The author’s river journey resumes at Lake Texoma and the
Central Red River Valley
By E. Dan Klepper
 The headwaters of the Red River, A gathering of creeks and
forks with names like the Prairie Dog Town and Tierra Blanca, ramble lazily
across northern Texas, rolling through red rock canyons and the broken plains
of the Panhandle along the way. Once
across the 100th meridian, the waterway merges with the North Fork to become
the Red River proper, commencing its service as boundary line between Texas and
Oklahoma, then traveling 640 miles before finally quitting the state for
Arkansas and Louisiana.
Halfway to Texarkana, however, the Red stoves up just above
the city of Denison, where it broadsides the 160-foot Denison Dam. Too deep
here to hold its namesake russet color, the river becomes a slate gray
reservoir, covering 89,000 acres, cut with chop on a windy autumn day and
turning blue as an ocean in the summertime. Remnants of a deciduous forest
populate its southern shoreline, growing right up to land’s end, where
sandstone bluffs and tree trunks collapse into gentle waves. I took my first
lake laps here years ago, paddling the shallows, held afloat by my
grandmother’s grip, and later, as a young adult, swam with friends and camped
along the shoreline, sleeping in a hammock strung between the limbs of
driftwood trees.
Along the southeastern edge of Lake Texoma, you can enjoy a
similar retreat at Eisenhower State Park. Campsites with water and electricity
offer a shaded hiatus beneath dense stands of oak, elm, cedar, and dogwood, and
plenty of more formal lodging can be found nearby and outside the park. Anglers
will appreciate the fish-cleaning station and lighted fishing pier, while a
launch ramp accommodates boaters. But the park’s swim beach, located in a
secluded cove below a peninsula called Elm Point, may be its finest amenity.
This sandy, soft-bottomed spot features a graduated water depth, a pebble beach
perfect for sunbathing, cozy bluffs sheltering each end, and a string of orange
buoys stretching across the cove’s deep-water entrance to discourage jet skis
and motorboats from coming ashore. If you’re planning a visit, don’t forget the
picnic, the inflatables, and the water-resistant sunscreen. Floating dreamily
in the cove’s calm waters will occupy your entire day.
If you find you’ve taken on too much sun and fun (it can
happen), devote an afternoon away from the water sports to admire the Denison
Dam, the 13,350-foot-long earth embankment that makes it all possible.
Completed in 1944, this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project was once the
largest rolled earthfill dam in the world. Built for flood control and
hydroelectric power, the dam holds back more than two-and-a-half million
acre-feet of water. Although its power tur-bines are off limits to visitors,
opportunities to examine the dam’s architecture arise in viewing points above
the riprap abutments, below and along the impressive berm, and from a concrete
overlook above the sluiceway.
My father was raised in this Red River Valley before the dam,
when the Red ran a slender course from Coesfield east to Kidd. After the dam
was built, he would row a boat halfway across the reservoir to hunt the
lake-made islands with his dog Old Red. My grandparents eventually moved to
Lake Texoma country, acquiring two acres along Preston Peninsula in the late
1940s. The isolated peninsula, a sliver of high ground covered in red oaks and
cedars and striated with deep ravines, still pokes into the lake water like a
bony arm with a clenched fist. Long before inundation, the land that spread out
beyond the peninsula provided a backdrop for much of North Texas’ pioneer
history.
Trapper and trader Holland Coffee established a trading post
on the north banks of the river sometime around 1833, moving it south across the
river in 1837 to a high bluff in the Washita Bend of the Red. A small community
called Preston, also known as Preston Bend, developed around the trading post
and served as an important river crossing, accommodating an estimated 1,000
wagons per year. Preston also gained a reputation as a rowdy and lawless
community, a reputation that may have been promulgated by Coffee himself, whose
trade with the region’s Shawnee, Tawakoni, and other tribes included guns and
whiskey for stolen cattle and horses. Despite an early run-in with the law,
Coffee served in the Texas House of Representatives in the late 1830s and, with
his wife, Sophia Suttenfield Aughinbaugh (aka Sophia Porter), established Glen
Eden, a successful plantation in Preston Bend. The remains of Glen Eden now lie
submerged beneath the lake waters of Texoma, but visitors to Preston Cemetery,
a peaceful retreat at the peninsula’s end, may explore the shaded
tombstones—many dating to the 1800s, including Coffee’s and Sophia’s—and
examine the historical marker commemorating the Coffee trading post.
Another historical Red River figure, Dwight David “Ike”
Eisenhower, was born in the downstairs bedroom of his family’s rental house in
nearby Denison. The tiny, wood-framed house now sits on a six-acre state
historic site downtown. Eisenhower, who rose to the rank of General during
World War II, was instru-mental in Germany’s surrender, and after a run for the
Presidency, served two terms as our 34th President. Although the child “Ike”
spent little more than a year and a half in the house before his family
returned with him to Kansas, the site provides a convincing vision of pastoral
Red River Valley life at the turn of the 20th Century, with woodlands, a coop
full of chickens, and an array of blooming gardenscapes.
Elsewhere in Denison, much of the historic 19th-Century
architecture has undergone extensive renovations, particularly along downtown
Main Street, where specialty shops, art galleries, antiques stores, and
restaurants now occupy many of the storefronts. Denison, a railroad town, arose
from a relatively wild frontier community during the 1870s when “tent cities,”
occupied by bars, gambling halls, and brothels, surrounded the more law-abiding
selection of businesses along Main Street. Denison’s first train arrived on
tracks laid for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, rolling into town on
Christmas Eve, 1872.
Today, Denison’s renaissance as a vacation destination is
due in large part to its downtown facelift together with its proximity to Lake
Texoma, one of the finest water-recreation spots in the state. Restaurants like
Watson’s Drive-In and Watsonburger, two classic Mid-Century burger joints, make
for great lunch retreats; the Gourmet Waffle Shop & Cafe provides an
old-school, coffee shop-style breakfast. An Italian lunch or dinner requires a
stroll down Main Street, where Devolli’s offers homemade pasta dishes. You can
also choose from a selection of more than 20 wines, including Homestead Red and
the Rose of Ivanhoe, from Homestead Winery. Homestead’s Denison tasting room,
one of three in North Texas, shares the old Star Movie Theater building and the
renovated 1920s Art Deco storefront next door with Devolli’s.
If you follow the Red River Valley eastward from Denison,
through bucolic horse pastures and grain fields to Ivanhoe, you can tour
Homestead’s vineyards, where grapes ripen in the fields of the Parker family
farm. After the tour, sample wines at the tasting room in the 112-year-old
family home. Opened in 1989, Homestead Winery is the Red River Valley’s oldest
continually operating winery and a way for owner Gabe Parker to carry on his
family’s century-old farming tra-dition. Cabernet Sauvignon and syrah grapes
have replaced the grain crops that Parker’s grandfather raised a hundred years
ago, but the chestnut soil, laid down in the wake of the Red River’s deluge,
remains the same.
The Red River makes an appearance here just north of the
Ivanhoe vineyards at Sowell’s Bluff, where Texas 78 spans the ruddy waters
courtesy of the Red River Bridge. The steel and concrete bridge, opened in
1946, is actually the third to connect this river crossing. The first, a
suspension bridge completed in 1927 and christened with a bottle of Red River
water by a “Miss Isabel Moor, attended by her la-dies in waiting … ,” collapsed
into the icy January waters in 1934 after a cable snapped on the Tex-as side.
The second opened in 1938 but succumbed to flood waters three years later when
the Red decided to push its north bank boun-daries, changing course and making
an end run around the bridge, washing away the north half of the bridge in its
wake.
A leisurely drive across the Sowell’s Bluff bridge casts a
staccato of black shadows along the windshield and dash, an effect made
possible by the summer sun and the open lattice-work of steel girders passing
overhead, while a rickrack of rivets and crossbars orchestrates the rolling Red
beyond. The river flows with tranquility here, as if discharged of its
ran-corous and untamed past, a perception perhaps consequential of the soft
afternoon light and the verdant generosity of the river’s shoreline. But I know
better. The Red is nature’s rebel, just as all rivers are, forever resisting
boundaries, reviving in the most unlikely moments, quick to rally, willful when
ready, and always, always rising again.
From the July 2012 issue.
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