Brazos River Paddle from Hidalgo Falls to Highway 105-April 2007
Mark Andrus

Jack Richardson was asked to lead a trip from Hidalgo Falls to Highway 105 for the attendees at the Hidalgo Falls festival. I drove him up there. We left Sugar Land early on Sunday morning to get there in time for the 10am trip. Jack gave a long talk on the river bank before we started about the various ways that river commerce was conducted in the 19th Century before improved roads and railroads became common. He talked about flatboats, steamboats, floating cotton bales down side creeks and other means of river commerce.

A couple of hundred yards downstream, we paddled past the remains of the lock structure that had been installed in the early part of the 20th Century. The locks had long been dreamed about as a way of getting steamboats above Hidalgo Falls whose shallowness impeded river traffic upstream for most of the year. It took a long time to get funding to built the locks. The locks were in operation for only a few years because the 1913 flood washed them away. They were never rebuilt because railroads had taken away most of the business from the steamboats. Jack remembered a time when he toured England in a canal boat. England had built an extensive system of canals in the 18th and 19th Century for boat traffic. I remembered an economic history book by North that I had read in college. The North book said that the United States would have been able to develop almost as well if there had been no railroads because canals would have been built to take most of the traffic.

The 1913 flood was the highest flood recorded on the Brazos. It was said that three rivers flowed together further downstream-the Brazos, the San Bernard and the Colorado. My grandmother remembered that her father had to walk two miles through water into Angleton to get the Christmas presents for the family.

The river on our trip in April, 2007 was no where as high as it was during the 1913 flood but it was much higher than usual. We made fast time down the river and we could just drift along with the flow so that the trip would not end too soon. We wished we had that much water on our News Years 2006 trip from Highway 21 down to Hidalgo Falls when we could not take out at the lower takeout because it was too far away from the bank.

There was a lot of mud at the take-out because the river must have dropped a few feet from its highest point a few days before. We used ropes to pull boats up the bank. We called and got my truck and another vehicle moved down to the take-out. Jack and I rode in the cab of my truck, but the other 5 people rode in the bed. I drove slowly the 4 miles back to Hidalgo Falls. We headed back to Sugar Land soon after that and we missed most of the slalom competition.