The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (11 page)

Upon emerging from its penultimate canyon at the Grand Wash Cliffs, the river uncoils and begins gliding south along the western edge of Arizona toward its final destination on the far side of the Mexican border, where the Sonoran Desert touches the top of the Sea of Cortés. The antipodal segment of this journey, a stretch of about 565 miles, takes the Colorado through some of the hottest, driest, and most desolate terrain in North America, an area where the ash-colored wastes on the east and west sides of the river were once dotted for miles with shattered wagons and sand-encrusted skeletons of mules that had belonged to miners bound for the California gold rush.

Through the angled light of late September, the two men permitted the current to carry them past the stark, bone-dry mesas and beneath the jagged escarpments of isolated desert mountain ranges such as the Blacks, the Spirits, and the Deads. Drifting through long shadows laid down by forests of giant saguaros, they penetrated into the northern end of the Sonoran Desert, where, more than 1,750 miles from its source in the icy mountain tarns of Wyoming, the river formed a giant, restless, ever-changing delta—a flat and sweltering region,
twice the size of Rhode Island, that was so intricately interlaced with marshes and sloughs that its contours could neither be mapped nor surveyed because the land itself refused to stay in one place.

Properly speaking, this maze of ephemeral creeks and endlessly shifting atolls belonged neither to Mexico nor to the United States because, in essence, it was a nation unto itself, a watery republic populated by
a prolific confederation of wild creatures that fed upon its riches. The water teemed with schools of crayfish and shrimp. The rushes and sedges sheltered deer and bighorn sheep and small wild hogs, all of them hunted by coyote and cougar and even jaguar. Most impressive of all were the boundless flocks of waterfowl—entire weather systems composed of egrets and cormorants, bitterns and herons, ducks and pelicans, all migrating along the Pacific Flyway.

Somewhere out there in that estuarine Eden at the tail end of September, the stern of the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister
touched salt water, and
Hall and Sumner became the first men in recorded history to row from Wyoming to the Sea of Cortés. This landmark achievement truly brought their journey to a close. But if the two men were moved by what they encountered down there in the lowest reaches of the river, or by their own act of completion, their diaries and letters failed to capture those feelings.

Sumner, in particular, was unimpressed and downright grouchy. He described the low valleys on either side of the river as
“burned to a cinder” and dismissed the delta as “nothing to brag of.” The whole place left him wallowing in a listless depression.
“I find myself penniless and disgusted with the whole thing, sitting under a Mesquite bush in the sand,” he wrote in his journal at the end of it all. “I never want to see it again.”

He had no idea that, within just a few years, the sun-scorched wasteland located just north of the delta would become a focal point of energy and ambition that would reverberate up the entire length of the river, transforming not only the Colorado, but also the great canyon whose passage they had unlocked, in ways that neither Sumner, Hall, nor even Powell himself would have conceived of in their wildest dreams.

T
he section of the lower river where the landscape had been “burned to a cinder” belonged to one of the strangest parts of the entire Colorado—a place that, in its own way, was as alien and exotic as the Grand Canyon. Here, deep in southern Arizona and just above the Mexican border, the terrain flattened, the current slowed, and the vast loads of sediment suspended within the river began to drop through the water and settle along the riverbed. As this material built up in sheetlike layers, one upon the other, the streambed began to elevate, inch by inch and foot by foot, until the channel became so clogged that the current would periodically break free from the confinement of its banks and go tearing off across the desert in some new direction like a
headless brown serpent.

This bizarre trick of river geomorphology
repeated at irregular intervals, usually once every few decades, and over the centuries the Colorado had developed the habit of returning to some half a dozen alternative channels. One of these channels embarked on one of the most perverse detours anywhere on earth—a wandering circuit that, like the route of a lost band of thirst-addled gold seekers, dipped into Mexico, then careened back into the United States at the California border before making a beeline for a bowl-shaped depression at the foot of a bone-dry set of ridges known as the Chocolate Mountains, about forty miles southeast of present-day Palm Springs.

This treeless inferno was known as the California Desert, and its lowest point, which lay below sea level and endured heat rivaling that of Death Valley, was called the Salton Sink. Here the fugitive river would form a vast, evanescent lake that was known to the native Cocopah Indians—the only people who had lived in the area long enough to recognize this as a recurring pattern—as
the Palm of the Hand of God, and that the whites would eventually call the Salton Sea. For years at a time, the Colorado would pour into this dead-end lake until the two main detour washes, later known as the New and the Alamo Channels, accumulated enough silt to force the prodigal river to return once again to its old bed and resume its route back through the delta to the Gulf of California. Meanwhile, the Salton Sea would slowly evaporate until a new laminate of fine sediment, particles that had been excavated from within the Grand Canyon, lay baking and exposed under the relentless desert sun.

Neither Hall nor Sumner was aware of the existence of the Salton Sink. But it caught the eye of men who followed in their wake, and what drew their attention was the dirt. The entire valley was almost pure topsoil, packed with a rich conglomerate of minerals and other nutrients that had been finely abraded, thoroughly mixed, and drenched in sunshine for 360 days a year. The only drawback was the lack of rain in the Sink,
which amounted to roughly 2.4 inches a
year, less than half of what the Gobi Desert typically receives. But just a few miles away lay the greatest river in the Southwest. If someone could devise a way to funnel the water onto that rich matrix of soil, the California Desert would find itself transformed into an agricultural terrarium that would be the envy of the nation.

T
he man who finally managed to put all of this together, a driven engineer from Michigan named Charles Rockwood, had a jaw set like a bulldog’s and hands so huge that it was said
he could crush an apple in one palm. After helping to survey railway routes through the Rockies and across the Columbia River basin,
Rockwood made his way to the Southwest around the turn of the twentieth century and focused his considerable energies on the task of turning the Colorado into an irrigation spigot and aiming it at the Salton Sink. The plan that he and his associates devised was audacious, elegant, and laden with the potential for disastrous mishap.

By cutting a diversion channel into one of the river’s ancient detour routes, they reasoned—correctly—that they could employ this dry arroyo system as a conduit to transport a portion of the river’s flow to the flat, silt-enriched soils just south of the Salton Sea. There, a series of canals and irrigation ditches would distribute the water onto the fields of settlers who, upon learning of this new paradise—billed as America’s last great farming frontier—would stampede to get in on the ground floor.

Rockwood didn’t waste any time. By the spring of 1901, he and his team had cut an opening in the west bank of the Colorado and prepared their diversion channel. They opened the headgates in May, then stood back and watched with satisfaction as a significant portion of the river started pouring into a network of freshly prepared canals. As word got out, settlers followed the water and poured into the valley too. Within a year, the
population had jumped from exactly zero whites and Europeans to more than five thousand. Three years later, there were seven towns, nearly eight hundred miles of irrigation canals, and 120,000 acres under cultivation. All that was needed was a new name for the place. So they started calling it the Imperial Valley.

Conditions were primitive—families lived in canvas tents or huts knocked together from rough lumber—and the heat was unspeakable, almost 125 degrees in the shade. But how the crops thrived! Cantaloupes and tomatoes, lettuce and broccoli, cauliflower and cotton, grapes and shoulder-high wheat and barley—all of it flourished, maturing weeks ahead of the harvest in other parts of the country and thus commanding premium market prices when it was
shipped East by the Southern Pacific Railroad. Although no one thought to point it out, the residents of Memphis and St. Louis and New Orleans might have been intrigued to learn that, when these consignments of produce arrived at their tables and they bit into the winter vegetables and fruit of the Imperial Valley, they were literally eating the Grand Canyon.

The entire venture was a smashing success, and the exuberance it unleashed was captured by the slogan adopted by the valley’s first newspaper.
“Water Is King,” the
Imperial Press
proclaimed in a tagline across the top of its front page. “Here Is Its Kingdom.” The people who read those words had no idea how unerringly true this was. But the Colorado was about to teach them, in the harshest and most graphic terms one could care to imagine, the folly and hubris of trying to tame it.

T
he first in what would prove to be a series of back-to-back flash floods hit the Imperial Valley and its surrounding region in the spring of 1905, when a massive surge made off with a control gate in one of the diversion channels just south of the Mexican border and opened a six-foot-wide breach. No one knew it at the time, but this marked the moment when the Colorado was once again about to skip out of its main channel and go off on another mad breakaway run to recharge the dead-end sea in the heart of the desert.

With a newly reborn and rapidly expanding Salton Sea rising by seven inches a day at the lowest point of the Imperial Valley, Rockwood led the first three attempts to plug the breach. His initial effort to cut off the river in March of 1905, with a sixty-foot dam made of wooden pilings, brush, and sandbags, was a failure. A flood surge swept it aside as if it were made of dried leaves. Weeks later, a second dam, longer than the first, was carried away by yet another flood tide. By June, the gap had widened to 160 feet, and the water flowing toward the gulf had slowed to a trickle as
most of the river hurtled toward the Sink. Rockwell’s third and final try, a six-hundred-foot barrier that
took several weeks to assemble and cost $60,000, was wiped out by an overnight flash food on the thirtieth of November.

Defeated and out of money, Rockwood had no choice but to turn the job over to the Southern Pacific, which had invested heavily in the valley and could not afford to see its interests destroyed. Responsibility then fell to Harry T. Cory,
one of the railroad’s most competent construction engineers, who had started his career at the age of twenty-six as a full professor of engineering at the University of Missouri. His job was to stop the Colorado, using any means necessary.