Parked at Home 2024 | #3: Amistad National Recreation Area
Yesterday — Thursday, March 21 at 7:00 p.m. — I watched the third installment of the 2024 season of Parked at Home featuring Amistad National Recreation Area in Texas with park archaeologist Jack Johnson. Park ranger Allison Horrocks of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park started the webinar by explaining the migration of butterflies between New England and Texas, which takes four generations to complete. She compared this migration to “The Butterfly Effect”, a theory that small events can affect people around the world. In this way, the dam and mill in Pawtucket, RI built in 1793 started social changes and industrialization across the young United States.
By the 1820s, laborers in the Blackstone River Valley worked for $12 a month digging the forty-six mile long, eight to ten feet deep Blackstone Canal. This waterway became “a liquid highway” to transport goods and control the watershed. Many laborers were yeoman farmers and Irish immigrants who worked six days a week from sunrise to sunset. Despite this cheap labor source, the canal proved to be a terrible investment, and the canal closed soon after the opening of the Providence and Worcester Railroad.
Johnson focused on a more successful enterprise, the Amistad Reservoir, located twelve miles northwest of Del Rio, TX on the Texas-Mexico border. Four rivers flow into the reservoir. Rio Grande starts in Colorado and flows past Big Bend National Park. Pecos River begins near Pecos National Historical Park travels through Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Devil’s River is relatively shorter at a hundred miles long. Rio Conchos begins close to the Pacific Ocean and is affected by typhoons.
After laying out the landscape, Johnson described the timeline that led to the creation of the park, along with other associated National Park Service (NPS) sites. The area was part of the colony New Spain until 1821, when Mexico won independence from Spain. Before the independence of Texas from Mexico in 1836, the boundary was set at the Oasis River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico to create Padre Island National Seashore. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the boundary was moved to the Rio Grande. Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park interprets the war, along with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As part of this treaty, the US military constructed forts to prevent Comanche Native Americans from crossing into Mexico. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, the San Antonio-El Paso Road connected to the Chihuahua Trail, allowing prospectors to more quickly reach their destination.
In the 1880s, the Second Continental Railroad was constructed just outside the current park boundaries. Crews use up to five hundred kegs of black powder per mile to blast a flat route through cliffs. Italian and Irish crews laid the tracks from east to west, while Chinese crews worked west to east. The oldest and longest railroad tunnel in Texas is located inside the park and now is home to a colony of bats. When the reservoir is full, boaters can visit the tunnel, but NPS discourages people from going inside. At sunset, the bats fly out together.
By 1944, the United States was cooperating with Mexico and made a water treaty to build reservoirs. Ten years later, in 1954, disastrous flooding after Hurricane Alice caused these plans to change. From 1958 to 1968, NPS and International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) collaborated to manage resources and survey the reservoir basin. The Amistad Dam officially opened in 1969 with US President Richard Nixon and Mexico President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz giving speeches between a pair of enormous eagle statues. Not until 1990 did Amistad National Recreation Area become a unit in NPS.
As an archaeologist, Johnson studied the ancient history of the area, focussing on Native American hunter-gatherer societies. The dry rock shelters preserved a huge number of materials, including sandals, baskets, nets, food, and human coprolites. The pictographs found on rocks in Panther Cave and Parida Cave are between 1400 and 4000 years old and drawn in the Pecos River Style.
During the Q&A at the end of the webinar, Johnson described the water quality in the park, describing Devil’s River as the clearest and cleanest in the state of Texas. The area receives little rain, so the contents of the rivers are spring water flowing over limestone bedrock. The water becomes less salty as it travels nearer the reservoir. He also explained that the NPS site is not the only preserved land in the area with Seminole Canyon State Park & Historic Site and Independence Creek Preserve of The Nature Conservancy nearby.
Read the summaries from Parked at Home 2024:
Read the summaries from Parked at Home 2023: