page_title: Red River of the South
section_title: European-American exploration and settlement
hierarchical_section_title: Red River of the South / History / European-American exploration and settlement
caption_attribution_description: English: Two kinds of horsepower. Crossing the Red River near Granite, Oklahoma. Triangulation party of E. O. Heaton. Near Granite, Oklahoma.
context_page_description: The Red River, or sometimes the Red River of the South, is a major river in the Southern United States. It was named for the red-bed country of its watershed. It is one of several rivers with that name. Although it was once a tributary of the Mississippi River, the Red River is now a tributary of the Atchafalaya River, a distributary of the Mississippi that flows separately into the Gulf of Mexico. It is connected to the Mississippi River by the Old River Control Structure.
  The south bank of the Red River formed part of the US–Mexico border from the Adams–Onís Treaty until the Texas Annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
  The Red River is the second-largest river basin in the southern Great Plains. It rises in two branches in the Texas Panhandle and flows east, where it acts as the border between the states of Texas and Oklahoma. It forms a short border between Texas and Arkansas before entering Arkansas, turning south near Fulton, Arkansas, and flowing into Louisiana, where it flows into the Atchafalaya River. The total length of the river is 1,360 miles, with a mean flow of over 57,000 cubic feet per second at the mouth.
context_section_description: In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Red River Expedition to explore parts of the new lands of the Louisiana Purchase by traveling up the Red River. He said it was "in truth, next to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the Mississippi", in a letter to William Dunbar. Having threaded the maze of bayous at the river's confluence, and the "Great Raft" of lodged driftwood, the expedition was stopped by the Spanish near what is now New Boston, Texas.
  In 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike, under orders to ascertain the source of the Red River, ascended the Arkansas River, made his way downstream on what turned out to be the Rio Grande, and was sent home by the Spanish authorities. A more successful exploration of the river's upper reaches to both its sources was the 1852 expedition under Capt. Randolph Barnes Marcy, assisted by Brevet Capt. George B. McClellan. A decade later McClellan was an important general in the American Civil War.
  In April 1815, Captain Henry Miller Shreve was the first person to bring a steamboat, the Enterprise, up the Red River. Fulton and Livingston, who claimed the exclusive right to navigate Louisiana waters by steamboat, sued Shreve in the District Court of New Orleans. The judge ruled that the monopoly claimed by the plaintiffs was illegal. That decision, along with a similar outcome in Gibbons v. Ogden freed navigation on every river, lake or harbor in the United States from interference by monopolies.
  When John Quincy Adams became Secretary of State in 1817, one of his highest priorities was to negotiate the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase with Spain. He negotiated with the Spanish Minister to the United States, Luis de Onis, and finally concluded the Adams–Onis Treaty, also known as the Treaty of 1819. The treaty defined the south bank of the river as the boundary between the United States and Spain, as of when it was surveyed and demarcated following 1819. That boundary continued to be recognized when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, then again when Texas became independent from Mexico. It remained so until the United States Congress consented to the Red River Boundary Compact adopted by the states of Oklahoma and Texas, which set the jurisdictional boundary between Texas and Oklahoma at the vegetation line on the south bank, but left title of adjacent property owners at the south bank. The Red River actively meanders, as is evident when comparing a map of the political boundaries defined by where the river was decades ago against where the river is now.
  The Red River Campaign (March–May 1864) was fought along the Red River Valley in Louisiana during the American Civil War. It was a failed attempt by the Union to occupy eastern Texas. Confederate commander Richard Taylor was able to repel an army under Nathaniel Banks three times bigger than his own.
  In Louisiana, the area of present-day Natchitoches Parish was settled by French Creole and mixed-race Louisiana Creole people, starting before 1800.  The Cane River National Heritage Area marks this area of influence, with plantations and churches founded by Louisiana Creoles. Some of the sites are designated as destinations on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail, designed in the 21st century. For nearly 100 years after the American Civil War, some of the plantations were the center of a large African American and Creole community, whose people lived and worked in this area for generations.
  The area along the lower Red River of Grant Parish, Louisiana and neighboring parishes were a mixture of hill country and cotton plantations, with white planters and subsistence farmers, and numerous African American slaves working the plantations in the ante bellum years. It was an area of heated social tensions and insurgency during and after the Reconstruction era. Grant was a new parish created by the Reconstruction legislature, with the goal of increasing Republican Party representation. In 1873, Grant Parish was the site of the Colfax massacre, caused by political tension and violence arising from the disputed 
caption: Crossing the North Fork of the Red River near Granite, Oklahoma, 1921.
exif: {"Image Copyright": "This image is in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted."}