La Junta de los Rios

The Rio Grande reaches Presidio nearly spent, most of it drawn off upstream in New Mexico and the El Paso valley, and the hundred and fifty miles above it run dry often enough to be called the Forgotten Reach. What refills the river is the Rio Conchos, which comes down out of the Sierra Madre Occidental and joins it a few miles northwest of town; between sixty nine and eighty six per cent of the water below Presidio is Conchos water. The Spanish called the junction La Junta de los Rios, and its floodplain has probably been farmed longer than anywhere else in Texas.

Crops were being grown on these bottoms by about 700 AD, and the people who grew them were living in permanent villages along both rivers when the first Europeans came through in the 1530s. Cabeza de Vaca wrote that the people of La Junta had the best physiques of any he had seen. Later Spanish expeditions described square, flat roofed adobe houses and reckoned one pueblo at more than a thousand people. A presidio went up in 1760 and was rebuilt in 1773, and in 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ran an international border down the middle of the fields.

The farming never stopped. Presidio County grew four bales of cotton on twelve acres in 1919 and nearly seven thousand bales on eighteen thousand acres by 1939, with onions, cantaloupes and melons behind. The floodplain is still a floodplain. Reservoirs on the Conchos began releasing water in late August 2008 to draw down after a wet monsoon, September rain made it far worse, and the river came up higher than anyone in the valley remembered: the levees at Redford failed and flooded the village, another broke at Ojinaga, and low lying Presidio was evacuated for days.