World's shortest river is still long on drama - and hilarity

Far away from the Beaver State, in the backcountry of West Virginia by the Kentucky border, a man named Floyd Hatfield was the proud owner of a fine razorback hog.

A distant neighbor, from across the Tug River on the Kentucky side, saw the hog one day, and claimed the hog was really his. He could tell, he said, by the distinctive notches in the hog’s ear.

Hatfield was enraged; the neighbor was basically calling him a thief, an insult that was, in the heart of Appalachia just after the Civil War, not to be borne.

The neighbor took Hatfield to court, suing for the return of the hog, and lost. But the Justice of the Peace was Anderson Hatfield, a relative of Floyd, and the neighbor was convinced the fix was in. Now the neighbor was enraged.

That was in late 1878, and the dispute over the allegedly stolen hog blossomed out over the following 12 years into the most notorious family feud in U.S. history. The neighbor, as you have probably guessed by now, was named McCoy — Randolph McCoy.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud ended with more than a dozen members of both families being measured for coffins, and a decade or so of prosecutions for murder.

The stakes in the Lincoln City-Great Falls, Mont., feud, if it can be called that, are a lot less serious. In fact, the whole situation is the kind of thing that’s just fun and funny.

But the parallels are striking, and — now that nearly 150 years has passed since the last Hatfield-McCoy blood was spilled — amusing.

It all started, more or less, in 1940 when the city of Delake — which today is part of Lincoln City — had a contest to name the channel that drains Devil’s Lake into the Pacific Ocean. At the time it had no official name, mostly being known as simply “The Outlet.” It was, however, already locally being proclaimed as the shortest river in the world. Measured from the rim of the lake to the low-tide level on the beach, it was just 440 feet long.

The winning entry in the naming contest was “D,” submitted by Johanna Beard of Albany, who reasoned that the world’s shortest river should have the world’s shortest name.

There were some objections from the folks at Klamath Falls, who objected that it really should be “D Creek” and taken off the list of rivers entirely. The Klamath Falls folks had their own candidate for “world’s shortest” honors in the Link River, which is 8,000 feet long but is also undeniably a “real” river.

Nothing came of this objection, though, and soon the Highway Department made the claim official with a sign at the bridge on Highway 101: “D River: World’s Shortest.”

Somewhere along the way, the Guinness Book of World Records picked up on the claim, and listed the D River as the world’s shortest river, at 440 feet.

And that’s how the situation stood in 1987 when, like a pugnacious neighbor casting covetous eyes upon a prize razorback hog, Mrs. Susie Nardlinger’s fifth-grade class at Lincoln Elementary School in Great Falls, Mont., set out to prove that the title of World’s Shortest River actually belonged to them.

Under their teacher’s guidance, the students surveyed and measured a very short and as-yet-unnamed waterway that connected Giant Springs with the Missouri River. It was 201 feet long, less than half the official length of the D River. They named it Roe River and petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographical Names to list it.

The kids also earned a ton of popular support for their crusade as newspapers, magazines, and television reporters caught onto what they were doing and started running stories about their quest to win the record for their town. The publicity culminated with a spot on the docket of “the highest court of opinion in the land,” as writer Niki Hale Price puts it: The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Like the McCoys arguing their case in front of Justice Anderson Hatfield, Lincoln City boosters didn’t think they were getting much of a fair trial there. How could they, with the other side represented by all those cute little precocious fifth-graders?

In due time the geography board certified the Roe River with a listed length of 201 feet, and and at that point the kids went in for the close — by submitting the newly designated river to the Guinness Book of World Records.

When the 1987 edition of the Guinness Book came out, the Roe River was listed as the world’s shortest.

The year after this disastrous turn of fortune, the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce hired David Gomberg as director.

“I learned very quickly that the mothers and fathers in Lincoln City took the ‘shortest river’ very seriously and they said, David, go fix this for us,” Gomberg said, in an interview with Conde Nast Traveler’s Ken Jennings.

In the more than 30 years since that year, Gomberg has been the D River’s number-one booster in the battle for shortest-river honors.

“A group of students in Great Falls as a school project decided to get a drainage ditch recognized as a river by the Survey of Geographical Names,” he said, “and then submitted that to the Guinness Book as the shortest river in the world.”

As a drainage ditch, the Roe would be something to see – its stream flow is in the range of 2,300 cubic feet per second, or about half the size of the McKenzie River at Leaburg. Moreover, the D itself isn’t exactly huge.

But then, it’s not usually 440 feet long, either. In fact, it’s only that long twice a year, at the two maximum low tides. With the title on the line, Lincoln City locals started thinking that wasn’t a fair way to measure the river. So a local survey company sallied forth on a spring tide and measured the river at its shortest – with the tide as high as possible, and the ocean practically lapping at the footings of Highway 101.

The result: 120 feet.

Armed with this information, the Lincoln City partisans went back to the Guinness Book publisher to petition for a new trial.

In 1990, the Guinness people agreed to update the listing so that it listed the D River as the world’s shortest during high tides, and the Roe as the world’s shortest at other times. Both could keep their “World’s Shortest River” signs and information, and everybody was happy....

Well, almost everybody. Just as Randolph McCoy wouldn’t have been happy settling for half of the hog he thought was his, some of the students and community boosters in Great Falls did not want to share the title they considered theirs by right of conquest following a hard-fought victory.

Mrs. Nardlinger found another short waterway nearby — this one really was more or less a drainage ditch — that was the length of a medium-size motorhome, and started the process of surveying that to petition to designate it as a “fork” of the Roe River.

As for Dave Gombert and the Lincoln City boosters, they weren’t ready to settle for half a hog either.

Under Gombert’s leadership, the Chamber hired a team of geologists to survey the river, and the geologists decreed that the river measurements that had been used were entirely wrong.

“They said that it starts where the water comes out of the lake at the water break there, and ends at the vegetation line,” said Gombert. “We determined that our river was actually not 440 feet but about 110 feet long.”

Beyond that vegetation line, the geologists said, the D River was no longer the D River, but rather the D River Estuary ... or at any rate, that’s how Gombert sees it.

“That’s our story,” he added. “We’re sticking to it.”

At that point, very understandably, the Guinness Book people gave up and simply deleted the entire category of “shortest river” from their next edition. The whole affair seems to have left a bit of a bad taste in their mouths, because they’ve basically memory-holed the whole affair: When Beach Connection writer Andre Hagestedt asked about it a few years ago, a PR assistant with the Guinness Book actually claimed Guinness had never published the D River as the world’s shortest.

As a side note, there is a story in fairly widespread circulation online from Oregon Coast Today that tells of some really startling new activity on the D River. According to this story, just in case the whole “world’s shortest because Estuary” wheeze doesn’t hold up, the D River now has a new record it can contend for: World’s Narrowest. And also, maybe World’s Fastest too.

This article is un-by-lined and has no date, but a quick dive into the source code brings up a fairly suspicious one: March 30, 2021 ... just in time for April Fools Day. Oregon Coast Today is kind of famous for April Fools pranks, and it seems pretty clear that this is one of them.

In this article, Chip Dipson (or is that Dip Chipson? It could be a typo) claims Explore Lincoln City brought some of its extra leftover marketing money to the table to partner with the Oregon Department of Transportation while ODOT crews were shoring up the Highway 101 bridge over the river.

“Workers already had concrete deliveries on order, they had rebar,” Mr. Dippity says in this article. “All you’d need to build a concrete channel to narrow the width of the D River to four inches.”

The article says the new riverbed would be unveiled at a special ceremony on Thursday, April 1, 2021.

“Some people question whether building up concrete walls two meters tall to force the D River into a 4-inch-wide channel was a smart move,” Mr. Chippity adds. “They’ll see how smart it is when potamologists and tourists flock to Lincoln City in the dead of winter to stand astride the world’s narrowest river. Mark my words.”

This also, according to Mr. Chalupadip, puts it in the running for world’s fastest river, as squeezing the channel down into a four-inch slot resulted in current speeds of 39 miles an hour.

Ironically enough, that was probably about the maximum sprinting speed of Old Man Hatfield’s razorback hog.

(Sources: “World’s shortest river is long on controversy,” an article by Niki Hale Price published Jan. 18, 2007, in Oregon Coast Today; “What’s the World’s Shortest River?” an article by Ken Jennings published June 18, 2012, in Conde Nast Traveler; “Destination Oregon: Lincoln City’s D River — The World’s Shortest?” a short video published Dec. 22, 2021, by Central Oregon Daily News; “What’s up with those claims of Oregon Coast towns?” an article by Andre Hagestedt published without a date in the Oregon Coast Beach ConnectionWebsite; “Changing the Channel,” a humorous article published March 30, 2021, in Oregon Coast Today.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.