Summary
Seldom has a river come to life so vividly in a book as does the Brazos River in Graves' book Goodbye to a River. It's a narrative of his three-week trip in November 1957 down 170 miles of the river from Possum Kingdom Dam in Palo Pinto County through Parker and Hood Counties to Lake Whitney in Somervell County. He wanted to see the river again before it was spoiled.
"It was a goodbye trip," he says in chapter 11, and he told the West Texas Historical Association in 1958 that "increasing talk of five projected new dams made it seem a good idea to consolidate my impressions of the river while the river was still there."
Graves had been introduced to the Brazos and its surroundings as a boy growing up in Fort Worth. He later graduated from Rice University in 1942, earned an M.A. degree in English from Columbia University and taught English at University of Texas and TCU. But he became disenchanted with the academic world ("I got sick of grading freshman papers") and left home to begin a career as a freelance writer and travel in the U.S. and Europe.
He returned to Fort Worth in the late 1950s for what he thought would be a short visit, but he decided to settle in Texas. He attended to his ailing father, bought 400 acres of land on White Bluff Creek in Somervell County, built a house and a barn, and became a farmer and rancher.
Originally a magazine article, Goodbye to a River was expanded into a book. And when Knopf published it in 1960, it became a classic. Graves was no longer a little-known Texan. He was a naturalist in the tradition of J.Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek and a historian in the tradition of Walter Prescott Webb.
He later wrote the second and third books of what became "the Brazos trilogy." Knopf also published Hard Scrabble (Observations on a Patch of Land) in 1974 and From a Limestone Ledge (Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life) in 1980.
Goodbye to a River was a modestly presented work, limited to a small area of history and geography. It was primarily about something judged at the time to be outdated and bypassed -- love for the plot of ground where one was born and reared. It was prompted by Graves' longing to return, after years of living away from his Brazos boyhood, to record before it was too late the unforgettable experiences of hunting and fishing and living along the river in its northern course. Graves traveled down what he calls "my piece of the river" with not much more than a canoe, a tent and his young dog. But the book is anything but local or provincial in its wisdom.
"Hundreds of people and things and events are with you as you pass through the heart of the country they are linked with," he explained. "Physical contact with their terrain gives you some added understanding of them." In a letter to the publisher Sept. 12, 1957, Graves added, "Its main quality is wildness and isolation. Most of it looks much as it must have to the Comanches and Kiowas. Every curve of the river must have some tale of murder." He wanted to "get it down on paper."
