Caddo Lake
Interesting facts
- The world's first over-water oil platform, Ferry Lake No. 1, was completed on Caddo Lake in 1911 by the Gulf Refining Company.
- That pioneering 1911 well reached a depth of 2,185 feet and produced about 450 barrels of oil a day.
- The Great Raft that dammed the Red River was a log jam stretching some 165 miles before engineers began clearing it.
- When Captain Henry Shreve and the Army Corps of Engineers cleared the raft, the lake's water level dropped by more than ten feet.
- While the raft held the water high, steamboats reached Jefferson, Texas, which grew into one of the busiest inland ports in the United States.
- Caddo Lake was designated a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention on 23 October 1993.
- A 2003 survey counted 216 bird species, 189 kinds of trees and shrubs, and 47 mammal species in the Caddo Lake area.
- Tar Island is the only island in the lake, which covers about 25,400 acres of open water and bayou.
- A federal survey in 1913–14 concluded that the raft-dammed lake had formed between about 1770 and 1780.
Why it is worth it
There are two competing stories for how Caddo Lake came to exist, and they disagree about almost everything except the outcome. The Caddo people's own account holds that the Great Spirit caused a sudden earthquake to punish a disobedient chief, and the lake appeared more or less overnight, around 1811 — the same period as the real, well-documented New Madrid earthquakes. The geological account is far slower and less dramatic: a natural log dam called the Great Raft had been building up on the Red River since the 1600s, fallen trees accumulating year after year during spring floods, until sometime in the early 1800s the jam finally blocked the river enough to push water sideways into the Cypress Valley — flooding a forest gradually rather than instantly, and leaving the lake behind as the water settled.
That second story explains what the lake actually looks like today: a flooded forest, not a basin that filled with water. Bald cypress trees, some more than 400 years old, stand directly in the shallows exactly where they grew before the flooding, draped in Spanish moss that is neither Spanish nor a moss — it's an epiphyte, a flowering plant with no roots in its host tree at all, living purely on rainwater and airborne nutrients as it hangs from the branches.
The lake straddles the Texas–Louisiana line, and the nearby town of Uncertain, Texas, earns its name honestly: the flooded cypress brake is a genuine maze of channels, easy to lose your bearings in even with a map, which has fed a long-running local folklore of moonshiners, hauntings, and the occasional claimed Bigfoot sighting in the bottomland forest — stories worth knowing as stories, not as anything the lake itself confirms.
Good to know
The cypress channels are genuinely disorienting; a local guide or boat tour is the practical way to see the lake rather than risk getting lost navigating it solo.
Getting there
32 km from Shreveport. Shreveport Regional Airport (SHV) is about 34 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Caddo Lake is a 25,400-acre (10,300 ha) lake and bayou (wetland) on the border between Texas and Louisiana, in northern Harrison County and southern Marion County in Texas and western Caddo Parish in Louisiana. The lake is named after the Caddoans or Caddo, Native Americans who lived in the area until their expulsion by the United States in the 19th century. The US forced most of them to move west to Indian Territory.
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