The 1928 Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide Page: 96
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96 THE TEXAS ALMANAC.
small river craft as far as Dallas, but the
project has been abandoned, for the time
at least. In the past the river has been
navigated upon a few occasions as far as
Dallas.
THE SAN JACINTO BASIN.
The main channel of this stream is
formed in the northern part of Harris
County by the junction of the east and
west branches, which rise in Walker
County. The area of the basin is only
2,880 square miles, but most of the basin
is well wooded and the rainfall is around
forty inches annually. The stream rises
at an altitude of about 350 feet and
meanders throughout its course. The flow
of the San Jacinto has not been measured
in its lower stages, but it is large for the
small drainage basin. Part of the chan-
nel was utilized in the construction of the
Houston ship channel from Trinity Bay,
through San Jacinto Bay to Houston.
There is a comparatively large acreage
of rice lands irrigated from this river in
Harris County.
THE BRAZOS BASIN.
The Brazos River has a watershed of
41,700' square miles in Texas, the largest
drainage area in the State excepting the
combined Rio Grande-Pecos-Devil's River
basin, in addition to 600 square miles in
castern New Mexico. The extreme upper
source is in Roosevelt, Curry and Quay
Counties, New Mexico, at an elevation of
more than 4,000 feet above sea level. This
branch which is known in its lower
reaches as the Salt Fork of the Brazos,
traverses the level expanse of the plains,
first in the form of deep draws which be-
come canyons as the stream breaks from
the cap rock at the edge of the plains.
The Double Mountain Fork of the
Brazos rises in Lamb and Hockley Coun-
ties and flows across the plains, descend-
ing from the cap rock in Garza County
and joining the Salt Fork in the north-
eastern part of Stonewall County. The
other of the three principal upper tribu-
taries of the Brazos is the Clear Fork,
which rises in Scurry and Fisher Coun-
ties and flows into the Salt Fork in the
southern part of Young County to form
the main channel of the Brazos River,
about 470 miles from its mouth at the
Gulf of Mexico. Notable tributaries along
the middle and lower course of the
stream are the Navasota, Yegua, Little
Brazos, Little and Bosque Rivers.
The upper portion of the basin is
through an open country largely without
timber. The run-off is rapid and the
rainfall, which averages from twenty to
twenty-five inches, frequently falls rap-
idly, causing heavy "rises."
The river strikes the black land belt in
Hill County and becomes a meandering
stream. The rainfall throughout the
lower course will average about thirty-
five inches annually and this, contributed
to the discharge from the large upper
catchment basin, gives the Brazos the
largest flow of any Texas river as it
nears the Gulf. A station maintained at
Richmond for a period of several years in-
dicated an average flow of 5,770,000 acre-
feet annually.
The Brazos enters the Gulf of Mexico
near Freeport and its channel is used for
navigation purposes by ocean-going ves-
sels to that harbor. Some locks and dams
have been built in the past with a viewto navigating the Brazos as far as Waco,
but nothing is being done on the project
at present, nor has been done for a num-
ber 'of years.
Reservoir Basins.
The contour of the land along the chan-
nel of the Brazos affords some exception-
al opportunities for reservoir construc-
tion, but there are no exceptionally large
projects completed. A good deal- of the
work that has been done by the State
Board of Water Engineers has been in
surveys located in Stonewall, Haskell,
Young, Stephens, Palo Pinto, Hood, Som-
ervell, Hill and McLennan Counties. There
are a number of tentative reservoir proj-
ects on the tributaries of the Brazos, and
there has been some reclamation work in
the form of levees. There are extensive
rice irrigation projects along the lower
course of the river as it crosses the coast-
al plain.
THE COLORADO BASIN.
The Colorado River rises in the lower
portion of the South Plains. The actual
source is usually placed in Dawson Coun-
ty, but there is some drainage from Lynn
and Gaines Counties through the long
"draws" characteristic of that country.
The river rises at an altitude of about
3,000 feet and flows something more than
600 miles in a southeasterly direction into
the Matagorda Bay, which empties into
the Gulf of Mexico. The drainage basin
covers 37,800 square miles. This is a lit-
tle less than the basin of the Brazos, but,
being farther west, the rainfall does not
average as much as that of the Brazos
basin. But there is a perennial flow into
the channel of the Colorado from a num-
ber of its tributaries, notably the Concho
and the Llano, which are fed by the nu-
merous springs of the Edwards Plateau.
The principal tributaries are the Concho,
the Pecan Bayou, the San Saba, the Llano,
the Pedernales, and Barton's Creek.
Above Austin the channel runs through
a country varying from rolling prairie to
mountainous. With the exception of cedar
breaks, the country is open and the run-
off is rapid. At Austin the river crosses
the line of the Balcones escarpment and
enters the alluvial belt. From this point
to the Gulf the flow of the water is much
slower.
Colorado Raft.
Especially in the lower coastal belt the
channel has a tendency to silt up, also to
become choked with log rafts. A raft
which formed many years ago in Mata-
gorda and Wharton Counties and gradu-
ally- extended its length up the course of
the channel so greatly menaced life and
property that the State Legislature re-
mitted the State ad valorem tax of these
counties for a period of twenty years for
the payment of bonded indebtedness in-
curred in removing this raft. By cutting
a channel along the side of this raft,
much of it has been removed.
A large number of surveys have been
made along the channel of the Colorado
and its tributaries and several sites have
been discovered which are well adapted to
reservoir construction. The granting of
permits by the State for the erection of
four or five great dams along the middle
course of the Colorado in Lampasas,
Llano, Burnet and Travis Counties, in-
volving rights to the entire flow of the
waters of the Colorado above these points,
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The 1928 Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, book, 1928~; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth123786/m1/99/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.