The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 18??-1935, 1897-03-19
~ AMERICAN NILE
SUCH Is THE GREAT RIO GRANDE,
WITH ITS VAGARIES.

derstOOd-FlOws Mainly Underground,
but at Times There Is Torrent on Top.
Its river l, 800 miles long, meas
ured in its windings," said the man
from New Mexico, speaking of the Rio
Grande. "For few miles, at its mouth,
light draft steamers run up from the
gulf of Mexico. Above that it doesn't
float a craft except at ferries. In the old
days, when New Mexico was a province
of Spain, the people along the river
didn't even have ferryboats, and the
c2ly way they had of getting across was
by fording. For this purpose a special
breed of large horses was reared to be
kept at the fords. When the river was
too high for these horses to wade across,
travellers camped ON the bank and wait
ed for the waters to subside. Now there
are bridges over the river at the larger
Rio Grande towns, and in other places
rope ferries and rowboats are the means
of crossing.
I'm times Of low water a stranger
seeing its current for the first time
would be apt to think slightingly of the
Rio Bravo del Norte, as the New Mexi-
cans love to call the great river Mean
dering in small part Of very wide
channel he would see only little muddy
stream, for ordinarily nine tenths of the
Rio Grande is underground, the water
soaking along toward the gulf through
the sands beneath its channel The val
ley, bounded everywhere to left and
right by mountains or foothills, is sandy
and the water, percolatlng the sands
down to hard pan, spreads out ON each
side so that it may always be found
anywhere in the valley by digging down
to the level of the rivers surface. For
the greater part of the year the river
above ground flows swift and muddy.
narrowing as it swirls round sand bar
and widening over shadows But the
thing that strikes the stranger most
queerly is its disappearance altogether
for reaches, many miles in length, of
its channel, which, except, it may be,
for water hole here and there, is as
dry as Sahara. The river is keeping
right along about its business, however,
and where rock reef or clay bed blocks
its subterranean current it energies to
the surface and takes fresh start above
ground, running as big stream which,
farther down, may lose itself in the
sands again
1T is when the floods come down
that the Rio Grande shows why it re-
quires so big channel for its all the
year round use and demonstrates that
If the waterway were even wider it
would be an advantage to residents
along its banks. 1t is fed by'a watershed
of vast area and steep descent, which
in times Of rain and melting SHOWS pre-
cipitates the waters rapidly into the
channel. In June, when the snow melts
on the peaks about its headwaters in
Colorado and northern New Mexico, and
later in the summer, when heavy show
ers and cloudbursts are the order of the
day, the Rio Grande overhows its banks,
deluging wide tracts Of valley and some
times carving a new channel for itself,
changing its course for miles. Where
the valley is unusually wide and sandy,
as below Isleta and in the Merilla val
ley, the old channels in which the river
used to flow are plainly indicated in the
landscape.
''No one who has seen the great river
in food is likely to forget the positive
ferocity it seems to display as its waters
sweep all before them, and woe to the
man or beast who is overtaken by them!
The food arrives without warning. The
sky may be clear above when the travel
er, leisurely jogging across the wide
channel, hears his wagon wheels CRATE
upon the sand with peculiar sound. 1t
means that the waters are stirring the
sands beneath him, and then, if he
knows the river, he lashes his horse,
making at all speed for the nearest
bank, and lucky he is if he reaches it
safe. The chances are that before he gets
there he hears the roaring of waters up
the channel and sees them coming down
toward him with a front like wall,
rolling forward and downward as if
over fall, with rising food behind.
Many a man and whole wagon trains
have been overwhelmed in this way,
and, buried in sands or cast away on
desert banks, no human eye has ever
seen them again.
1.-THE great river has its pleasing and
romantic aspect, so fascinating that it is
a saytlg among people who live in its
vallGy that whatsoever drinks of its wa
tiers and departs will come again to seek
them Like the Nile, the Rio Grande
enriches the soil of its valley to the
! point of inexhaustible fertility. Along
its banks in New Mexico are fields that
for two centuries have been cultivated
yearly, yielding great crops, and they
are as productive today as when they
first were titled. Irrigating canals, call
ed acequias madras (mother ditches),
convey water from the river to be dis
tributed through little gates to the fields
of the valley, which it both waters and
enriches. A trip along the river reveals
t a succession Of pictures of primitive
civilization of the old Spanish-American
} type Adobe villages, with small, fat
rooted houses built about antique
;; churches, and the spacious houses of the
4 vicos, or great men; orchards. vineyards,
) wheatfields and grazing cattle are all
features of the scenery Of the Rio
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