The print I keep in a folder is a reproduction, too large for the folder. When I open it on the desk I hold one corner down with my left hand, because the paper wants to curl back. It is a copy of an 1892 bird’s eye view of Dallas, and its full title promises the city “with the projected river and navigation improvements.”1
The word that matters is projected. The artist drew the Trinity as the promoters hoped it would be, seen from the Oak Cliff side, with the town spread out beyond the river. The Library of Congress catalog notes that it is a perspective view not drawn to scale.1
What the view is selling
The frame tells you who paid for it. Small engravings of buildings run around the border, with the county courthouse at the top center inside a wreath under a star, and a row of business advertisements runs across the bottom. The first advertisement on the left invites readers to apply to the Dallas Board of Trade for information about the city.1 A copyright stamp of the Library of Congress sits beneath the title, dated September 17, 1892.1 A view like this is a prospectus. The essay on advertisements as economic data makes the general case for reading them that way, and I would add only that a prospectus is most useful for what it assumes nobody will check.
What the view assumed was a working river. The year before it was printed, a group of prominent Dallas citizens formed the Trinity River Navigation Company to promote river traffic, and the company built a dam at McCommas Bluff, thirteen miles south of the city, to deepen the upper reaches.2
Two articles and two distances
My research problem was a simple one. How far up the Trinity did the old steamboats actually come before the railroads, and how close was that to Dallas? The Handbook of Texas answers in two places, and the two answers do not match.
The Handbook’s article on the river says that in 1854 a packet reached Porter’s Bluff, fifty miles below Dallas, and that before 1874 nearly fifty boats navigated as far north as Trinidad in Kaufman County and Porter’s Bluff in northern Navarro County.3 Its article on the navigation projects repeats the 1854 voyage but puts Porter’s Bluff forty miles below Dallas, and places Trinidad in Henderson County, with some fifty boats on the river between 1852 and 1874.2
Ten miles and a county line. Neither changes the story, and I could have picked one. I did not, because a distance that two careful articles cannot agree on is a distance nobody has measured recently, and I would rather say that than print a number with borrowed confidence. A third source muddies it further. An 1892 county history, describing a French family that came up from the coast in 1856, has them travel by way of Galveston to a landing it calls Parker’s Bluff and then overland by ox team.4 That may be a misprint for Porter’s Bluff, or a different landing. I cannot tell from the page.
So the rule I follow here is to report the range and name the sources. The boats came to within forty or fifty miles of Dallas in the 1850s, depending on which Handbook article you trust, and one cargo boat reached the town itself in 1868 after a voyage of a year and four days from Galveston.23 Those are the facts that bear weight.
What the river carried
The best numbers in either article are about cargo, and there the two agree. In the peak season of 1868 and 1869, boats carried 15,425 bales of cotton down the Trinity.23 Then two railroads arrived in 1872 and 1873 and the riverboat trade died, a turn traced in the essay on the railroads’ arrival.2 What kept the port idea alive was resentment of railroad freight rates.2
Most tellings treat the navigation dream as civic folly. I read it as a pricing argument. A merchant paying a railroad’s rate had every reason to fund a rival route, even an improbable one, because the credible threat of a second carrier is worth money at the bargaining table whether or not a boat ever docks. On that reading the 1892 view was doing its job the day it was printed.
The limit of that reading is that it cannot explain the persistence. In 1893 the city turned out to greet the H. A. Harvey, Jr., a 113 foot boat that had come up from Galveston in two months and ten days.2 The federal government spent more than $2,000,000 on locks and dams between 1902 and the abandonment of the work in 1921, and the plan came back again in the twentieth century until voters in the Dallas and Fort Worth area rejected a tax to fund it in 1973.2 A bargaining threat does not last eighty years. Something closer to belief was at work, and I do not have a record that shows it plainly.
The name in the corner
The river now runs where engineers put it. According to the Handbook, the channel was moved, straightened and confined between levees in a project begun in 1930.5 The view’s promise of a port is visible today only on paper, which is why paper is where I look. The founding settlement beside the river belongs to the entry on John Neely Bryan; the society that gathers so much Dallas paper has its own entry, and my ties to it appear on the civic page. The fairgrounds are the next stop, in the essay on Fair Park’s first decades, and the courthouse at the top of the frame belongs to a longer story told in Old Red and what Dallas kept. Every essay in this set is listed on the Dallas history page.
In the lower left corner of the print, in letters smaller than the advertisements, is the line Paul Giraud, Del. & Sculp. 1892, and under the view a second line gives the copyright to him as well.1 He drew it and he cut it. The catalog records his name and nothing more, and I have found nothing else about him. Whoever he was, he drew a harbor that never existed with enough conviction that I still check the distances.
References
-
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Dallas, Texas. With the projected river and navigation improvements viewed from above the sister city of Oak Cliff, 1892. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
-
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Trinity River Navigation Projects. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8
-
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Trinity River. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
-
Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County, Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1892), sketch of A. Capy, Library of Congress, Memorial and biographical history of Dallas County, Texas. ↩
-
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Dallas, TX. ↩