"The Unconquerable Colorado"

The life story of the Colorado is a saga of defiance. As a river it is ugly; tricky as a gangster, merciless as the laws of nature. But as a worker it is efficient. And as a fighter it is unconquerable.

A little girl, holding Daddy's hand, peeked over the rim into the mile-deep, fifteen mile wide chaos of mountains, mesas, and tortuous gorges chiseled and gashed across northern Arizona by this savage stream and, as several hundred thousand other visitors to the Grand Canyon do every year, recoiled in dismay.

"For goodness sake, Daddy," she gasped, "what happened?"

You have to go a long time back to answer that one; back, in fact, to the ninth verse of the first chapter of Genesis the actual beginning of that stupendous business of dry land rising out and waters rushing down to sea. In this eternal conflict of the elements no spot of the earth's surface has escaped unchanged, and no waters have wrought so ruthlessly or with such gorgeously theatrical results as those of the Colorado. Its fanatical zeal has ravished onetwelfth of the entire United States, an area equal in size to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri combined; 54,371 square miles greater than all France. Half a dozen European countries could be tucked away inside its major canyons. To grasp the immensity of the river's domain one must think in new dimensions, feel in terms of eternity, and hold the hand of God.

From the lofty peaks and valleys of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico; from the high-walled canyons of Nevada and Arizona, hundreds of furious torrents rush together to form this single flood which gouges and files its hidden path through a thousand miles of awesome canyons. In mid-career, surly and dangerous, it merges on the Pacific plain, snakes through the deserts of California, Arizona, and Old Mexico, gulping vicious spurts of energy along the way from the Bill Williams and Gila rivers before it stumbles over its own luggage into the Gulf of California. No other river in the world ever fought through such a wide variety of country, nor left a trail of such barbaric beauty; a watershed of majestic proportions as untamed today as when the continent was born, a wild, jagged wilderness almost two thousand miles long and from three to five hundred miles wide.

Little man, always hungry, always greedy for arable lands, came upon this vast scene of devastation very late, less than a moment ago geologically speaking. Feeling himself robbed, he called the marauder every bad name he could think of; Outlaw of the West, Beast of the Canyons, Mad River of the Desert, and Red Bull of the Delta. With this off his chest he set to work with a flourish to make the wild, free thing his servant. But until a cat's wink ago stealing water from the Colorado was about as easy as snatching a cup of coffee through the window of a streamliner's dining car going seventy miles an hour. However now, with incredible audacity, the deed is done, the Colorado has literally been sold down the river and no man living today need fear the slave's revenge. What the victim may be planning to do some day to the Boulder Dam Project is of no concern for several generations. During this interlude in its history it will almost meekly light the way, plow the soil, and give life to the desert. The Era of the West is beginning.

Of course, by river time, this incident is the merest interruption. Its second hand ticks in centuries, a million years is but a day. The Colorado never saw a white man till four hundred years ago. Already it had completed the earth's two billion year biography in technicolor on a thousand-mile stage, a mile high, as a mere by-product of its main job; that of defying an obstruction seven thousand feet high and a thousand miles thick at the base. Naturally it had to get tough, and it did. And it will again.

To begin with, the Colorado river was born in a trap between two mountain ranges, fourteen thousand feet above the sea. For fifteen million years it sowed its wild oats, a bastard without benefit of a birth certificate. Then all of a sudden, on July 21st, 1921, a squeamish Congress of the United States cleared the records by designating Grand Lake, high in the Colorado Rockies, as forever after the stream's official parent. Before that time the term Colorado river had been applied only below the junction of the Grand and the Green; and of the two the Green, rising in Wyoming, was generally considered the more important. (All the old books and most of the new must be read with this in mind).

In early life the baby Colorado had to deal with nothing more

Boulder Dam is a milestone in the achievements of the Bureau of Reclamation in the west. This great dam was built to control the formidable than a broad. gentle valley, not unlike that of the Mississippi; the receding sea not discouragingly far away. For a time the future looked rosy for the infant crawling this way and that around little rough spots. But life was not to turn out that way. Old Man Nature had other ideas. With secret wiles he aroused in the deep womb of Mother Earth a mighty unrest, and in her millennial-long travail she stirred the covers of her dark bed on a vast scale. Under the whole course of the young river a quarter million square miles rose slowly and relentlessly.From that day to this, over the entire uplifted country, every drop of water has been at war with every grain of sand. Inch by inch the dry land came up, inch by inch the river cut it down-about a thousand feet every two million years just fast enough to hold its own. Too proud to climb, too smart to dig, it worked solely to maintain its original elevation above sea level. Today, deep in the gloom of the inner gorge, between canyon walls seven thousand feet high, it is up against the oldest known rock in the world, the thousand million year old Archeozoic core of the earth; still grinding, still running exactly where it ran in the beginning.

Furthermore, the terrifying gorge we see today is not all the cutting and carrying away the waters have done. A vast bulk yet another mile high over the entire quarter million square miles of watershed has been almost utterly devoured. A few stubs left sticking up bear witness that mountain ranges high as the Himalayas might otherwise exist today. The scope of the river's labor strains human comprehension, bare facts seem gross exaggerations, and any statement can become paradox. The Colorado is not to blame for the canyons. The river did not attack the earth, the earth attacked the river. The Colorado's seven-state basin isn't a basin at all, it is an irregularly shaped continental hump breaking down abruptly to sub-sea level. It flaunts the continent's highest mountains, most arid mesas, loftiest plateaus, deepest canyons, and lowest deserts. It is the sun-scorched, sand-blasted skeleton of the Great American Desert yet the home of one of the greatest river systems in the world. There is something horrifying to man about its naked beauty, but it is good for his soul.

In the high country ice caps, glaciers, and cloudbursts on more than fifty peaks above fourteen thousand feet in altitude feed fury to a thousand nameless torrents and more than fifty named rivers and creeks.Many tributaries, mostly so inaccessible as to be practically Unknown to the public, are unsurpassed in all the world for sheer violence and appalling beauty. Not more than one in a thousand Grand Canyon visitors ever heard of the four amazing waterfalls thirty miles away in Havasupai Canyon-iridescent blue-tinted water sparkling greenish in the sunlight, dashing musically over a precipice higher than that of Niagara Falls. Almost as seldom seen are the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado, caused by a volcanic dam pushed across the path of the stream in the explosions of 876 A. D.

The upper basin is a land of hidden rivers, secret canyons, and unexplored caverns in unscaled walls; a realm of mystery and dangerIts wild color blinds the boldest eye, its barbaric pattern defies the bravest foot. Lives have been lost, heroic hearts broken, but who can say that a complete map of the Colorado's high country has yet been made?

From the beginning the bedeviled Colorado has made the best use possible of what it had to work with. Its allies, the rain, the frost, the wind, eroded mountains and mesas and headlong freshets, gashing across the plateaus, swirled immeasurable tons of this debris into the river's fast-falling current. Of this the master opportunist turned every cutting particle against the solid rock rising persistently to block its passage. Many deep canyons were cut along the course of the river. The longest unbroken stretch is the Marble and Grand Canyon series; about 230 miles where sheer walls now rise forty-five hundred feet. In this distance alone the river drops downhill onethird of a mile.

Rock and gravel and earth, having served their master in the canyons, go to the Gulf by fast freight aboard the muddy, red current. Comparison with the Nile emphasizes the cause of its speed: length of Nile, 3,946 miles, total fall, 6,000 feet; length of Colorado, 1,700 miles, total fall, 14,000 feet a good two and a half vertical miles.

This sand-laden speedster not only sculped the high country to astound the eye of many but built a delta in the low country to break his heart a weird subworld.

The Gulf of California once reached the base of the San Jacinto mountains, one hundred and forty miles above its present head. It was there the river first met the tides, staggered, fumbled, dropped its load and soon found itself battling a sand dam of its own making. Behind this dam, at the far western end, a huge lake backed up in a depression a thousand feet below sea level. Gradually the head of the Gulf was pushed farther down, gradually the lake evaporated;mighty Colorado River and to produce power. A lake over a hundred miles long is backed up behind Boulder, reaching Grand Canyon.

RECLAMATION BUREAU OF RECLAMATION

steadily the old river came on, chasing the Gulf through a dozen emergency channels, occasionally swerving northwest to pour new flood into the lake in Salton Sink. Always it brought sand, dumping its monstrous loads in ridges, flats, islands, and unstable bars, spreading its delta with reckless abandon. In the course of its detours it filled in the sink until now the Salton Sea, forty-seven miles long, seventeen miles wide, steams itself away under the desert sun only two hundred and forty-eight feet below sea level.

It is easy to see why a bed which would be ample in December would cramp this variable giant in June; and why, frustrated and always looking for trouble, would thrash around, kicking up old sand, spreading new, and getting the geography of hundreds of square miles in a mess a sort of fascinating, nightmarish mess, in places from a hundred to three hundred feet higher than the lowest spots of the surrounding country.

The delta is low and hot, twenty-two hundred square miles of it below sea level, with temperatures up to 130; sand dunes, alkali flats, salt sinks, hot mud geysers; a patchwork of sloughs and sickly lakes, laced through with changing channels of the river itself. For hundreds of years vast stretches lie unnoticed by the "overhead" river; then suddenly taken with a whim to destroy, it sweeps down in such floods the whole landscape is changed in a matter of hours. Its bad behavior in its high delta bed is exactly what got the Colorado into trouble. It finally roused man to action.

But a lot had to happen first. The unfriendly Colorado is a freak. Other great rivers, practically without exception, have been the original arteries of pioneer travel, affording easy access to interiors, and inviting settlers. Later, they fathered commerce, floating produce down, bringing back the luxuries of civilization. None of these things the Colorado has ever done.

Traffic on the lower river never flourished and died early of a broken heart. To this day no man and no boat has been hardy enough to travel upstream through the canyons. Almost every great river in the world has a great city at its mouth. The Colorado has none, nor even a settlement upstream for about a hundred miles. Yuma, a good town now but which, in the early days, the river tried time and again to destroy.

Nowhere in its whole anti-social career is the river so strange, terrifying, and dangerous as it is in that last hundred miles before it enters the Gulf. Here it fights off intrusion with perhaps the most phenomenal tidal bore in the world. A tidal bore is nothing but a tidal wave rushing up between converging shores to meet a river's current. They are noticeable in but few rivers. Ordinarily river mouths spread wide and tides carry away much of the sedimenta tion with little disturbance. But the Colorado, as usual, got a tough break. Its exit into the Gulf is narrow and landlocked, with no widesweeping tidewaters. Its main current is always pinched between stubborn sand banks, and heavy with silt.

The first white man to successfully struggle against the river was the Spanish navigator, Hernando de Alarcon. In 1540 he worked his three sturdy ships in through the delta maze, survived the bore's pounding, and staggered two hundred and thirty-four miles up the lower river then reeled right back again. This single escapade seems to have convinced the adventurous Spaniards they didn't care much for river travel.

About the same time a few wandering Conquistadores led by one Lt. Don Lopez Cardenas, stopped dead in their tracks on the brink of the Grand Canyon. However, unless their eyes popped out, nothing came of that either. Another small group led by Father Escalante, a Spanish priest, got lost in the same region and in desperation actually crossed the Colorado near the mouth of the Paria river.

Three hundred and eighty-six years passed. One day in 1826 along came James O. Pattie, the first American to take a look over the rim of the Grand Canyon which is exactly all he did so far as the river is concerned. Then Europe went all out for beaver hats, which made a tremendous difference to thousands of other beavercluttered streams in western America but very little to the Colorado itself. A few trappers risked short flirtations with the Green and the Grand but in most cases their names died with them. In 1825, vacationing with half a dozen others, Brigadier General William H. Ashley decided to cash in a few Colorado river beavers. He staked his life and nearly starved to death on the upper waters but he didn't get far and he didn't get beavers. Next in 1836, as shown by his autograph on the stone walls, Julien, a mysterious Catholic missionary, got past the junction of the upper rivers before the canyons gave him the kiss of death. So far the human element more or less affected the history of the Colorado but in no way entered into its life story as a river. (As a matter of fact, nothing ever did until it ran up against Boulder Dam.) However, when in 1869 Major John Wesley Powell led the first successful expedition through all the canyons from far up the Green to where Boulder dam now stands, his intrepid exploration was of great value to man. His courage, his facility in bestowing names, and his accurate scientific reports opened to human knowledge an incomparable region, hitherto utterly unknown.

Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, who accompanied Powell on a second trip in 1870-71, gives the following glimpse of the country at that time: "Below Green River City, Wyoming, where we embarked, there was not a settlement, not a single settler of any kind on or near the river for a distance of more than a thousand miles. The nearest Mormons were a hundred airline miles westward across trackless wilderness. To the east the few pioneers who had crossed the backbone of the continent were twice as far away in solitude the river swept on with ominous concentration of purpose."

In the seventy-five years that have elapsed since then the Colorado, without it making the least particle of difference in its habits, has given up much of its mystery. Fifteen other successful voyages have been made through the inner gorge and many books written revealing its wonders. The Grand Canyon National Park has been established, a fifty-five mile stretch along both sides of the deepest, most impressive canyons. In all, six bridges have been built. The most remarkable, Navajo Bridge, spans Marble Canyon, the only highway bridge in approximately 300 river miles between Moab, Utah and Boulder Dam. This is one of the highest bridges in the world, its floor four hundred and sixty-seven feet above the river. In the Park excellent roads have been made along both sides of the rim, a few trails cut and blasted out down to the river. Railroads, hotels and guides have come in, sightseeing made easy in this restricted area. However, far to the south in the delta country, something else was happening destined to make enough difference to throw the old river completely off schedule. Hungry men fell in love with miles of rich, flat land, seemingly ignored by the river; some began to plow, some climbed the banks and built all manner of fences, putting up little "Keep Out" signs. In Arizona, California, and Old Mexico thousands of men feverishly dug ditches and led ribbons of water between the furrows of thousands of fertile acres. Crops flourished and the whole nation smacked its lips.The river looked down from its high bed and scowled at the intruders. Time and again it flipped its tail and wiped out dams, dykes, and headgates. The persistent, audacious development of the Yuma desert, Imperial Valley, and the Mexican delta is book-length stuff, concerning men only. The final showdown alone involved the river. This came in 1905-6-7. By that time the men were fighting mad and the river of a mind to tell them off once and for all. Taking a million dollar bite out of Imperial Valley's barricades it plunged across two hundred square miles of growing crops, flooding bringing millions of cubic feet of muddy water every twenty-four hours into the Salton Sea.The war was on, man against the river; a tragi-comic free-for-all peculiarly American; greed, skullduggery, personal vanities, fabulous lobbies, confusion, wasted time and high blood pressure all mixed up with high courage, individual sacrifice, scientific genius, hard work and great vision. New fences finally stemmed the flood and confined the river once more to its high bed but seven states and two nations knew the relief was only temporary. Something drastic had to be done. The wild thing had to be caught in a tight place, stopped in its tracks and held there. By that time men knew this would take some doing. So they got together to talk it over and forthwith en joyed a nice little thirty year war among themselves.

It is probable that the river itself had no fear whatever for its freedom until 1936 when Boulder Dam wedged itself between the solid rock walls of Black Canyon. That backed him up and knocked him groggy-his first humiliation in fifteen million years.

But, of course, this isn't all the river has to worry about. The elastic overall Project envisions decades of building; its object, flood and silt control, water conservation for irrigation, industrial and domestic purposes.

Boulder Dam caught the river in Black canyon, fifth down from the Grand Canyon, and it is simply the biggest dam built then in the world; 726 feet high, equal to a sixty story skyscraper; 660 feet thick at the base; 1244 feet across the top, and 45 feet wide, carrying a four-lane highway. It contains about three and one-quarter million cubic yards of concrete, and is the magnificently original corner stone of the fast-growing structure of the southwest. In line and texture it is simple and majestic, an inexpressibly beautiful work of art con-ceived and created by a mathematical and machine-minded culture.

Down at the base in a couple of wings, high as twenty story buildings, with room for seventeen gigantic generators, six billion kilowatt hours of electric energy can be created annually. Great steel towers march off across two hundred and fifty miles of desert carry-ing 1,835,000 units of horse power-limitless wealth for millions of people, and $5,000,000 annually for the United States Treasury.

All this is important, but equally important is the fact that Boulder Dam gave man his first flood-free chance to work his will with the lower river. Down there two million contiguous desert acres in Arizona, California, and Old Mexico waited only for irrigation, hordes of people from all parts of the United States were swarming in, all crying aloud for water, and thousands of machines in plants and mines were begging to be born. Tremendous things happened fast and are still happening in the life of the manacled river.

Geographically, Parker Dam, 156 miles below Boulder, comes first, lifting water seventy feet into the Colorado River Aqueduct, which is in itself a world beater. Never was there one so long nor with anywhere near its capacity. It crosses deserts by steps and pumps, tunnels through full-size mountains, crawls under a river by inverted siphon and delivers to insatiable Los Angeles and twelve of its neighbors good, clean water.

Chronologically, Imperial Dam, almost 150 miles further downstream, was completed well ahead of Parker. Its business differs radically from that of the other two; also its appearance. It is a strange, bulky sort of a fence with massive gates, used to raise the water level about 23 feet in a backwater basin reaching only fifteen miles upstream. On the California side are six parallel settling basins twelve hundred feet long. Above the intake gates huge trash racks divert the heavier debris, only the silt settles in the basins and can be sluiced out, leaving perfectly clear water to go directly into the All-American Canal.

The main fence is constructed to herd most of the river westward into California's Imperial Valley; the gates on the Arizona side of the river are to let water through for the great irrigated area near Yuma.

The All-American Canal is a whale of a ditch, concrete lined, eighty miles long, over twenty feet deep, and two hundred feet wide at the water's surface. Its destiny is to keep twenty-nine hundred miles of lesser canals and laterals running bank full to a sunken garden larger than the state of Delaware. Imperial Dam is above sea level. The garden, all its workers, and ten towns served by the monster ditch are far below sea level. The water would run much too fast if not controlled. This is accomplished by five steps, with power plants at each, producing a total output of four million kilowatt hours per year.

And still the heckling goes on. Right now dirt is flying, giant shovels swinging and men sweating in Pyramid canyon up river eighty miles from Parker, sixty-seven miles below Boulder. Here Davis Dam is growing stubbornly across the river's path. Its crest will rise one hundred and thirty-eight feet above the river bed, provide another two-lane highway bridge, and back up nearly two million acre feet of water in a lake reaching almost to Boulder Dam. Primarily designed as a power project, transmission lines and substations will interconnect with the Boulder and Parker plants and will furnish power to the Gila development in southern Arizona, as well as to other commercial markets in central and western Arizona and southern California.

The golden era of the west is indeed underway. Power demands are fast overtaking the capacity of all existing hydroelectric genera-tors; millions of arid acres still wait for water to come to them in little ditches and determined men are swarming over the land in shirt-sleeves and high boots draining the river to the utmost drop of water it can be coerced into giving up.

And the answer is in the making. Behind Boulder Dam lies the biggest settling basin man ever made its waters could submerge the entire state of New York a foot deep, or drown Connecticut under ten feet. It has a five hundred and fifty mile shoreline and backs up one hundred and fifteen miles, twenty-seven of which reach into the Grand Canyon itself. It is beautiful Lake Mead, fast becoming one of the nation's favorite recreational areas; a sparkling, clear blue jewel in a rugged, technicolor setting. Its clearness and its blueness are startling in view of the fact that every year it receives thirty million acre feet of the thickest, reddest, muddiest water ever to flow on the face of the earth. Lake Mead is indeed a settling basin.

And the wise old Colorado knows exactly how to use it best for its own purposes. Behind Boulder Dam, far back now in the lower stretches of the Grand Canyon, silt is piling up.

But of course, in the meantime, man will be fighting back, building other dams higher up the river, making other huge lakes for the river to fill. He certainly will delay the inevitable to the last possible day in the evening. The Colorado River Project is re-assuringly elastic. Already two more dams to check the silt flow into Lake Mead have reached the tentative stage. Each will rival Boulder in size and be located on the upper river above Grand Canyon.

While all this is going on this wildest, hardest-working, most violently beautiful-ugly river is deep in its canyons, gnawing out the vitals of the earth, and making its own plans. Time is of no consequence. The entire uplifted country must be flattened and submerged. It will not be the first time but the seventh. And each time that the land has risen anew the river has resumed its task. The grim old fighter knows that the time must come when the whole southwest is once again reduced to submarine mud. It knows that when this chore is done a complete continental cycle will have passed, a cycle sweeping through a hundred million years of time.

Let man build his dams. Let the deserts of the last great wilderness of America blossom and bear fruit. It could be the old river isn't even annoyed; it could be the continent can be rotted off into the sea as quickly this way as any other. It could possibly even be that the hard-fighting, unconquerable Colorado conceals a streak of beneficence in its character which would make it manageable enough to take time out to build the great new Empire of the Southwest.