I've lived at both ends of the Brazos, and for a quarter of a century on a tributary to the Brazos, not far from Granbury. My maternal grandmother was born in Dennis, a bit upstream from Granbury. My paternal grandparents and a couple of my father's siblings lived in Granbury, as do some of my cousins still. Where do I start? The author grew up in Fort Worth, as did I, and knew this stretch of the Brazos, as did I, though his knowledge is much more intimate I never, in my memory, set foot in the river.

Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas.

Goodbye to a river by john graves