In the winter of 1907, a railroad stopped the Colorado River by dumping rock into it off a wooden trestle, one flat car at a time. The trestle stood on piles driven ninety feet into the riverbed, spanning a gap more than a thousand feet wide. The entire river was pouring through that gap, fleeing its old bed for a desert basin below sea level. For nearly two years, the runaway water had been filling that basin with a new sea.
Engineers who came to inspect the break called closing it a physical impossibility. Before February was out, the Colorado was running south to the Gulf of California again, and it would never return to the sink. The fight began in 1905, when the Southern Pacific Railroad took charge of a river crisis on its border with Mexico. The trouble started a year earlier, when silt from the Colorado choked the canal feeding California’s new farm country in the Imperial Valley.
To keep water flowing, the irrigation company cut a second intake straight into the riverbank, with no gate on it. That was a bet on the river behaving. River gauges at Yuma held about twenty-seven years of records, and in all that time, no winter had brought two floods. The winter of 1905 brought several, one after another.
Each flood chewed at the banks of the new cut, and by the time Epes Randolph, who ran the Southern Pacific’s lines in Arizona, arrived to see the trouble for himself, the cut had more than doubled in width and the river was pushing through on its own. The problem was which way the water wanted to go. From the break, the Colorado’s old bed fell about one hundred feet on its way south to the Gulf of California. The ground to the west fell about four hundred feet down to the bottom of the Salton Sink.
A federal engineer who inspected the break that summer calculated that the slope toward the sink was roughly four times as steep as the slope toward the sea. Every flood had a shorter, steeper road to take, and each one sent more of the river down it. Randolph wired the railroad’s president, E. H.
Harriman, who had just loaned the irrigation company $200,000 to fix its canal. Randolph warned that controlling the river might easily run into three-quarters of a million dollars. Harriman asked if Randolph was certain he could put the river back into its old channel. Randolph answered that he was.
Harriman’s reply was five words long: go ahead and do it. The first attempt used the old methods. Crews built a long barrier of piles, brush mattresses, and sandbags to push the current away from the break. On November 29, 1905, a flood came down the Gila River carrying so much driftwood it nearly covered the water.
The barrier went out before the flood even peaked. When the water fell, the breach was about six hundred feet wide. By the end of the year, nearly all of the Colorado was running into the sink. The danger was not drowning.
Every farm and town in the valley drank water that came through gravity-fed canals, because the river sat higher than the fields. If the runaway river cut its own bed deep enough, the canal heads would be left hanging above a gorge and the water would stop. President Theodore Roosevelt’s message to Congress later spelled it out: water could no longer be diverted by gravity into the canals already built. About twelve thousand people had settled the valley in four years, and engineers believed they were in more danger of being driven out by thirst than by flood.
Randolph’s plan was simple: dump rock into the river faster than the river could carry it away, until the pile rose high enough to turn the current back into its old bed. Almost every expert who heard the plan thought it would fail. Between forty and fifty well-known engineers came to look at the break over the two years, and hardly any two agreed on what to do. Most agreed on one point: the riverbed was fine, soft silt, and a stone dropped on it would just keep sinking.
They also warned that once water poured over the top of a rock pile, it would pluck the top stones off one at a time until the river cut a gap nobody could close. Randolph had heard arguments like that before. Years earlier, building railroads in the South, he had used brush mats and rock fill on the Tombigbee River in Alabama, and he had seen them hold. He kept his plan.
The whole problem became a hauling job. Randolph’s answer was to bring the railroad right down to the river. Crews laid a spur off the Southern Pacific’s main line straight to the break. The railroad borrowed three hundred giant side-dump cars from the Union Pacific, steel cars that had helped build a railroad across the Great Salt Lake.
Each carried fifty or sixty tons, and a crew could tip the whole load over the side at once. The rock came from a new quarry blasted into a granite ledge at Andrade on the border. From Los Angeles came eleven hundred timber piles, each one hundred and ninety feet long, and forty miles of steel cable for weaving brush into mats wide enough to cover the river bottom so the rock would have something to sit on. The piles were for a trestle built straight across the current, standing on piles driven into the same soft silt the experts were worried about.
Randolph was not a man the railroad could easily spare. He had been sick for twelve years, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1894, and had come west for the dry air. He first lived in Indio, California, a railroad town at the north end of the same basin the river would start filling. After his health failed again in Los Angeles, where he had managed an electric railway network, he moved to Tucson in 1904 and the Southern Pacific put him in charge of its lines between El Paso and Los Angeles.
By the time the river broke loose, he was president of two railroads in Arizona and Mexico and among the Southern Pacific’s president’s most trusted advisers. After the November flood, Randolph ran two plans at once: a steel and concrete headgate set on solid rock near Pilot Knob so the valley could take its water from a safe intake, and a wooden gate beside the break to carry the river’s low water around the work. The wooden gate was not ready until April 18, 1906. That same day, San Francisco shook apart.
The earthquake and fires wrecked much of the city and held up the machinery for the canal’s big new dredge, which was on order there. The Southern Pacific’s president hurried to the city to help, and Randolph followed. In temporary offices, with the ruins still smoking, he told his boss the irrigation company’s money was spent, the river was still loose, and the summer flood could take the whole valley. His boss had a burning city on his hands, his trains busy carrying refugees, and his own lines crippled.
He said yes anyway and put up another $250,000. The next day, the irrigation company’s chief engineer resigned, and H. T. Cory took his place.
Cory was thirty-six, a former professor of mechanical and civil engineering who had been dean of engineering at the University of Cincinnati before joining Randolph as his assistant in 1905. From then on, the railroad ran the fight. Nothing could be closed yet. The summer flood came bigger than the new wooden gate could carry.
By spring, the breach was a quarter of a mile wide. By late June, it was more than half a mile, and the whole river was pouring through it. The border towns of Calexico and Mexicali were partly washed away. The railroad’s line into Mexico was underwater or gone in long stretches.
About thirty thousand acres on the west side of the valley went dry in the middle of a flood. The worst thing in the valley that year was not the standing water but the moving water. The fine silt of the valley floor washed out almost like powdered sugar. Wherever the flood gathered into a strong current, it started a rapid.
The rapid turned into a cascade, the cascade into a waterfall, and the waterfall began eating its way upstream. Those falls could move upstream four thousand feet in a single day, leaving gorges fifty to eighty feet deep with walls that stood nearly straight up. Some of those gorges were more than a thousand feet across. By the time the season was over, the channels the runaway river had cut added up to more than forty miles.
Cory later calculated that the river had carried almost four times as much earth into the sea as was dug out for the entire Panama Canal, and it had done it in nine months. Down on the basin floor, the Southern Pacific’s main line to the east ran straight across the sink. For sixty-one miles, the tracks sat below sea level, with the lowest point 266 feet below the ocean. When those tracks went down in the 1870s, the basin was bone-dry desert.
After the November flood, the new sea covered about 150 square miles. By June 1906, it was rising seven inches a day. The station at Salton went under, and so did the works of the new Liverpool Salt Company. The railroad moved its track eleven times to keep trains running around the water, and finally built thirty-nine miles of new mainline up out of the sea’s reach.
The Torres Martinez Reservation of the Desert Cahuilla sat in that basin, and their families knew this lake from their oldest stories, a sea that came and left again long before there were rails across it. When the water came back, most of them packed what they had and moved up into the mountains. Nearly half of the reservation would end up under the new sea. In early August, the river finally dropped low enough to fight.
The railroad finished its spur to the break, and the first trainload of material rolled over it on August 15. Randolph and Cory leaned on the railroad for everything: pile drivers, steam shovels, bridge crews, and repair parts. The labor came from the nations of the region, recruited across two countries, because every bit of the work sat on Mexican soil. Pima, Maricopa, Tohono O’odham, and Quechan men came from Arizona, and Cocopah and Kumiai men came from Mexico.
With their families, they made a camp of about two thousand people beside the work. Mexico put the area under martial law, and a force of rurales, the Mexican mounted police, came up to keep order. First came a brush mattress more than one hundred feet wide, woven on a barge rigged like a giant loom. Two shifts worked twenty days and nights, using about two thousand cords of brush, a woodpile four feet high and three miles long.
It went to the bottom of the Colorado as a double layer from bank to bank. Superintendent Thomas Hind started by pushing two jetties out from the banks to narrow the gap. Then a trestle went across the rest of it on top of the mat, and in mid-September the first trains rolled out and started tipping rock. In less than two weeks, the pile was high enough to start turning the river toward the gate.
By October 10, about thirteen thousand cubic feet per second were running through the new wooden gate, and only a tenth of the river was spilling over the dam. The gate was taking a beating. Driftwood piled against it, and water was starting to find its way underneath. Crews rushed a second trestle into place in front of the gate to take some of the pressure off.
When the first rock cars rolled out onto it, three of its bents settled and the train went over, sending several battleships tumbling off the rails. Nobody was seriously hurt. The next afternoon, October 11, the gate buckled in the middle and went out with a roar, and two-thirds of it floated off downstream. Four months of work and about $122,000 were gone.
But when the engineers walked out on the rock dam the river had just abandoned, they found something that mattered more than the gate. The rocks had not sunk. The brush mat had not broken under the weight, and the dam had only leaked a little. On the one question that decided everything, the experts had been wrong.
Now Randolph had to close two channels before the Gila sent down another flood. This time the railroad threw everything it had at the break. Ten work trains hauled rock from three or four quarries. The labor force climbed to about a thousand men with seven hundred horses and mules.
They built high rock dams across both the old intake and the bypass, working through the nights, and tied the two dams together with heavy levees into a single barrier about half a mile long. They faced the dams with gravel and clay and drove the fill into the gaps between the stones with jets of water from big pumps. Down the old riverbed, which had been dry for more than a year and grown up in willows, crews cleared a strip of brush more than one hundred feet wide for miles, and mule teams dragging Fresno scrapers cut a shallow channel along it to give the river a clean start back toward the Gulf. On November 4, 1906, the whole river turned.
The Colorado went back into its old bed and ran south, and none of it was heading for the sink, which had not happened in more than a year. That should have been the end of it. Cory left seventy-five men to patrol the new dams and levees and took the train to Calexico to catch up on his other job. About a month later, in the first week of December, another flood came down the Gila and caught the patrol by surprise.
It pushed the Colorado from about nine thousand cubic feet per second to about forty-five thousand. The river climbed against the new rock dam, and the dam held. What did not hold was an older earthen levee roughly a quarter-mile south of it, on a bank that two dry summers had baked and cracked. Water worked its way underneath, and somewhere around midnight the levee began to leak, then to give.
Within a day or two, the whole Colorado was running back toward the Salton Sea. The break grew until, by December 20, it was the gap from the start of the story: eleven hundred feet wide and forty feet deep, with the entire river roaring through it. The Southern Pacific had spent more than a million dollars on a river it did not own in a country that was not its own. The railroad itself had surprisingly little riding on it.
The valley’s freight earned the Southern Pacific only twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year. For about fifty thousand dollars, it could have moved its tracks up out of the sea’s way and walked off. The people with the most riding on it were in Washington. The federal government owned almost all the irrigable land along the lower Colorado and was building a dam of its own at Laguna above Yuma, with about a million dollars already spent.
If the falls kept cutting upstream, they could reach the main river, then Yuma, where the great railroad bridge stood, and then Laguna itself. On December 13, the railroad’s president put the whole thing in a telegram to the White House. President Theodore Roosevelt answered two days later, wanting to know exactly how far the railroad intended to go. The railroad wanted help and a promise it would be repaid.
The president’s first answer was that the government could not act on a break in Mexico, and Congress was not in session anyway. The telegrams went back and forth for a week. Back in the valley, the governor of California and towns across the south of the state were sending urgent appeals to save the settlements in the sink. On December 20, the order went out to close the break, and Randolph passed it to Cory by telegram: control the river at all cost.
Roosevelt wired back that he was delighted to receive the telegram and promised to ask Congress for a law so it would not happen again. The man who had to close the break was Cory. What he faced was worse than August. Back then, at low water, the channel they had dammed had been six or seven hundred feet wide.
Now the gap was nearly twice that. There was no low water to wait for this time and no time to weave a mattress. The spring flood was coming. Roosevelt’s message to Congress warned that if the break was not closed before it, all the property built up in that valley would probably be wiped out, farms and towns alike.
So they changed the method. Instead of one trestle on a mat, they built two trestles across the whole break about fifty feet apart and dumped rock from both at once. Two ridges of stone would rise under them, and the space between the ridges would be packed with gravel and clay until the two ridges and the fill between them made one wide dam. Two trestles meant twice as many cars could stand over the break and dump at the same moment.
In the deepest part of the break, every pile had to go down through as much as forty feet of moving water before it even reached the silt. The river fought back. Three times within a month, floods loaded with driftwood tore out the piles and wrecked the trestles, sometimes partly and sometimes completely, and more than once they hit a bridge that was nearly finished. Three times the pile drivers went back to work.
A history written for the San Diego Historical Society describes Cory in those weeks as seeming to be everywhere, walking and patrolling the job at all hours and never appearing to sleep. On January 12, 1907, Roosevelt’s special message went to Congress. It said the railroad was the only agency equal to the task of controlling the river. Even with unlimited money, he wrote, the government’s own people could not carry on the work with the speed it needed.
The same message laid out what was at stake: about 700,000 acres along the river, land he called as fertile as the Nile Valley, ground that could someday add at least 350,000 people to Arizona and California. On January 27, the first trestle was across the break for the fourth time. At five that evening, the bridge crews spiked the last rail into place. The workmen stood back and cheered as the first train of rock eased out onto the trestle.
By dawn the next morning, 145 carloads of rock had gone into the break. From then on, the dumping did not stop. Crew relieved crew at every shift change without a pause, and at night great searchlights lit the trestles and the water below them. The rock came from Patagonia, Arizona, more than 480 miles away, hauled over two mountain passes.
It came from Tacna, sixty miles to the east, and from quarries near Colton, two hundred miles to the west, dragged over San Gorgonio Pass. Those quarries sat on three different railroads: the Santa Fe, the Salt Lake Road, and the Southern Pacific itself. The job was pulling rock off lines the Southern Pacific did not even own. Trains of rock ran with the right of way, even over passenger trains.
For three weeks, Cory later told Congress, two divisions of the Southern Pacific system were practically tied up by the railroad’s demands for equipment and facilities at the break. A thousand flat cars were working for the river and nothing else. Shipping out of San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, was practically abandoned for two weeks. Frederick Newell, who ran the United States Reclamation Service, described the scene.
The stones were as big as a gang of men could push off a flat car, and hundreds of workmen were pushing them off as fast as the cars could be placed. Some were too big even for that, so crews broke them right on the cars with small charges of dynamite they called pop shots. Newell wrote that the pop shots sounded like artillery in action. On top of that came the roar of the water, the whistle signals, the orders shouted to the men, and the noise of an army working day and night.
At first, trainload after trainload seemed to vanish into the hole. The heap rose anyway, and as it rose, it held the river back. To send the Colorado back into its old bed, the engineers had to lift the entire river about eleven feet. Then the share headed west started to fall.
As the heap climbed, less and less of the river went over it, and more and more of it turned south, back down its old channel toward the Gulf. Now the finer stuff went in: train after train of small stone and gravel from the nearby hills, gravel from the railroad’s big pit at Mammoth, and clay from pits near Pilot Knob. Last of all, crews washed silt into the cracks with hoses until the water stopped seeping through. On February 10, 1907, the break was closed and the Colorado was back in its own bed, headed for the Gulf.
It was fifteen days after the first carload of rock went in and fifty-two days after the railroad was told to go ahead. Two years for the river to build that sea, and fifteen days for a railroad to cut off its supply. By the railroad’s count, more than two thousand carloads of rock went into the break in that stretch, about eighty thousand cubic yards. The whole fight, from the first loan to the last carload, cost the railroad about $3,100,000.
The railroad asked the government to pay it back, and when the government finally paid in 1930, the check covered about a third of the bill. The finished barrier went into the records as the Hind-Clark Dam, after the two superintendents who built its halves. It held. The river never got through the railroad’s defenses again.
The Salton Sea stopped rising, and the share of the river running into the sink was back to none, and this time it stayed there. Randolph spent the rest of his life in Tucson running railroads until he died there in 1921. Four years later, the city opened a big new park and named it for him. It carries another man’s name now, but a bust of Randolph still stands near the middle of it with plaques telling what he built.
At the break, when the rock and gravel finally reached the tops of those two trestles, the crews pulled the rails, ties, and stringers off one of them to use again somewhere else. The other one they left where it stood. One of the wooden trestles from the start of this story never left the river at all. It was buried inside the rock it had dumped.
A railroad bridge turned into part of a dam, and the Colorado, after all that time spilling downhill into a desert, went back to the sea.