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Ln 0') i.... DISCOVERY OF RIVER C\l Cl o While searching for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, then believed to be "somewhere north of Mexico," Captain Hernando Alarcon discovered the Colorado River in 1540. It was given the name EI Rio Colorado by Father Garces, one of the band of dauntless missionaries who entered the desolate Colorado River desert country in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century to bring the Cross to the Indians living there. For more than three centuries following its discovery, the Colorado remained a river of mystery. EARLY IRRIGATORS There is a great deal of evidence to indicate that the Colorado River basin was widely popu- lated thousands of years before the coming of the white man, and that at various places in the Southwest extensive irrigation works were built by these early people, and water from the river and its tributaries was used for the growing of crops. Most of these ancient people had disappeared before the coming of the white man, and there are strong indications that in many cases they were forced to leave because of protracted droughts. LATER DEVELOPMENT The first use by white men of water from the Colorado River and its tributaries for irriga- tion purposes carne about in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The Mormons in Utah were among the first pioneers to use water from the Colorado River tributaries for irrigation of lands on a large scale. Among the modern irrigation projects stemming from the Colo- rado River, the Palo Verde district in California was one of the first to use water from the main stream, starting as far back as 1877. Large-scale development on the Colorado River and its tributaries, however, did not get under way to any great extent until after the Reclamation Act was adopted by Congress in 1902. That was more than fifty years ago, but the great water and power projects now in operation on the lower Colorado were first set under way only about twenty-five years ago. FLOOD MENACE Prior to the construction of Hoover Dam, the Colorado River for uncounted centuries had been roaring down the mountain canyons and across desert plateaus of the Southwest, a mad water giant that destroyed with its annual floods all of man's works that chanced to be in its wayward path. In the quantity of water it carries in various seasons of the year, it is one of the most variable in America. Before its waters were harnessed by Hoover Dam, the quan- tity of water in the lower river varied from devastating floods running as high as 200,000 cubic feet per second to a mere trickle in the late summer and early fall. THE 1905 FLOOD In 1905, flood waters of the Colorado River broke through the levees in Imperial Valley and inundated hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile land. The flood waters broke away from the river channel and flowed back inland to form the Salton Sea. It was possible for this to occur for the reason that Imperial Valley is below sea level, some parts as much as 250 feet. [6]