20 Wild Facts About Eastern Texas You Never Knew

East Texas has an asteroid crater nobody can see, a lake created by a 100-mile traffic jam of driftwood, an island with no water around it, and a post office that sits in two states at once. And almost all of it traces back to the same buried thing. In this video we count down 20 wild facts about eastern Texas — Caddo Lake and the Great Raft, High Island and the spring bird fallout, the Neutral Ground, the Texas–Oklahoma oil war on the Red River, the Big Thicket, Spindletop, the East Texas oil field, the Texas Railroad Commission and OPEC, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the Louann Salt layer underneath all of it. Fact 1 explains why every other fact on this list exists. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro — the lake nobody built 0:14 20. The only natural lake in Texas (Caddo Lake) 1:16 19. The Great Raft — a lake made of driftwood 2:00 18. Henry Shreve accidentally drained it 2:43 17. Navigating Caddo Lake by street sign 3:31 16. High Island — the island that isn't an island 4:23 15. Why a continent's birds land there 5:14 14. The Texarkana post office in two states 6:02 13. The Neutral Ground — 15 years with no law 6:56 12. The Texas–Oklahoma border that moves 7:42 11. Petrified palmwood, the state stone 8:58 10. The invisible asteroid crater under Leon County 9:55 9. The Big Thicket — four ecosystems, one place 10:52 8. Carnivorous plants and why they're there 11:33 7. The Neches, a river they never dammed 12:16 6. Spindletop was NOT the first Texas oil well 13:17 5. The largest oil field in the lower 48 is invisible 14:15 4. When oil crashed to 10 cents a barrel 15:27 3. The oil reserve stored in holes made with water 16:21 2. Salt domes, sulfur and sulfuric acid 17:03 1. The Louann Salt — the answer to everything 18:48 Outro 📍 PLACES COVERED Caddo Lake • Jefferson • Uncertain • Marshall • High Island • Bolivar Peninsula • Texarkana • Sabine River • Red River • Leon County • Big Thicket National Preserve • Neches River • Beaumont • Spindletop • Kilgore • Longview •