The Trinity River flows through Fort Worth and Dallas before entering the woods of East Texas. These two regions are defined in contrast to each other: North Texas as a booming sunbelt metropolis and East Texas as a rural, southern, and economically stagnant hinterland—yet they exist along the same river. The history of the Trinity River shows how portraying Texas as a divided state, of rural or urban, has worked against the common good for the benefit of a few powerful interests.
On the one hand the Trinity heightened the divide between the city and the countryside because development in North Texas made the lower river harder to control. As roofs and streets multiplied in Dallas and Fort Worth, they funneled stormwater at much higher rates into the Trinity. At the same time these cities built major levees which pushed the floodwaters downstream, making flooding more destructive in East Texas. Pollution made it even harder for people on the lower river to survive: major floods sometime carried the cities’ pollution hundreds of miles downriver, stinking up the bottomlands and killing the fish rural residents depended on for their dinner table.
By the start of the twentieth century North Texas business leaders came to believe that in order to make their homes into great cities that the Trinity would have to be made into a navigable river all the way to Forth Worth. They gave money, influenced politicians, and even started an advocacy group in East Texas that was secretly funded by people like Amon Carter the publisher of the Fort-Worth Star Telegram. These efforts came to a head in 1973 after they had secured federal financing to build a Trinity canal. The only thing needed now was for the counties along the Trinity to approve $150 million worth of bonds to get the more than billion-dollar project started.
In one of the greatest upsets of Texas politics, a coalition of country people, from wealthy oilmen to small farmers, joined with environmentalists and fiscal conservatives to defeat these powerful boosters’ plans to destroy the Trinity. Rural opposition was not only rooted in attachment to place, but in residents’ understanding of the river itself. Whereas the upstream cities had largely confined the Trinity between its levees, the people living downstream had only experienced worsened flooding on the Trinity as a direct result of upstream urbanization. This experience meant that they had a better understanding that a project to canalize the river was both financially and ecologically impractical.
Boosters’ dreams of canalizing the Trinity did not die at the ballot box and they continued to advocate for different versions of the canal in the mid-1970s. Though several East Texas counties voted in favor of the canal, others like San Jacinto county defeated the proposal by much higher margins than in Tarrant or Dallas county. When public hearings were held about the Trinity after their defeat in East Texas, canal boosters tried to label anyone who opposed their plans as urban outsiders, which was particularly ironic given the fact that the movement to canalize the river had long been financed and led by North Texas businessmen. The chairman of one hearing in Houston County asked a woman who opposed the canal, “just for the dickens of it” where she lived before moving to East Texas. Yet she had never moved from anywhere, as she said, “I was born and raised there.”