I was so anxious to get started that I did not take the
time to replenish them in Yuma, intending to do so at the custom-house
on the Arizona side twelve miles below, where some one had told me
there was a store. I counted on camping there. After a hurriedly eaten
luncheon we were ready to start, the boat was shoved off, and we were
embarked for Mexico.
Half an hour later we passed the abandoned Imperial Canal, the
man-made channel which had nearly destroyed the vast agricultural
lands which it had in turn created. Just such a flood as that on which
we were travelling had torn out the insufficiently supported
head-gates. The entire stream, instead of pushing slowly across the
delta, weltering in its own silt to the Gulf, poured into the bottom
of the basin nearly four hundred feet below the top of this silt-made
dam. In a single night it cut an eighty-foot channel in the unyielding
soil, and what had once been the northern end of the California Gulf
was turned into an inland sea, filled with the turbid waters of the
Colorado, instead of the sparkling waters of the ocean. Nothing but an
almost superhuman fight finally rescued the land from the grip of the
water.
A short distance below, just across the Mexican line, on the
California side, was the new canal, dug in a firmer soil and with
strongly built gates anchored in rock back from the river.
Half a mile away from the stream, on a spur railway, was the Mexican
custom-house.
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