The Mighty Red

For most of recorded history, the Red River has posed problems for Louisianians. Its geological quirks made it an oddity among Louisiana streams, and its murky water could be downright treacherous. 

Fed by two branches in the Texas Panhandle, the Red River is Louisiana’s second-largest stream. It flows 1,360 miles along the border of Texas and Oklahoma, through southwest Arkansas, and across North Louisiana to empty into the Atchafalaya and Mississippi rivers near Simmesport. 

Reddish sediment suspended in the water gives the river its name. More than two hundred years ago, explorer C. C. Robin claimed that local inhabitants believed the muddy water had special powers, perhaps because of the rich farmland that lay along its banks. “They attribute to it the capacity for increasing fertility . . . and especially of increasing the frequency of the occurrences of triplets.”

Early explorers such as Robin discovered the Red River was unique in three ways. First was the water’s peculiar salty taste. Around 1800, both Robin and fellow explorer James Pitot wrote that it was “brackish,” and Pitot claimed one could barely drink it when the river was low. 

Both men correctly identified an underground salt dome as the culprit. Far upstream on the Texas-Oklahoma border, the river flows over a dome and picks up just enough salt to make the water sometimes brackish. 

This salt content frustrated Louisiana farmers for generations because crops do not tolerate salt well. If farmers regularly used Red River water for irrigation, they were slowly killing their fields. 

The Red River was also the only major river in Louisiana that had whitewater rapids. Over eons of time, it cut through a formation of sandstone at modern-day Alexandria and created a series of rapids that stretched for nearly a mile. When French explorers encountered the rapids, they named the area (and later parish) “Rapides.”

Just upstream from the rapids was the river’s third unusual feature. A huge log jam called the Great River Raft clogged the Red and made boat passage impossible. Starting around Boyce, it stretched for perhaps 150 miles upstream. 

Eventually, both the raft and rapids were removed, but the Red continued to taunt farmers because they could not use its salty water for irrigation. Sportsmen also found little use for the river because the heavy sediment made it difficult for any fish other than catfish to survive.

“They attribute to it the capacity for increasing fertility . . . and especially of increasing the frequency of the occurrences of triplets.”

Businessmen were more concerned about using the river for commercial traffic. Unfortunately, despite the clearing of the raft and the cutting of a channel through the rapids, the Red remained so shallow during the summer that it was impossible for barges to go beyond Alexandria. 

By the late twentieth century, the Red was the largest undammed river in the United States. Shreveport and Bossier City sat on the bank of the second-largest river in Louisiana but were unable to tap it for commercial transportation. 

To correct this, the Louisiana legislature created the Red River Waterway Commission in the mid-1960s to work with Congress to make the river navigable all the way to Shreveport. 

Senator J. Bennett Johnston pushed a plan to build five locks and dams on the river, and in the 1980s he helped convince Congress to appropriate approximately $2 billion for the project. Completed in 1994, the newly dammed river was named the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway. 

[You Might also like: Water-Logged and Carbon-Dated, the story of a Caddo canoe that washed up on the banks of the Red River... six hundred years after it was built.]

The locks and dams created five pools and a 9-foot-deep and 200-foot-wide channel from Shreveport-Bossier City to near the Mississippi River. The locks are 84 feet wide, 705 feet long, and provide 141 feet of lift. 

The dams also help control flooding and allow both the salt and sediment to settle to the river bottom by slowing the current. Many fish species now thrive in the pools. Today, the Red River is one of the most popular fishing spots in the South, and many farmers are using its water for irrigation. 

In 2001, the Red River National Wildlife Refuge Act was signed to create a federal wildlife refuge containing approximately 50,000 acres along the river between Colfax and the Arkansas state line. This establishment continues more than 150 years of trying to tame the mighty Red River.