Brazos River
The River of the Arms of God, crossing the heart of Texas
Spanish explorers named it Río de los Brazos de Dios, the River of the Arms of God, and Texas legend offers several stories of thirsty travelers saved by its water. The Brazos proper begins in Stonewall County, where the Salt Fork and the Double Mountain Fork meet below the Caprock, and runs 840 miles (1,350 km) southeast to the Gulf of Mexico near Freeport. Its watershed reaches back into eastern New Mexico and covers about 44,600 square miles (115,500 km²), nearly all of it in Texas. The Texas State Historical Association calls it the river with the greatest discharge in the state.
The river runs through the founding story of Texas. Stephen F. Austin's colony settled along its lower valley in the 1820s, and on March 2, 1836, delegates at Washington-on-the-Brazos signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Upstream, Waco grew around a crossing spanned in 1870 by a suspension bridge built for cattle drives on the Chisholm Trail. Today dams form Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Whitney, and the Brazos River Authority, created in 1929, manages water for cities, farms and industry across the basin.