58 Fun Facts About The Rio Grande

What is the Rio Grande called in Mexico?

Río Bravo. Bravo means wild or turbulent, and Mexico kept that old Spanish name for the lower river while American settlers in South Texas made Rio Grande the usual name on their side.

The Civil War's last land battle came on the Rio Grande over a month after whose surrender?

Robert E. Lee. Both commanders at Palmito Ranch, near Brownsville, knew the war in the east was over when they fought on 13 May 1865; the Confederates won, then surrendered within weeks.

Which of these rivers is longer than the Rio Grande?

The Yukon. It runs about 1,980 miles against roughly 1,900 for the Rio Grande, whose length shifts as its course changes; depending on how it is measured, it ranks fourth or fifth in North America.

In which US state does the Rio Grande rise?

Colorado. The river starts as a clear, snow-fed stream about 12,000 feet up near the Continental Divide, a cold mountain birth for a river best known as a desert border.

Into which body of water does the Rio Grande empty?

The Gulf of Mexico. Dams and irrigation in both countries take so much water on the way that only a fraction of the river's natural flow ever arrives.

Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley, irrigated by the river, is best known for which fruit, sold as Ruby Red?

Grapefruit. The Ruby Red began as a freak of nature, a branch bearing red fruit on a pink-grapefruit tree in the Valley around 1929, and Texas later named red grapefruit its state fruit.

Which four Mexican states border the Rio Grande?

Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. All four face a single American state, Texas, across the water, and Nuevo León reaches the river only through one narrow strip of land.

Which pair of twin cities marks the point where the Rio Grande starts to form the US–Mexico border?

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The Mexican city was itself called El Paso del Norte until 1888, when it was renamed for Benito Juárez, who had run his government from the town while fighting the French.

Which Mexican tributary joins the Rio Grande near Ojinaga and restores its flow after it nearly dries near Presidio?

Rio Conchos. It is the Rio Grande's biggest tributary by flow, so from here on the river along the Texas border is carrying largely water that fell on Mexico's Sierra Madre.

Which two US tributaries join the Rio Grande from the north near Amistad Reservoir?

The Pecos and Devils rivers. Both now end in Lake Amistad, a reservoir the United States and Mexico built together on the border and finished in 1969.

The Rio Grande Gorge, likely cut when ancient Lake Alamosa spilled over, lies near which New Mexico town?

Taos. The overflow, hundreds of thousands of years ago, also drained the lake for good and joined the high San Luis Valley upstream to the river.

Which 1994 film stages a wedding on New Mexico's Rio Grande Gorge Bridge?

Natural Born Killers. The bridge is one of the highest in the United States, though nobody agrees quite how high: published figures run from about 565 to 650 feet above the river.

Which secret wartime laboratory built the first atomic bombs on a plateau above New Mexico's Rio Grande?

Los Alamos. In late 1942 the Army settled on an isolated boys' ranch school on the mesa, a site pushed by Robert Oppenheimer, who knew the country from his youth.

What did the Rio Grande do at its mouth in 2001?

Failed to reach the sea. Farms and cities had pumped out so much that the last trickle died in the sand about a hundred yards short of the surf, and locals joked that the sandbar was the newest bridge to Mexico.

Which cattle baron made his first fortune as a Rio Grande steamboat captain before founding a huge South Texas ranch?

Richard King. A New York runaway who stowed away on a ship as a boy and was piloting steamboats at sixteen, he came to the border to carry army supplies, built a near-monopoly on the river trade and went on to found the King Ranch.

Which boomtown at the Rio Grande's mouth let the Confederacy trade with Europe despite the Union blockade?

Bagdad, Tamaulipas. It stood on neutral Mexican soil, so the Union navy could not blockade it, and supplies landed there were hauled 25 miles upriver and slipped across into Texas.

The Brownsville & Matamoros International Bridge, dating from 1910, is what type of bridge?

Its swing mechanism has not been used since the last big steamboats vanished in the early 1900s.

Which Spanish expedition first reached the Tiwa pueblos along the Rio Grande in 1540?

Coronado's. His army wintered among the Tiwa in 1540–41, seized their food and clothing against the cold, and set off the Tiguex War, which left the pueblos along the river destroyed.

Who founded the Spanish colony of Santa Fe de Nuevo Méjico in 1598, where the Rio Grande meets the Rio Chama?

Juan de Oñate. He ruled the colony so harshly that Spain later tried him for excessive force against Acoma Pueblo, fined him and banished him from New Mexico for life.

Which river did Mexico claim as its border with the Republic of Texas, rather than the Rio Grande?

The Nueces. When US troops marched from Corpus Christi, at its mouth, to the Rio Grande in 1846, Mexico treated the move as an act of war, and the clash that followed gave President Polk his case for war.

Which 1848 agreement defined the US–Mexico border as the middle of the Rio Grande's deepest channel?

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Because the river kept shifting its bed, a border tied to its channel moved too, and the two countries spent decades arguing over land the water had carried across.

At Los Ebanos, Texas, people still cross the Rio Grande to Mexico on the river's last what?

Hand-pulled ferry. Since 1950 a crew has hauled the barge across by rope, its cable anchored to one of the ebony trees that gave Los Ebanos its name.

What was Cordova Island, created when an 1899 channel cut across a Rio Grande bend?

A piece of Mexico inside US territory. Almost surrounded by American soil, it became a notorious haven for smugglers during Prohibition, when a saloon called the Hole in the Wall traded a few yards from the line.

After the 1960s Chamizal settlement, what was built to stop the Rio Grande shifting the border?

Concrete riverbed. The two countries split the cost of lining the river's new course, and the land handed back to Mexico became a public park.

Which two presidents met at El Paso in 1909 for the first US–Mexico presidential summit?

Porfirio Díaz and William Howard Taft. On the day they met, guards seized a man hiding a palm pistol only a few feet from the two presidents' route, and the summit went ahead.

The 1938 agreement dividing the Rio Grande's US water among three states is called the Rio Grande what?

Compact. Under the Rio Grande Compact the states keep score in water debits and credits measured at gauging stations, and their quarrels over the sums have reached the US Supreme Court more than once.

Which US–Mexico agency, founded in 1889, straightened 155 winding miles of the Rio Grande into 86?

The International Boundary and Water Commission. It was set up just to settle where the border lay whenever the river moved, and in the 1930s it cut out the bends so the boundary would stay put.

Truth or Consequences, the New Mexico town beside Elephant Butte Dam, renamed itself in 1950 after what?

A radio quiz show. Host Ralph Edwards promised to broadcast from the first town to take his show's name; Hot Springs voted yes within weeks, and Edwards came back for its fiesta every May for 50 years.

Elephant Butte gets its name from what?

A volcanic plug shaped like the animal, lying down. The hard core of an eroded volcano, it turned into an island when the reservoir filled behind the dam, which engineers first called Engle Dam.

New Mexico's Hatch Valley, irrigated by the Rio Grande, is world-famous for which crop?

Chile peppers. The same pods are sold green when picked early and red once they ripen, which is how New Mexico came to have an official state question: 'Red or green?'

Which two presidents dedicated the Rio Grande's Falcon Dam in October 1953?

Dwight Eisenhower and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. The lake that rose behind the dam drowned the riverside town of Falcon, which gave it its name, and old Zapata too; both were moved to higher ground.

Big Bend National Park won international recognition in 2012 for which natural feature?

Dark skies. So far from any city that it has the least light pollution of any national park unit in the lower 48 states, the park was named an International Dark Sky Park.

Which three canyons of the Rio Grande lie within Big Bend National Park?

Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas. The river is the border here, so in each canyon one limestone wall stands in Texas and the facing wall in Mexico, with cliffs some 1,500 feet high.

Which mountain range lies entirely inside Big Bend National Park, a forested island above the desert?

The Chisos. Their heights catch far more rain than the desert floor by the river, which is why Douglas fir, aspen and ponderosa pine grow there above a cactus desert.

Which animal returned to Big Bend from Mexico in the 1980s?

Black bear. Shot and trapped out decades earlier, bears came back unaided: in the late 1980s a female left Mexico's Sierra del Carmen, crossed miles of desert and swam the Rio Grande to reach the park's forested peaks.

Which desert does the Rio Grande wind through at Big Bend?

The Chihuahuan. Walled in by Mexico's two Sierra Madre ranges, which block moist air from either coast, it gets most of its rain in late-summer thunderstorms, and most of the desert lies south of the border.

Despite its name, Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley is really which kind of landform?

A river delta. Its rich silt was little more than rangeland until large-scale irrigation and a railroad arrived around 1900, and within some thirty years the delta had become a major farm belt.

What does P'oesóˀon, the Tewa Pueblo name for the Rio Grande, mean?

Big Water. Tewa po can mean water or river, so some render the name 'big river', the same idea the Spanish reached with Río Grande.

Which endangered fish, once found along most of the Rio Grande, now occupies under a tenth of its old range?

Rio Grande silvery minnow. Its eggs drift downstream on the current, so on a river chopped up by dams the young cannot get back, and the fish now holds on in one stretch of New Mexico.

Which scheme carries water under the Continental Divide from the Navajo and Blanco rivers into the Rio Grande system?

The San Juan–Chama Project. Its three tunnels run about 26 miles in all, so snowmelt that would have drained west toward the Pacific ends up in New Mexico's taps and fields instead.

What nickname is given to the often-dry, 200-mile stretch of the Rio Grande above Presidio, Texas?

The Forgotten River. Farms and cities upstream take nearly all the water, leaving a parched riverbed that runs on for more than 200 miles.

About three million years ago, where did the ancestral Rio Grande end?

In landlocked desert lakes. The young river filled one closed basin after another, at one stage feeding a vast lake that spread from southern New Mexico into Mexico, and found an outlet to the sea only late in its history.

Which Texas town faces Piedras Negras, Coahuila, across the Rio Grande?

Eagle Pass. In 1865 General Jo Shelby's unsurrendered Confederates crossed into Mexico here and, in midstream, sank their flag in the river, an episode remembered as the Grave of the Confederacy.

Which star plays the cavalry colonel in Rio Grande, the 1950 Western that closed its director's Cavalry Trilogy?

John Wayne. He plays Kirby Yorke opposite Maureen O'Hara, and the film exists because Republic Pictures would not finance Ford's pet project, The Quiet Man, until the three of them had made the studio a Western.

What did the US and Mexico sign in 1944 concerning the Rio Grande?

A water-sharing treaty. It also committed the two countries to build dams together on the river, which is how the Falcon and Amistad reservoirs came to straddle the border.

Which endangered spotted cat survives in the United States mostly in thorn brush near the lower Rio Grande?

Ocelot. Only a small remnant is left north of the border, because the thorn scrub it hides in by day, brush so dense a person has to crawl through it, was cleared for farms and towns.

Which tall birds flock in their thousands each winter to Bosque del Apache, a New Mexico refuge on the Rio Grande?

Sandhill cranes. The refuge was created in 1939 as a stopover for migrating birds, and each autumn its managers flood fields with Rio Grande water to make wetlands for the arriving flocks.

In which mountain range does the Rio Grande rise, at the base of Canby Mountain?

The San Juan Mountains. The river is born just east of the Continental Divide, so snow that melts a short walk to the west runs the other way, toward the Pacific.

Which Texas border city was the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande in 1840?

Laredo. Federalist rebels from Mexico's northern states declared the republic there in January 1840; after a heavy defeat its government fled north into Texas, and the revolt was over within the year.

Which Western novel opens in a dusty Texas town near the Rio Grande?

Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry's cattle drive starts with a raid over the river to rustle a herd in Mexico; the novel won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit television miniseries.

Steamboats requisitioned to the Rio Grande in 1846 carried the army of which general toward Monterrey?

Zachary Taylor. His wins along the Rio Grande and at Monterrey made 'Old Rough and Ready' a national hero, and two years later the Whigs ran the general for president and won.

The first new crossing of which kind in over a century opened over the Rio Grande near Brownsville in 2015?

A railway bridge. The West Rail line took freight trains out of the middle of Brownsville and Matamoros, and the old right of way through Brownsville was opened up as a new corridor.

In the Civil War, a neutral Mexican port at the Rio Grande's mouth swapped European arms for which Confederate cargo?

Cotton bales. The river was the one Confederate border the Union navy could not close, and when Northern troops seized Brownsville in 1863 the cotton simply crossed farther upstream.

Which shipwrecked Spaniard is believed to have crossed the Rio Grande on foot around 1535?

Cabeza de Vaca. One of only four survivors of an expedition wrecked on the Texas coast in 1528, he spent years among the tribes as a trader and healer before walking into Spanish Mexico in 1536.

Before the Civil War, thousands of enslaved Texans escaped to freedom by running in which direction?

South, to Mexico. Mexico's president abolished slavery by decree in 1829, and Mexican towns just across the Rio Grande became havens for the runaways.

Which president signed the 1962 law for tunnels bringing water under the Continental Divide to the Rio Grande?

John F. Kennedy. It was the first big reclamation law of his presidency, and the Navajo Times argued it passed only because an irrigation project for the Navajo Nation was written into the same bill.

In July 2022 the Rio Grande ran dry for about 50 miles, including five miles through which city?

Albuquerque. It was the city's first dry riverbed since 1983, and it lasted only days: rain sent a pulse of water through the city before the month was out.

John Ford shot his 1950 Western Rio Grande far from Texas, in red-rock country around which Utah town?

Moab. Ford shot the film in Professor Valley and along a different desert river from the one in its title, country he had just used for Wagon Master.