Cooke County Chronicles - Part 3 - Red River and Silver City
By: Sharon Hess

The Red is not necessarily the most attractive river in Texas but it certainly deserves its name...ask anyone who has spent a day of fishing along the banks or swimming in the murky waters....your clothes will be stained for some time to come.

It is the red clay soil that gives the river its crimson color and thus her name. I believe the Red River must be feminine by the way she meanders her way along. Sometimes she’s as docile as a lamb and her waters flow gently along the banks, the catfish flopping, their tails slapping the calm surface as they return to the depths. At other times she’s as angry and honery as a bumblebee as her waters rise high and the foam whirls and bobs around the debris carried by the swiftly moving currents. Like an angered demon the waters rise and nothing along the banks are safe from her fury....saplings are torn from their home in the sandy Oklahoma soil and decayed fallen trees are picked up by her waves and carried briskly along.

W.R. Strong, an early pioneer speaks of Cooke County: “The first road or trail through Cooke County was made by the Mormons when they left Missouri for Salt Lake and it must have been not later than 1843 or 1844. There was a big bunch of them and they left a pretty plain trail which after wards became the old California Trail.

“They came from Preston and Whitesboro across the prairie, keeping on the divide between Timber Creek and Mineral Creek (Grayson County), around the head of Pecan Creek and on around both Brushey and Dry Elm, crossed Main Elm at the St. Jo crossing and on the divide between Clear and Farmer’s Creeks on to Young County.

“This trail afterwards became the California Trail, and I have seen lots of long wagon trains going over it on their way to California especially during the years ‘49 and ‘50 when the gold fever was on. Also some of our own men followed it-Capt. (W.C.) Twitty, Dr. (J. Pope) Long, Mr. (William) Howeth, Marcus Webster, Joe Worth, Roy Montague and others.”