Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2009 > December > 14 > Entry
River Tracing: Brazos, Part 2: The Jungle of the Columbia Bottomlands
Time to cut through the jungle.
After lunch at the On the River, an undistinguished but hearty seafood joint located, not on the river, but nearby, in Freeport, near the aging shrimp boats, we set out to criss-cross the Columbia Bottomlands. These are the lush lowlands dotted with oxbow lakes that reach from just above Freeport on the Brazos River almost to Richmond near Houston.
We checked in with the bottomlands at Brazoria, East Columbia and the Brazos Bend State Park. Here, the Brazos is broad, red-brown and swollen with rain, therefore dangerous. Vine-covered bluffs impound the muscular river. Above the bluffs spread the tangled forests, and higher, the Gulf Coastal plains, meadows studded mostly with low-spreading live oaks.
This is the Texas the Anglo-Americans chose to settle in the 1820s. Perhaps it resembled the overgrowth of the coastal Deep South, but Stephen F. Austin and company planted their first colonies along this stretch of the Brazos. The river then was reliable enough to support some steamboat traffic and thereby the shipping of cotton, which still shares the upper prairies with sorghum and other cash crops.
Some buildings remain. We love visiting this valentine to early colonial and republican Texas. East Columbia is now home to a dozen or so exquisitely restored 19th-century structures, but I’m afraid most Texans don’t even know it exists.
Brazos Bend is, by comparison, a popular gathering point. The state park’s primary attractions are its American alligators, more easy to view in the summer, when they sun on the banks of several bottomland lakes and ponds. We were there for the river, however, and, instead, hiked down to the closest point of contact.
We ran into the park’s casual visitors, campers and rangers - as well as a sweet bulldog — before jamming into suburban Houston traffic by accident on our way to College Station to meet dear friends who put us up for the first night.
Coming soon: “Historical Overflow,” “Above the Falls,” “Trail of Lakes,” and more.
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