According to Aristoteles every story has a beginning and an end. Quite by nature the description of a river should begin at its source and follow to its mouth. If this sounds trivial a look on the map of its catchment area teaches us differently. The plate that has been put up on a rock to mark the origin of the Rhine suggests a clarity that is immediately blurred by the confusing net of capillaries. The accuracy of distance presumed by a number is only virtual, measured from a point arbitrarily determined. Why from here - why from the Anterior, why not from the Posterior Rhine? Consequently measured along which line? Which one of two waters is the main course of the river, which one is the tributary. And if we have sorted out the source, where is the end? Off Hoek van Holland? Near Katwijk? At Kampen? "Why the name Rhein eventually came to pass, if it really has derived from the celtic word for 'to run', the Greek rein and the Old High German hrinan, turns out to be more mysterious with every hour on our way through the bottoms of the valleys and the ravines of the confluents and tributaries. There is so much flowing in the Grisons and in such an immeasurable number that it remains unfathomable how a part of the flowing ('Rinnende') became 'Rhein'. It is even more mysterious how the people far distant from the sources, where the flowing can't be jumped across, have managed to agree on the same name."¹

"The Alpenrhein tributary system is generally regarded as the Rhine’s main headwaters. The flow begins in southeastern Switzerland along the southern flank of the St. Gotthard massif, in the canton of Grisons (also known as Graubünden). Two headstreams, the Hinterrhein [Posterior Rhine] and Vorderrhein [Anterior Rhine], collect glacial runoff and melting snow from hundreds of tiny rivulets and funnel the water down the narrow crags and gorges to the valley below. The Hinterrhein (57 km long) flows northward from the Paradise Glacier [Paradiesgletscher] near the Rheinquellhorn (3202m high) down the Via Mala, a spectacularly steep and dangerous canyon. Below Thusis, it loses some of its Alpine character and begins to wind its way through the Domleschg valley towards Reichenau. The Vorderrhein (68 km in length) cascades eastward from Lake Toma at the foot of Mount Badus (2928 m in height) on the southern flank of the Gotthard massif down the steep Bündner Oberland valley. The two headstreams merge to become the Alpenrhein (100 km) at the small Swiss town of Reichenau, just north of Chur. The Alpenrhein then winds its way through a wide valley choked with glacial debris, its riverbed serving at times as a border separating Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria, before flowing into Lake Constance (545 square kilometers in surface area). Biologically the Vorderrhein and Hinterrhein belong to the Trout Region, the Alpenrhein to the Trout/Grayling Region."¹
While for convenience Lake Toma is pinpointed as the principal source of the Anterior Rhine (and therefore the Alpenrhein or Rhine²), in reality the Alpine streams have no single source, and therefore no easy identifiable geographic locations, from which they spring. In Rhaeto-Romansch, the Grisons' local language, 'Rein' simply means ‘flowing water’ or ‘river.’ In view of the many tributaries as well as the intricacies of the Delta 'The Rhine' cannot be but a geographic or hydraulic abstraction, an effluent 'trimmed' like the trunk of a tree that that must be cleared of its branches to become 'timber wood'.
Rein da Tuma, Rein da Nalps, Rein da Medel, Rein da Sumvitg - The various mountain streams are distinguished by the gorges through which they flow: The Rein de Maighels, the Rein de Medel, the Rein de Sumvitg, and so on down the valley ridges. The Alpenrhein is the sum of all these Alpine flows. It is literally ‘The River.’

Even more than the Rhine below Lake Constance the Alpenrhein with its tributaries was "by nature unpredictable. Its flow was irregular and its deposition pattern haphazard, rendering human settlement in the Swiss canton of Grisons and the Austrian province of Vorarlberg exceedingly precarious. Mining and textiles were the prime industries, agriculture and livestock less so due to frequent inundations. The timber industry boomed in the eighteenth century, giving rise to more and more lumberjack communities situated directly on the floodplain. Meanwhile, deforestation from lumbering accelerated river erosion, thereby increasing the severity of floods. The floods of 1868 and 1871 brought the three riparian states – Switzerland, Austria, and Liechtenstein – to the negotiating table in search of a mutually acceptable rectification plan. The Swiss were the driving force behind these efforts, since they were eager to develop the Alpenrhein’s economic potential. The Austrian government still tended to view the Alpenrhein (which lay far removed from its Danube commercial centers) as a fringe region. It therefore took more than twenty years – and several more floods (1888, 1890, 1892) – before the Swiss-Austrian State Treaty of 1892 was finally negotiated and ratified."
In 1895 the Alpine riparian states created their own International Rhine Regulation Commission to oversee the Alpenrhein Project. Its initial plan was to to provide a riverbed 110 meters wide to steepen the river’s slope sufficiently to give its waters enough momentum to transport its sand and gravel into Lake Constance. In order to achieve this the bed of the river between the mouth of the Ill (not to be confused with the river Ill in Alsace) and Lake Constance was reduced in two phases: Between 1895 and 1900 a cut of 5 km was dug at Fußach near Lake Constance. It shortened the run by 7 km and moved the mouth 8 km to the west. In the years 1909-1922/3 a second cut was laid at Diepoldsau that shortened the river by another 3 km while dams and embankments harnessed the stretch from the Ill down.
In spite of the works the bed continued to silt up to dangerous heights. The river rose from year to year and the dams had to be raised and reinforced until the river at high water was level with the roofs of the villages menacing the settlements and the land behind the dyke. Following a new treaty in 1954 the cuts were reworked and the width of the river narrowed to 70 meters to increase the velocity of discharge. This project worked much better and today Lake Constance swallows 3 million cubic meters of glacial rubble, each year.
Additional flood control efforts along the rivulets and streams of the Anterior, Posterior and Alpine Rhine went hand in hand with land reclamation. As important was, however, the development of hydroelectric power in the valleys of the Anterior as well as the Posterior Rhine. First plants were built at Ragaz (1892), Frauenkirch (1894), Glaris (1899), and Flims (1904). While these served mostly for local consumption, in 1910 a plant was built at Sils, along with the long-distance power lines to export the energy 150 kilometers to the west. With a yearly production of 130 million kW/h, it was the largest of its kind at the time. Other projects followed in quick succession. By 1990 the Swiss-controlled section of the Alpenrhein basin was bedecked with 28 reservoirs and 61 hydroelectric plants, which collectively accounted for 15 percent of Switzerland’s yearly hydroelectric production.