A half mile to the west rises the Sabine River, whose lower channel separated the New World empires of France and Spain and in 1836 became the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States. A fork here is called Cow Leach for an Indian chief who lived in the area. This is a three-way watershed: water flowing north goes into the Sulphur and then to the Mississippi, water flowing west drains to the Trinity, and water flowing south goes into the Sabine, which forms the Texas-Louisiana boundary and pours more water into the Gulf of Mexico than any other Texas river, 6,400,000 acre feet annually.