DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. The Trinity River — three words that carry a long, long memory. Three main tributaries feed her: the West Fork, the Elm Fork, and the East Fork, all drawing down from headwaters up in North Texas, braiding together into something older than any name we've got for it.
And I do mean old. In the 20th century, carved stone heads were discovered near this very site — prehistoric relics known as Malakoff Man — and what they told us is that humans were living in this valley thousands of years ago. Thousands.
Let that settle in while the river keeps rolling. By the time European exploration got underway, Indian villages already dotted these banks like they'd always been there, because they had. Then came the French.
Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, moved through here in 1687 and called this waterway the River of Canoes. You can almost picture why, can't you — except I'm not allowed to speculate, so I'll just say the man had a way with names. Three years later, in 1690, the Spaniard Alonso de Leon came through and is credited with first using the name Trinity.
Two explorers, two names, one river that didn't much care either way. The fertile Trinity floodplain did what fertile floodplains do — it drew people in. Anglo-American settlers came during the Republic of Texas, and Buffalo, the first Henderson County seat, was founded a few miles upstream at a ferry crossing.
Then ambition arrived, as it tends to. Since the 1850s, navigation of the Trinity has been proposed in a number of ambitious plans — a number of them, the marker takes care to say, meaning this river has been the subject of grand dreaming more than once. And for a while, the dreaming worked.
Steamboats plied the Trinity carrying cotton, cattle, and lumber all the way down to Galveston and other Gulf of Mexico ports, and they kept at it right up until the 1870s. Then the railroad arrived, and just like that, the era of riverboat trade was over. The town of Trinidad was founded in 1881 on the St.
Louis Southwestern Railroad — known to locals as the Cotton Belt — and it came with a pump station built to draw water from the Trinity for the boilers of steam locomotives. The river that once launched steamboats was now just fueling the thing that replaced them. A ferry still crossed here for a while, until a bridge was finally erected in 1900.
Three forks, thousands of years of human life, two European names, steamboats, railroads, and a bridge. The Trinity just keeps moving.
What the marker says
Three main tributaries-- the West, Elm, and East forks-- feed the Trinity from headwaters in North Texas. Discovery of prehistoric Malakoff Man carved stone heads near this site in the 20th century revealed that humans inhabited the Trinity valley thousands of years ago. Indian villages dotted the river banks when European exploration began. French explorer robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle called this waterway the River of Canoes in 1687. Spaniard Alonso de Leon is credited with first using the name "Trinity" in 1690. The fertile Trinity floodplain drew Anglo-American settlers to this area during the Republic of Texas. Buffalo, first Henderson County Seat, was founded a few miles upstream at a ferry crossing. Navigation of the Trinity has been proposed in a number of ambitious plans since the 1850s. Steamboats plied the river carrying cotton, cattle, and lumber to Galveston and other Gulf of Mexico ports until the 1870s. Arrival of the railroad ended the era of riverboat trade. Founded in 1881 on the St. Louis Southwestern Railroad, also known as the Cotton Belt, the town of Trinidad had a pump station to draw water for the boilers of steam locomotives. A ferry crossed the Trinity here until a bridge was erected in 1900.