From the Dissertation to the Book: Going Home

Now that I have deposited and defended my dissertation, it’s on to the next task: writing the book. My main strategy for this year will be to think about it as little as possible and focus on our projects like my river history website. When I do return, I have to figure out how to keep people’s attention who are not my committee or friends as we explore 150 years’ worth of history. I will make many of the same arguments that I do in the dissertation about the environmental and political legacy of slavery, but above all else, this will be a story. And the main character, that will tie everything together and that will undergo the greatest change has to be the Trinity itself. Right now, the Trinity appears in the introduction and early chapters and mostly disappears in the final chapters.

Over the last seventy years, the Trinity has been largely forgotten with fewer people living and working in its floodplain. It has also been a time of dramatic change for the river, and not just because of climate change. The Trinity has also become an even more fearsome place—a fact reaffirmed by several people who have read this very website and share stories of death and loss related to the river. Not everyone can afford to forget the river.

I have been lucky enough to have Bill deBuys, whose writing on rivers is a model for me, mentor me through this final year and he has been the most insistent on this point about the river as a character. One suggestion was that perhaps I needed to organize a trip down the Trinity that would give the book a structure. This sounds like a great adventure, but who knows when my career and fatherhood might allow for such a journey. I do already have a lifetime of experience to draw from.

Though I have not lived full time near the Trinity since I was a boy, I return there regularly to visit my father and be in the country. On the drive from the DFW airport, we exit the interstate onto US highway 287. The Trinity used to close the highway pretty regularly due to flooding, but when I was in high school, they raised the roadbed by a few feet, and at least for now, that’s been enough to keep commerce flowing. Near the end of the two-hour drive we cross the river. As we approach the bridge my dad always rolls down the windows and the Trinity air hits you at seventy miles an hour, its rich smell and humid feel. The odor is so familiar that it simply smells like home to me. I suppose this is a challenge that many authors face, it is much easier to describe new experiences rather than the ones that have become a part of us.

Sickness on the Trinity

Of the many prisons in Texas, the Beto Unit, located near the Trinity River has the largest outbreak in the state.  Though COVID-19 is a new and terrifying disease, there is a long history of outbreaks along the Trinity River.  In the antebellum period, perceptions of the healthfulness of the Trinity varied by location, whereas following the Civil War the Trinity developed a reputation as being generally unsafe for human health.  William Bollaert’s report from the early 1840s singled out the Trinity below Swartout as being especially unhealthy: the fevers “common on these low alluvial lands." Ten years later another traveler across the Trinity similarly noted, “Great country here for chills." That same year a plantation mistress wrote to her son describing the fever on their Trinity plantation that quickly took the life of “poor little Flora.”  With such conditions, she asked, “Who can tell what a day may bring forth?”  Steamboats navigating the river not only carried cash crops but could also spread disease and devastation.  In the 1840s one traveler had noted that the Trinity River town of Cincinnati “comes in for its share of agues.”As a thriving river port, Cincinnati had another vulnerability: contact with distant towns from which yellow fever could be spread.  The Trinity’s use as a highway to market meant that it could also help spread yellow fever.  Once yellow fever arrived in Cincinnati it spread and persisted because of the abundant mosquitos living in the bottomlands.  Many, possibly hundreds, died during the epidemic and Cincinnati permanently lost even more of its residents who left and never returned to the promising, but too dangerous river town.

Well before emancipation explorers, settlers, and boosters had debated about the propensity for disease in the Trinity River bottomlands.  When the naturalist arrived with Mier y Teran’s expedition at the flooding Trinity he had become so feverish that he no longer cared to study nature.  As the historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has argued, nineteenth-century settlers understood, through “universal experience that disease was associated in powerful ways with moist, swampy places.” However, knowing that they were more likely to catch a fever or another illness in the bottomlands did not stop people from moving there.  “Settlers confronted the irony of good situations: proximity to waterways, so necessary for economic well-being, meant proximity to miasma and deadly ills,” Valencius writes.  Planters who came to the Trinity did so with a combination of wishful thinking and trial and error.  If a particular location proved too sickly or too flood-prone then they might move their home. George T. Wood the second governor of Texas and a Trinity planter decided that his first home had been built too close to the river and began building a home on a hill away from the river. Furthermore, planters also came to the Trinity believing that their slaves were less likely to become sick, an idea that played into their racist justification for slavery—and these ideas about race and the environment persisted in the postwar period as well.

Because of their limited resources and minimal aid provided by the federal government, the Civil War and the immediate postwar years were particularly lethal for freedpeople throughout the South.  Historian Jim Downs has shown how much suffering and death took place alongside the arrival of emancipation.  With the federal government slow to offer aid in the immediate moments after emancipation, Downs writes that “tens of thousands of freed slaves became sick and died due to the unexpected problems caused by the exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation.” As Downs argues, migration and displacement proved deadly, suggesting another reason why many freed slaves chose to remain on or near their plantations adjacent to the Trinity.  Yet with their crops weakened or destroyed by flooding in the first two years after emancipation, freedpeople also faced potential disease with little to sustain them. 

When yellow fever returned to the Trinity after the Civil War it had a particularly devastating effect on the freedpeople in the region.  Not only were they suffering from failed crops and a complete lack of freedom dues, but yellow fever also hindered the ability of the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance and protect their rights.  In 1867 hundreds of United States soldiers died from yellow fever and that September the commander of the Bureau in Texas, Charles Griffin died from yellow fever.  In Walker County, a former agent, who had been a voter registrar, died.  His replacement survived the disease but found himself unable to follow through on his duties during his illness. Even further upriver in Anderson County, the agent reported on the chaos caused by the spread of the disease. 

Given all of the challenges of Reconstruction, the yellow fever outbreak made it even more difficult for the Freedmen’s Bureau to accomplish its mission in a region where white residents attacked agents for doing their job.   Most of the freedpeople had arrived at the Trinity before emancipation, and the floods and sickness that came with life on the river appeared as a threat to their survival.  Conevery Valencius has argues that 19th century settlers understanding of their bodies and environment played an important role in the expansion of the United States.  “That a stretch of land was ‘healthy’ held significance not only for the future of the household that claimed it,” she writes, “but for the future of the nation dependent on such successful settlement.” While Valencius was referring to the physical expansion of the United States, the massive expansion of the federal government and its role in citizens’ everyday life during the Civil War and Reconstruction also depended on healthy environments that would allow its officers and agents to do their work. 

1 William Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas (Norman: Published in co-operation with the Newberry Library, Chicago, by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 110.

2 Entry from May 31, 1853, Henry H, Field Diary, Box 2003-019, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

3 “Letter from S.W. Goree to Thomas J. Goree,” March 20, 1853, Newton Gresham Library, Sam Houston State University, Digital Collections, https://digital.library.shsu.edu/digital/collection/p243coll3/id/2907/rec/9.

4 Bollaert, William Bollaert’s Texas, 292.

5 D'Anne McAdams Crews, ed., Huntsville and Walker County, Texas: A Bicentennial History (Huntsville, Texas: Sam Houston State University, 1976). Heather Hornbuckle, "Cincinnati: An Early Riverport in Walker County," Texas Historian, March 1978.

6 Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country : How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 80.

7 Valencius, 140.

8 Sue Ann Hayes Cobb ed., Hayes Cemetery Patrick Hayes Texas Pioneer, unpublished manuscript 2005, Madisonville Public Library, Madisonville, Texas.

9 S. H. German, "Governor George Thomas Wood." The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1917): 260-68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30234712, 273.

11 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7.

12 Patricia Smith Prather and Jane Clements Monday, From Slave to Statesman: The Legacy of Joshua Houston, Servant to Sam Houston (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1993), 101.

13 Christopher B. Bean, Too Great a Burden to Bear : The Struggle and Failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 144.

14 Valencius, The Health of the Country, 260.

Digital Trinity River History

Grasshopper Geography

Today I launched the latest river history on riverhistories.org featuring none other than the Trinity River.  No doubt creating a storyboard about a river that I have spent the past six years studying took less effort than one for rivers about which I had little prior knowledge.  One particular piece of advice I received was that I should be careful not to give away all the best parts of my dissertation.  I can understand this sentiment that you may want to have people wait to read your published articles or books, but I am also not sure what 'saving the best parts' would even look like.  Ultimately my Trinity storyboard reflects change over time from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century and there is only so much one can do in a 15 slide storyboard versus a three-hundred page dissertation/book.  Still, this advice made me think what am I "giving away" with this dissertation at any point from the storyboard to the book.  

In part this is a question of labor, or six years of my life spent researching, interpreting, and writing.  The only way to make an effective argument about this particular river and southern rivers more broadly was to learn everything I could possibly find related to the river.  I often frustrated archivists when I told them that I would look at anything they had related to the Trinity River.  The research for this project ended up taking me to over fifty archives, including digital ones like the Portal to Texas History, in addition to all the historical commissions collections, state and university libraries in Texas. I found credit reports detailing Trinity River planters and merchants at the Harvard Business School, Cornell had a striking collection of letters from a Trinity River planter to his family in Massachusetts, and even Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Collection had useful sources.  Then, the next challenge was what to do with these thousands of documents I collected.

In part, I made sense of my research by comparing it with the existing scholarship on the history of rivers and slavery.  Thus I read as many history books related to environmental history, the history of Texas, and the history of slavery as possible.  And I decided that quite simply, there is not enough history out there that brings together the history of the environment/rivers and the history of slavery.  Furthermore some of the more successful books that do explore this relationship such as Mart Stewart's What Nature Suffers to Croe focus on different parts of the South such as the Georgia lowcountry rather than the frontier of slavery.  So my work brings together the history of rivers and slavery in Texas and that in itself is an argument about what we need to focus on.  

My dissertation has gone from around five chapters to now ten chapters, and most chapters make their own contribution to our understanding of American history.  For example my dissertation shows how planters did not assume they controlled nature in Texas unlike the rice planters of the lowcountry--the control of people and nature did not go hand in hand on the Trinity.  At the start of the twentieth century, I argue that townspeople played a key role in preserving access to the commons. This claim stands in contrast to major books like Steve Hahn's The Roots of Southern Populism that point to a conflict between towns and rural people as leading to the closing of the commons.  And in the middle of the twentieth century I argue that rural people actively advocated for their environment in very significant ways even if their motivations differed from the people typically labeled as environmentalists.  So if you have a stake in environmentalism or common lands or the relationship between the exploitation of people and places then this dissertation then you might find my arguments useful.  

And finally, the format of my project speaks to ways in which the pieces are less than the sum total of the book.  I am trying to build upon past river histories to make a narrative of the Trinity that brings the role of the river to the forefront in a new and compelling way.  I hope that this will not only be a dissertation that some historians find useful, but a book that many people who care about river and justice will want to read.  

Fear the River: Drownings in the Trinity River

I've already discussed two major ways in which people feared the Trinity River, in previous posts I described how people often assumed the worst about the creatures and crimes in the botttomlands, with tragic consequences.  And much of the dissertation explores how floods dictated the rhythms of daily life.  However, my students in my "Rivers, Politics, and Power" course reminded me of another way in which people have feared rivers, mainly through the risk of drowning.  During my research for this dissertation I came across countless accounts of drownings in newspapers, journals, and legal documents.  At a certain point, I stopped cataloging reports of drowning because the reports were so prevalent.  

Over the last two centuries I believe that somewhere around a hundred people died from drowning in the Trinity River.  They died running away from slavery. They drowned bathing in the river.  They died swimming to ferries tied to the wrong side of the bank.  In the 19th century they drowned on sinking steamboats and in the 20th century they drowned clearing snagged trees in order to make the river navigable again.  

I pay close attention to these events in the first half of my dissertation.  Because word spread about deaths in the Trinity, most people whether they were runaways, steamboat pilots, or stock farmers took precautions when crossing the Trinity.  One of the things that stands out to me now, is how many of these deaths took place in the 20th century.  As bridges were built across the Trinity and people moved away from the bottomlands, it seems there would have been fewer opportunities to drown in the river.  Perhaps the fact that so many people nonetheless drowned in the 20th century meant that people who had no experience with the power of the river would have been less cautious or afraid.  It also suggests the ways in which the Trinity retained its power, particularly in urban areas where it was generally hidden from sight behind massive levees.  

As I mentioned in my recent Dallas Morning News column in November, the most common response I have heard from North Texas residents when I say Trinity River is, "oh, the bodies?"  I had assumed that they were referring to the murder victims who had been thrown into the river, but this reflection suggests they have a broader understanding of the Trinity's relationship to death.  

Writing a dissertation on a river forces you to pay close attention to language.  Rivers are humankind's original metaphor, describing the constant process of change, including life and death.  Like other rivers, the Trinity invites its residents to think in terms of allegories.  Thus, the Trinity became a stygian river, not just because of the people who did die in the river, but also because they had been taught about the river Styx and were conditioned to think of certain rivers in this way.  

Finally, I wonder how this long history of people unable to counter the power of the river played into opposition to the proposed Trinity River canal.  If those drownings contributed to an understanding of the foolishness of trying to control such a powerful and unpredictable process.  On the other hand, maybe these deaths encouraged the opposite response: we cannot live with such a dangerous river and it must be tamed and controlled.  

The Trinity River as a Texas symbol for the 21st Century

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.

Does the Trinity River Connect or Divide Texas?

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.” 

Politics in the City and the Countryside: Bridging the Divide on the Trinity

Since I returned from my October trip in Texas, I've been thinking a lot about the rural-urban framework I'm using.  Because the Trinity River flows from urban North Texas and down through rural East Texas, it is a great opportunity to consider the ways that the city and the countryside are connected or divided from each other.  This was the main topic of the presentations I led, and I tried to be open about the limitations of this framework.  For example, the Trinity River does not explain that much about the contrast in North Texas' century-plus boom and East Texas' long term underdevelopment.  Another environmental historian has already written a lovely book on the economic connections between the periphery and the core, but there's a lot of work left to be done on the material and political connections.  The commentary and narrative coming out of the media after this week's election has highlighted one of the reasons why my research and analysis is relevant today.  

One of The Hill's headlines from this morning reads: "America's urban-rural divide deepens."  In their telling of the story "suburban voters delivered a stern rebuke to an unpopular president" and "exacerbate a divide between booming urban centers and struggling rural communities."  While this sort of analysis has a purpose given our Madisonian apportionment of votes, it leads to facile and unrepresentative assumptions and stereotypes about rural people.  Looking at state-level or district-level votes, ignores a great degree of dissent and diversity on the ground.  This was certainly true with the way that politics on the Trinity River has been presented.  

In 1973, all of the counties on the Trinity River from the Dallas-Fort Worth area on down participated in a bond-approval vote to determine the fate of a proposed Trinity River canal.  I won't go into all the details here, but the canal was a terrible plan, a waste of money, ecologically ignorant, and not needed, something which even many of its boosters like Rep. Charlie Wilson later admitted.  In a surprise to many of the region's most powerful boosters, the canal was defeated.  This history is often portrayed as a victory led by urban environmentalists and urban voters.  It is true that the urban counties carried the proposal to defeat with 56% opposing in Dallas County and 54% of voters opposing in Tarrant County, but there was significant opposition from East Texas. 

As you can see in the attached image, 53.2% of the voters in rural counties voted in favor of the canal.  It would be easy for a deadline-crunched journalist to write a similar headline about this vote, ie "Trinity Vote Reveals Gap Between Enlightened Urban Voters and Ignorant Country People."  But that's not what the data actually says.  Several East Texas Counties voted against the canal, and San Jacinto and Houston County both opposed the canal by over 75%, enough to make the Sierra Club blush with pride.  Certainly rural voters and urban voters had different reasons for voting against the canal--but it would be both inaccurate and unfair to label all East Texans as blind supporters of elite boosters and their plans for the conquest of every environment.  

In this context, my dissertation reminds me a bit of the new reboot of #queereye, without the laughter and tears.  The cast spends a lot of their time working with people who live in rural/exurban regions and who at first glance might fit the portrayal of hateful, intolerant country bumpkins, but then it turns out they're kind and thoughtful people who are willing to learn.  Or for my historiographically-minded readers, think of this project as reflecting more of Lawrence Goodwyn's approach in which he wrote, "At bottom, Populism was, quite simply, an expression of self-respect,” rather than Richard Hofstadter who portrayed rural people as angry and left-behind.    

From boom to backwater

Wonderful books have been written about the history of Texas rivers and even many of its creeks, though no books have been written about one of the state's major rivers, yes the Trinity!  To the west of the Trinity on the Brazos there's Kenna Lang Archer's recent Unruly Waters and to the east Thad Sitton's Backwoodsmen covers the history of the Neches. 

Sitton's book, Backwoodsmen : Stockmen and Hunters along a Big Thicket River Valley, describes a world that had long been divorced from the get-rich mentality that powered Texas' growth.  From the start of Anglo settlement the Neches was a backwoods, backwater area where subsistence rather than commercial growth proved the rule, but unlike the Neches, the larger Trinity did not start out that way.  

As I've been writing the actual dissertation this summer, I have realized the extent to which the Trinity was not peripheral but central to Texas' economic growth in the antebellum period.  The Trinity was one of the major plantation regions in the state.  It's likely/possible that planters forced more slaves to plantations along the Trinity than any other area in Texas in the five years leading up the Civil War.  By the 1850s the Trinity was the place where planters wanted to live--with its navigable river (albeit not always so) and its abundant fertile lands.  While the Neches was always a backwater, it's all the more striking that the Trinity went from being so important to the state's growth to becoming a backwater by the 1890s.  To a large extent this change happens because of the river.  Explaining why and how this happens, especially in relation to the rise of an urban Texas centered around Dallas, will be the much of the work of the dissertation.  

Apologies for the sporadic postings, but I have been busy writing the actual dissertation as the impending birth of my son has given me the benefit of a clear and non-negotiable deadline!