Rio Grande
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Rio Grande. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a well known river of the Southwest. The name is Spanish for great river. The Rio Grande rises between the folds of the Rocky Mountains in the southwest of Colorado. It flows in a southeasterly direction, 1,800 miles into the Gulf of Mexico. For 1,100 miles it forms the boundary between Mexico and the United States . Shallow draft steamboats come up to a point 450 miles from the Gulf. The river is flooded at seasons by melting snows and by rains about its upper course. The main portion of the stream lies in a semi-arid region, through which it is reduced in the dry season almost to a series of gravel bars. The plains on both sides of the Rio Grande were, until of late, the undisputed kingdom of the cattlemen, but the gardener and farmer are pressing in. The lower part of the valley is declared the most favorable region on the North American continent for the production of the Bermuda onion and vegetables for the early market. The waters of the Rio have been impounded by dams and turned into irrigating canals. One of these canals, near San Benito, Texas, fills a basin a mile and a half long, water from which is distributed by 114 miles of irrigating ditches. Before the water reaches the Rio again it has irrigated 30,000 acres, converting an area of sparse grass, arid sagebrush, and mesquite into fertile farms. Main line railroads reach the river at Brownsville, Laredo, Eagle Pass, and El Paso. Labor of all kinds is performed chiefly by Mexicans who work under their own foremen. Lands in the best part of the valley are now worth as many dollars per acre as they were worth cents twenty years ago.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a river of western Africa, which enters the Atlantic by an estuary opposite the Bissagos Islands; upper course not well known.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that the river is "reduced in the dry season almost to a series of gravel bars" has become its permanent condition over long stretches. Elephant Butte Dam in New Mexico was completed in 1916, and Falcon (1953) and Amistad (1969) followed, so that irrigation and municipal withdrawals now consume most of the flow: the channel runs dry in the Big Bend stretch and in 2001 a sandbar sealed the mouth so that the river failed to reach the Gulf of Mexico at all. The shallow-draft steamboats that once came 450 miles upriver are long gone, and the boundary line "for 1,100 miles" is now usually given as roughly 1,250 miles and was legally fixed after the Chamizal dispute at El Paso was settled by treaty in 1963. Collier's other Rio Grande, the West African stream whose "upper course [was] not well known" in 1921, lies in Guinea-Bissau, independent of Portugal since 1974 and fully mapped.
Written for this edition, 2026.