9337

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9337
• Author: Colorado River Water Users Association.
• Title: The Colorado River of Many Returns.
• USFW Year: 2001.
• USFW - Doc Type: Coachella, California.
• Copyright Material: NO

CALIFORNIA
The Colorado River timeline is packed with events that touched
this once wild, unpredictable adversary, now regarded as the
most controlled, most litigated river in the world. It begins in
1540 with its discovery by Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcon who
sailed upstream from the Gulf of California to its junction with the
Gila. The ensuing years, filled more
during the first two centuries with
legend than fact, go forward to hint
at a mesmerizing history of discovery
and derring-do.
By the mid-1880s, the
southwestern United States long had
been regarded as a land of high
mountains, deep canyons and
scorching, bone-dry deserts - a land
of rattlesnakes, wild burros, Gila
monsters and little else that moved.
As a Southern Californian

and student of water development
using this timeline to trace the major
events to impact your state, your finger first comes to a halt at 1901
where it notes water reaching Imperial Valley fields from the Colorado
River through the just completed Alamo Canal. Imperial is a below-
sea-level valley where, as early as 1860, water pioneers looked to the
Colorado, with several unsuccessful efforts being made to develop these
lands in California's southeastern stretches.
Then finally success. A fly-by-night promoter and an
enthusiastic young engineer, who had been making a series of attempts,
were joined by a grizzled, old surveyor, a wealthy civil engineer, an
irrigation expert and one or two others to form the privately owned
California Development Company. The result was the Alamo Canal.
But there was one major drawback: About 50 miles of it flowed
through a natural route in Mexico, and the international political
implications were frightening.
Your attention next is drawn to 1902 where the timeline
chronicles President Theodore Roosevelt's signing of the Reclamation
Act, which created what today is known as the Bureau of Reclamation,
provided for water storage and distribution facilities in the westernmost
states and triggered a long series of investigations and reports on
control and use of the Colorado. This river was destined to become a
vital lifeline to Southern California's arid lands stretching westward
from its banks, indeed all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Moving on across the timeline, your finger next pauses at 1911
when the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) was formed to acquire
properties of the then-bankrupt California Development Company and
eventually of the 13 mutual water companies, which had built and
operated the distribution canals. Efforts to design a canal within U.S.
borders resumed.
Your next pause is at 1918 to note the formation of the
Coachella Valley County Water District (later the word county would
be dropped) when it received overwhelming approval from the 373
voters to cast a ballot. During the spring of the previous year, Thomas
C. Yager, considered by most to be a brilliant young attorney, ahead of
his time, full of ideas to benefit the valley, called together a group,
mostly farmers, to report that some underhanded intruders had filed on
the unappropriated flow of their local streams and tributaries - the
only source of supply to the valley's underground waters. The red flag
was raised, the word spread, petitions were filed and a county water
district was formed that would have the authority to protect the then
present water supply.
UR13AN AREAS FIND COLORADO RIVER WATER ESSENTIAL TO MAINTAINING THE
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ECONOMY.
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