Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [80]
The first of these tamers was an eastern developer with a grandiose imagination, a bulldog chin, a shock of steel-wool hair, and a name suggestive of his temperament. In 1892, Charles Rockwood saw the Colorado River for the first time and became obsessed. Sitting north of it, an appendage of the vast Sonoran Desert of southern California and Arizona, were hundreds of thousands of absolutely flat acres built by its ancient delta, fertile land where you could grow crops twelve months of the year. All that stood in the way of cultivation was an annual rainfall of 2.4 inches, about the lowest in the United States. Despite the imposing nature of the task, the temptation to play God with the river and turn this brutal desert green was too much for Rockwood to resist. After traveling halfway around the world for financial support, he seduced the most famous private irrigationist of his day, George Chaffey, into joining forces with him. By 1901, Rockwood and Chaffey had cut a diversion channel, and a good portion of the river was pouring over fields in what had once been called the Valley of the Dead (in grand nineteenth-century fustian tradition, Rockwood renamed it Imperial Valley). Within eight months, there were two towns, two thousand settlers, and a hundred thousand acres ready for harvesting.
By 1904, however, the artificial channel had already silted up, and a bypass had to be cut. It silted up. Another bypass was cut; it too silted up. Finally, after much negotiation, the developers persuaded the Mexican government to let them cut still another channel below the border. Because it was meant as a temporary expedient while the original channel was cleaned out in advance of the spring floods, the Mexican channel had the flimsiest of control gates. As luck would have it, the spring floods arrived two months early. In February, a great surge of snowmelt and warm rain spilled out of the Gila River, just above the Mexican channel, and made off with the control gate. For the first time in centuries, the river was back in its phantom channel, the Alamo River, heading for its old haunt, the Salton Sink. As the surge advanced across the Imperial Valley, it cut into the loamy soil at a foot-per-second rate, forming a waterfall that marched backward toward the main channel. Even as their fields were being eaten and as their homes swam away, the valley people came out by the hundreds to see this apparition, a twenty-foot falls moving backward at a slow walk. By summer, virtually all of the Colorado River was out of its main channel, and the Salton Sink had once again become the Salton Sea.
Chaffey had had some differences with Rockwood and got out of the California Development Company a short while earlier with his reputation intact, leaving his erstwhile partner ruined. But the Southern Pacific Railroad had already invested too much money in a spur line to the valley to watch it abandoned to fate, so it took Rockwood’s company into receivership and set about trying to tame the river. For the next two years, Edward H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, and the Colorado River fought nose to nose. Southern Pacific trains crawled back and forth across the valley like caterpillars, carrying rock and gravel to plug the half-mile breach. But 1905, 1906, and 1907 were some of the wettest years in the Colorado Basin’s history. In 1907, the river sent a record twenty-five million acre-feet—eight quadrillion gallons—to the gulf. The floods, one following another, casually ripped Harriman’s brush weirs to shreds; his miles of driven piles were uprooted and washed away. Finally, in February of 1907, after laughing away the railroad’s best efforts, the river decided to lull. With mad energy, the SP crews finally secured the breach. When the next surge came down, the weirs held, and the river, dumping silt ten times faster than the trains, began rebuilding its own confinement.
Victory or no, the Colorado