Of Time and the Trinity River

By John Paul Newport, Jr.
Star-Telegram Writer

The West Fork of the Trinity River, meandering 50 miles between downtown Fort Worth and downtown Dallas, is by any standard an undistinguished stream—shabby, smelly, most unhygenic, reduced in summer to an oozy trickle.

"The Trinity River?" folks often react when the subject arises. "That old sludge pit?"

And truly, it would be extremely difficult to romanticize the river. If Mark Twain had grown up in Fort Worth, Huckleberry Finn would have left his raft at home and run away on foot.

But for all its shortcomings as a body of water, the Trinity gets less respect than it deserves. It is, after all, the only river we've got in these parts, and its history is our history. Scattered in the river bottoms between Fort Worth and Dallas are the curious sites and remnants of Indian battles, gangster wars and civic struggles.

The Trinity is not only the longest river entirely in the state but also is this particular area's only distinctive natural feature. Tidied up a bit, the river is projected as the core of a "linear" green-belt park that would someday link the two major cities. Parts of the greenbelt park are already under development.

The modern river explorer can follow a map through time to discover something of what role the river has played in our heritage.

Site of Camp Worth

Both major cities were founded on the Trinity—Dallas as a trading post, Fort Worth for protection against the Indians—and both, in fact, are still dependent on the river, in its dammed up shape as lakes, for water today.

According to some sources, Maj. Ripley Arnold, in choosing the site of Camp Worth, was more impressed by the presence of a natural artesian well than by the panoramic—and strategic—view of the plains to the west and north. Arnold's contingent of dragoons originally camped down on the river, but mosquitoes quickly routed them to the top of the bluff, overlooking the confluence of the Clear and West Forks, and there the modest military outpost was built in 1849, near where the Tarrant County Courthouse stands today.

A member of Arnold's troop, Simon B. Ferrar, described in his journal the final day's journey to the site from what now is Arlington:

"We passed through the Crosstimbers, crossing the different creeks as best we could, through a wild and beautiful country inhabited only by Indians, wild or mustang horses, innumerable quantities of deer, wolves and wild Turkey." The next year, one of Arnold's scouts reportedly killed a 14-foot alligator in the river, and had to commandeer two oxen to drag the reptile back to the camp for alligator steak.

(Alligators have been discovered in the river recently, too. In 1974, a 7.5-foot beast slithered out of the Trinity slime onto an Irving motorcycle track. It took a dozen men three hours to corral the creature.)

Other early settlers on the river in Tarrant County reported seeing bald eagles, wild turkeys, partridge, geese, ducks, buffalo, antelope, white tail deer, panthers, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, rabbits, raccoons, beavers and squirrels. The Trinity teemed with fish, and its banks were festooned with grapevines, plum trees and wild blueberry plants.

Bird's Fort

The site of the first settlement in Tarrant County, ripped apart now by gravel operations, was a tiny, ox-bow lake just north of the river. Capt. Jonathan Bird and his band of 40 Rangers built a blockhouse and several cabins there in the early winter, 1841. Three months later, they left, punished by the Indians, the weather and lack of food.

The next September, another group of men, this time with families, resettled the Bird's Fort structures. They lasted six months, and part of the reason for their disbanding was a visit by John Neely Bryan.

Bryan, 31, a robust Tennessean, had raised a cabin of his own down river a bit—the founding of Dallas—and his purpose in calling at Bird's Fort was to entice away a family or two. The Hamp Ratton [sic] family took the bait, and loaded up a raft for the 30-mile float.^*

On that one visit, Bryan instituted two, now venerable traditions: Dallas boosterism and the Dallas vs. Tarrant County rivalry.^**

In 1843, under the full moon of August, nine Indian tribes of North Texas assembled at the abandoned fort to negotiate a treaty with Presi dent Sam Houston of the Republic of Texas.

Houston was resplendent in a purple velvet suit embroidered with fox heads and an Indian blanket thrown over his shoulder, but the treaty was signed, a month later, without him. He wanted eleven tribes to participate, and left after two weeks of waiting in vain for the Comanche and Kiowa representatives to show up.

Dalton Ferry

Just west of Bird's Fort, near present-day Highway 157, was the earliest, best known fording place on the Trinity. The Central National Road crossed here in the 1840s on its way from the Red River to San Antonio. The short-lived Dalton's Ferry was established in 1850, and by the 1860s the principal stage and mail lines, as well as the Pony Express, crossed the West Fork here.

Village Creek

Since their earliest forays into the upper Trinity valley, European settlers seemed to believe the region was an Indian population center.

"By far the largest portion of the (Caddo) tribe are under Tarshar, the Wolf, camped among the Wild Indians of Texas at the three forks of the Trinity," Gen. Hugh McLeod wrote Pres. Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar in 1838.

Apparently, most tales of large populations were unfounded, although Indians were pushed into the region by displacements elsewhere.

One tale that has passed into the written history of the area concerns an Indian battle at Village Creek in 1841. Though some details from contemporary accounts are probably exaggerated, a battle seems most certainly to have taken place, probably a mile or two up the creek from the river proper, near or under Lake Arlington.

The raid was led by Gen. Edward H. Tarrant, for whom Tarrant County is named. His band of Red River volunteers supposedly swept through a village of 225 lodges, including a blacksmith shop and 300 acres planted in corn. Half of the village's 1,000 warriors were away, reports said.

The only Anglo fatality was Capt. John B. Denton, whose body was evacuated and buried safely to the north—thus, Denton County.

Randol Mill

Randol Mill, first built in 1856, was one of the earliest community hangouts. In a sparsely populated land, any location that brought citizens together quickly became a clearinghouse for news and gossip.

Rebuilt several times, the mill operated until 1922, and burned for good in 1933. Remnants—parts of the dam, an 18-foot turbine shaft—can be found today in the river bank.

At least one man who played in the river as a boy remembers seeing a set of dinosaur tracks in the river bottom slightly west of the mill.

In a recorded interview with Ruby Schmidt of the Tarrant County Historical Commission, Will Works, 86, said the footprints—"three-toed tracks the size of plates"—were visible only when the then-much-clearer water was low.

La Reunion

In 1855, Victor Prosper Considerant and a band of French utopian socialists had a brief encounter with Texas. The colony, the product of three years planning and financing approaching one million dollars, collapsed in less than a year.

To some extent, the failure resulted from bad administration and internal bickering, but also, rarefied French socialism had little chance to survive amid raging frontier capitalism.

Early Dallas benefited, as many of the well-educated and well-off professionals stayed in the area.

Nothing remains of the colony now—except a gigantic, glass hotel namesake at the western edge of downtown Dallas.

First Street Bridge

The bottomlands have never been the safest place to be.

In the early days, Indians posed the danger. In 1842, a band of Comanches ambushed and scalped one hunting party of Anglo settlers just as they had treed a bear by the river in what is now western Dallas County.

Later, bandits posed the threat.

During the time of Hell's Half Acre—Fort Worth's infamous gambling and red-light district of the 1880s and 1890s—the best outlaws, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stayed in hotels. The worst hid out in the river bottoms, whence they would occasionally maraud into town or waylay drunken cowboys separated from their pals and cattle herds.

One of the most famous outlaw tales of this century involves the gangster O.D. Stevens and the First Street bridge.

Stevens, a gang boss, was widely suspected of being the mastermind behind a $71,000 mail robbery at Fort Worth's Texas & Pacific Terminal in February, 1933. But nothing could be proven. He lived on a hill in Handley in a fancy flagstone house equipped with secret panels and false-bottomed closets. (The house this year was made over into a restaurant called "The Texas Connection.")

Anyway, In July of 1933, three of Stevens' henchmen were reported missing. It was immediately assumed that Stevens, fearing the three were about to squeal, had murdered them. The assumption proved correct.

An extensive manhunt was mounted—centering on the river, naturally—and it was Sheriff's Deputy H.W, "Dusty" Rhodes who made the discovery, near dusk on July 13, at the First Street bridge.

"Looking down to the stream 60 feet below me," Rhodes wrote for the Star-Telegram the next day, "I saw something that caused my heart to skip a beat—three faces, cold and white, were looking straight up at me."

Stevens' three pals, already shot, had been bundled in chicken wire and cement, then pitched into the river.

Stevens went to Alcatraz.

Clyde Barrow Training Ground

Clyde Barrow grew up in East Dallas—at Eagle Pitcher—and first got mean in his teenage years, before Bonnie Parker. He took up with gangsters, and would sometimes stand watch for them outside abandoned farm houses in the bottomland.

At least once in the late 1920s, tells J. W. Dunlap of Arlington, Barrow acted alone, robbing cars, late at night, on a Trinity River bridge somewhere between Grand Prairie and Arlington.

Clyde held up Dunlap's father-in-law, a veterinarian who knew the Barrow clan.

"Clyde, you don't want my car," Dunlap quotes Dr. J. M. Gregory as saying, "I gotta make my living in that car."

"Oh, hell, Doc, I didn't know it was you," Barrow returned. "I'll get the next one."

Dunlap says his wife, who was with her father at the time, swears it happened just that way.

Gateway Park

In October, the Fort Worth City Council approved purchase of the final 120 acres of what will be a rustic, 500-acre park known as Gateway. It is the city's first installment, apart from Trinity and Forest Parks, in the hoped-for Trinity Greenbelt all the way to Dallas.

Tennis courts and ball fields will be included in the park, but other large tracts, on either side of the river, will be maintained in near wilderness state. That such undeveloped tracts are still available owes to the floodplain—low lying, flood-prone expanses where commercial or residential construction is not strictly prohibited, but is generally considered a low-percentage move. Floods on the scale of last October's occurred in 1957, 1949, 1922 and 1906.

In all, more than 15,000 acres of floodplain straddle the West Fork between Fort Worth and Dallas. On maps of the region, it looks like a giant hole of undevelopment in the very middle of the nation's 10th largest metropolitan center. Roads cross the river in fewer than a dozen spots.

Some of the land is used for farming and grazing. More has been ruined by sand and gravel mining operations. But most of the land immediately along the waterway remains, if not pristine, then at least green and well-timbered. Little of the land, however, is now accessible to the public.

A greenbelt park would open this corridor for low-key recreational activities. Parking lots every two miles or so would be connected by bicycle or hiking trails.

"One of the real values of such a park is visual," said Terry Cheek, an Arlington landscape consultant who co-authored a 1972 study on the Trinity Greenbelt for the U.S. Army Corns of Engineers.

"Even if it (the linear park) is only 100 yards wide when seen from the edge, seen from the side it provides a long uninterrupted space of green for your eyes," he said. "Let's face it, we all live in our automobiles." Canoeing will be a prime feature both of Gateway Park and the greenbelt. When the river is high enough, a trip from downtown Fort Worth to downtown Dallas is still quite possible.

Long stretches of the West Fork—through East Fort Worth, Arlington and Irving—trail placidly beneath towering canopies of blackjack oak and sycamore trees, elm, willow and native pecan. It is easy in these parts—if one ignores the wafting, slight malodor and the flood-washed litter—to partake of the illusion that the river flows in wilderness.

But the modern-day Trinity explorer will see few mammals, other than the occasional stray dog. A few beavers remain, on the evidence of the tell-tale stumps they leave behind. There are squirrels and opossums and, according to some people, maybe a fox or two. Ducks and blue heron fly, snakes are present and turtles abound, sliding into the water from the sunny banks with the first noise of human approach, but fish in the West Fork, for the most part, are a scrappy and unappetizing lot.

Yet to some people, even these vestiges of wildlife in the urban bottoms would seem surprising.

Rose-Brown-May Park

A recent land donation to the city of Arlington, this 204-acre park is Arlington's initial contribution to the preserved, greenbelt corridor.

An Arlington Park and Recreation Department spokesman said the land will be left in it natural state, eventually laced with hiking trails. No motor vehicles will be allowed into the area.

Texans traditionally have treated the Trinity, at best, with utilitarian indifference, and at worst, like an open sewer. Pollution was so bad by 1924, the year Fort Worth first began chemically to treat its sewage, a state health inspector was driven to poetic flourish in his description of its "inky surface putrescent."

"The shadows of the overarching trees," he wrote in his report to Austin, "add Stygian blackness and the suggestion of some mythological river of death."

Clearly, the Trinity still is no candidate for the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, but since the early 1970s most industrial pollution has stopped and municipal sewage treatment standards have improved.

Perhaps, with a sense of the river's history and plans for a greenbelt park, the public today will begin to treat the Trinity like it has a future.

^*Factual Error: It was the Capt. Mabel Gilbert family who traversed the river to Bryan's location by raft, not the Hamp Rattan family.

^**Factual Ambiguity: It is unclear what rivalry the author is referring to here, as neither Tarrant County nor Fort Worth would exist until several years later.