Unruly Waters

Most historians will be familiar with Kenna Lang Archer’s themes regarding human interaction with Texas’s Brazos River: (a) the river had to be imagined before it was remade; (b) there were stark disconnections between ambitions and results; and (c) an abiding faith in both technology and the malleability of nature signaled profound human hubris. Archer’s protagonist nevertheless stands out as exceptional. First, “the Brazos is a western river with a southern ending” and thus, a watershed subjected to multiple cultural ideals and multiple “models of development” (p. xxiii). Secondly, human developments on the Brazos are definitely notable in their failings, which have left the river’s “ecological integrity” relatively intact (p. xxii). Music, paint, and prose bonded the river basin’s plantation owners, convict laborers, steamboat travelers, family farmers, cowboys, and Indians to the unpredictable river, even as they forged a “psychological” association with the “homes they had left behind” (p. 73). They also informed the templates for expectation even as those expectations were thwarted at every turn. The stream’s “flashy nature” deferred and deterred the vision of a navigable river (p. 53).

Archaeology · Cartography · Convict · Drainage basin · Environmental ethics · Faith · Geography · Sociology · Theology · American Environmental and Regional History · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy