This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday November 24, 2019
Growing up in East Texas, I used to go with my dad to the Trinity River to practice my aim on sticks floating downriver. However, the steady flow of soda bottles, oil jugs and footballs that came from North Texas was the most fun, since these items responded more energetically to my .22 rifle, jumping in the air if the bullet made contact.
Whenever I flew out of the DFW International airport, I always looked at the landscape below with fear as the roads, big-roofed homes and warehouses seemed to reach further and further into the disappearing countryside. But when I was on the Trinity, shooting at Dallas’ trash, I didn’t think much about what it meant to be connected through the river to this ever-expanding metropolis. Having spent the last six years writing my dissertation on the Trinity River, I’ve since come to recognize the Trinity’s importance to Texas history, especially as a way to understand the changing relationship between rural and urban places in the state.
Before the end of the Civil War, the lower half of the Trinity was regularly navigated by steamboats and had been one of the major economic regions in Texas. The slaves who lived on the plantations that lined its banks grew cotton that was shipped through Galveston to New Orleans, New York and England. As railroads were built rapidly after the Civil War fueling the growth of cities like Dallas, navigation abruptly ended on the Trinity by the 1870s. Within less than a decade the river went from the equivalent of an interstate highway to a county road. The relative isolation that the river then provided proved useful for many of the freedpeople who remained on the Trinity, as lynchings and the rise of Jim Crow throughout Texas limited their ability to live without the threat of violence.
Most of Texas’ population has lived in its cities and suburbs since World War II, even though most of Texas’ landscape remains rural to this day. North Texas has grown both because of and in spite of the Trinity. As a source of water and an outlet for sewage and industrial wastes, the Trinity enabled development. The massive, costly levees have worked to contain the floodwaters for much of the region and made the Trinity into the state’s most populated river.
All the ways the river has been used and engineered by North Texans have made a different river downstream. Not only does East Texas receive Dallas’ sewage and trash on the river, but floods have become more destructive as a result of the upstream levees. With each new impervious surface covering the prairie, such as another housing development, more water is funneled into the Trinity instead of being absorbed into the ground. These changes made many of the traditional uses of the downstream bottomlands all the more economically impracticable.
Today the Trinity remains maligned, in my own conversations and judging by the press attention. It’s mainly known as a dumping ground for bodies or Lime bikes. Yet the Trinity’s potential as a symbol that Texans can embrace for the 21st century remains huge. It is, after all, a product of our shared history, a dynamic and unpredictable process that has changed in response to major themes in Texas history including slavery and urbanization. Furthermore, the Trinity provides a physical connection between urban and rural Texas.
Though political maps suggest rural and urban Texas have been divided into blue or red counties, the same muddy brown river flows through both places. The trash that pollutes the Trinity in North Texas inevitably floats down to East Texas like a never-ending stream of blank messages in a bottle that need no explanation. More concern for the health of the Trinity in Fort Worth and Dallas would mean not only a healthier environment for North Texans, but also a greater concern for the people who live downriver.
Scot McFarlane is a doctoral student in American History at Columbia University. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.