via the Louisiana Purchase boundaries, so he ordered the barricades removed, dispatched the Oklahoma National Guard to keep order, and destroyed the Oklahoma entrance to the RRBC toll bridge.

In the end, legal negotiations resolved the issue, but this legendary dispute left its marks. Sterling lost his reelection bid in 1932, and some argued that his lackluster performance in the 1931 bridge war forever painted him as "the officious postal clerk or the stingy banker" (p. 213). From a legal standpoint, he may have been correct in seeking to enforce the federal injunction by closing the free bridge, but he was dead wrong in the court of public opinion. Murray gained considerable national publicity as a consequence of his actions on behalf of Oklahomans. He parlayed that celebrity into a regional presidential bid in 1932 but lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, in some respects due to the same folksy, rural swagger that helped Murray vanquish the toll-bridge owners in the first place.

Rusty Williams's The Red River Bridge War: A Texas-Oklahoma Border Battle provides a provocative account of this strange post–Civil War political conflict between Texas and Oklahoma that foreshadowed similar conflicts throughout the western United States between private enterprise and state-sponsored development. Williams has consulted a wide range of primary documents, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and legal records to reconstruct this story with aplomb. At approximately 220 pages of text, The Red River Bridge War—which is the first book-length treatment of this episode—reads quickly and should serve as a valuable reference for professional historians and history buffs interested in Depression-era history.