WSP10089

• File Number: 8220.200.05.A
• Description: Hoover Dam/Lake Mead/Boulder Canyon Project
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 1/1/1950
• Title: The Story of Hoover Dam: Conservation Bulletin No. 9
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Publication

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the river

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LIE SETTING OF THIS STORY is in the southwestern United States, a pic-
turesque land of high mountains, deep canyons, and scorching deserts, of
Joshua trees and giant cacti, of bighorn sheep and Gila monsters. The chid
character is the treacherous, destructive Colorado River.
Third longest river in the Union, the Colorado rises high in the snow-capped
mountains of Wyoming and Colorado, zigzags southwest for 1,700 miles, and
finally pours into Mexico's Gulf of California far to the south.
The Colorado's drainage basin is vast. It covers 244,000 square miles,
one-twelfth the land area of the United States. Tributaries extend their
tentacles through seven ofthe large Western States.
The Colorado is mighty. It slashes through all in its path. It has gouged
the rock of the mesas into gorges and chasms. One of the gorges, the Grand
Canyon, is world famous, a titariic cleft over 200 miles long, a dozen miles
in breadth and a mile deep.
South of the canyons the Colorado makes its way through the hottest and
driest region in the United States. The temperature reaches more than 120
in the shade. Rain is almost unknown all summer long. There, dryas
bone and shimmering in the heat, is an American Sahara.

TI"e Exploring Spaniards Corne

Exploring north from Mexico the Spanish conquistadors were the first white
men to penetrate this forbidden land of aridity. They were surprised to find
it peopled with Indians. They found that the Indians had attained a high

Aerial view of Hoover Dam and surrounding area.

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