Word: rivers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...children, told of painstakingly saving enough pesos to pay off a smuggler. With others, he journeyed to Piedras Negras opposite Eagle Pass, Texas. "Night came," he recounted later. "We took all our clothes, rolled them in a bundle so they wouldn't get wet, then waded across the river naked, holding our clothes over our heads." The wetbacks met "The Man" in a thicket. He took their money, then locked them in the truck. After 15 minutes on the road, the cramped Mexicans discovered that there was no ventilation. "The air was gone," Pantoja said. "We couldn...
Rising in the Rockies and meandering listlessly through four states, the silt-strangled Arkansas River has brought devastating floods and fascinating legends to the hapless people along its banks, but not much else. Boatmen in the 1840s stopped near Conway to soak up liquor and lie in the sun until they swelled like toads, giving Toadsuck Ferry its name. At Dwight Mission, the Cherokee sage, Sequoyah, developed his syllabary in 1828, providing a written Indian language. Now Toadsuck Ferry is gone, replaced by a bridge, and Dwight Mission lies under the waters of a reservoir. Both are victims...
Down to the Sea. Oklahoma's Will Rogers once cracked: "When the Arkansas, Red River, Salt Fork, Verdigris, Caney, Cat Creek, Possum Creek, Dog Creek and Skunk Branch all are up after a rain, we got more seacoast than Australia." Despite its tendency to burst its banks, the Arkansas was nonetheless a busy waterway. Keelboats explored it in the early 1800s. By the 1820s side-wheelers pushed past the Fort Smith sandbars. Before going to Texas, Sam Houston steamed up a tributary in Oklahoma to wed his Cherokee beauty. Henry Shreve, founder of Shreveport, in 1833 eliminated...
After a 1943 flood, Oklahoma's late Senator Robert S. Kerr turned his considerable skills as a cloakroom operator to winning approval for a scheme to tame the river. In 1955 the first major funds were appropriated. From the start, opponents quipped that it would be cheaper to pave the Arkansas than to dam it. Yet the project is now three-fourths completed. Eventually, 17 locks and dams (the biggest named for Kerr) will create a 446-mile skein of lakes running clear down to the Mississippi near Yancopin, Ark., forming a barge channel nine feet deep...
...stretch is already navigable, will be extended another 100 miles to Little Rock before year's end. Engineers predict yearly benefits of $69,927,400, by 1970, a strangely precise estimate arrived at by combining savings in flood control, hydroelectric energy, recreation and freight. Up and down the river, land prices have soared-in one case from $25 an acre to $2,500 with no ceiling yet in sight. Boats have become as ubiquitous as second cars. Supporters of the project claim that cheap transportation will tap the landlocked region's raw materials and enrich...