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Chapter
6
A RUNAWAY
RIVER
The managers of the California
Development Company had difficulty almost immediately
keeping their waterways open. An attempt was made to relieve
the silt problem by putting in a waste gate eight miles
below the intake, for the purpose of sluicing out the
channel in time of high water. According to Engineer Cory,
"The idea 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 of 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."
A New Cut is
Made
In the late summer of 1904, it was
obvious that something drastic had to be done. Hundreds of
farmers in the Imperial Valley had put in claims for damage
caused by the lack of adequate water. The financially
strapped company did not have the resources to buy the
dredges needed to quickly clean out the clogged canal, so
they decided to cut a new intake from the river at a point
four miles south of the international border. This would
eliminate the clogged portion. Little did President Heber
and Chief Engineer Rockwood know that the Colorado River was
about to make one of its semi-millennial changes in course,
with powerful floodwaters about to turn the valley into a
great freshwater lake. Had they known, they would have
fortified the west bank of the river, not cut through
it!
In Engineer Rockwoods words, "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."
Continuing his explanation in the
Calexico Chronicle of May 1909, Rockwood said that cutting
from the river to the main canal at this point meant
dredging only 3300 feet, through easy material, while an
attempt to dredge out the main canal above would have meant
going through four miles of very difficult material. The cut
was completed in three weeks, by the middle of October,
1904, and elaborate plans for a controlling gate were
immediately forwarded to the City of Mexico for approval
without which they had no right or authority to construct
such a gate. Approval finally came in December 1905-more
than a year later. Meanwhile serious trouble had begun.
Because rod readings kept at Yuma for a period of twenty
seven years showed only three winter floods during that
time, and never two winter floods in the same year, Rockwood
felt there would be plenty of time to close the cut before
the approach of a summer flood, using the same means they
had used for three successive years around the Chaffey gate
at the canal.
Unbelievable
Floods
"During this winter of 1905, however,
we had more than one winter flood. The first two,
arriving in February, did not
enlarge the lower intake. In fact, it was necessary to
dredge out the channel to allow sufficient water to come
into the valley for the use of the people. Rockwood was not
alarmed by these floods because it was still very early in
the season. However, a third flood came in March, and it was
obvious that they were up against a very unusual season,
unknown in the history of the river as far back as they were
able to reach. Realizing that the river's elevation was now
high enough to deliver needed water to the farmers through
the upper intake, they decided to close the lower
intake.
So much for good intentions! At the
time the first attempt to close the lower intake was made,
the cut was about 60 feet wide. A dam of pilings, brush and
sandbags was thrown across it in March, but it had scarcely
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 was also destroyed by the river. By the middle
of June, the river was discharging 90,000 cubic feet of
water per second; the width of the lower intake had widened
from sixty feet to one hundred and sixty; water was
overflowing the banks of the main canal, rolling across the
rich Imperial Valley farmland and accumulating in the
deepest part of the Sink. A new Salton Sea was
forming.
During the next two years a gigantic
battle was waged between man and nature, with man
desperately trying to return the river to its original
channel, and the river stubbornly refusing to do so. Five
attempts were made to close the break in 1905, and all of
them failed. Settlers and investors in Imperial Valley
watched with increasing alarm as the flood waters continued
to wash away valuable farm land. In 1906 another flood
widened the gap and sent a wall of water 10 miles wide into
Imperial Valley, threatening the cities of Calexico and
Mexicali and carrying away a part of the Inter-California
Railroad, a branch line extending down into the Imperial
Valley. When its mainline from Los Angeles to Yuma and the
east coast was threatened, the Southern Pacific Railroad
entered the fight. Tons of brush, rock and dirt were dumped
into the break, but the swirling waters washed the materials
away. Tune and again the SP was forced to move its mainline
tracks to higher ground.
E. H.
Harriman's Fight with the River
The story of the commitment of Mr. E.
H. Harriman, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad
Company, to saving the Imperial Valley is told in a book
entitled, The Salton Sea, An Account of Harriman's Fight
with the Colorado River, by George Keenan, and published by
The Machlfflan Company in 1917. The California Development
Co. did not have the funds to fight the river, and they
applied to the Southern Pacific for a loan, on the grounds
that the Imperial Valley was furnishing a great deal of
traffic to the railroad. Mr. Harriman was a man of
imagination and vision, according to Mr. Keenan, and he was
in sympathy with the bold attempt to irrigate and reclaim
the and lands of the Colorado Desert. Against the advice of
SP counselors, he authorized a loan of $200,000, with the
stipulation that the Southern Pacific should have the right
to select three directors of the California Development
Company, one of whom should be president, and that fifty-one
per cent of its stock should be placed in the hands of a
trustee as collateral security for the loan. Mr. Harriman
appointed Mr. Epes Randolph of Tucson as its
president.
Mr. Randolph was regarded as one of
the ablest civil engineers in the United States and he had
already had much experience m dealing with river-control
problems the South. He found the situation far more serious
than the Development Company had represented it to be. He
told Harriman that the cost "might easily run into three
quarters of a million dollars." Harriman could have backed
out then, but he telegraphed President Randolph, "Are you
certain you can put the river back into the old channel ?"W.
Randolph replied, "I am certain that it can be done." Then
Mr. Harriman wired, "Go ahead and do it."
The difficulty of dealing with this
menacing situation was greatly increased by the necessity of
furnishing an uninterrupted supply of water to the farmers
of Imperial Valley while the engineering operations were in
progress. The Colorado must be controlled but not wholly
excluded. A plan to install a new steel and concrete
head-gate near Pilot Knob, and to re excavate and enlarge
the silted channel with a specially built dredge moved ahead
The earthquake and fire in San Francisco on April 18, 1906
meant that the 850 ton floating dredge, the "Delta," was not
ready until the following November. With the ruins of San
Francisco still smoldering around the temporary Southern
Pacific office, and with no clear knowledge of the losses
his railroad had sustained, Mr. Harriman still was deeply
concerned with the desperate situation in the Imperial
Valley, and he consented to another loan of
$250,000.
On April 19, 1906, the day after the
earthquake and fire, Mr. Rockwood resigned, and all
subsequent defensive work was planned and executed by SP
engineers. Their task was daunting. Thousands of acres of
land, covered with growing crops was underwater. Thousands
more were so eroded and furrowed by the torrential streams
that they would never be cultivated again. The works of the
New Liverpool Salt Company were buried under 60 feet of
water. Mr Keenan describes the problem in these
words:
"The most dangerous and alarming
feature of the situation was the "cutting back" of the
torrents as they rushed down the delta slope toward the
Salton Sea. The fine silt of which the soil was composed
washed out like powdered sugar, and wherever there happened
to be a strong current, the flow soon produced a rapid. The
rapid then became a cascade, the cascade grew into a fall,
and the fall finally developed into a roaring cataract,
which 'cut back', upstream, at the rate sometimes of four
thousand feet a day, widening as it receded, and leaving
below it a deep gorge with almost perpendicular walls. Some
of the gorges were fifty to eighty feet deep and more than a
thousand feet across. It was estimated that the channels
thus formed during the floods of 1906 had an aggregate
length of more than forty miles, and that the solid matter
scoured out of them and came down into the Salton Sea was
nearly four times as great as the whole amount excavated in
the digging of the Panama Canal. The total of 400,000,000 to
450,000,000 cubic yards were moved. Mr Cory stated, 'Very
rarely, if ever before, has it been possible to see a
geological agency effect in a few months a change which
usually requires centuries.' "
Finally, in November of 1906, the
breach was closed when the SP dumped tons of earth and rock
into it. But the relief was short-lived. On December 5,
1906, a severe flood rushed down the Gila River into the
Colorado near Yuma, and new breaks occurred in the levee.
Within a matter of hours, the river was once again flowing
entirely into the Salton Sea.
This last flood was a heartbreaker.
The Southern Pacific had already spent more than one million
dollars trying to turn the river, and the farmers and
citizens of Imperial Valley had lost millions. In order to
provide lasting protection to the Imperial Valley, it would
be necessary to build a stronger, higher and more massive
levee along the west bank of the river for a distance of at
least twenty miles. The interests chiefly at risk were those
of the national government. It owned all of the irrigable
land along the lower Colorado. It was constructing the
Laguna Dam above Yuma, upon which it had already expended
about $ 1,000,000. The water it impounded, was expected to
irrigate and reclaim about 90,000 fertile acres in Arizona
and California. Left unchecked, the river might eventually
cut back upstream and take out the Laguna Dam and irrigation
works, rendering valueless more than two thousand square
miles of potentially fertile land.
Imperial Valley settlers would have
been willing to help the SP in the fight accorcding to
Maxwell Evarts, but because the original survey of this part
of California had been found inaccurate, the government
could not issue patents to the farmers who had made
homestead entries on the land and were actually in
possession of it. The settlers could not raise money by
mortgaging their farms because legal title still rested with
the government.
The Southern Pacific was already
moving its mainline well out of the flooded area of the
Salton Sink in 1906. President Randolph informed Mr.
Harriman that the additional work needed to close the breach
and reinforce the west bank of the river below the border
might well cost the SP at least $1,500.000 more, over and
above the $2,000,000. it had already spent. It was time to
ask for government help, and Mr. Harriman turned first to
the governor of California. He was told that the state had
no funds to do this, but the governor did contact President
Theodore Roosevelt to ask for federal intervention. Then
Harriman himself sent word to the President on December 13,
1906 that he did not doubt that the Colorado could
ultimately be controlled, but he did not feel that the SP,
which was not responsible for the current disaster, was
morally bound to do the work alone. Interesting telegraphic
correspondence ensued. President Roosevelt's first telegram
to E.H. Harriman, on December 15, simply said that he
assumed Harriman was planning to immediately continue work
to close the break. "Keep me informed," he said. The
following telegrams were exchanged:
"New York, December 19,1906
THE PRESIDENT, Washington Further referring to your
telegram of the 15th inst. our engineers advise that
closing the break and restoring the levees can be most
quickly and cheaply done, if the work is
undertaken immediately, at a cost of $300,000. to
$350,000. The Southern Pacific Company, having been at an
expense of about $2,000,000. already does not feel
warranted in assuming this responsibility and the
additional expenditure which is likely to follow to make
the work permanent, besides the expenditure which the
company is already undergoing to put its tracks above
danger line. We are willing to cooperate with the
Government, contributing train service, use of tracks and
switches, use of rock quarries, train crews etc., and the
California Development Company will contribute its
engineers and organization, the whole work to be done
under the Reclamation Service. Can you bring this
about?
Washington, December 20, 1906 E.H.
HARRIMAN, New York Replying to yours of the 19th,
Reclamation Service cannot enter upon work without
authorization of Congress and suitable convention with
Mexico. Congress adjourns today for holidays. Impossible
to secure action at present. It is incumbent upon you to
close break again. Question of future permanent
maintenance can be taken up. Reclamation engineers
available for consultation. That is all the aid that
there is in power of Government to render, and it seems
to me clear that it is the imperative duty of the
California Development Company to close the break at
once. The danger is ultimately due only to the action of
that company in the past in making heading completed in
October 1904, in Mexican territory. The present crisis
can at this moment only be met by the action of the
company which is ultimately responsible for it, and that
action should be taken without an hour's delay. Through
the Department of State I am endeavoring to secure such
action by the Mexican Government as will enable Congress
in its turn to act. But at present Congress can do
nothing without such action by the Mexican Government.
This is a matter of such vital importance that I wish to
repeat that there is not the slightest excuse for the
California Development Company waiting an hour for the
action of the Government. It is its duty to meet the
present danger immediately, and then this Government will
take up with it, as it has already taken up with Mexico,
the question of providing in permanent shape against the
recurrence of the danger.
THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
One man, E. H. Harriman, held the key
to the survival of the Imperial Valley, the Laguna Dam and
1,600,000 acres of government land. If he chose to order a
continuance of the work, he would put at risk a million and
a half dollars of his own money, or the money of the
Southern Pacific stockholders, in addition to the almost two
million already spent. He would be doing this without any
assurance of reimbursement or compensation and without any
certainty of success. Mr. Harriman was being prosecuted by
the Interstate Commerce Commission , presumably as a
malefactor, and President Roosevelt, only a few weeks
before, had called him an "undesirable citizen", but he
showed courage and public spiritness, above personal
feelings. On December 20, 1906, the same day he received the
President's telegram, he replied in the following
words:
"You seem to be under the
impression that the California Development Company is a
Southern Pacific enterprise. This is erroneous. It had
nothing to do with its work, or the opening of the canal.
We are not interested in its stock and in no way
control i. t We have loaned it some money to
assist in dealing with the situation. What the Southern
Pacific has done was for the protection of the settlers
as well as of its own tracks, but we have determined to
move the tracks onto high ground anyway. However, in view
of your message, I am giving authority to the Southern
Pacific officers in the West to proceed at once with
efforts to repair the break, trusting that the
Government, as soon as you can procure the necessary
Congressional action, will assist us with the
burden.
E.H.
HARRIMAN
When President Roosevelt received Mr.
Harriman's telegram of December 20, saying that orders had
been given to proceed with the work, he replied as
follows:
"Am delighted to receive your
telegram. Have at once directed the Reclamation
Service to get into touch with you, so that as soon as
Congress reassembles I can recommend legislation which
will provide against a repetition of the chsaster
and make provision for the equitable distribution of
the burden.
THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Not until 1923 was any kind of a
settlement made, and then only for a portion of the real
cost. Congress would argue that payment to a large company
like the Southern Pacific would constitute a gift of
taxpayers' money .
Ole Nordland, Editor of the Indio
Daily News for many years, described the effort of the
Southern Pacific in these words: "The gargantuan effort of
stemming the flood tied up a network of 1,200 miles of main
lines for three weeks while the SP fought to bring the river
under control. The work started the very day of the exchange
of telegrams, December 20, 1906. Dispatchers sidetracked
crack passenger trains to let rock trains through while
amazed passengers looked on. Surplus engines stood by to aid
in the massive haul of rock and gravel. The rock trains came
from as far away as 480 miles to hurtle 2,057 carloads of
rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay into
the break in 15 days. The loads were dumped from two
trestles built across the river break and were literally
dumped faster than the water could wash them away. The
Colorado River put up a stubborn fight. Three times it
ripped away the trestle piles. Finally, on January 27, 1907,
the breach was closed and the valley's farms and cities were
saved. The Colorado River was returned to its former path
but it left in its wake today's Salton Sea."
Among the papers in the Nordland
Collection at the Coachella Valley Museum is a letter from
Wiley Magruder to Ole Nordland. Written in the 1960s, he
says, in part: "I wish as a matter of accuracy, the
newspapers would quit printing that the Salton Sea was
formed because the Colorado River broke its banks. The
Salton Sea lies there a shining shimmering monument to man's
carelessness. In my day in the Imperial Valley, to
divulge this information would have been heretic. Mark Rose,
dreamer and diinker-upper of the Hoover Dam and the
All-American Canal, stood daily in front of Clements Drug
Store, one thumb, in the armhole of his vest, the
other hand gesticulating with a cigar, regaling a crowd of
farmers wearing faded and patched overalls. Mark knew
how to sway his crowds, and he had my respect and
my sympathy... I remember the anxious days after each of
the June risings of the river, when the water flow had
dropped and the bottom of the channel had been scoured so
deep that water could not have leaped into the headgates if
it had wings ... All of us kept our mouths shut about
man's big mistake in letting the whole river in, when we
listened to Mark Rose and his big vision of a dam that would
hold back the floods and let them pass into the canals as
needed. 'If we ever get the money for that dam we've got to
make 'em think that the river broke in', we said to each
other....
"Those were desperate days for
Imperial Valley and the Water Problem had the attention of
everyone ... Scotty Russell, Ira Aten, Otis Tout, Edgar
Howe, Charley Collins, Mobley Meadows, and Mark Rose, who
figgered out a way. He wanted the dam built first in one
canyon and then another, finally settling on Boulder. It was
a fantastic dream. It was such a costly proposition that few
beheved it would ever come about .... Phil Swing got himself
elected to Congress just by promising he would try to do
something. With the aid of his fatherly friend, Hiram
Johnson, he did influence into both the Congress and the
Senate the Swing-Johnson Bin. ...It passed both houses and
it appropriated money for surveys that would look toward
control of the meandering Colorado River, with clauses
committing the government to do something about it if
possible. Amidst all the confusion, lots of people got to
blaming The River ... Traveling many, many miles, it did
then and does yet bring the water we need. Insofar as I know
it never did intentionally do us any harm. Unless you count
the accidental Salton Sea, and by goilies, I believe that
was a pocketfull of money. The sea has been there smiling at
us for nearly five decades."
A smiling sea it was, but it disrupted
the life of Figtree John, one of the most famous and
colorful of the Cahuilla Indians, whose home was flooded
when the sea came in. For years his wattled "jacal", a home
made of arrow weed and mud, and surrounded by Black Mission
fig trees, stood beside a spring in the northwest corner of
the old lakebed, near the present Riverside/Imperial County
line. The spot was identified on the US Geological Survey of
1904, Indio Special Map, as surveyed in 1901. The spring was
called "Paltukwic Kaikaiawit', meaning "blue water," by the
Cahullas, but it was Figtree John Spring on US maps. When
the sea flooded his home he moved two and a half miles north
to Agua Dulce Spring, planted more fig trees, and soon Agua
Dulce Spring's name was changed to Fig Tree John Spring. The
tale of this early day resident of the shores of Salton Sea
is part of the folklore of the Coachella Valley.
At the height of the filling in 1907
the Salton Sea reached the level of 195 feet below sea
level, 76 feet above the pre-flood level of the Salton Sink.
The deepened Alamo and New River channels acquired a
beneficial function as drainage channels for the irrigated
Imperial Valley on both sides of the border. Drainage waters
kept the Salton Sea alive.
By 1925 it had subsided to 250 feet
below sea level. Increased irrigation plus industrial and
sanitation wastes from the region south of the border had
brought the water level up to 228 feet below sea level as of
July 1987.
The Imperial Irrigation District, with
power to tax, was formed in 1911. In 1912, it bought the
California Development Company from receivership and took
over the responsibility of diversion and distribution of
water within the Imperial Valley. Not until Hoover Dam was
built were the problems of levee maintenance and silting
overcome.
George Keenan, in his book, The Salton
Sea, reminds us of the lack of suitable thanks given to E.
H. Harriman for the courageous role he played in this saga.
Keenan speculates: "Perhaps Mr. Harriman was not entitled to
credit, for the reason that the work in the field was done
by the Southern Pacific Company and its engineers. this was
not the view taken by the company and the engineers
themselves. If Mr. Harriman, personally, had been asked who
finally controlled the Colorado River and saved the Imperial
Valley, he undoubtedly would have replied: 'Epes Randolph,
H.T. Cory, Thomas J. Hind, C.K. Clarke and their
associates.' But these gentlemen have publicly said that the
driving power behind their work &emdash; the one thing that
made it successful, was the invincible determination of
their chief...C.K. Clarke said, 'The writer desires to put
on record the fact that the accomplishment of the work was
due primarily and exclusively to the independent judgment
and courage of Mr. Harriman, who persisted in his belief
that the breaks could be closed, and his determination to
close them, in the face of opposition and regardless of the
positive assertions of a host of eminent engineers that the
closure was a physical impossibility.'"
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