The Cossatot River derives from a French word meaning"crushed head," and in 1833, it was to be spanned by a toll bridge.

The Cross Timbers is well defined on this 1844 map by Josiah Gregg.

What may be the final photo of the ferry at Fulton, Hempstead County, Arkansas which crossed the Red River just below the Great Bend.

Between 1809 and 1819, a young American named Henry Ker traveled up the Red River from its mouth to its far western reaches search of gold.

One of my favorite maps of the Red River is Nicolas de Fer's illustrated map published in France in 1718.

Decommissioned in 1926, the Gardie Eastman may well have been the last steamboat to traverse the entirety of the Red River.

I was pleasantly surprised to recognize that the Jefferson to Shreveport Waterway still exists as Twelve Mile Bayou.

The Pawnee/ Wichita village that George Catlin sketched was abandoned by the 1860s.

Near Marksville, Louisiana sit 2,500 year old, human constructed mounds... ancient, earthen pyramids. They've been abandoned once again.

The "Willis Bridge" now connects Oklahoma to Texas over Lake Texoma along US 377.

Two maps of the rapids at Alexandria during the Civil War reside in the Library of Congress.

Marion Post (later, Marion Post Wolcott) was the first photographer to document the Cane River Creole culture of Louisiana.

The Caddo Nation mined salt for over eight hundred years, and this activity remained an Arkansas industry into the 19th century.

Sophia Suttenfield Aughinbaugh Coffee Butt Porter was one of the more colorful characters to inhabit the Red River Valley.

Today, Grand Ecore is referred to mainly as a geological feature, but there is a TON of human history on this bluff.

In 1931, the toll bridge at the former Sacra's Ferry site across from Brown Springs closed for good in favor of a free bridge a upstream.

Sykes (Sikes) Ferry Road passing over Dorcheat Bayou north of Minden in central Webster Parish, Louisiana.

When the capitol of Louisiana faced Union Control and Reconstruction during the Civil War, western Louisiana descended into lawlessness.

The people in Southwestern Arkansas before the Civil War were much more populist and had a strong free-soil expansionist base.

The bones of the Natchez warriorss could be seen there years afterwards at Lake Sang pour Sang — "Blood for Blood."