FLOOD07093

• County: Otero
• County: Pueblo
• Community: Otero, Pueblo Counties
• Stream Name: Arkansas River
• Basin: Arkansas
• Title: Arkansas River Channel Capacity and Riparian Habitat Planning Study
• Date: 8/1/2001
• Prepared For: CWCB
• Prepared By: US Army Corps of Engineers
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Project

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Platte River Valleys. These two events brought a huge influx of fortune seekers, miners, traders,
cattlemen, soldiers, and settlers that traveled through and started to settle in these river valleys.
This huge population influx required a reliable food supply and demanded fresh foods. The
subsequent and rapid development of irrigation systems was nearly complete by the end of the
1800s (Nadler 1978:58-60; Nadler and Schumm 1981:95-97; Abbott 1985:8).

Nadler (1978: 111) and Nadler and Schumm (1981 :95-97) utilize anotherimportant year,
1926, as being significant in the metamorphosis of the Arkansas River. Nadler (1978) does not
specify why this particular year is an important year and it may have been arbitrarily chosen;
however, it appears that it may be related to the availability of a 1926 U.S. Department of
Agriculture Soil Map (Sweet and Inman 1926) for the Arkansas Valley area that he used in his
study (Nadler 1978:6). There are several reasons why a good map dating to the year 1926 would
have been so important; several significant events occurred in and near the valley within about a
ten-year period. These events include the period after the famous 1921 flood that had
devastating effects on the human population in the Arkansas River valley; "... the amount of land
being farmed more than tripled between 1900 and 1929" (Nadler 1978:60); the period is
immediately before the "Droughts between 1926 and 1940" (Nadler and Schumm 1981:97); and
at about this time, the valley starts to see the effects of the introduction of the invasive
phreatophyte known as salt-cedar (Tamarix) (Lindauer 1970:4-5; Lindaur and Ward 1968:3-4;
Robinson 1965; Nadler 1978:85-87, 111; Nadler and Schumm 1981:97-98).

Some of the earliest documented accounts and historical observations of the Arkansas
River, the valley, and of its characteristics have been reported by early explorers and military
expeditions in hundreds of diaries, journals, articles, and reference books such as Emory (1848),
Farnham (1906), Parkman (1948), Coues (1895), Gilbert (1896), Vestal (1939), and Jackson
(1966) as reported in Nadler (1978:64, 67, 78, 84, 89).

Lt. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge ([1877] 1959), writing of his experiences in the 1860s
and 1870s, provides an excellent description of the character of the Great Plains rivers and their
floodplains, and on the shifting sands of these prairie rivers as he observed them. While his
example of moving channels and sand is specific to the area near Dodge City, Kansas, a good
distance downstream from the study area, the conditions he described were very similar to those
of the study area. His description is so effecti ve as to the historic character of the Arkansas
River that we reiterate it here word-for-word.

"As soon as they [the rivers that cross the plains] emerge [from the mountains
and foothills] on the third plain [between about 3,000to 4,000 feet (Dodge 1959:7)]
their character changes; their current is less rapid, the banks are low, the bed is wide,
shallow, and filled with sand. The bottom lands are very broad, without trees or
shrubbery, except occasionally a small growth of willow, scarcely larger than
switches. The bottom is an alluvial deposit of from one to six feet, underlain by
sand. When the river rises and the current increases in power, this sand is washed
out from below, the banks falls in, and the stream is never, for two consecutive years,
in the same bed, the current eating the alluvium on one side to deposit great bars on
the other. These in a very few years gain a scanty vegetation, another slight deposit
of alluvial soil, to be again destroyed by another freak of the ever-changing current.

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