The Falls of Wichita Falls: An Environmental History of the Red Rolling Plains by Jahue Anderson (review)

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• The Falls of Wichita Falls: An Environmental History of the Red Rolling Plainsby Jahue Anderson
• Andrew C. Baker

The Falls of Wichita Falls: An Environmental History of the Red Rolling Plains. By Jahue Anderson. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2023. Pp. 204. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index).

The Falls of Wichita Fallsis a western story about the troubled relationship between the dreams of city boosters and the harsh environmental realities of the region. Wichita Falls faced the predictable unpredictability of the Red Rolling Plains with its aridity, salinity, and perennial vulnerability to tornadoes and floods. As Jahue Anderson explains, the region’s geography, climate, geology, and history created “these pumpjack-filled, cattle-laden, mesquite-infested red plains” (p. xii).

The opening chapter has all the makings of a great Texas tale. On a sunny day in April 1905, a train bearing President Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Frederick, Oklahoma, about sixty miles northwest of Wichita Falls. The hunter-in-chief had come to chase wolves across the 480,000 acre “Big Pasture,” one of the few remaining places where a man could gallop into the horizon without hindrance. Joining him was a cast of historical characters who could not help but be Western archetypes. There was wolf-grabbing lawman Jon R. Abernathy, western cattlemen Samuel Burk Burnett and W. Tom Waggoner, Texas Ranger captain and rancher William J. “Bill” McDonald, and famed Commanche leader Quanah Parker. The result was a testosterone-fueled collision of Turnerian historical stages that went storming across the Red Rolling Plains.

Eor Anderson, the event offers a tangle of interpretive possibilities. He seizes some of these moments deftly, finding in Roosevelt’s wolf hunt both epilogue and prologue to the region’s environmental history. At other points, though, Anderson clutters the narrative with ecological asides: “what Roosevelt did not understand. . . is that the wolf is a ‘keystone’ species” (p. 19); “modern range management science indicates” (p. 28); and “unfortunately, the president failed to realize the selective killing of predators unbalanced the ecosystem” (p. 34).

The hunt sets the stage for the century of development to follow. That story begins and ends with the twice-mentioned falls of Wichita, which becomes the book’s central metaphor. Stormwaters destroyed the original falls along the Big Wichita River in 1886. As with so many Texas rivers, flash flooding was a persistent reminder of the costs of untamed nature and the need to dam and control. Yet, in this case, the destruction of the falls was also the result of a predictable failure of engineering. The storm overpowered an upstream dam “built by ambitious waterpower enthusiasts” (p. 3). In other words, they were destroyed as much by ill-conceived development as unruly nature. It is a compelling metaphor for the environmental history that follows. The Big Wichita River never lived up to city leader’s expectations, so they turned to engineers to fix it, and in doing so they ruined it.

This Environmental History of the Red Rolling Plains, then, is a western water story. Arch-booster Joseph Kemp successfully lobbied the state government to allow the creation of bond-funded water districts for conservation, reclamation, and [End Page 467]irrigation in 1917. He followed this in 1924 with a voter-approved reservoir, the largest in the state, predictably named Lake Kemp. This reservoir and the irrigation district that went with it would transform the region into an irrigated empire. But this western water story has a twist. The most vexing problem at Wichita Ealls was not floods or droughts or the difficulties of taming the river. It was salinity. Salt deposited by ancient oceans in the Permian period leached into the Big Wichita River watershed, tainting Kemp’s dreams of turning the valley into an irrigated Eden. Dams would instead turn this into a valley of salt-encrusted fields and brackish reservoirs full of water unfit to drink. The same Permian geologic formations also held riches in oil, which propelled both boom and bust during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Oil production, in turn, brought more salt out of the ground, adding their brines to the salt load in area waters.

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