The Salton Sea E-Book

George Kennan

• Herausgeber: Word Well Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In 1903, the US government tried to stop diversion of Colorado River water for use in the Imperial Valley. For that reason, and to bypass increased silting at the original intake, the California Development Company but a canal head in Mexico. A series of floods in 1905 destroyed a temporary dam and eroded the new canal intake. Water then rushed into the Imperial Canal-Alamo River system, allowing the entire discharge of the Colorado River to pour into the Salton Sink, creating the Salt Sea. After the floods had subsided, work on a diversion dam began. This first attempt failed. A second attempt consisted of a concrete flow gate, that became choked with silt and debris after a 1906 flood. Immense quantities of rock were brought to close the break, which was accomplished in February of 1907 after two years. Railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman (1848-1909) played a crucial role n these efforts. These matters are discussed in this book by George Kennan *1845-1924), published in 1917.

Leseprobe

THE SALTON SEA

AN ACCOUNT OF HARRIMAN’S FIGHT WITH THE COLORADO RIVER

ILLUSTRATED

GEORGE KENNAN

Originally published in the United States in the year 1917

This text is in the public domain.

Modern Edition © 2022 by Word Well Books

The publishers have made all reasonable efforts to ensure this book is indeed in the Public Domain in any and all territories it has been published.

Created with Vellum

CONTENTS

Foreword

The Salton Sea

1. The Salton Sink

2. The Creation of the Oasis

3. The Runaway River

4. The Saving of the Valley

5. The Recompense

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.

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.

1

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.