Mile 48.8 - RBD Castor River Diversion Channel

48.8 RBD Castor River Diversion Channel

Historically the Castor River ran free across the Missouri Bootheel into the Arkansas Delta, to join the beautiful St. Francis, and parallel the Mississippi for hundreds of miles past Caruthersville, Osceola, West Memphis and Marianna, all the way down to the end of Crowley’s Ridge at Helena Arkansas. But sometime in the last century the flood fearing farmers of the Bootheel prevailed upon the engineers to re-route the poor Castor (which is latin for Beaver) to an ignominious ending here below the Cape.

The Castor used to run southward to eventually join the St. Francis River. But the poor abused Castor, once a beautiful Ozark stream that ran into the Missouri Bootheel, was ripped from its natural channel by flood-fearing engineers, and forced through the lowlands to join the Mississippi through the Castor River Diversion Canal, the Headwater Diversion Canal, and then the Ducktown Ditch, to meet the Mississippi at here at the Cape.