WSP03964

• File Number: 8210.110.60
• Description: Colorado River Water Users Association
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 12/4/1958
• Author: CRWUA
• Title: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Annual Report

and demanded they build their highways along that line regardles s of moun-
tains, forests, rivers or other physical difficulties which engineers would
automatically avoid -- and it was Peter the Great who transported a million
and a half Russians from one point to another. It was a mass movement of
people unprecedented in the history of the; world up to that time.

Now why hasn't this migration I speak of -- our migration of the past
10 years -- caused more than a ripple of comment. I guess it was because
the trek was not organized. Somebody inBaldwin, Long Island, decided to
"go West", and put his family in the car and left for the "West". At the same
time some people in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and some people in Macon,
Georgia; and Some others in Brunswick, Maine; in Brooklyn; in Milwaukee;
and Trenton, New Jersey; and Chicago; and Lafayette, Indiana; and Redwing,
Minnesota; and West Branch, Iowa; all decided the same thing but they decided
in their own good time and chose their own method of transportation whether
it was by bus or train or airplane or their own family car or even in combi-
nation with neighbors.

This was no trek of the poor and underprivileged, the desperate and
the hungry which we read about while our hearts bled in a book called "Grapes
of Wrath", No, far from that pathetic straggling procession, this was the move-
ment of people looking for something better than they had. So "West" they came,
urged on sometimes by soldier sons who had trained in the sun-drenched air-
fields of the Southwest and who wanted to come back here to live forever and
ever and ever.

Thus began their great adventure. Most of them went on to the Pacific
Coast and it is hoped found there the land of promise they so eagerly sought.
However, there were many who liked what they saw in New Mexico and Arizona,
Colorado and Utah, and Wyoming on the eastern slopes of the Rockies and some-
times on the western side. They liked what they saw and they stayed. They
stayed wherever the spirit moved them to stay since they had neither friends
nor associations and could afford to choose.

Is this over? Of course not. The whole movement of people in the
United States of America today, ten years after the great trek started, is from
East to West, and it is this which has cau~ed the explosion in the Southwest
whose reverbations will continue their echoes as long as people can move.

It is doubtful if anyone knows all of the answers for the migration west-
ward, but here are a few:

Here in the Southwest they found improved methods of farming the like
of which Eastern farmers have never seeJ:).. Here also were new breeds of cattle,
for it was only in the past few years that Brahmins had been successfully intro-
duced and the cattlemen's original distast~ for them "because they didn't look

- 4 -