The stories are fascinating.Stories that most every town has, and only the old folk know, stories that can't be found on the Internet, usually dealing with 19th century tales of what spawned from the enmity between Indians ('The People') and the many whites movin' in on their turf, mannn. The story: simple, but done right: Graves gives the Brazos one last a-travelin' in the '50s before a number of dams are constructed that, in his view, will ruin it, and along the way he informs the reader of local history surrounding any landmark or non-landmark he spots or looks for. The writing is beautiful, edging on poetic always. That Graves, boy, he really knows how to craft a sentence. (57 owners, man, are you kidding me? Where did they get this bad boy from?)It appears to be some forgotten 'classic', a book that was able to achieve quite the amount of fame on its release (1960), but over many years lost its impact and hazed out into absolute obscurity, known now only to Larry McMurtry and other literary Texans.I'm-a gonna say right here, right now, that Goodbye to a River deserves this reputation given to it by few.

I was, and shit, still am, confused as all hell as to why this book here by a John Graves, some old fart I'd never heard of (surprise surprise), was chosen this year of '07 as the 'core text' of the freshman University Seminar course, a course that makes no sense at all in its recent necessity, at Texas State University. 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