THE SALTON SEA
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
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MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: The Salton Sea in August 1906
_Frontispiece_]
THE SALTON SEA
AN ACCOUNT OF HARRIMAN’S FIGHT
WITH THE COLORADO RIVER
BY
GEORGE KENNAN
ILLUSTRATED
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and printed. Published May, 1917.
FOREWORD
I desire gratefully to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Smithsonian
Institution, the U. S. Reclamation Service, the U. S. Geological
Survey, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the officials of
the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, for their courtesy in furnishing
me information, or permitting me to make use of their maps, diagrams
and illustrations.
GEORGE KENNAN.
CONTENTS
PAGES
1. THE SALTON SINK 5
2. THE CREATION OF THE OASIS 18
3. THE RUNAWAY RIVER 31
4. THE SAVING OF THE VALLEY 61
5. THE RECOMPENSE 93
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Salton Sea in August, 1906 _Frontispiece_
_Opposite page_
Relief Map of Imperial Valley 19
A Part of Colorado River Watershed 31
Agricultural Lands Eroded 57
A Flood Waterfall }
} 58
Nearer View of Flood Cataract }
Channel Cut by Runaway River 60
Hind-Clarke Dam }
} 89
Railroad Track on Reconstructed Levee }
THE SALTON SEA
“The desert waited, silent, hot and fierce in its desolation, holding
its treasures under the seal of death against the coming of the strong
ones.” (_Inscription over the main entrance to the Barbara Worth
Hotel, El Centro, Imperial Valley._)
No series of events in the history of southern California is more
interesting, or more dramatic, than the creation of the beautiful and
fertile oasis of the Imperial Valley in the arid desert-basin of the
Salton Sink; the partial transformation of this cultivated valley
into a great Inland Sea by the furious inpour of a runaway river;
the barring out of the flood by the courage and energy of a single
man, and the final development of the valley into one of the richest
agricultural areas in the world.
Sixteen years ago, the region whose productiveness now rivals that of
the lower Nile was the dried-up bottom of an ancient sea. It was seldom
sprinkled by rain; it was scorched by sunshine of almost equatorial
intensity, and during the summer months its mirage-haunted air was
frequently heated to a temperature of 120 degrees. The greater part of
it lay far below the level of the sea; nearly all of it was destitute
of water and vegetation; furious dust and sand storms swept across it,
and it was regarded, by all the early explorers of the Southwest, as
perhaps the dreariest and most forbidding desert on the North American
continent. This ancient sea-basin, which thousands of years ago held
the northern part of the Gulf of California, is now the Imperial
Valley--a vast agricultural and horticultural hothouse, which produces
almost everything that can be grown in lower Egypt, and which has
recently been described in the San Francisco Argonaut as “potentially
the richest unified district in the United States.”
As recently as the year 1900, the Imperial Valley had not a single
civilized inhabitant, and not one of its hot, arid acres had ever been
cultivated. It now has a population of more than forty thousand, with
churches, banks, ice factories, electric-light plants and fine school
buildings, in half a dozen prosperous towns, and its 400,000 acres of
cultivated land have produced, in the last six or eight years, crops to
the value of at least $50,000,000. The history of this fertile oasis in
the Colorado Desert will forever be connected with the name of E. H.
Harriman. He did not create the Imperial Valley, nor did he develop it;
but he saved it from ruinous devastation at a time when the agency that
had created it threatened capriciously to destroy it, and when there
was no other power in the world that could give it protection.
THE SALTON SINK
The story of the Imperial Valley begins with the formation, in remote
geologic times, of the great shallow depression, or basin, which
modern explorers have called the Salton Sink. Tens of thousands of
years ago, before the appearance of man on earth, the long arm of the
Pacific Ocean which is now known as the Gulf of California extended in
a northwesterly direction to a point more than a hundred miles distant
from its present head. Its terminus was then near the San Gorgonio
pass, about ninety miles east of the place where Los Angeles now
stands, and it extended across the Colorado Desert to the site of the
present town of Yuma. If it had not been affected by external forces,
it would probably have retained to the present day its ancient boundary
line; but into it, on its eastern side, happened to empty one of the
mightiest rivers of the Great West--the Colorado--and by this agency
the upper part of the Gulf was gradually separated from the lower,
and was finally turned into a salt-water lake, equal in extent to the
Great Salt Lake in Utah. This detached body of ocean water, which had
formerly been the upper part of the Gulf of California, completely
filled the basin of the Salton Sink, and had an area of approximately
2100 square miles.
“But how,” it may be asked, “could a river, however mighty, cut the
Gulf of California in two, so as to separate the upper part from the
lower and leave the former isolated?” Easily enough in the long ages
of geologic time. A great river like the Colorado does not consist of
water only. It holds in suspension and carries down to the sea a great
load of sediment, which, when deposited at its mouth, gradually builds
up a delta-plain of mud, and often changes topographical conditions
over a wide area. It was this deposited sediment that cut the Gulf
of California in two. The drainage basin of the Colorado and its
tributaries extends from the Gulf of California to the southern edge
of the Yellowstone National Park, and has an area of more than 260,000
square miles. Most of this area is mountainous, and the innumerable
streams that tear down through its gorges and ravines erode and gather
up vast quantities of sediment, which the river carries to the Gulf and
finally deposits in its waters. How great a load of silt the Colorado
brought down in prehistoric times we have no means of knowing; but it
transports past Yuma now about 160,000,000 tons of solid matter every
year, or enough to fill a reservoir one mile square to a depth of one
hundred and twenty five feet.[1] Century after century, the river
poured this vast quantity of silt into the Gulf opposite its mouth,
and gradually built up a delta-bar which extended westward, year by
year, until it finally reached the opposite coast. The upper part of
the Gulf was then separated from the lower by a natural levee, in the
shape of a delta-plain, which was perhaps ten miles in width by thirty
in length, and which extended from a point near the present site of
Yuma to the rampart of the Cocopah Mountains at Black Butte. When the
river had thus cut the Gulf of California in two, it happened to choose
a course for itself on the southeastern side of the delta-plain that it
had built up, and thereafter it discharged its waters into the lower
Gulf, leaving what had been the upper Gulf isolated as a salt-water
lake. Under the burning sun of that region about six feet of water
evaporates every year, and in course of time the lake dried up, leaving
the arid basin afterward known as the Salton Sink. This depression was
about one hundred miles in length by thirty five in width. It then had
a maximum depth of perhaps one thousand feet, and in the deeper parts
its floor was covered with an incrustation of salt.
[Illustration: The Ancient Gulf of California]
How long this ancient sea-bottom remained dry cannot now be determined;
but many thousands of years ago, probably in Middle Tertiary times the
Colorado River, which had first cut off the basin from the ocean and
thus allowed it to become waterless, proceeded to refill it. Running
over a raised delta-plain of silt, which sloped both ways, the river
could easily be diverted to either side, and in one of its prehistoric
floods it capriciously changed its course, leaving the Gulf and pouring
its waters into the dry basin of the Salton Sink. When it had refilled
this basin, and transformed it into a great fresh-water lake, it broke
through the silt dam, or levee, on the Cocopah Mountain side, and
found a new outlet to the Gulf through what is now known as Hardy’s
Colorado. For many years--possibly for centuries--the Salton Sink was
a fresh-water lake, into which the Colorado poured 150,000,000 tons
or more of silt every year. At last, suddenly or gradually, the river
again changed its course, abandoning the Sink and cutting a channel to
the Gulf through the eastern part of the delta plain. Then the Salton
Sea again dried up, leaving a two-hundred-mile ellipse of fresh-water
shells to mark its former level.
How many times, since the Tertiary epoch, the Salton Sink has been
alternately emptied and refilled, we have no means of knowing; but the
instability of the conditions that now determine the course of the
Colorado below Yuma seem to indicate that, at intervals of four or five
hundred years for many millenniums, the river, like a great liquid
pendulum, swung back and forth across its delta, now emptying into the
Gulf on the Arizona side, and then discharging into the Sink on the
California side. Every time the lake was deprived of the river water it
dried up, and every time the Sink was revisited by the river it again
became a lake. That the Colorado must have returned to this basin many
times, and flowed into it for long periods, is indicated by the fact
that after the Sink was separated from the Gulf of California, the
river carried into it something like seventeen cubic miles of silt.[2]
Artesian well borings at Holtville show that the sedimentary deposits
in that part of the Imperial Valley are now more than 1000 feet in
depth.
For three centuries or more--from 1540 to 1902--the Salton Sink was a
hot, arid desert. Melchior Diaz, a Spanish explorer in the service of
Cortes, reached the edge of it in the fall of 1540, and the Spanish
captain Juan Bautista de Anza crossed it two hundred and thirty four
years later; but neither of them saw anything like a lake. The only
evidence that the Colorado River ran into the Sink, at any time between
1540 and 1905, is furnished by the so-called Rocque map, now in the
British Museum, which was compiled from all the sources of information
that were in existence in 1762. This map shows a considerable body of
water in the Salton Sink, with the Colorado River flowing into it; but
no written record in support of the map has ever been found, and the
probability is that the water was nothing more than a comparatively
small lake, or lagoon, fed by the Colorado in time of flood. Overflow
water in considerable quantities often reached the basin when the
river happened to be more than bank full; but the main current of the
Colorado continued to flow into the Gulf, and the flood water in the
Sink soon evaporated.
In the latter part of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th,
many Spanish and American pathfinders crossed the Sink on their way
from Yuma to the California missions, but none of them found anything
like a lake. Colonel W. H. Emory, who traversed it with General
Kearney in the fall of 1846, described it as a hot, arid desert, where
there was a stretch of “ninety miles from water to water,” and where
no vegetation could be found except scattered desert shrubs and two
small patches of sun-burned grass. Captain A. R. Johnson, who also
accompanied the Kearney expedition, was the first to notice the fact
that this stretch of waterless desert was the dried-up bottom of an
ancient lake; but neither he nor Colonel Emory observed the still more
suggestive fact that it was below the level of the sea. In the deepest
part of the basin, near the present station of Salton, they discovered
a small lagoon; but its water proved to be so saturated with alkali
and salt that it was “wholly unfit for man or brute.” Three years
later, gold-seekers from the East began to take this route to the
Pacific Coast, and Bayard Taylor, in his “El-dorado,” has given their
impressions of the Salton Sink in the following words:
“The emigrants by the Gila route gave a terrible account of the
crossing of the Great Desert lying west of the Colorado. They
described this region as scorching and sterile--a country of burning
salt plains and shifting hills of sand, where the only signs of human
habitation were the bones of animals and men scattered along the
trails.”
Such, seventy years ago, was the Salton Sink, and such it had been
during the three preceding centuries of recorded history. If anyone
had then ventured to predict that this dried-up bed of the Gulf of
California, this hot, sterile and apparently irreclaimable desert,
would eventually become a beautiful cultivated valley, producing
cotton, barley, alfalfa, dates, melons and fruit, to the value of ten
or fifteen million dollars every year, he would have been generally
regarded as a visionary enthusiast, if not a desert-crazed monomaniac.
Although, at the beginning of the “gold rush” to California in 1849,
the Salton Sink had been known to the Spaniards for more than three
centuries, and to American explorers for at least twenty years, no
scientific examination of it had ever been made. Four years later,
however, in 1853, Jefferson Davis, who was then Secretary of War,
prevailed upon Congress to authorize a series of explorations for
the discovery of a practicable railroad route to the Pacific Coast.
Lieutenant R. S. Williamson, of the United States Topographic
Engineers, was selected as leader of the southern expedition, and with
him, as geologist, went Professor William P. Blake of New York, a young
graduate of the Yale Scientific School, who afterward attained great
distinction as geologist, explorer and mining engineer, in fields as
widely separated as Arizona, Alaska and Japan. Professor Blake was the
first to explain the origin of the Salton Sink, to trace its ancient
history, and to give a name to the great fresh-water lake that it
had once held. He was also the first to suggest the possibility of
irrigating it, and to predict that when it should be supplied with
water it would “yield crops of almost any kind.” Reclamation of desert
areas is now comparatively common; but sixty years ago, only a bold
and original mind could have entertained the idea of getting crops
out of such a “Death Valley” as the Salton Sink then was. Professor
Blake, however, had the imagination of an investigator, tempered by
the accurate knowledge of a scientist, and he could see that the
sedimentary deposits in that ancient sea-basin needed only water to
make them fertile.
The Kearney expedition of 1846, and the Bartlett and Williamson
surveys in 1850 and 1853, demonstrated the practicability of reaching
California by the southern route, and thousands of emigrants,
attracted to the Pacific Coast by the discovery of gold, went that
way in order to avoid the high mountains and the snow that they would
have encountered further north. This rising tide of travel soon led
to improvement in the means of transportation. Early in the “gold
rush,” Dr. A. L. Lincoln, a relative of Abraham Lincoln, established a
permanent ferry across the Colorado, near the junction of that river
with the Gila; a few years later, seventy four camels and dromedaries
were imported from Africa for use on the desert part of the route;
and in 1857, a private company began running bimonthly stages between
San Antonio, Texas, and San Diego, California. Finally, in 1858, the
Government established the “Butterfield Overland Mail,” which ran a
semi-weekly line of coaches from St. Louis to San Francisco, by way
of El Paso, Yuma and the Colorado Desert, on a time schedule of
twenty five days. This line was well equipped with more than a hundred
specially constructed Concord coaches, a thousand horses, seven hundred
mules, and about one hundred and fifty drivers. It received from the
Government a subsidy of $600,000 a year, and was the longest continuous
horse-express line then in existence on the North American continent.
Until the outbreak of the Civil War, this southern route was the main
artery of travel from the eastern States to the Pacific Coast; and it
is estimated that, between 1849 and 1860, eight thousand emigrants
crossed the Colorado Desert on their way to California.
Of all these eight thousand gold-seekers or pioneers, only one seems
to have been impressed by the agricultural possibilities of the Salton
Sink. Dr. O. M. Wozencraft, who has been described as “a man of marked
personality and far-reaching vision who lived a generation before his
time,” crossed the Sink on his way to San Bernardino sometime in the
early fifties; noticed the deposit of silt in the bed of the ancient
lake; observed that the shallow basin lay so far below the level of
the Colorado River that it might easily be irrigated therefrom; and
reached the conclusion, previously stated by Professor Blake, that the
arid waste of the Sink, if adequately supplied with water, could be
made to “yield crops of almost any kind.” This idea so took possession
of his mind that, during the next five or six years, he spent much of
his time and a large part of his private means in promoting schemes
for the irrigation of this desert area. His engineer, Ebenezer Hadley
of San Diego, made a preliminary survey of the Sink, and recommended
a canal location practically identical with that which forty years
later was adopted. In 1859, upon the initiative of Dr. Wozencraft, the
California legislature asked Congress to cede to the State 3,000,000
acres of arid land, including the Salton Sink, for irrigation purposes.
The bill was favorably reported by a House committee, but failed to
pass. The Congressmen of that time regarded the reclamation of the
Colorado Desert as a subject for jocular rather than serious treatment,
and most of them were in sympathy with the California humorist, J.
Ross Browne, who said: “I can see no great obstacle to success except
the porous nature of the sand. By removing the sand from the desert,
success would be insured at once.”
With the failure of Dr. Wozencraft’s attempt to bring about the
reclamation of the Colorado Desert, interest in that region gradually
waned. The Butterfield Overland Mail service to the Pacific Coast was
discontinued; a new “Pony Express” line to San Francisco, by way of
Salt Lake City, was established; and before 1865, the southern route,
via Yuma and the Colorado Desert, had been practically abandoned. Dr.
Wozencraft continued talking, to all who would listen, about his scheme
for the irrigation of the Salton Sink; but most people regarded it as
visionary, and nobody seemed inclined to take it up. Only in 1891,
thirty eight years after Professor Blake first suggested irrigation,
and twenty nine years after Dr. Wozencraft’s bill failed in Congress,
was a serious attempt made to realize the “dream” of turning water
into the Salton Sink and creating a fertile oasis in the heart of the
Colorado Desert.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Rep. of U. S. Geolog. Survey for 1916.
[2] “The Imperial Valley and Salton Sink,” by H. T. Cory, formerly
Chief Engineer of the California Development Co., p. 49; San Francisco
1915 (embodying paper read Jan. 8, 1913, before the Amer. Soc. of Civil
Engineers and published in its Transactions as “Paper 1270”).
THE CREATION OF THE OASIS
In 1891, John C. Beatty, of California, another man who had imagination
and foresight, became interested in the agricultural possibilities
of the Colorado Desert, and formed a corporation under the name of
“The California Irrigation Company” for the purpose of carrying
water into the Salton Sink from the Colorado River. He engaged as his
technical adviser Mr. C. R. Rockwood, who had been in the employ of
the U. S. Reclamation Service, and who was regarded as “a shrewd and
clever man and engineer.”[3] Mr. Rockwood made a careful survey of
the Colorado delta, and found, as Lieutenant Bergland had found in
an earlier survey, that between the river and the Sink there was a
natural obstacle in the shape of a range of sand hills, which extended
southward to the border line of Mexico. All natural overflows of the
river, in prehistoric times, had been south of this barrier, and Mr.
Rockwood thought that it would be easier and more economical to follow
the river’s ancient track than to put a conduit through these hills
on the American side of the boundary. He proposed, therefore, to take
water from the Colorado at Potholes, twelve miles above Yuma, carry it
southward into Mexico, thence westward around the promontory of sand
hills, and finally northward, across the line again, into southern
California. This plan would involve the digging of a curving canal,
forty or fifty miles in length, through Mexican territory; but it would
obviate the necessity of cutting through the sand hills, and would
perhaps enable the diggers to utilize, on the Mexican side, one of the
dry barrancas, or ancient overflow channels, through which the Colorado
discharged into the Sink in ages past.
[Illustration: Relief Map of Imperial Valley and Its Environment]
Owing to the lack of public confidence in reclamation experiments,
Mr. Beatty and his associates were not able to secure as much capital
as they needed for their enterprise, and when the monetary panic of
1893 came, they found themselves involved in financial difficulties
from which they could not extricate themselves. In the latter part of
1893 the California Irrigation Co. went into bankruptcy, and its maps,
records, and engineering data were turned over to Mr. Rockwood, in
satisfaction of a judgment that he obtained in a suit for his unpaid
salary.[4]
This seemed likely to put an end to the Salton Sink project; but Mr.
Rockwood, whose observations and work in the Colorado delta had given
him unbounded faith in the ultimate success of the scheme, determined
to undertake the promotion of it himself. After several years of
endeavor, he succeeded in forming another organization which was
incorporated in New Jersey, on the 21st of April 1896, under the title
of “The California Development Company.” For two years or more, this
corporation tried to get permission from the Mexican Government to hold
land, acquire rights, and dig an irrigating canal south of the boundary
line; but the Mexican authorities refused to make any concessions,
and it was finally found necessary to organize a subsidiary Mexican
company. This corporation, which had a nominal capital of $62,000, was
wholly owned and controlled by the California Development Co., but it
operated under a Mexican charter.
As the financial resources of both companies were largely on paper,
it then became necessary to secure real capital for the prosecution
of the work, and this task Mr. Rockwood found extremely difficult.
The proposed reclamation of an arid desert, where the thermometer
went in summer to 120 in the shade, and where only two or three
inches of rain fell in the course of the whole year, did not strike
Eastern capitalists as a very promising venture, and most of them were
disinclined to go into it. At last, however, in 1898, Mr. Rockwood
secured a promise from certain capitalists in New York that they would
advance the necessary funds; but two days before the papers were to be
signed, the American battleship “Maine” was blown up in the harbor of
Havana, and this catastrophe, together with the war that followed it,
put an end to the negotiations.
But the plan for the irrigation of the Salton Sink was not destined to
fail. Among the men with whom Dr. Wozencraft discussed it, in the early
eighties, was George Chaffey, a civil engineer and irrigation expert
of Los Angeles, who had had a good deal of experience in dealing with
water problems, and who had already established successful irrigation
systems in other parts of California.[5] Mr. Chaffey declined to go
into it at Dr. Wozencraft’s solicitation, not because he was afraid of
the engineering difficulties involved, but because he thought that
the torrid climate of the Sink would prevent colonization of it, even
if the colonists were promised plenty of water. Most men, he reasoned,
would be frightened by the prospect of having to do hard agricultural
labor in shade temperatures of 110 to 120, and sun temperatures of
perhaps 140 to 150. They simply would not go to a place where they
would be subjected to such heat. Some years later, however, Mr. Chaffey
carried through successfully an irrigation enterprise in the interior
of Australia, where the temperature in the shade often reached a
maximum of 125, but where, nevertheless, men were able to work without
danger or serious inconvenience. This changed his view of irrigation
in the Colorado Desert; and in 1900, when the California Development
Co. seemed unable to get money enough for its project elsewhere, Mr.
Chaffey offered to finance the undertaking and superintend the work.
His proposals were accepted, and on the 3rd of April 1900, he became
president of the company, and signed a contract by which he bound
himself to construct canals, at a cost of not more than $150,000, which
would carry to the Imperial Valley 400,000 acre-feet of water per
annum.[6]
Mr. Chaffey and his associates modified the plan of Mr. Rockwood by
taking water from the Colorado at Pilot Knob, nearly opposite Yuma,
instead of at Potholes, twelve miles above. Putting in a head-gate
there, they carried their main canal southward across the Mexican
boundary, in a course nearly parallel with the river, until they
reached the barranca, or dry overflow channel, known as the Alamo. As
this ancient watercourse meandered westward in the direction of the
Salton Sink, they were able to clear it out, enlarge it, and utilize
most of it as a part of their irrigation system. Then, at a point about
forty miles west of the Colorado, they carried their canal northward,
across the boundary line again, into southern California. The work
throughout was pushed with great energy, and on the 14th of May,
1901, a little more than a year after Mr. Chaffey assumed direction
of affairs, water was turned in at the Pilot Knob head-gate, and the
irrigation of the Salton Sink became a certainty, if not a fully
accomplished fact.
As the California Development Co. was a water-selling company only,
and had no proprietary interest in the lands to be irrigated, it
was thought best to form another organization for the promotion
of settlement; and in March 1901 the Imperial Land Company was
incorporated for the purpose of attracting colonists, laying out town
sites, and developing the Sink by bringing its lands into cultivation.
Then Mr. Chaffey and the Land Company began an advertising campaign for
the purpose of interesting the general public in the scheme; and in
order not to frighten settlers and small investors by using in their
advertisements and circulars the ominous words “desert” and “Sink,”
they changed the name of the basin that they proposed to irrigate and
called it “The Imperial Valley.” This title was evidently alluring,
because it attracted small investors in all parts of the East, and
particularly in New England. The Development Company’s stock was
bought, for example, in places as far away from the Salton Sink as
Boston, Concord, Hopedale and Waverley, Mass.; Barre and Montpelier,
Vt.; Portsmouth, N. H.; Elgin, Ill.; Portland, Oregon; and Toronto,
Canada.[7] Settlers soon began to come in; mutual water companies were
organized; and before the 3rd of April 1902, when Mr. Chaffey severed
his connection with the company, four hundred miles of irrigating
ditches had been dug, and water was available for 100,000 acres or more
of irrigable land.[8]
About this time, however, the future of the Valley was seriously
imperilled by unfavorable reports concerning its soil. In the early
part of 1902, the Bureau of Soils of the U. S. Agricultural Department
published the results of a survey of the irrigable lands in the
Colorado Desert, and reported that they were so impregnated with alkali
that very few things could be successfully grown on them.
“One hundred and twenty five thousand acres of land” (the report said)
“have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk
of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They
must early find that it will be useless to attempt their growth....
No doubt the best thing to do is to raise such crops as sugar beet,
sorghum, and date palm (if the climate will permit), that are suited
to such alkali conditions, and abandon as worthless the lands which
contain too much alkali to grow those crops.” (“Field Operations of
the Bureau of Soils, U. S. Department of Agriculture,” 1901, p. 587.)
This report, which was widely quoted and commented upon, acted as a
serious check to the colonization of the Valley; and if it had been
made two or three years earlier, it might have been fatal to the whole
irrigation project. Fortunately, however, the crops raised by a few
farmers who had already been cultivating this “alkali impregnated”
land proved conclusively that the report of the analysis of the soil
made by the Government experts was unduly pessimistic, if not wholly
erroneous. Almost everything that was tried _did_ grow, in spite of
expert predictions, and the practical experience of men on the ground
gradually revived public confidence in the productiveness of the
irrigated lands. The colonization and development of the Valley then
proceeded with great rapidity. The two thousand settlers on the ground
at the end of 1902 increased to seven thousand in 1903 and to more
than ten thousand in 1904. A branch of the Southern Pacific railroad
was built through the Valley from Imperial Junction to Calexico and
Mexicali; town sites were laid out in six or seven different places;
the water system was extended by the digging of nearly four hundred
additional miles of irrigating ditches and canals; and before the 1st
of January 1905, one hundred and twenty thousand acres of reclaimed
land were actually under cultivation, while two hundred thousand acres
more had been covered by water stock.
[Illustration: Colorado Delta and Imperial Valley]
The observed fertility of the soil completely discredited the reports
of the Government experts, and more than justified the prediction made
by Professor Blake half a century before that when the Sink should
be supplied with water, it would produce “crops of almost any kind.”
Grapes, melons and garden vegetables matured in the Valley earlier
than in any other part of California; barley was a profitable crop;
alfalfa could be cut five or six times a year; and the finest quality
of long-staple Egyptian cotton yielded more than a bale (500 pounds) to
the acre. Experiments proved also that the climate and soil were well
adapted to the culture of grapes, grapefruit, oranges, lemons, olives,
figs, dates, pomegranates, apricots, peaches and pears.
The fear that men would not be willing or able to do hard work in the
hot climate of the valley proved to be wholly groundless. Great heat is
not necessarily weakening or prostrating unless it is accompanied with
great humidity, and the air of the Valley is at all seasons extremely
dry. In a discussion of this subject, Mr. H. T. Cory, formerly chief
engineer of the California Development Co., says:
“The climate of the region, with its long, hot, dry summers, is
peculiarly favorable to agricultural luxuriance. Thus it is that
here the very earliest grapes, fruits and vegetables are produced
for the United States market, with the consequent advantage of
commanding the highest prices. This is notably true of the Imperial
Valley cantaloupe, now famous all over this country, and of the
early grapes, asparagus etc. On account of the very low humidity
and gentle winds which blow most of the time in hot weather, the
sensible temperature--which is indicated by the wet-bulb thermometer
readings and gives the measure of heat felt by the human body--is much
less than the actual temperature as measured by the dry bulb. It is
conservative to say that a temperature of 110 in Imperial Valley is
not more uncomfortable than 95 in Los Angeles, or 85 in the more humid
sections of the Eastern States. Furthermore the nights are always
cool, the low humidity resulting in rapid and large daily temperature
variations.”
Under these favoring conditions of soil and climate, it seemed almost
certain, in 1904, that the Imperial Valley would have a great and
prosperous future; but no forecast in that region is trustworthy unless
it takes into account the irrigating agency, as well as the climate and
the soil. The Colorado River created the Salton Sink, and made fertile
the Imperial Valley; but it could destroy, as well as create; and in
1904 it showed itself in a new aspect and threatened the Valley with a
terrible calamity.
[Illustration: A Part of the Colorado River Watershed. The Grand Cañon]
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Mr. H. T. Cory.
[4] Mr. Cory.
[5] In his “Imperial Valley and Salton Sink,” Mr. H. T. Cory, formerly
chief engineer of the California Development Co., refers to Mr. Chaffey
in the following words:
“The writer takes pleasure in expressing appreciation of the standing
of Mr. George M. Chaffey in irrigation work in the West. The Ontario
Colony he founded in 1883 was selected ten years later as a model for
the irrigation exhibit at the World’s Exposition, and in his work at
Mildura, Australia, he designed, had built in England, and installed,
the first centrifugal pumps on the same shaft with a total capacity of
320 cubic feet per second lifted 20 feet. He is at present, among other
things, head of the magnificent water system irrigating 10,000 acres of
citrus lands near Whittier, California, including the highest priced
agricultural lands in California ($5,000 per acre). Furthermore he is
a man of affairs, and of large means which he acquired principally in
irrigation enterprises and banking.”
[6] Andrew M. Chaffey.
[7] List of stockholders in Sou. Pac. office, N. Y.
[8] Andrew M. Chaffey.
THE RUNAWAY RIVER
The most serious problem with which engineers have to deal in the
irrigation of arid land from a turbid river is the getting rid of
silt, and this problem is a particularly difficult one in the Imperial
Valley, owing to the immense amount of sediment that the irrigating
water contains. The Colorado River, until after it passes the Grand
Cañon, is almost everywhere a swift, turbulent stream, with great
eroding capacity. As Mr. E. C. LaRue has said, in a brief but graphic
description of it,
“When the snows melt in the Rocky and Wind River Mountains, a million
cascade brooks unite to form a thousand torrent creeks; a thousand
torrent creeks unite to form half a hundred rivers beset with
cataracts; half a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado,
which flows, a mad, turbid stream, into the Gulf of California.”
(“Colorado River and Its Utilization,” a Geological Survey report,
Government Printing Office, Washington 1916.)
Such a river, naturally, dissolves the earth and gnaws the rocks over
which it tears its way, and takes up millions of tons of solid matter,
in the shape of gravel, sand and finely pulverized soil. This great
volume of sediment, when finally dropped, not only tends to change the
river’s course by creating bars at or near its mouth, but gradually
fills up the irrigating ditches and canals and thus lessens their
carrying capacity. A single day’s supply of water for the Imperial
Valley contains silt enough to make a levee twenty feet high, twenty
feet wide, and one mile long. (Imperial Valley Press, July 25 1916). If
this silt is not dredged out, sluiced out, or collected in a settling
basin, it eventually raises the beds of the canals, fills the ditches,
and chokes up the whole irrigation system.
The managers of the California Development Co. had difficulty, almost
from the first, in keeping their waterways open. As more and more land
was brought into cultivation, more and more water was required, while
the silting up of the canals lessened the ability of the company to
meet the constantly increasing demand. There was a shortage as early as
the winter of 1902-3; but the situation did not become serious until
the following year, when the main canal, for a distance of four miles
below the intake, became so silted up that it could not possibly carry
the volume of water that was imperatively needed. An attempt was made
to remedy this state of affairs by putting in a waste-gate, eight
miles below the intake, for the purpose of sluicing out the channel in
time of high water.
“The idea” (as stated by Mr. Cory) “was to divert a large quantity of
water during the flood season, waste it through the Best waste-gate,
and in this way scour out the upper portion of the canal. At first,
the action was as expected, and some two feet in the bottom were
carried away. When, however, the river reached its maximum height, ...
and carried an excessive silt content, especially of the heavier and
sandy type, this scouring action was entirely overcome, and the bottom
of this stretch was raised approximately one foot higher than during
the previous year.”
This silting up of the main canal, and the consequent reduction of its
carrying capacity, caused great injury to the agricultural interests
of the Valley. Crops in many places perished for lack of water, and
hundreds of farmers put in damage claims, which amounted in the
aggregate to half a million dollars. In the late summer of 1904, it
became evident that radical measures would have to be taken at once to
increase the water supply. As the managers of the company had neither
the financial means nor the requisite machinery for quickly dredging
out the silted part of the canal, they decided, in September of that
year, to cut a new intake from the river at a point about four miles
south of the international boundary. This would eliminate the choked-up
part of the canal, and let water directly into the part that was
unobstructed.
[Illustration: The Three Headings (or Intakes), in Spring of 1905]
If President Heber and Chief Engineer Rockwood had been aware of the
fact that the Colorado was even then preparing to pour its waters
into the Salton Sink, by making one of its semi-millennial changes of
course, they might perhaps have fortified the western bank instead of
cutting through it; but there was little or nothing to show the extreme
instability of the conditions that were then determining the trend of
the river across its delta, and the idea that it might burst through
this intake and again turn the Valley into a fresh-water lake does not
seem to have occurred to anyone. The cutting was therefore made and the
water shortage relieved; but at the cost of imminent peril to the whole
Valley and its twelve thousand inhabitants.
In view of the tremendous and disastrous consequences of this measure,
it is only fair that Chief Engineer Rockwood should be allowed to
state, with some fullness, his reasons for adopting it, and for failing
to put in a head-gate to control the flow of water through the channel
and thus prevent its enlargement. In an article entitled “Born of the
Desert,” published in the second annual magazine number of the Calexico
Chronicle, in May 1909, he sets forth his reasons in the following
words:
“As soon as the summer flood (1904) dropped, I discovered that instead
of the bottom” (of the canal) “being lower, it was approximately
one foot above that of the year previous.... We knew that with the
dredging tools which we had it would be impossible to dredge out
this four miles of canal in sufficient time for the uses of the
Valley, providing the water in the river should drop as low as it had
the previous year.... We were then confronted with the proposition
of doing one of two things, either cutting a new heading from the
canal to the river below the silted four-mile section of the canal,
or else allowing the Valley to pass through another winter with an
insufficient water supply. The latter proposition we could not face,
for the reason that the people of the Valley had an absolute right to
demand that water should be furnished them, and it was questionable in
our minds as to whether we would be able to keep out of bankruptcy if
we were to be confronted by another period of shortage in the coming
season of 1904-1905.
“The cutting of the lower intake, after mature deliberation, and
upon the insistence of several of the leading men of the Valley, was
decided upon. We hesitated about making this cut, not so much because
we believed we were incurring danger of the river’s breaking through,
as from the fact that we had been unable to obtain the consent of
the Government of Mexico to make it, and we believed that we were
jeopardizing our Mexican rights should the cut be made without the
consent of the Government. On a telegraphic communication, however,
from our attorney in the City of Mexico, to go ahead and make the cut,
we did so, under the presumption that he had obtained the necessary
permit from the Mexican authorities. It was some time after this, in
fact after the cut was made in the river, before we discovered that he
had been unable to obtain the formal permit, but had simply obtained
the promise of certain officials that we would not be interfered
with, providing that plans were at once submitted for the necessary
controlling structures to be placed in this heading.
“... In cutting from the main canal to the river at this point, we
had to dredge a distance of 3300 feet only, through easy material to
remove, while an attempt to dredge out the main canal above would
have meant the dredging of four miles of very difficult material. We
began the cut the latter end of September and completed it in about
three weeks. As soon as the cut was decided upon, elaborate plans
for a controlling gate were immediately started, and when completed,
early in November, were immediately forwarded to the City of Mexico
for the approval of the engineers of the Mexican Government, without
whose approval we had no authority or right to construct the gate.
Notwithstanding the insistence of our attorney in the City of Mexico,
and various telegraphic communications insisting upon this approval
being hurried, we were unable to obtain it until twelve months
afterward, namely, the month of December 1905.
“In the meantime, serious trouble had begun. We have since been
accused of gross negligence and criminal carelessness in making this
cut; but I doubt as to whether anyone should be accused of negligence,
or carelessness, in failing to foresee what had never happened before.
We had before us at the time the history of the river as shown by
the rod-readings kept at Yuma for a period of twenty seven years. In
the twenty seven years there had been but three winter floods. In no
winter of the twenty seven had there been two winter floods. It was
not probable, then, that there would be any winter flood to enlarge
the cut made by us, and without doubt, as it seemed to us, we would be
able to close the cut, before the approach of the summer flood, by the
same means that we had used in closing the cut for three successive
years around the Chaffey gate at the head of the canal.[9] During
this winter of 1905, however, we had more than one winter flood. The
first flood came, I believe, about the first of February, but did
not enlarge the lower intake. On the contrary, it caused such a silt
deposit in the lower intake that I found it necessary, after the flood
had passed, to put the dredge through in order to deepen the channel
sufficiently to allow water to come into the valley for the use of the
people. This was followed shortly by another heavy flood that did not
erode the banks of the intake, but, on the contrary, the same as the
first, caused a deposit of silt and a necessary dredging. We were not
alarmed by these floods, as it was still very early in the season. No
damage had been done by them, and we still believed that there would
be no difficulty in closing the intake before the approach of the
summer flood, which was the only one we feared. However, the first two
floods were followed by a third, coming sometime in March, and this
was sufficient notice to us that we were up against a very unusual
season, something unknown in the history of the river as far back as
we were able to reach; and as it was now approaching the season of
the year when we might reasonably expect the river surface to remain
at an elevation that would allow sufficient water for the uses of the
Valley to be gotten through the upper intake, we decided to close the
lower.” (“Born of the Desert,” by C. R. Rockwood, Calexico Chronicle,
May 1909.)
At the time when the first attempt to close the intake was made, the
cutting was about sixty feet wide. A dam of piles, brush and sandbags
was thrown across it in March 1905, but it had hardly been completed
when another flood came down the Colorado and swept it away. A second
dam of the same kind, built a few weeks later, shared the same fate.
By the middle of June, the river was discharging 90,000 cubic feet of
water per second; the width of the lower intake had increased from
sixty feet to one hundred and sixty; water was overflowing the banks of
the main canal and accumulating in the deepest part of the Sink; and a
new Salton Sea was in process of formation.
[Illustration: Lower Intake at Time of Southern Pacific Loan]
Such was the state of affairs when Mr. Harriman and the Southern
Pacific Railroad Company first became directly interested in the
problem of river control. Early in 1905, the California Development
Co., finding itself in pecuniary difficulties, applied to Mr. Julius
Kruttschnitt, General Manager of the Southern Pacific, for a loan, on
the alleged ground that the Imperial Valley was furnishing a great deal
of traffic to the railroad, and the irrigation company was therefore
warranted in asking for financial assistance. Mr. Kruttschnitt,
however, declined to consider the application. The petitioners then
addressed the President of the railroad company, Mr. E. H. Harriman,
who, it was thought, might be induced to give the necessary aid, even
though he had no personal interest in the Valley and no connection
whatever with the California Development Co. Mr. Harriman, as a man of
imagination and far-seeing vision, was naturally in sympathy with the
bold attempt to irrigate and reclaim the arid lands of the Colorado
Desert, and when the matter of the loan was presented to him, he not
only gave it immediate consideration, but ordered an investigation and
a report. He finally consented, against the advice of Mr. Kruttschnitt
and other counsellors, to loan the Development Company $200,000, “to
be used in paying off certain of its floating indebtedness and in
completing and perfecting its canal system.” Inasmuch, however, as
the financial management of the irrigation company had not always
been judicious, Mr. Harriman and the Southern Pacific stipulated that
they should have the right to select three of its directors, one of
whom should be president, and that fifty one per cent of its stock
(6300 shares) should be placed in the hands of a trustee as collateral
security for the loan. This stipulation was agreed to, and on the 20th
of June 1905, the Southern Pacific Company, as chief creditor, took
temporary control of the California Development Company by selecting
three of its directors, and by appointing as its president Mr. Epes
Randolph, of Tucson, who was then acting also as president of the
Harriman Lines in Arizona and Mexico.[10]