Today, the southern Prairie Dog Town Fork is considered the main fork, though the North Fork is as long and normally has a greater water flow. That territory was later incorporated into the state of Oklahoma, whose southern border follows the south fork. Originally called Greer County, Texas, the US Supreme Court ruled that it belonged to the United States, which at the time oversaw the Oklahoma Territory. Marcy's expedition had followed the Prairie Dog Town Fork. Because of a cartographic error, the land between the north and south forks were claimed by both the state of Texas and the United States federal government. Specialists have debated whether the North Fork or the Prairie Dog Town Fork is the true stem. The source of the Red River is the confluence of the North Fork and Prairie Dog Town Fork, in Harmon County, Oklahoma. JSTOR ( January 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.įind sources: 'Red River of the South' – news Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. This section needs additional citations for verification. The total length of the river is 1,360 miles (2,190 km), with a mean flow of over 57,000 cubic feet per second (1,600 m 3/s) at the mouth. It forms much of the eastern border of Miller County, Arkansas, turning south near Fulton and flowing into Louisiana, where it feeds the Atchafalaya River. It forms a short border between Texas and Arkansas before entering Arkansas. It rises in two branches in the Texas Panhandle and flows east, where it serves as the border between the states of Texas and Oklahoma. The Red River is the second-largest river basin in the southern Great Plains. The south bank of the Red River formed part of the US–Mexico border from the Adams–Onís Treaty (in force 1821) until the Texas Annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This confluence is connected to the Mississippi River by the Old River Control Structure. Although once a tributary of the Mississippi River, the Red River is now a tributary of the Atchafalaya River, a distributary of the Mississippi that flows separately into the Gulf of Mexico. It is known as the Red River of the South to distinguish it from the Red River of the North, which flows between Minnesota and North Dakota into the Canadian province of Manitoba. It was named for its reddish water color from passing through red-bed country in its watershed. The Red River, or sometimes the Red River of the South, is a major river in the Southern United States.

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