On my recent trip to Texas I went all up and down the Brazos, took a bunch of pictures.
The Brazos, at least down near the bottom, is a big muddy mess. I can’t imagine crossing this thing without a bridge, on a horse no less.
I took a whole bunch of pictures of this, but it’s tough to really convey it. I was just barely over the Red River in Oklahoma (this was on the way in to the state) and I saw a house get crushed by a tree that was bigger than it. Easy to see how it happened — the soil around there was nothing but red dirt — but not easy to see how the tree got that big to begin with. It’s a darn good bet that, since this wasn’t bottomland, the tree wasn’t there the last time a herd of buffalo came through — and that was about 150 years ago, give or take a couple decades.