An Arizona Meadow that Disappeared

An Arizona Meadow That

IN APRIL 8, 1879, Hyrum Weech arrived in the Gila valley to make his home. It is difficult for one who lives in that valley at the present time to believe that the view which greeted him was so totally unlike that which one sees there today. Yet scores of old residents tell the same story about conditions of those days along the Gila that is so clearly related in the autobiography of this remarkble pioneer. After a description of earlier exploratory trips to the valley he describes it as follows: "The river, winding its course through the valley, was fringed on both sides with cottonwood and willow trees. The valley was covered with groves of mesquite trees and stretches of open ground covered with grass The Gila then was a stream with well defined banks and sloping graveled bottom. It was about four to six rods wide."

Certainly this picture is completely changed today! Instead of a quiet and clear stream less than a hundred feet wide the Gila river as it runs through the Safford valley is now a great winding channel with an average width of more than 200 feet. Scores of farms have been entirely washed away and the river channel occupies more than 16,000 acres of what was once rich farm land. Instead of a comparatively clear and steady flow, the water now rushes down in muddy tor-rents after each rain, carrying vast quantities of silt into the great San Carlos reservoir.

The thick growth of mesquite and other trees that extended from the banks of the river back to the mountain has been so completely cleared away that firewood now has to be hauled from the mountains and is so expensive that stoves which burn wood are being rap-idly supplanted by crude oil heaters. With the clearing of the land the river has cut farther and farther back into the improved farm lands. Today the river channel occupies about one-third of all the arable land of the valley. Some of this can be reclaimed, and many of the dangers of future damage will be avoided by the erosion and flood prevention work of the U. S. Soil Con-servation Service now under way, but much of the land is lost forever.

What is true of the river is also true of the washes that feed it. Many of these washes have become veritable canyons due to over-grazing and removal of vegetation along their banks. One of the most spectacular and tragic examples is the San Simon wash, a chasm more than 60 miles long which is in many places hundreds of feet wide and between 20 and 30 feet deep.

The true story of the San Simon is almost unbelievable. Fifty years ago there was a great unbroken meadow from Rodeo to Solomonville. Drainage was well spread over the area and each heavy rain replenished the artesian wells and waterholes without a rapid runoff. But some of the most severe storms carried some debris upon the lands of a few farmers living near Solomonville and they excavated a channel about twenty feet wide and four feet deep for a short distance to aid the drainage into the Gila. A few funneling levees and furrows to help the drainage into the main channel completed this part of the work. Consistent overgrazing and occasional droughts and heavy rains did the rest.

An empire of 1,250,000 acres, stretching from the 21,000 acres of timber on the upper end of the watershed through a succession of grassy plains to the fine agricultural land of the lower areas, has already been partially destroyed by neglect and carelessness.

Thousands of acre feet of silt have been washed into the Gila and thence to the reservoirs below. The wash grows larger as it extends itself and its hundreds of tributaries farther into the surrounding lands year by year. Instances might easily be multiplied because practically every wash tributary to the Gila has the same history. The young children of Hyrum Weech, in the early days of the settlement of Pima, ate their picnic lunches in Cottonwood wash. It was a tree-bordered creek only a few feet wide. It is now a deep dry wash similar to the San Simon, and has become more difficult to control each year.

Disappeared Gnawing Erosion Creates Unbelievable Changes on San Simon

The actual destruction of the land is only one phase of the problem of the Gila watershed. Perhaps the 40,000 acres of rich irrigated farms around Duncan and Safford could be bought and paid for by the money that will eventually be necessary to prevent their destruction. Over a long period of years the entire San Simon valley might profitably be abandoned surrendered as worthless to the natural forces set in motion by the carelessness of man.

But this is not the end of the story. Apart from the importance of preserv-ing the productive capacity of our soil for future generations, more immediate reasons make it imperative that every-thing be done to control erosion and floods on the Gila.

Should accelerated erosion continue along the upper Gila river, the Coolidge dam and the lands below it are doomed. Already the cost of removing silt from the distributaries of the San Carlos project is more than $100,000 each year. Without erosion control the life of this project will undoubtedly be made shorter by many years. The wel-fare of the upper valley is in this mat-ter the welfare of all who use the waters of the Gila.

The U. S. Soil Conservation Service has tackled the problem. Instead of ruined and abandoned lands, there is a modern vision of the future that in-cludes the best that Hyrum Weech saw when he gazed on a virgin valley in 1879. Rebuilding instead of annual destruction of land, more trees and grass, and an adequate and steady sup-ply of water, are among the goals sought. Combined with the safety and developments of civilization contributed by the great early pioneers, the new and more stable situation will support unnumbered generations of future Ari-zonians in substantial comfort.