The Arkansas River is a major tributary of the Mississippi River. It generally flows to the east and southeast as it traverses the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The river's source basin lies in the western United States in Colorado, specifically the Arkansas River Valley, where the headwaters derive from the snowpack in the Sawatch and Mosquito mountain ranges. It then flows east into the Midwest via Kansas, and finally into the South through Oklahoma and Arkansas.
At 1,469 miles (2,364 km), it is the sixth-longest river in the United States, the second-longest tributary in the Mississippiâ€"Missouri system, and the 45th longest river in the world. Its origin is in the Rocky Mountains in Lake County, Colorado, near Leadville. In 1859, placer gold discovered in the Leadville area brought thousands seeking to strike it rich, but the easily recovered placer gold was quickly exhausted. The Arkansas River's mouth is at Napoleon, Arkansas, and its drainage basin covers nearly 170,000 sq mi (440,300 km²). In terms of volume, the river is much smaller than the Missouri and Ohio Rivers, with a mean discharge of roughly 41,000 cubic feet per second (1,200 m3/s).
The Arkansas from its headwaters to the 100th meridian west formed part of the U.S.-Mexico border from the Adamsâ€"OnÃs Treaty (in force 1821) until the Texas Annexation or Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Pronunciations
Name pronunciation varies by region. Many people in western states, including Kansas and Colorado, pronounce it /É'ËrˈkænzÉ™s/ ar-KAN-zÉ™s, while many other people in Oklahoma and Arkansas typically pronounce it /ˈÉ'ËrkÉ™nsÉ"Ë/ AR-kÉ™n-saw according to a state law passed in 1881.
Hydrography
The Arkansas has three distinct sections in its long path through central North America. At its headwaters, the Arkansas runs as a steep fast-flowing mountain river through the Rockies in its narrow valley, dropping 4,600Â feet (1.4Â km) in 120Â miles (193Â km). This section supports extensive whitewater rafting, including The Numbers (near Granite, Colorado), Brown's Canyon, and the Royal Gorge.
At Cañon City, Colorado, the Arkansas River valley widens and flattens markedly. Just west of Pueblo, Colorado, the river enters the Great Plains. Through the rest of Colorado, Kansas, and much of Oklahoma, it is a typical Great Plains riverway, with wide, shallow banks subject to seasonal flooding and periods of dwindling flow. Tributaries include the Cimarron River and the Salt Fork Arkansas River.
In eastern Oklahoma the river begins to widen further into a more contained consistent channel. To maintain more reliable flow rates, a series of large reservoir lakes have been built on the Arkansas and its intersecting tributaries including the Canadian, Verdigris, Neosho (Grand), Illinois, and Poteau rivers. These locks and dams allow the river to be navigable by barges and large river craft downriver of Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System joins in with the Verdigris River.
Into western Arkansas, the river path works between the encroaching Boston and Ouachita Mountains, including many isolated, flat-topped mesas, buttes, or monadnocks such as Mount Nebo, Petit Jean Mountain, and Mount Magazine, the highest point in the state. The river valley then expands as it encounters much flatter land beginning just west of Little Rock, Arkansas. It continues eastward across the plains and forests of eastern Arkansas until it flows into the Mississippi River.
Water flow in the Arkansas River (as measured in central Kansas) has dropped from approximately 248 cubic feet per second (7 m³/s) average from 1944-1963 to 53 cubic feet per second (1.5 m³/s) average from 1984â€"2003, largely because of the pumping of groundwater for irrigation in eastern Colorado and western Kansas.
Important cities along the Arkansas River include Pueblo, Colorado, Garden City, Kansas, Wichita, Kansas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Little Rock, Arkansas.
The I-40 bridge disaster of May 2002 took place on I-40's crossing of Kerr Reservoir on the Arkansas River near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma.
Allocation problems
Since 1902, Kansas has claimed Colorado takes too much of the river's water, resulting in a number of lawsuits before the U.S. Supreme Court that continue to this day, generally under the name of Kansas v. Colorado. The problems over the possession and use of Arkansas River water by Colorado and Kansas led to the creation of an interstate compact or agreement between the two states. While Congress approved the Arkansas River Compact in 1949, the compact did not stop further disputes by the two states over water rights to the river.
The Kansas-Oklahoma Arkansas River Basin Compact was created in 1965 to promote mutual consideration and equity over water use in the basin shared by those states. It led to the Kansas-Oklahoma Arkansas River Commission, which was charged with administering the compact and reducing pollution. The compact was approved and implemented by both states in 1970, and has been in force since then.
Riverway commerce
The McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System begins at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa on the Verdigris River, enters the Arkansas near Muskogee, and runs via an extensive lock and dam system to the Mississippi River.
Through Oklahoma and Arkansas, dams artificially deepen and widen the river to build it into a commercially navigable body of water. From the mouth of the Verdigris, to the point downstream where the McClellan-Kerr system moves over to the White River near Arkansas Post in far eastern Arkansas, the Arkansas sustains commercial barge traffic and offers passenger and recreational use through what is often little more than a series of reservoirs.
The river in history
Many nations of Native Americans lived near, or along, the 1,450-mile (2334-km) stretch of the Arkansas River for thousands of years. The first Europeans to see the river were members of the Spanish Coronado expedition on June 29, 1541. Also in the 1540s, Hernando de Soto discovered the junction of the Arkansas with the Mississippi. The Spanish originally called the river Napeste. "The name "Arkansas" was first applied by Father Jacques Marquette, who called the river Akansa in his journal of 1673. The Joliet-Marquette expedition travelled the Mississippi River from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin towards the Gulf of Mexico, but turned back at the mouth of the Arkansas River. By that time, they had encountered Native Americans carrying European trinkets, and feared confrontation with Spanish conquistadors.
Jean-Baptiste Bénard de la Harpe, a French trader, explorer and nobleman had led an expedition into what is now Oklahoma in 1718-19. His original objective was to establish a trading post near the present city of Texarkana, Arkansas, but he then extended his trip as far north as the Arkansas River (which he designated as the Alcansas). the explorer wrote that he and 9 other men, including three Caddo guides and 22 horses loaded with trade goods had come to a native settlement overlooking the river, where there were about 6,000 natives, who gave the strangers a warm welcome. La Harpe's party were honored with the calumet ceremony and spent ten days at this location. In 1988, evidence of a native village was discovered along the Arkansas River 13 miles (21 km) south of present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. By then, the site was known as the Lasley Vore Site. A team led by Dr. George H. Odell, an anthropology professor from the University of Tulsa, uncovered numerous artifacts that indicated the natives were members of the Wichita people, and that the European artifacts also found there were of the same time period. Dr. Odell concluded that this was most likely place that la Harpe met the natives he described.
In 1819, the Adams-OnÃs Treaty set the Arkansas as part of the frontier between the United States and Spanish Mexico. This continued until the United States annexed Texas after the Mexican-American War, in 1846. The treaty was made shortly after "Old Settler" Cherokees moved to near what became known as Webbers Falls on the Arkansas River. That area, then part of Arkansas Territory would become Indian Territory and later Oklahoma, was traditional territory of the Osage, leading to conflict and a treaty in 1828 but still unresolved by the time thousands of additional Cherokee refugees moved to the area during the Trail of Tears.
Later, the Santa Fe Trail followed the Arkansas through much of Kansas, picking it up near Great Bend and continuing through to La Junta, Colorado, unless users elected to take the challenging Cimarron Cutoff in Cimarron, Kansas.
In the 1880s, Charles "Buffalo" Jones, one of the cofounders of Garden City, Kansas, organized four irrigation companies to take water one hundred miles from the Arkansas River to cultivate 75,000 acres (300Â km2) of land.
Angling
The headwaters of the Arkansas River in central Colorado have been known for exceptional trout fishing, particularly fly fishing, since the 19th century, when greenback cutthroat trout dominated the river. Today, brown trout dominate the river, which also contains rainbow trout. Trout Unlimited considers the Arkansas one of the top 100 trout streams in America, a reputation the river has had since the 1950s. From Leadville to Pueblo, the Arkansas River is serviced by numerous fly shops and guides operating in Buena Vista, Salida, Cañon City and Pueblo. The Colorado Division of Wildlife provides regular online fishing reports for the river.
A fish kill occurred on December 29, 2010, in which an estimated 100,000 freshwater drum lined the Arkansas River bank. An investigation, conducted by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, found the dead fish "cover 17 miles of river from the Ozark Lock and Dam downstream to River Mile 240, directly south of Hartman, Arkansas." Tests later indicated the likely cause of the kill was gas bubble trauma caused by opening the spillways on the Ozark Dam.
Image gallery
See also
- Ackerman Island
- Kansas v. Colorado
- List of crossings of the Arkansas River
- List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem)
- Listing of rivers for each state: Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas
- McClellanâ€"Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System
References
External links
- Colorado-Kansas Arkansas River Compact
- Friends of the Arkansas River
- Aquifer saturation map for Equus Beds Aquifer Recharge Project
- Arkansas River Coalition
- Full Scale Map
- Santa Fe Trail Research
- Wichita Water Center Tours
- Animated Map of navigation system
- Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Arkansas River
- Oklahoma Digital Maps: Digital Collections of Oklahoma and Indian Territory
-  "Arkansas, a river of the United States of America". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911.Â
- Â "Arkansas River". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.Â
-  "Arkansas". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2 (9th ed.). 1878. Arkansas River is discussed at the end of this article.
-  "Arkansas, a S. W. river of the United States". The American Cyclopædia. 1879.Â