Heck and High Water: Floods on the Canadian by Dr. Margaret Bickers

     It is probable that word flashed down the telegraph lines, where they existed. Otherwise the first warnings people had may have come from upstream neighbors riding down the valley with the news. Or the rapidly rising water, churning and reddish brown, that roared down the Canadian River Valley throwing down bridges and ripping out trees and the riverbanks. The silt-thick flood also carried bodies, some human and some otherwise. The hamlet of Mills, tucked into the east bank of the Canadian River in its gorge halfway between Sabinoso and the river’s east turn at Conchas, vanished and seven residents drowned. As the waters roared out of New Mexico they ripped out wagon bridges and railroad trestles isolating the two banks yet again. Long-time residents of the valley and the wider Canadian River Breaks must have stared in awe at the terrible fall rise. But the waters were on time: it was the nearly-yearly equinoctial flood on a massive scale.

     Floods shaped the Canadian River. Before there were people in the valley to take note of the rising and falling water levels, the Canadian surged and sank, adding silt to the floodplain, cutting new channels and devouring old banks. It was (and is) what hydrologists call “a flashy stream,” meaning that it can rise and fall quickly in response to local rain and storms. It could also rise slowly, stay high and then decline slowly much as larger rivers like the Lower Mississippi do.

     Before the construction of dams on the river, the Canadian generally rose twice a year. Spring snowmelt from the Sangre de Christo Mountains swelled creeks that flowed into the Canadian and Conchas Rivers, bringing several weeks of high water in May or June. Smaller snowpacks meant lower floods, while heavy snows led to memorable floods that carried away even large trees, inundated the floodplain and beyond and made the Canadian impassible for weeks along much of its length in Texas and New Mexico. The Tascosa Pioneer made note of such rises, proclaiming that the Canadian was booming along with the town. On occasion, such as 1935, large storms formed over the Canadian watershed, pouring heavy rains into already well-filled streams and adding to the usual spring rise.

     The other rise came in the fall. The remnants of tropical weather systems, either from the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of California, combined with cold fronts or collided with the rising terrain of eastern New Mexico and poured rain onto the High Plains, again swelling the river and tearing out anything in its path. The greatest floods in modern record, October 1904 and September 1941, along with the memorable 1923 floods in Oklahoma, came from these autumnal, or “equinoctial” storms. The earlier high water of 1893 almost consumed part of Old Tascosa after some town residents tried to force the river into a different channel in order to keep the river from ruining some pastures. Instead the river ruined other pastures, carried away the wagon bridge, and collapsed several houses in town when the next flood proved to be much larger than anticipated.

     If there had been gages on the river in 1904, that drought-breaking surge would have been the largest recorded in the known history of the river. As it was, it is the only one with known fatalities. Instead it was 1941 that entered the record books both for the amount of water and the duration of the flood. The Canadian swelled twice in 1941. During the spring it rose in May and stayed impassible for almost a month. James Stephens of the Matador Ranch’s Alamositas Division, west of Boys’ Ranch, recorded the difficulties. In order to reach Vega he had to go through Amarillo rather than fording the river. At its height nothing could cross – no riders, wagons or motor vehicles dared venture into the red flood. As the waters drained away, quicksand remained a plague. In September the river rose again, as did its sister stream the Pecos, endangering the big railroad bridges at Amarillo and Plemons near Borger.

     The last notable flood on the Canadian came in 1965. The still-incomplete Sanford Dam caught some of the waters, as did Conchas and the brand new Ute Dam in New Mexico. Had the dams been absent in the spring of 1983, floods would again have hurtled downstream as the heavy snows in New Mexico melted. Instead the waters were “conserved,” caught and held for future use.

     Not all floods filled the entire river valley. As still happens today, heavy local storms triggered flash floods as lots of water fell all at once. It surged into the river, charging downstream and then fading almost as quickly as it came. US Army Lieutenant James Abert noted just such a flash flood during his 1848 expedition down the Canadian, noting how the formerly dry riverbed suddenly held yards and yards of churning red water. Cowboys on the Bell Ranch in New Mexico recalled crossing a low river in the morning, then searching for a safe crossing later that afternoon as upstream rain triggered a local flood. The same scene repeated itself at Tascosa and on the ranches along the Canadian whenever a strong thunderstorm dumped water into the creeks and the Canadian.

     The Canadian wasn’t alone in its floods. The Great Flood of 1923 that cut Oklahoma in half and interrupted transportation across the state for ten days came about because of fall rains on both the Canadian and Beaver/ North Canadian River. Woodward, OK in the Oklahoma Panhandle became an island for thirty-six hours and Oklahoma City almost lost its water supply when the floodwaters breached the main drinking-water reservoir. The Cimarron River in Oklahoma and Kansas took its name from its unpredictability: Cimarron means “wild” in Spanish.

     In the late 20th Century dams and groundwater reductions brought an end to the great Canadian River floods. The sinking water table meant that springs added less water to the river, making it smaller and drier. The dams held spring melt and runoff as well as storm flows. The hundreds of small check dams on ranches in Texas and New Mexico contributed their small shares to stopping the floods. Climate change over the 19th and 20th Centuries may also have played a role as the cooler, moister Little Ice Age gave way to a drier, warmer period. But local rises still caused headaches for those needing to cross the Canadian and serve as a reminder of the river’s earlier rampages.

Sources:

Ranch Manager Diaries, Alamositas Division, Matador Ranch Collection, The Southwest Collection of the Special Collections Libraries, Texas Tech University.

The Amarillo (TX) Daily News

The Tascosa (TX) Pioneer

David Remley, The Bell Ranch: Ranching in the American Southwest, 1828-1948 Revised Edition. Las Cruces: Yucca Tree Press, 2000.

John L. McCarty. Maverick Town: The Story of Old Tascosa Enlarged Edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

C.A. “Flood on the South Canadian River in Oklahoma and Indian Territory, October 1-4, 1904,” U.S. Weather Bureau Monthly Weather Review 32, no. 11 (November, 1904).

Martha Ellis Downer. Bell Ranch Recollections and Memories. Amarillo: Trafton and Autry Printing, Inc., 1985.

S.A. Schumm and R. W. Lichty, “Channel Widening and Flood-Plain Construction Along Cimarron River in Southwestern Kansas.” Geological Survey paper 352-D, 1963.