Red River (Mississippi watershed)
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The Red River is one of several rivers with that name. It rises in two branches in the Texas Panhandle and flows along the border of Texas and Oklahoma and Texas and Arkansas. At Fulton, Arkansas, the Red turns south into Louisiana where it empties into the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers after 1,360 miles. The river gains its name from the red-clay farmland it waters. The Red River is dammed by the Denison Dam (est. 1943) to form Lake Texoma, a very large reservoir of 89,000 acres (360 km²), some 70 miles (100 km) north of Dallas. Other reservoirs serve as flood-control on the river's tributaries.
Much of the river's length in Louisiana was unnavigable in the early Nineteenth Century due to a collection of fallen trees that formed a "Great Raft" over 160 miles (257 km) long. Captain Henry Miller Shreve cleared the jam in 1839, and now the river is navigable for small craft north of Natchitoches, Louisiana.
See also the Red River disambiguation page.
See also
External links
- Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. "RED RIVER" (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/RR/rnr1.html)