Canadian River

Catchment area / course

Canadian River at Calvin, OK

The Canadian River is a river in the U.S., which flows through the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. He is to be distinguished from its tributary North Canadian River, which joins him at the Eufaula Lake.

With 1458 km of the Canadian River is the longest tributary of the Arkansas. It rises at ( 37 ° 1 '0 "N, 105 ° 3' 0 " W37.016666666667 - 105.052926 ) on 2926 m above the sea level in the Sangre de Cristo Range in Las Animas County, Colorado. 2.5 km further south he reached in Colfax County New Mexico. It flows through several canyons southeast until it is dammed at Conchas Lake for the first time, from there it flows eastward. The Canadian is still dammed reservoirs in the Lake Logan and Ute Lake.

He then continues to flow through the panhandle of Texas, where he forms the northern border of the Llano Estacado. Then he is dammed at Lake Meredith, which is managed as Lake Meredith National Recreation Area of the National Park Service. To him the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument closes at.

The river flows on through the plains of Oklahoma, where it forms numerous bays and islands meander with quicksand. In Eufaula Lake, he is again dammed before it opens in Haskell County at (35 ° 27 ' 12 " N, 95 ° 1' 58 " W35.453429 - 95.032733 ) in the Arkansas River.

The first Europeans in what is now Texas was the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1541. 1601 was made by the Spanish governor of New Mexico, Don Juan de Oñate, an expedition to the prairies of Oklahoma, he named the river Rio Magdalena.

The name he received from Canadian French explorers who were looking for a route from Mississippi to Santa Fe. They assumed that the river would flow northward to Canada.

After surviving tradition of the Jicarilla he belongs next to the Arkansas River, the Rio Grande and the Rio Pecos to those four sacred rivers that limited their country.

See also: List of longest rivers of the earth