Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of Drifting Toward Disaster, a Texas Observer series about life-changing challenges facing Texans and their rivers. For Part 1, see “The Second Rio Grande.”
Few rivers can claim as strong a connection to Texas’ natural and cultural history—and its very identity—as the Brazos.
It drains the second-largest river basin in Texas, meandering for 840 miles from the Llano Estacado near Lubbock, cutting across prairie and limestone hills to woodlands, through farms and ranches, cities, towns, and coastal marshes before finally merging with the Gulf of Mexico south of Freeport’s giant petrochemical plants.
