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, onits 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.

“But how,” it may be asked, “could a river, however mighty, cut the Gulf of California in two, so as to separate the upper part from the lower and leave the former isolated?” Easily enough in the long ages of geologic time. A great river like the Colorado does not consist of water only. It holds in suspension and carries down to the sea a great load of sediment, which, when deposited at its mouth, gradually builds up a delta-plain of mud, and often changes topographical conditions over a wide area. It was this deposited sediment that cut the Gulf of California in two. The drainage basin of the Colorado and its tributaries extends from the Gulf of California to the southern edge of the Yellowstone National Park, and has an area of more than 260,000 square miles. Mostof this area is mountainous, and the innumerable streams that tear down through its gorges and ravines erode and gather up vast quantities of sediment, which the river carries to the Gulf and finally deposits in its waters. How great a load of silt the Colorado brought down in prehistoric times we have no means of knowing; but it transports past Yuma now about 160,000,000 tons of solid matter every year, or enough to fill a reservoir one mile square to a depth of one hundred and twenty five feet.[1]Century after century, the river poured this vast quantity of silt into the Gulf opposite its mouth, and gradually built up a delta-bar which extended westward, year by year, until it finally reached the opposite coast. The upper part of the Gulf was then separated from the lower by a natural levee, in the shape of a delta-plain, which was perhaps ten miles in width by thirty in length, and which extended from a point near the present site of Yuma to the rampart of the Cocopah Mountains at Black Butte. When the river had thus cut the Gulf of California in two, it happened to choose a course for itself on the southeastern side of the delta-plain that it had built up, and thereafter it discharged its waters into the lower Gulf,leaving what had been the upper Gulf isolated as a salt-water lake. Under the burning sun of that region about six feet of water evaporates every year, and in course of time the lake dried up, leaving the arid basin afterward known as the Salton Sink. This depression was about one hundred miles in length by thirty five in width. It then had a maximum depth of perhaps one thousand feet, and in the deeper parts its floor was covered with an incrustation of salt.

The Ancient Gulf of California

How long this ancient sea-bottom remained dry cannot now be determined; but many thousands of years ago, probably in Middle Tertiary times the Colorado River, which had first cut off the basin from the ocean and thus allowed it to become waterless, proceeded to refill it. Running over a raised delta-plain of silt, which sloped both ways, the river could easily be diverted to either side, and in one of its prehistoric floods it capriciously changed its course, leaving the Gulf and pouring its waters into the dry basin of the Salton Sink. When it had refilled this basin, and transformed it into a great fresh-water lake, it broke through the silt dam, or levee, on the Cocopah Mountain side, and found a new outlet to the Gulf through what is now known as Hardy’s Colorado. For many years—possibly for centuries—the SaltonSink was a fresh-water lake, into which the Colorado poured 150,000,000 tons or more of silt every year. At last, suddenly or gradually, the river again changed its course, abandoning the Sink and cutting a channel to the Gulf through the eastern part of the delta plain. Then the Salton Sea again dried up, leaving a two-hundred-mile ellipse of fresh-water shells to mark its former level.

How many times, since the Tertiary epoch, the Salton Sink has been alternately emptied and refilled, we have no means of knowing; but the instability of the conditions that now determine the course of the Colorado below Yuma seem to indicate that, at intervals of four or five hundred years for many millenniums, the river, like a great liquid pendulum, swung back and forth across its delta, now emptying into the Gulf on the Arizona side, and then discharging into the Sink on the California side. Every time the lake was deprived of the river water it dried up, and every time the Sink was revisited by the river it again became a lake. That the Colorado must have returned to this basin many times, and flowed into it for long periods, is indicated by the fact that after the Sink was separated from the Gulf of California, the river carriedinto it something like seventeen cubic miles of silt.[2]Artesian well borings at Holtville show that the sedimentary deposits in that part of the Imperial Valley are now more than 1000 feet in depth.

For three centuries or more—from 1540 to 1902—the Salton Sink was a hot, arid desert. Melchior Diaz, a Spanish explorer in the service of Cortes, reached the edge of it in the fall of 1540, and the Spanish captain Juan Bautista de Anza crossed it two hundred and thirty four years later; but neither of them saw anything like a lake. The only evidence that the Colorado River ran into the Sink, at any time between 1540 and 1905, is furnished by the so-called Rocque map, now in the British Museum, which was compiled from all the sources of information that were in existence in 1762. This map shows a considerable body of water in the Salton Sink, with the Colorado River flowing into it; but no written record in support of the map has ever been found, and the probability is that the water was nothing more than a comparatively small lake, or lagoon, fedby the Colorado in time of flood. Overflow water in considerable quantities often reached the basin when the river happened to be more than bank full; but the main current of the Colorado continued to flow into the Gulf, and the flood water in the Sink soon evaporated.

In the latter part of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, many Spanish and American pathfinders crossed the Sink on their way from Yuma to the California missions, but none of them found anything like a lake. Colonel W. H. Emory, who traversed it with General Kearney in the fall of 1846, described it as a hot, arid desert, where there was a stretch of “ninety miles from water to water,” and where no vegetation could be found except scattered desert shrubs and two small patches of sun-burned grass. Captain A. R. Johnson, who also accompanied the Kearney expedition, was the first to notice the fact that this stretch of waterless desert was the dried-up bottom of an ancient lake; but neither he nor Colonel Emory observed the still more suggestive fact that it was below the level of the sea. In the deepest part of the basin, near the present station of Salton, they discovered a small lagoon; but its water proved to be so saturated with alkali and salt that it was “wholly unfit forman or brute.” Three years later, gold-seekers from the East began to take this route to the Pacific Coast, and Bayard Taylor, in his “El-dorado,” has given their impressions of the Salton Sink in the following words:

“The emigrants by the Gila route gave a terrible account of the crossing of the Great Desert lying west of the Colorado. They described this region as scorching and sterile—a country of burning salt plains and shifting hills of sand, where the only signs of human habitation were the bones of animals and men scattered along the trails.”

Such, seventy years ago, was the Salton Sink, and such it had been during the three preceding centuries of recorded history. If anyone had then ventured to predict that this dried-up bed of the Gulf of California, this hot, sterile and apparently irreclaimable desert, would eventually become a beautiful cultivated valley, producing cotton, barley, alfalfa, dates, melons and fruit, to the value of ten or fifteen million dollars every year, he would have been generally regarded as a visionary enthusiast, if not a desert-crazed monomaniac.

Although, at the beginning of the “gold rush” to California in 1849, the Salton Sink had been known to the Spaniards for more thanthree centuries, and to American explorers for at least twenty years, no scientific examination of it had ever been made. Four years later, however, in 1853, Jefferson Davis, who was then Secretary of War, prevailed upon Congress to authorize a series of explorations for the discovery of a practicable railroad route to the Pacific Coast. Lieutenant R. S. Williamson, of the United States Topographic Engineers, was selected as leader of the southern expedition, and with him, as geologist, went Professor William P. Blake of New York, a young graduate of the Yale Scientific School, who afterward attained great distinction as geologist, explorer and mining engineer, in fields as widely separated as Arizona, Alaska and Japan. Professor Blake was the first to explain the origin of the Salton Sink, to trace its ancient history, and to give a name to the great fresh-water lake that it had once held. He was also the first to suggest the possibility of irrigating it, and to predict that when it should be supplied with water it would “yield crops of almost any kind.” Reclamation of desert areas is now comparatively common; but sixty years ago, only a bold and original mind could have entertained the idea of getting crops out of such a “Death Valley” as the Salton Sink then was.Professor Blake, however, had the imagination of an investigator, tempered by the accurate knowledge of a scientist, and he could see that the sedimentary deposits in that ancient sea-basin needed only water to make them fertile.

The Kearney expedition of 1846, and the Bartlett and Williamson surveys in 1850 and 1853, demonstrated the practicability of reaching California by the southern route, and thousands of emigrants, attracted to the Pacific Coast by the discovery of gold, went that way in order to avoid the high mountains and the snow that they would have encountered further north. This rising tide of travel soon led to improvement in the means of transportation. Early in the “gold rush,”Dr.A. L. Lincoln, a relative of Abraham Lincoln, established a permanent ferry across the Colorado, near the junction of that river with the Gila; a few years later, seventy four camels and dromedaries were imported from Africa for use on the desert part of the route; and in 1857, a private company began running bimonthly stages between San Antonio, Texas, and San Diego, California. Finally, in 1858, the Government established the “Butterfield Overland Mail,” which ran a semi-weekly line of coaches from St. Louis to San Francisco, by way of ElPaso, Yuma and the Colorado Desert, on a time schedule of twenty five days. This line was well equipped with more than a hundred specially constructed Concord coaches, a thousand horses, seven hundred mules, and about one hundred and fifty drivers. It received from the Government a subsidy of $600,000 a year, and was the longest continuous horse-express line then in existence on the North American continent. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, this southern route was the main artery of travel from the eastern States to the Pacific Coast; and it is estimated that, between 1849 and 1860, eight thousand emigrants crossed the Colorado Desert on their way to California.

Of all these eight thousand gold-seekers or pioneers, only one seems to have been impressed by the agricultural possibilities of the Salton Sink.Dr.O. M. Wozencraft, who has been described as “a man of marked personality and far-reaching vision who lived a generation before his time,” crossed the Sink on his way to San Bernardino sometime in the early fifties; noticed the deposit of silt in the bed of the ancient lake; observed that the shallow basin lay so far below the level of the Colorado River that it might easily be irrigated therefrom; andreached the conclusion, previously stated by Professor Blake, that the arid waste of the Sink, if adequately supplied with water, could be made to “yield crops of almost any kind.” This idea so took possession of his mind that, during the next five or six years, he spent much of his time and a large part of his private means in promoting schemes for the irrigation of this desert area. His engineer, Ebenezer Hadley of San Diego, made a preliminary survey of the Sink, and recommended a canal location practically identical with that which forty years later was adopted. In 1859, upon the initiative ofDr.Wozencraft, the California legislature asked Congress to cede to the State 3,000,000 acres of arid land, including the Salton Sink, for irrigation purposes. The bill was favorably reported by a House committee, but failed to pass. The Congressmen of that time regarded the reclamation of the Colorado Desert as a subject for jocular rather than serious treatment, and most of them were in sympathy with the California humorist, J. Ross Browne, who said: “I can see no great obstacle to success except the porous nature of the sand. By removing the sand from the desert, success would be insured at once.”

With the failure ofDr.Wozencraft’s attemptto bring about the reclamation of the Colorado Desert, interest in that region gradually waned. The Butterfield Overland Mail service to the Pacific Coast was discontinued; a new “Pony Express” line to San Francisco, by way of Salt Lake City, was established; and before 1865, the southern route, via Yuma and the Colorado Desert, had been practically abandoned.Dr.Wozencraft continued talking, to all who would listen, about his scheme for the irrigation of the Salton Sink; but most people regarded it as visionary, and nobody seemed inclined to take it up. Only in 1891, thirty eight years after Professor Blake first suggested irrigation, and twenty nine years afterDr.Wozencraft’s bill failed in Congress, was a serious attempt made to realize the “dream” of turning water into the Salton Sink and creating a fertile oasis in the heart of the Colorado Desert.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Rep.of U. S. Geolog. Survey for 1916.[2]“The Imperial Valley and Salton Sink,” by H. T. Cory, formerly Chief Engineer of the California DevelopmentCo.,p.49; San Francisco 1915 (embodying paper readJan.8, 1913, before theAmer.Soc.of Civil Engineers and published in its Transactions as “Paper 1270”).

[1]Rep.of U. S. Geolog. Survey for 1916.

[2]“The Imperial Valley and Salton Sink,” by H. T. Cory, formerly Chief Engineer of the California DevelopmentCo.,p.49; San Francisco 1915 (embodying paper readJan.8, 1913, before theAmer.Soc.of Civil Engineers and published in its Transactions as “Paper 1270”).

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