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{15} W inding and carving its scenic way two hundred miles across the Texas Panhandle, the Canadian River dramatically divides the northern and southern tablelands of the Texas Panhandle. The first Anglo settlers adored the Canadian River anditsscenicvalley.Rancherslivedinthevalleyandsenttheiranimals onto the adjacent and monotonous High Plains. This northernmost realm of Texas was almost nine thousand square miles of river bottom, eroded breaks, picturesque canyons, and then immense and flat plains stretching northward through the middle of a continent. At the turn of the century, the Trans-Canadian country comprised the seven and a half Texas counties (and significant portions of four more counties) that lay north of the wide, sand-choked, boggy, floodprone but usually shallow waters of the Canadian River. It was a land larger than the state of Massachusetts, but in 1900, with barely three thousand people, it was essentially still a frontier for the U.S. Census Bureau. For millennia it was the river itself that had counted in human affairs. Clovis people, Puebloans, prehistoric Querecho, and historic Comanche and Kiowa routinely mined its flint deposits and used the river as a travel corridor. Throughout the sixteenth century the Canadian River was a major east-west corridor of travel and trade. Bison meat, hides, and flint flowed from the plains to pueblos. In return, Pueblo pottery, crafts, and textiles flowed eastward. A cavalcade of European explorers, military officers, traders, fighters, hunters, and pathfinders followed. In 1740 French pathfinders Paul and Pierre Mallet followed the river downstream, thereby discovering a strategic link between Santa Fe and New Orleans. There were good reasons to use the Canadian River Valley as a The Trans-Canadian Country Detail from Texas map in Rand, McNally & Co.’s The New 11 x 14 Atlas of the World, 1895. travel corridor. Unlike the elevated tablelands on either side, in the valley travelers found plenty of firewood from fringing cottonwoods and timbers. Game was abundant. In summer, wild grapes and tasty plums were available. And innumerable headwaters fed scores of creeks and streams that flowed through escarpment canyons to augment the base flow of the river. Among the many nineteenthcentury admirers of the river and its valley scenery were the explorer Lt. A. W. Whipple, the German artist Heinrich Möllhausen, the trader and author Josiah Gregg, the army officer and explorer Capt. Randolph Marcy, and the intrepid Indian scout Bill Dixon. But by 1900 the Canadian River was more of an obstacle than a pathway. The new economic engines of the Panhandle were powerful railroad corporations. With one exception, railroad lines shunned the Canadian Valley, instead laying out geometric travel and trade The Trans-Canadian Country {16} corridors on the tablelands themselves. They typically bypassed the older settlements in the Canadian Valley, while platting new railroad townsites on the convenient High Plains. Stagecoach lines saw their business fade away and their river valley routes go unused. Trade, transportation, and modernity soon left the Canadian Valley behind to follow steel rails across the Trans-Canadian plains. Older ranches lingered in the breaks as a cultural backwater, but people increasingly wanted to go north and south. Railroads had little choice but to construct major engineering works spanning the wide river. The Santa Fe RR built a long and expensive bridge near Canadian in Hemphill County, and the Fort Worth & Denver RR built one near Tascosa in Oldham County. The frontier nature of the Trans-Canadian was swept away in the decade after 1900. In 1902 the Rock Island RR began building a new line through the northwest corner of the Panhandle, scattering towns along the way. The Santa Fe and the Fort Worth & Denver railroads launched new schemes and promotions as well. A tidal wave of farmers, townspeople, and settlers began moving onto the High Plains north of the river. Land-hungry residents of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and other midwestern states flooded the region. Compared to home—where their winters were worse, their growing season shorter, and their real estate more expensive—the flat plains north of the river looked relatively balmy—and certainly cheap. The old Canadian River Valley frontier had been artistically appreciated mostly by lithographers, illustrators, and map-makers in the nineteenth century. Its photographers were mostly itinerants who lived elsewhere. According to the 1900 census, only three photographers dared to wrest a living in the Trans-Canadian: an Irish immigrant named Thomas McQuillan at Hansford; a youthful “cowboy photographer” named Reuben Gifford near Higgins; and a displaced New Yorker named James Quirk...

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