text: With Congress out of session, the new President, Andrew Johnson, began a period known as "Presidential Reconstruction", in which he personally oversaw the creation of new state governments throughout the South. He oversaw the convening of state political conventions populated by delegates whom he deemed to be loyal. Three leading issues came before the conventions: secession itself, the abolition of slavery, and the Confederate war debt. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina held conventions in 1865, while Texas' convention did not organize until March 1866. Johnson hoped to prevent deliberation over whether to re-admit the Southern states by accomplishing full ratification before Congress reconvened in December. He believed he could silence those who wished to deny the Southern states their place in the Union by pointing to how essential their assent had been to the successful ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.


title: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

text: Direct negotiations between state governments and the Johnson administration ensued. As the summer wore on, administration officials began giving assurances of the measure's limited scope with their demands for ratification. Johnson himself suggested directly to the governors of Mississippi and North Carolina that they could proactively control the allocation of rights to freedmen. Though Johnson obviously expected the freed people to enjoy at least some civil rights, including, as he specified, the right to testify in court, he wanted state lawmakers to know that the power to confer such rights would remain with the states. When South Carolina provisional governor Benjamin Franklin Perry objected to the scope of the amendment's enforcement clause, Secretary of State Seward responded by telegraph that in fact the second clause "is really restraining in its effect, instead of enlarging the powers of Congress". Politicians throughout the South were concerned that Congress might cite the amendment's enforcement powers as a way to authorize black suffrage.


text: When South Carolina ratified the Amendment in November 1865, it issued its own interpretive declaration that "any attempt by Congress toward legislating upon the political status of former slaves, or their civil relations, would be contrary to the Constitution of the United States." Alabama and Louisiana also declared that their ratification did not imply federal power to legislate on the status of former slaves. During the first week of December, North Carolina and Georgia gave the amendment the final votes needed for it to become part of the Constitution.


text: Having been ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states (27 of the 36 states, including those that had been in rebellion), Secretary of State Seward, on December 18, 1865, certified that the Thirteenth Amendment had become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution. Included on the enrolled list of ratifying states were the three ex-Confederate states that had given their assent, but with strings attached. Seward accepted their affirmative votes and brushed aside their interpretive declarations without comment, challenge or acknowledgment.


text: The immediate impact of the amendment was to make the entire pre-war system of chattel slavery in the U.S. illegal. The impact of the abolition of slavery was felt quickly. When the Thirteenth Amendment became operational, the scope of Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was widened to include the entire nation. Although the majority of Kentucky's slaves had been emancipated, 65,000–100,000 people remained to be legally freed when the amendment went into effect on December 18. In Delaware, where a large number of slaves had escaped during the war, nine hundred people became legally free.


text: Despite being rendered unconstitutional, slavery continued in areas under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes beyond ratification. The federal government negotiated new treaties with the "Five Civilized Tribes" in 1866, in which they agreed to end slavery.


text: The Three-Fifths Compromise in the original Constitution counted, for purposes of allocating taxes and seats in the House of Representatives, all "free persons", three-fifths of "other persons" (i.e., slaves) and excluded untaxed Native Americans. The freeing of all slaves made the three-fifths clause moot. Compared to the pre-war system, it also had the effect of increasing the political power of former slave-holding states by increasing their share of seats in the House of Representatives, and consequently their share in the Electoral College (where the number of a state's electoral votes, under Article II of the United States Constitution, is tied to the size of its congressional delegation).


text: Even as the Thirteenth Amendment was working its way through the ratification process, Republicans in Congress grew increasingly concerned about the potential for there to be a large increase in the congressional representation of the Democratic-dominated Southern states. Because the full population of freed slaves would be counted rather than three-fifths, the Southern states would dramatically increase their power in the population-based House of Representatives. Republicans hoped to offset this advantage by attracting and protecting votes of the newly enfranchised black population. They would eventually attempt to address this issue in section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment.


text: Southern culture remained deeply racist, and those blacks who remained faced a dangerous situation. J. J. Gries reported to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction: "There is a kind of innate feeling, a lingering hope among many in the South that slavery will be regalvanized in some shape or other. They tried by their laws to make a worse slavery than there was before, for the freedman has not the protection which the master from interest gave him before." W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1935:


text: Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work they did before emancipation, except as their work had been interrupted and changed by the upheaval of war. Moreover, they were getting about the same wages and apparently were going to be subject to slave codes modified only in name. There were among them thousands of fugitives in the camps of the soldiers or on the streets of the cities, homeless, sick, and impoverished. They had been freed practically with no land nor money, and, save in exceptional cases, without legal status, and without protection.


text: Official emancipation did not substantially alter the economic situation of most blacks who remained in the south.


text: As the amendment still permitted labor as punishment for convicted criminals, Southern states responded with what historian Douglas A. Blackmon called "an array of interlocking laws essentially intended to criminalize black life". These laws, passed or updated after emancipation, were known as Black Codes. Mississippi was the first state to pass such codes, with an 1865 law titled "An Act to confer Civil Rights on Freedmen". The Mississippi law required black workers to contract with white farmers by January1 of each year or face punishment for vagrancy. Blacks could be sentenced to forced labor for crimes including petty theft, using obscene language, or selling cotton after sunset. States passed new, strict vagrancy laws that were selectively enforced against blacks without white protectors. The labor of these convicts was then sold to farms, factories, lumber camps, quarries, and mines.


text: After its ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in November 1865, the South Carolina legislature immediately began to legislate Black Codes. The Black Codes created a separate set of laws, punishments, and acceptable behaviors for anyone with more than one black great-grandparent. Under these Codes, Blacks could only work as farmers or servants and had few Constitutional rights. Restrictions on black land ownership threatened to make economic subservience permanent.


text: Some states mandated indefinitely long periods of child "apprenticeship". Some laws did not target blacks specifically, but instead affected farm workers, most of whom were black. At the same time, many states passed laws to actively prevent blacks from acquiring property.


text: As its first enforcement legislation, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, guaranteeing black Americans citizenship and equal protection of the law, though not the right to vote. The amendment was also used as authorizing several Freedmen's Bureau bills. President Andrew Johnson vetoed these bills, but Congress overrode his vetoes to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Second Freedmen's Bureau Bill.


text: Proponents of the Act, including Trumbull and Wilson, argued that Section2 of the Thirteenth Amendment authorized the federal government to legislate civil rights for the States. Others disagreed, maintaining that inequality conditions were distinct from slavery. Seeking more substantial justification, and fearing that future opponents would again seek to overturn the legislation, Congress and the states added additional protections to the Constitution: the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) defining citizenship and mandating equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) banning racial voting restrictions.


text: The Freedmen's Bureau enforced the amendment locally, providing a degree of support for people subject to the Black Codes. Reciprocally, the Thirteenth Amendment established the Bureau's legal basis to operate in Kentucky. The Civil Rights Act circumvented racism in local jurisdictions by allowing blacks access to the federal courts. The Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, in combating the violence and intimidation of white supremacy, were also part of the effort to end slave conditions for Southern blacks. However, the effect of these laws waned as political will diminished and the federal government lost authority in the South, particularly after the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in exchange for a Republican presidency.


text: Southern business owners sought to reproduce the profitable arrangement of slavery with a system called peonage, in which disproportionately black workers were entrapped by loans and compelled to work indefinitely due to the resulting debt. Peonage continued well through Reconstruction and ensnared a large proportion of black workers in the South. These workers remained destitute and persecuted, forced to work dangerous jobs and further confined legally by the racist Jim Crow laws that governed the South. Peonage differed from chattel slavery because it was not strictly hereditary and did not allow the sale of people in exactly the same fashion. However, a person's debt—and by extension a person—could still be sold, and the system resembled antebellum slavery in many ways.


text: Slavery in New Mexico also continued "de facto" in the form of peonage, which became a Spanish colonial tradition to work around the prohibition of hereditary slavery by the New Laws of 1542. Though this practice was rendered unconstitutional by the Thirteenth Amendment, enforcement was lax. The Peonage Act of 1867 specifically mentioned New Mexico and increased enforcement by banning nationwide "the holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage", specifically banning "the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise."


text: In 1939, the Department of Justice created the Civil Rights Section, which focused primarily on First Amendment and labor rights. The increasing scrutiny of totalitarianism in the lead-up to World War II brought increased attention to issues of slavery and involuntary servitude, abroad and at home. The U.S. sought to counter foreign propaganda and increase its credibility on the race issue by combatting the Southern peonage system. Under the leadership of Attorney General Francis Biddle, the Civil Rights Section invoked the constitutional amendments and legislation of the Reconstruction Era as the basis for its actions.


text: In 1947, the DOJ successfully prosecuted Elizabeth Ingalls for keeping domestic servant Dora L. Jones in conditions of slavery. The court found that Jones "was a person wholly subject to the will of defendant; that she was one who had no freedom of action and whose person and services were wholly under the control of defendant and who was in a state of enforced compulsory service to the defendant." The Thirteenth Amendment enjoyed a swell of attention during this period, but from "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) until "Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co." (1968) it was again eclipsed by the Fourteenth Amendment.


text: The Thirteenth Amendment exempts penal labor from its prohibition of forced labor. This allows prisoners who have been convicted of crimes (not those merely awaiting trial) to be required to perform labor or else face punishment while in custody.


text: Few records of the committee's deliberations during the drafting of the Thirteenth Amendment survive, and the debate that followed both in Congress and in the state legislatures featured almost no discussion of this provision. It was apparently considered noncontroversial at the time, or at least legislators gave it little thought. The drafters based the amendment's phrasing on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which features an identical exception. Thomas Jefferson authored an early version of that ordinance's anti-slavery clause, including the exception of punishment for a crime, and also sought to prohibit slavery in general after 1800. Jefferson was an admirer of the works of Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria. Beccaria's "On Crimes and Punishments" suggested that the death penalty should be abolished and replaced with a lifetime of enslavement for the worst criminals; Jefferson likely included the clause due to his agreement with Beccaria. Beccaria, while attempting to reduce "legal barbarism" of the 1700s, considered forced labor one of the few harsh punishments acceptable; for example, he advocated slave labor as a just punishment for robbery, so that the thief's labor could be used to pay recompense to their victims and to society. Penal "hard labor" has ancient origins, and was adopted early in American history (as in Europe) often as a substitute for capital or corporal punishment.


text: Various commentators have accused states of abusing this provision to re-establish systems similar to slavery, or of otherwise exploiting such labor in a manner unfair to local labor. The Black Codes in the South criminalized "vagrancy", which was largely enforced against freed slaves. Later, convict lease programs in the South allowed local plantations to rent inexpensive prisoner labor. While many of these programs have been phased out (leasing of convicts was forbidden by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941), prison labor continues in the U.S. under a variety of justifications. Prison labor programs vary widely; some are uncompensated prison maintenance tasks, some are for local government maintenance tasks, some are for local businesses, and others are closer to internships. Modern rationales for prison labor programs often include reduction of recidivism and re-acclimation to society; the idea is that such labor programs will make it easier for the prisoner upon release to find gainful employment rather than relapse to criminality. However, this topic is not well-studied, and much of the work offered is so menial as to be unlikely to improve employment prospects. As of 2017, most prison labor programs do compensate prisoners, but generally with very low wages. What wages they do earn are often heavily garnished, with as much as 80% of a prisoner's paycheck withheld in the harshest cases.


text: In 2018, artist and entertainer Kanye West advocated for repealing the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for penal labor in a meeting with President Donald Trump, calling the exception a "trap door". In late 2020, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representative William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced a resolution to create a new amendment to close this loophole.


text: In contrast to the other "Reconstruction Amendments", the Thirteenth Amendment was rarely cited in later case law. As historian Amy Dru Stanley summarizes, "beyond a handful of landmark rulings striking down debt peonage, flagrant involuntary servitude, and some instances of race-based violence and discrimination, the Thirteenth Amendment has never been a potent source of rights claims."


text: "United States v. Rhodes" (1866), one of the first Thirteenth Amendment cases, tested the constitutionality of provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that granted blacks redress in the federal courts. Kentucky law prohibited blacks from testifying against whites—an arrangement which compromised the ability of Nancy Talbot ("a citizen of the United States of the African race") to reach justice against a white person accused of robbing her. After Talbot attempted to try the case in federal court, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled this federal option unconstitutional. Noah Swayne (a Supreme Court justice sitting on the Kentucky Circuit Court) overturned the Kentucky decision, holding that without the material enforcement provided by the Civil Rights Act, slavery would not truly be abolished. With "In Re Turner" (1867), Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase ordered freedom for Elizabeth Turner, a former slave in Maryland who became indentured to her former master.


text: In "Blyew v. United States", (1872) the Supreme Court heard another Civil Rights Act case relating to federal courts in Kentucky. John Blyew and George Kennard were white men visiting the cabin of a black family, the Fosters. Blyew apparently became angry with sixteen-year-old Richard Foster and hit him twice in the head with an ax. Blyew and Kennard killed Richard's parents, Sallie and Jack Foster, and his blind grandmother, Lucy Armstrong. They severely wounded the Fosters' two young daughters. Kentucky courts would not allow the Foster children to testify against Blyew and Kennard. Federal courts, authorized by the Civil Rights Act, found Blyew and Kennard guilty of murder. The Supreme Court ruled that the Foster children did not have standing in federal courts because only living people could take advantage of the Act. In doing so, the Courts effectively ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment did not permit a federal remedy in murder cases. Swayne and Joseph P. Bradley dissented, maintaining that in order to have meaningful effects, the Thirteenth Amendment would have to address systemic racial oppression.


text: The "Blyew" case set a precedent in state and federal courts that led to the erosion of Congress's Thirteenth Amendment powers. The Supreme Court continued along this path in the "Slaughter-House Cases" (1873), which upheld a state-sanctioned monopoly of white butchers. In "United States v. Cruikshank" (1876), the Court ignored Thirteenth Amendment dicta from a circuit court decision to exonerate perpetrators of the Colfax massacre and invalidate the Enforcement Act of 1870.


text: The Thirteenth Amendment is not solely a ban on chattel slavery; it also covers a much broader array of labor arrangements and social deprivations. As the U.S. Supreme Court explicated in the Slaughter-House Cases with respect to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment, and the Thirteenth Amendment in particular:


text: Undoubtedly while negro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which proposed the thirteenth article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or hereafter. If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void. And so if other rights are assailed by the States which properly and necessarily fall within the protection of these articles, that protection will apply, though the party interested may not be of African descent. But what we do say, and what we wish to be understood is, that in any fair and just construction of any section or phrase of these amendments, it is necessary to look to the purpose which we have said was the pervading spirit of them all, the evil which they were designed to remedy, and the process of continued addition to the Constitution, until that purpose was supposed to be accomplished, as far as constitutional law can accomplish it.


text: In the "Civil Rights Cases" (1883), the Supreme Court reviewed five consolidated cases dealing with the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which outlawed racial discrimination at "inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement". The Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment did not ban most forms of racial discrimination by non-government actors. In the majority decision, Bradley wrote (again in non-binding dicta) that the Thirteenth Amendment empowered Congress to attack "badges and incidents of slavery". However, he distinguished between "fundamental rights" of citizenship, protected by the Thirteenth Amendment, and the "social rights of men and races in the community". The majority opinion held that "it would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car; or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business." In his solitary dissent, John Marshall Harlan (a Kentucky lawyer who changed his mind about civil rights law after witnessing organized racist violence) argued that "such discrimination practiced by corporations and individuals in the exercise of their public or quasi-public functions is a badge of servitude, the imposition of which congress may prevent under its power."


text: The Court in the "Civil Rights Cases" also held that appropriate legislation under the amendment could go beyond nullifying state laws establishing or upholding slavery, because the amendment "has a reflex character also, establishing and decreeing universal civil and political freedom throughout the United States" and thus Congress was empowered "to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States." The Court stated about the amendment's scope:


text: This amendment, as well as the Fourteenth, is undoubtedly self-executing, without any ancillary legislation, so far as its terms are applicable to any existing state of circumstances. By its own unaided force and effect, it abolished slavery and established universal freedom. Still, legislation may be necessary and proper to meet all the various cases and circumstances to be affected by it, and to prescribe proper modes of redress for its violation in letter or spirit. And such legislation may be primary and direct in its character, for the amendment is not a mere prohibition of State laws establishing or upholding slavery, but an absolute declaration that slavery or involuntary servitude shall not exist in any part of the United States.


text: Attorneys in "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896) argued that racial segregation involved "observances of a servile character coincident with the incidents of slavery", in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. In their brief to the Supreme Court, Plessy's lawyers wrote that "distinction of race and caste" was inherently unconstitutional. The Supreme Court rejected this reasoning and upheld state laws enforcing segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. In the (7–1) majority decision, the Court found that "a statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded on the color of the two races and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude." Harlan dissented, writing: "The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor, atone for the wrong this day done."


text: In "Hodges v. United States" (1906), the Court struck down a federal statute providing for the punishment of two or more people who "conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States". A group of white men in Arkansas conspired to violently prevent eight black workers from performing their jobs at a lumber mill; the group was convicted by a federal grand jury. The Supreme Court ruled that the federal statute, which outlawed conspiracies to deprive citizens of their liberty, was not authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment. It held that "no mere personal assault or trespass or appropriation operates to reduce the individual to a condition of slavery." Harlan dissented, maintaining his opinion that the Thirteenth Amendment should protect freedom beyond "physical restraint". "Corrigan v. Buckley" (1922) reaffirmed the interpretation from "Hodges", finding that the amendment does not apply to restrictive covenants.


text: Enforcement of federal civil rights law in the South created numerous peonage cases, which slowly traveled up through the judiciary. The Supreme Court ruled in "Clyatt v. United States" (1905) that peonage was involuntary servitude. It held that although employers sometimes described their workers' entry into contract as voluntary, the servitude of peonage was always (by definition) involuntary.


text: In "Bailey v. Alabama" the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed its holding that the Thirteenth Amendment is not solely a ban on chattel slavery, it also covers a much broader array of labor arrangements and social deprivations. In addition to the aforesaid the Court also ruled on Congress enforcement power under the Thirteenth Amendment. The Court said:


text: The plain intention [of the amendment] was to abolish slavery of whatever name and form and all its badges and incidents; to render impossible any state of bondage; to make labor free, by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit, which is the essence of involuntary servitude. While the Amendment was self-executing, so far as its terms were applicable to any existing condition, Congress was authorized to secure its complete enforcement by appropriate legislation.


text: Legal histories cite "Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co." (1968) as a turning point of Thirteen Amendment jurisprudence. The Supreme Court confirmed in "Jones" that Congress may act "rationally" to prevent private actors from imposing "badges and incidents of servitude". The Joneses were a black couple in St. Louis County, Missouri, who sued a real estate company for refusing to sell them a house. The Court held:


text: Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation. ... this Court recognized long ago that, whatever else they may have encompassed, the badges and incidents of slavery—its "burdens and disabilities"—included restraints upon "those fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely, the same right ... to inherit, purchase, lease, sell and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens." Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3, 109 U. S. 22.


text: Just as the Black Codes, enacted after the Civil War to restrict the free exercise of those rights, were substitutes for the slave system, so the exclusion of Negroes from white communities became a substitute for the Black Codes. And when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery.


text: Negro citizens, North and South, who saw in the Thirteenth Amendment a promise of freedom—freedom to "go and come at pleasure" and to "buy and sell when they please"—would be left with "a mere paper guarantee" if Congress were powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of a Negro will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man. At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep.


text: The Court in "Jones" reopened the issue of linking racism in contemporary society to the history of slavery in the United States.


text: The "Jones" precedent has been used to justify Congressional action to protect migrant workers and target sex trafficking. The direct enforcement power found in the Thirteenth Amendment contrasts with that of the Fourteenth, which allows only responses to institutional discrimination of state actors.


text: The Supreme Court has taken an especially narrow view of involuntary servitude claims made by people not descended from black (African) slaves. In "Robertson v. Baldwin" (1897), a group of merchant seamen challenged federal statutes which criminalized a seaman's failure to complete their contractual term of service. The Court ruled that seamen's contracts had been considered unique from time immemorial, and that "the amendment was not intended to introduce any novel doctrine with respect to certain descriptions of service which have always been treated as exceptional." In this case, as in numerous "badges and incidents" cases, Justice Harlan authored a dissent favoring broader Thirteenth Amendment protections.


text: In "Selective Draft Law Cases", the Supreme Court ruled that the military draft was not "involuntary servitude". In "United States v. Kozminski", the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth Amendment did not prohibit compulsion of servitude through psychological coercion. "Kozminski" defined involuntary servitude for purposes of criminal prosecution as "a condition of servitude in which the victim is forced to work for the defendant by the use or threat of physical restraint or physical injury or by the use or threat of coercion through law or the legal process. This definition encompasses cases in which the defendant holds the victim in servitude by placing him or her in fear of such physical restraint or injury or legal coercion."


text: The U.S. Courts of Appeals, in "Immediato v. Rye Neck School District", "Herndon v. Chapel Hill", and "Steirer v. Bethlehem School District", have ruled that the use of community service as a high school graduation requirement did not violate the Thirteenth Amendment.


text: During the six decades following the 1804 ratification of the Twelfth Amendment two proposals to amend the Constitution were adopted by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. Neither has been ratified by the number of states necessary to become part of the Constitution. Each is referred to as "Article Thirteen", as was the successful Thirteenth Amendment, in the joint resolution passed by Congress.


text: "Columbia Law Review", special issue: Symposium: The Thirteenth Amendment: Meaning, Enforcement, and Contemporary Implications


text: Ripley, C. Peter et al. eds. "Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation" (1993) online


title: Colorado River

text: The Colorado River () is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The river drains an expansive, arid watershed that encompasses parts of seven U.S. states and two Mexican states. The name Colorado derives from the Spanish language for "colored reddish" due to its heavy silt load. Starting in the central Rocky Mountains of Colorado, it flows generally southwest across the Colorado Plateau and through the Grand Canyon before reaching Lake Mead on the Arizona–Nevada border, where it turns south toward the international border. After entering Mexico, the Colorado approaches the mostly dry Colorado River Delta at the tip of the Gulf of California between Baja California and Sonora.


title: Colorado River

text: Known for its dramatic canyons, whitewater rapids, and eleven U.S. National Parks, the Colorado River and its tributaries are a vital source of water for 40 million people. An extensive system of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts divert almost its entire flow for agricultural irrigation and urban water supply. Its large flow and steep gradient are used to generate hydroelectricity, meeting peaking power demands in much of the Intermountain West. Intensive water consumption has dried up the lower of the river, which has rarely reached the sea since the 1960s.


title: Colorado River

text: Native Americans have inhabited the Colorado River basin for at least 8,000 years. Starting around 1 AD, large agriculture-based societies were established, but a combination of drought and poor land use practices led to their collapse in the 1300s. Their descendants include tribes such as the Puebloans, while others including the Navajo settled in the Colorado Basin after the 1000s. In the 1500s, Spanish explorers began mapping and claiming the watershed, which became part of Mexico upon its independence in 1821. Even after most of the watershed became US territory in 1846, much of the river's course remained unknown. Several expeditions charted the Colorado in the mid-19th century—one of which, led by John Wesley Powell, was the first to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Large-scale settlement of the lower basin began in the mid- to late-1800s, with steamboats sailing from the Gulf of California to landings along the river that linked to wagon roads to the interior. Starting in the 1860s, gold and silver strikes drew prospectors to the upper Colorado River basin.


title: Colorado River

text: Large-scale river management began in the early 1900s, with major guidelines established in a series of international and US interstate treaties known as the "Law of the River". The US federal government constructed most of the major dams and aqueducts between 1910 and 1970; the largest, Hoover Dam, was completed in 1935. Numerous water projects have also involved state and local governments. With all of its water fully allocated, the Colorado is now considered among the most controlled and litigated rivers in the world.


title: Colorado River

text: The environmental movement in the American Southwest has opposed the damming and diversion of the Colorado River system due to negative effects on the ecology and natural beauty of the river and its tributaries. During the construction of Glen Canyon Dam (1956-66), environmental organizations vowed to block any further development of the river, and a number of later dam and aqueduct proposals were defeated by citizen opposition. Since 2000, extended drought has conflicted with increasing demands for Colorado River water, and the level of human development and control of the river continues to generate controversy.


title: Colorado River

text: The Colorado begins at La Poudre Pass in the Never Summer Mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park, above sea level. After a short run south, the river turns west below Grand Lake, the largest natural lake in the state. For the first of its course, the Colorado carves its way through the mountainous Western Slope, a sparsely populated region defined by the portion of the state west of the Continental Divide. As it flows southwest, it gains strength from many small tributaries, as well as larger ones including the Blue, Eagle and Roaring Fork rivers. After passing through De Beque Canyon, the Colorado emerges from the Rockies into the Grand Valley, a major farming and ranching region where it meets one of its largest tributaries, the Gunnison River, at Grand Junction. Most of the upper river is a swift whitewater stream ranging from wide, the depth ranging from , with a few notable exceptions, such as the Blackrocks reach where the river is nearly deep. In a few areas, such as the marshy Kawuneeche Valley near the headwaters and the Grand Valley, it exhibits braided characteristics.


title: Colorado River

text: From Grand Junction, the Colorado turns northwest before cutting southwest across the eponymous Colorado Plateau, a vast area of high desert centered at the Four Corners of the southwestern United States. Here, the climate becomes significantly drier than that in the Rocky Mountains, and the river becomes entrenched in progressively deeper gorges of bare rock, beginning with Ruby Canyon and then Westwater Canyon as it enters Utah, now once again heading southwest. Farther downstream it receives the Dolores River and defines the southern border of Arches National Park, before passing Moab and flowing through "The Portal", where it exits the Moab Valley between a pair of sandstone cliffs.


title: Colorado River

text: In Utah, the Colorado flows primarily through the "slickrock" country, which is characterized by its narrow canyons and unique "folds" created by the tilting of sedimentary rock layers along faults. This is one of the most inaccessible regions of the continental United States. Below the confluence with the Green River, its largest tributary, in Canyonlands National Park, the Colorado enters Cataract Canyon, named for its dangerous rapids, and then Glen Canyon, known for its arches and erosion-sculpted Navajo sandstone formations. Here, the San Juan River, carrying runoff from the southern slope of Colorado's San Juan Mountains, joins the Colorado from the east. The Colorado then enters northern Arizona, where since the 1960s Glen Canyon Dam near Page has flooded the Glen Canyon reach of the river, forming Lake Powell for hydroelectricity generation.


title: Colorado River

text: In Arizona, the river passes Lee's Ferry, an important crossing for early explorers and settlers and since the early 20th century the principal point where Colorado River flows are measured for apportionment to the seven U.S. and two Mexican states in the basin. Downstream, the river enters Marble Canyon, the beginning of the Grand Canyon, passing under the Navajo Bridges on a now southward course. Below the confluence with the Little Colorado River, the river swings west into Granite Gorge, the most dramatic portion of the Grand Canyon, where the river cuts up to into the Colorado Plateau, exposing some of the oldest visible rocks on Earth, dating as long ago as 2 billion years. The of the river that flow through the Grand Canyon are largely encompassed by Grand Canyon National Park and are known for their difficult whitewater, separated by pools that reach up to in depth.


title: Colorado River

text: At the lower end of Grand Canyon, the Colorado widens into Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the continental United States, formed by Hoover Dam on the border of Arizona and Nevada. Situated southeast of metropolitan Las Vegas, the dam is an integral component for management of the Colorado River, controlling floods and storing water for farms and cities in the lower Colorado River basin. Below the dam the river passes under the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge—which at nearly above the water is the highest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere—and then turns due south towards Mexico, defining the Arizona–Nevada and Arizona–California borders.


title: Colorado River

text: After leaving the confines of the Black Canyon, the river emerges from the Colorado Plateau into the Lower Colorado River Valley (LCRV), a desert region dependent on irrigation agriculture and tourism and also home to several major Indian reservations. The river widens here to a broad, moderately deep waterway averaging wide and reaching up to across, with depths ranging from . Before channelization of the Colorado in the 20th century, the lower river was subject to frequent course changes caused by seasonal flow variations. Joseph C. Ives, who surveyed the lower river in 1861, wrote that "the shifting of the channel, the banks, the islands, the bars is so continual and rapid that a detailed description, derived from the experiences of one trip, would be found incorrect, not only during the subsequent year, but perhaps in the course of a week, or even a day."


title: Colorado River

text: The LCRV is one of the most densely populated areas along the river, and there are numerous towns including Bullhead City, Arizona, Needles, California, and Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Here, several large diversions draw from the river, providing water for both local uses and distant regions including the Salt River Valley of Arizona and metropolitan Southern California. The last major U.S. diversion is at Imperial Dam, where over 90 percent of the river's flow is moved into the Gila Gravity Canal and Yuma Area Project, and the much bigger All-American Canal to irrigate California's Imperial Valley, the most productive winter agricultural region in the United States.


title: Colorado River

text: Below Imperial Dam, only a small portion of the Colorado River makes it beyond Yuma, Arizona, and the confluence with the intermittent Gila River—which carries runoff from western New Mexico and most of Arizona–before defining about of the Mexico–United States border. At Morelos Dam, the entire remaining flow of the Colorado is diverted to irrigate the Mexicali Valley, among Mexico's most fertile agricultural lands. Below San Luis Río Colorado, the Colorado passes entirely into Mexico, defining the Baja California–Sonora border. Since 1960, the stretch of the Colorado between here and the Gulf of California has been dry or a trickle formed by irrigation return flows. The Hardy River provides most of the flow into the Colorado River Delta, a vast alluvial floodplain covering about of northwestern Mexico. A large estuary is formed here before the Colorado empties into the Gulf about south of Yuma. Occasionally the International Boundary and Water Commission allows a springtime pulse flow to recharge the delta.


title: Colorado River

text: Before 20th-century development dewatered the lower Colorado, a major tidal bore was present in the delta and estuary; the first historical record was made by the Croatian missionary in Spanish service Father Ferdinand Konščak on July 18, 1746. During spring tide conditions, the tidal bore—locally called "El Burro"—formed in the estuary about Montague Island in Baja California and propagated upstream.


title: Colorado River

text: The Colorado is joined by over 25 significant tributaries, of which the Green River is the largest by both length and discharge. The Green River takes drainage from the Wind River Range of west-central Wyoming, from Utah's Uinta Mountains, and from the Rockies of northwestern Colorado. The Gila River is the second longest and drains a greater area than the Green, but has a significantly lower flow because of a more arid climate and larger diversions for irrigation and cities. Both the Gunnison and San Juan rivers, which derive most of their water from Rocky Mountains snowmelt, contribute more water than the Gila contributed naturally.


title: Colorado River

text: In its natural state, the Colorado River poured about into the Gulf of California each year, equaling an average discharge of . Its flow regime was not at all steady – indeed, "prior to the construction of federal dams and reservoirs, the Colorado was a river of extremes like no other in the United States." Summer peak flows often exceeded , and winter flows fell as low as . At Topock, Arizona (about upstream from the Gulf) a maximum historical discharge of was recorded in 1884, and a minimum of was recorded in 1935. Since the construction of Hoover Dam, the lower Colorado rarely exceeds or drops below . Annual runoff volume also varies widely, from a high of in 1984 to a low of in 2002, although in most years only a small portion of this flow – if any – reaches the Gulf.


title: Colorado River

text: About 85–90 percent of the Colorado River's discharge originates in melting snowpack from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. The three major upper tributaries of the Colorado – the snow-fed Gunnison, Green, and San Juan – alone deliver almost per year to the main stem. The remaining 10 to 15 percent comes from a variety of sources, primarily groundwater and summer monsoon storms. Tributaries in the Lower Basin are prone to monsoon–caused flash floods, but these storms do not often contribute significant volumes of runoff. Annual runoff follows snowmelt, which typically begins in April, peaking in May and June before exhausting in July or August.


title: Colorado River

text: Due to water diversions, flows at the mouth of the river have steadily declined since the early 1900s. Since 1960, the Colorado has typically dried up before reaching the sea, with the exception of a few wet years. In addition to water consumption, flows have declined due to evaporation from reservoirs and warming temperatures that reduce winter snow accumulation. Several of the Colorado's major tributaries, including the Gila River, also no longer reach the Colorado due to upstream diversions.


title: Colorado River

text: The average flow rate of the Colorado River at the northernmost point of the Mexico–United States border (NIB, or Northerly International Boundary) is , or per year – about one-fifth of what the natural flow would be. Below this location, the remaining flow is diverted to irrigate the Mexicali Valley, leaving a dry riverbed from Morelos Dam to the sea that is supplemented by intermittent flows of irrigation drainage water. There have been exceptions, however, particularly in 1983–1987, when the Colorado once again reached the sea after consecutive seasons of record-breaking snowfall. In 1984, of excess runoff reached the ocean.


title: Colorado River

text: The United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates or has operated 46 stream gauges to measure the discharge of the Colorado River, ranging from the headwaters near Grand Lake to the Mexico–U.S. border. The tables at right list data associated with eight of these gauges. River flows as gauged at Lees Ferry, Arizona, about halfway along the length of the Colorado and below Glen Canyon Dam, are used to determine water allocations in the Colorado River basin. The average discharge recorded there was approximately , or per year, from 1922 to 2020. This figure has been heavily affected by upstream diversions and reservoir evaporation, especially after the completion of the Colorado River Storage Project in the 1970s. Prior to the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1964, the average discharge recorded between 1912 and 1962 was , or per year.


title: Colorado River

text: The Colorado River Basin consists of , making it the seventh largest drainage basin in North America. About , or 97 percent of the basin, is in the United States. The basin extends into western Colorado and New Mexico, southwestern Wyoming, eastern and southern Utah, southeastern Nevada and California, and most of Arizona. The areas drained within Baja California and Sonora in Mexico are very small and do not contribute significant runoff. Aside from the Colorado River Delta, the basin extends into Sonora at a few locations further east, including the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River and San Pedro River (both tributaries of the Gila River). For hydrological management purposes, the Colorado River Basin is divided into the Upper Basin (the drainage area above Lees Ferry), and the Lower Basin. The Upper Basin covers only 45 percent of the land area of the Colorado River Basin, but contributes 92 percent of the runoff.


title: Colorado River

text: The entire eastern boundary of the Colorado River Basin runs along the North American Continental Divide and is defined largely by the Rocky Mountains. The Wind River Range in Wyoming marks the northern extent of the basin, and is separated from the Colorado Rockies by the endorheic Great Divide Basin in southwestern Wyoming. Streams that are nearby the east side of the divide drain into the Mississippi River and Rio Grande, while nearby areas north of the Wind River Range drain into the Columbia River. The western boundary of the Colorado River Basin is formed by various ranges and plateaus that border the Great Basin, including the Uinta Mountains and Wasatch Range. Major Great Basin watersheds bordering the Colorado River Basin are the Great Salt Lake and Sevier Lake watersheds. To the south, the Colorado River Basin borders several watersheds in Mexico draining into the Gulf of California, including the Sonoyta, Concepción, and Yaqui rivers. Much of the basin is at high elevation; the mean elevation is . Lees Ferry, more than halfway along the Colorado River from its source, is above sea level. The highest point in the Colorado River Basin is Uncompahgre Peak in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, while some water from the river drains via irrigation run-off into California's Salton Sea, below sea level.


title: Colorado River

text: About 72 percent of the Colorado River Basin is classified as arid, with the Sonoran and Mojave deserts covering the southern portion and the Colorado Plateau encompassing much of the central portion. The Colorado Plateau is home to most of the major canyon systems formed by the Colorado River and its tributaries, particularly those of the Green and San Juan rivers. About 23 percent of the basin is forest, with the largest area in the Rocky Mountains; other significant forested areas include the Kaibab, Aquarius, and Markagunt plateaus in southern Utah and northern Arizona, and the Mogollon Rim in central Arizona. These high plateaus and escarpments, often exceeding in elevation, form the northern and southern edges of the Colorado Plateau geological province. Developed land use in the basin is mostly irrigated agriculture, chiefly in the Grand Valley, the Lower Colorado River Valley, and the Salt River Valley, but the total area of crop and pasture land is only 2–3 percent of the entire basin. Urban areas cover less than 1 percent.


title: Colorado River

text: Climate in the Colorado River Basin ranges from subtropical hot desert at southern, lower elevations to alpine in the Rocky Mountains. Mean monthly high temperatures are in the Upper Basin and in the Lower Basin, and lows average , respectively. Annual precipitation averages , ranging from over in some areas of the Rockies to less than in dry desert valleys. The Upper Basin generally receives snow and rain during the winter and early spring, while precipitation in the Lower Basin falls mainly during intense but infrequent summer thunderstorms brought on by the North American Monsoon. Precipitation is influenced by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with El Niño being associated with wetter conditions and La Niña with drier conditions. The effect of ENSO is significantly more pronounced in the Lower Basin, where it has a strong impact on monsoonal rainfall. Runoff patterns across the Colorado River Basin reflect this; most of the perennial tributaries originate in the Upper Basin, while tributaries in the Lower Basin are either ephemeral (such as the Little Colorado River) or highly seasonal (such as the Gila and Salt rivers).


title: Colorado River

text: As of 2010, approximately 13 million people lived within the Colorado River basin, while about 40 million people live in areas supplied by Colorado River water. Colorado River basin states are among the fastest-growing in the US; the population of Nevada alone increased by about 66 percent between 1990 and 2000 as Arizona grew by some 40 percent. Phoenix, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada and Mexicali, Baja California are the largest cities by population within the Colorado River Basin. Other significant cities include Tucson, Arizona, St. George, Utah and Flagstaff, Arizona. Due to the rugged and inhospitable topography through which the river flows, there are only a few major towns along the Colorado River itself, including Grand Junction, Colorado and Yuma, Arizona.


title: Colorado River

text: As recently as the Cretaceous period about 100 million years ago, much of western North America was still part of the Pacific Ocean. Tectonic forces from the collision of the Farallon Plate with the North American Plate pushed up the Rocky Mountains between 50 and 75 million years ago in a mountain-building episode known as the Laramide orogeny. The Colorado River first formed as a west-flowing stream draining the southwestern portion of the range, and the uplift also diverted the Green River, once a tributary of the Mississippi River, west towards the Colorado. About 30 to 20 million years ago, volcanic activity related to the orogeny led to the Mid-Tertiary ignimbrite flare-up, which created smaller formations such as the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona and deposited massive amounts of volcanic ash and debris over the watershed. The Colorado Plateau first began to rise during the Eocene, between about 55 and 34 million years ago, but did not attain its present height until about 5 million years ago, about when the Colorado River established its present course into the Gulf of California.


title: Colorado River

text: The time scale and sequence over which the river's present course and the Grand Canyon were formed is uncertain. Before the Gulf of California was formed around 12 to 5 million years ago by faulting processes along the boundary of the North American and Pacific plates, the Colorado flowed west to an outlet on the Pacific Ocean—possibly Monterey Bay on the Central California coast, and may have played a role in the formation of the Monterey submarine canyon. Crustal extension in the Basin and Range Province began about 20 million years ago and the modern Sierra Nevada began forming about 10 million years ago, eventually diverting the Colorado southwards towards the Gulf. As the Colorado Plateau continued to rise between 5 and 2.5 million years ago, the river maintained its ancestral course (as an antecedent stream) and began to cut the Grand Canyon. Antecedence played a major part in shaping other peculiar geographic features in the watershed, including the Dolores River's bisection of Paradox Valley in Colorado and the Green River's cut through the Uinta Mountains in Utah.


title: Colorado River

text: Sediments carried from the plateau by the Colorado River created a vast delta made of more than of material that walled off the northernmost part of the gulf in approximately 1 million years. Cut off from the ocean, the portion of the gulf north of the delta eventually evaporated and formed the Salton Sink, which reached about below sea level. Since then the river has changed course into the Salton Sink at least three times, transforming it into Lake Cahuilla, which at maximum size flooded up the valley to present-day Indio, California. The lake took about 50 years to evaporate after the Colorado resumed flowing to the Gulf. The present-day Salton Sea can be considered the most recent incarnation of Lake Cahuilla, though on a much smaller scale.


title: Colorado River

text: Between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, massive flows of basalt from the Uinkaret volcanic field in northern Arizona dammed the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon. At least 13 lava dams were formed, the largest of which was more than high, backing the river up for nearly to present-day Moab, Utah. The lack of associated sediment deposits along this stretch of the Colorado River, which would have accumulated in the impounded lakes over time, suggests that most of these dams did not survive for more than a few decades before collapsing or being washed away. Failure of the lava dams caused by erosion, leaks and cavitation caused catastrophic floods, which may have been some of the largest ever to occur in North America, rivaling the late-Pleistocene Missoula Floods of the northwestern United States. Mapping of flood deposits indicate that crests as high as passed through the Grand Canyon, reaching peak discharges as great as .


title: Colorado River

text: The first humans of the Colorado River basin were likely Paleo-Indians of the Clovis and Folsom cultures, who first arrived on the Colorado Plateau about 12,000 years ago. Very little human activity occurred in the watershed until the rise of the Desert Archaic Culture, which from 8,000 to 2,000 years ago constituted most of the region's human population. These prehistoric inhabitants led a generally nomadic lifestyle, gathering plants and hunting small animals (though some of the earliest peoples hunted larger mammals that became extinct in North America after the end of the Pleistocene epoch). Another notable early group was the Fremont culture, whose peoples inhabited the Colorado Plateau from 2,000 to 700 years ago. The Fremont were likely the first peoples of the Colorado River basin to domesticate crops and construct masonry dwellings; they also left behind a large amount of rock art and petroglyphs, many of which have survived to the present day.


title: Colorado River

text: Beginning in the early centuries A.D., Colorado River basin peoples began to form large agriculture-based societies, some of which lasted hundreds of years and grew into well-organized civilizations encompassing tens of thousands of inhabitants. The Ancient Puebloan (also known as Anasazi or Hisatsinom) people of the Four Corners region were descended from the Desert Archaic culture. The Puebloan people developed a complex distribution system to supply drinking and irrigation water in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico.


title: Colorado River

text: The Puebloans dominated the basin of the San Juan River, and the center of their civilization was in Chaco Canyon. In Chaco Canyon and the surrounding lands, they built more than 150 multi-story pueblos or "great houses", the largest of which, Pueblo Bonito, is composed of more than 600 rooms. The Hohokam culture was present along the middle Gila River beginning around 1 A.D. Between 600 and 700 A.D. they began to employ irrigation on a large scale, and did so more prolifically than any other native group in the Colorado River basin. An extensive system of irrigation canals was constructed on the Gila and Salt rivers, with various estimates of a total length ranging from and capable of irrigating . Both civilizations supported large populations at their height; the Chaco Canyon Puebloans numbered between 6,000 and 15,000 and estimates for the Hohokam range between 30,000 and 200,000.


title: Colorado River

text: These sedentary peoples heavily exploited their surroundings, practicing logging and harvesting of other resources on a large scale. The construction of irrigation canals may have led to a significant change in the morphology of many waterways in the Colorado River basin. Prior to human contact, rivers such as the Gila, Salt and Chaco were shallow perennial streams with low, vegetated banks and large floodplains. In time, flash floods caused significant downcutting on irrigation canals, which in turn led to the entrenchment of the original streams into arroyos, making agriculture difficult. A variety of methods were employed to combat these problems, including the construction of large dams, but when a megadrought hit the region in the 14th century A.D. the ancient civilizations of the Colorado River basin abruptly collapsed. Some Puebloans migrated to the Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico and south-central Colorado, becoming the predecessors of the Hopi, Zuni, Laguna and Acoma people in western New Mexico. Many of the tribes that inhabited the Colorado River basin at the time of European contact were descended from Puebloan and Hohokam survivors, while others already had a long history of living in the region or migrated in from bordering lands.


title: Colorado River

text: The Navajo were an Athabaskan people who migrated from the north into the Colorado River basin around 1025 A.D. They soon established themselves as the dominant Native American tribe in the Colorado River basin, and their territory stretched over parts of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado – in the original homelands of the Puebloans. In fact, the Navajo acquired agricultural skills from the Puebloans before the collapse of the Pueblo civilization in the 14th century. A profusion of other tribes have made a continued, lasting presence along the Colorado River. The Mohave have lived along the rich bottomlands of the lower Colorado below Black Canyon since 1200 A.D. They were fishermen—navigating the river on rafts made of reeds to catch Gila trout and Colorado pikeminnow— and farmers, relying on the annual floods of the river rather than irrigation to water their crops. Ute peoples have inhabited the northern Colorado River basin, mainly in present-day Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, for at least 2,000 years, but did not become well established in the Four Corners area until 1500 A.D. The Apache, Cocopah, Halchidhoma, Havasupai, Hualapai, Maricopa, Pima, and Quechan are among many other groups that live along or had territories bordering on the Colorado River and its tributaries.


title: Colorado River

text: Beginning in the 17th century, contact with Europeans brought significant changes to the lifestyles of Native Americans in the Colorado River basin. Missionaries sought to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity – an effort sometimes successful, such as in Father Eusebio Francisco Kino's 1694 encounter with the "docile Pimas of the Gila Valley [who] readily accepted Kino and his Christian teachings". From 1694 to 1702 Kino would explore the Gila and Colorado Rivers to determine if California was an island or peninsula. The Spanish introduced sheep and goats to the Navajo, who came to rely heavily on them for meat, milk and wool. By the mid-16th century, the Utes, having acquired horses from the Spanish, introduced them to the Colorado River basin. The use of horses spread through the basin via trade between the various tribes and greatly facilitated hunting, communications, travel and warfare for indigenous peoples. The more aggressive tribes, such as the Utes and Navajos, often used horses to their advantage in raids against tribes that were slower to adopt them, such as the Goshutes and Southern Paiutes.


title: Colorado River

text: The gradual influx of European and American explorers, fortune seekers and settlers into the region eventually led to conflicts that forced many Native Americans off their traditional lands. After the acquisition of the Colorado River basin from Mexico in the Mexican–American War in 1846, U.S. military forces commanded by Kit Carson forced more than 8,000 Navajo men, women and children from their homes after a series of unsuccessful attempts to confine their territory, many of which were met with violent resistance. In what is now known as the Long Walk of the Navajo, the captives were marched from Arizona to Fort Sumner in New Mexico, and many died along the route. Four years later, the Navajo signed a treaty that moved them onto a reservation in the Four Corners region that is now known as the Navajo Nation. It is the largest Native American reservation in the United States, encompassing with a population of over 180,000 as of 2000.


title: Colorado River

text: The Mohave were expelled from their territory after a series of minor skirmishes and raids on wagon trains passing through the area in the late 1850s, culminating in an 1859 battle with American forces that concluded the Mohave War. In 1870, the Mohave were relocated to a reservation at Fort Mojave, which spans the borders of Arizona, California and Nevada. Some Mohave were also moved to the Colorado River Indian Reservation on the Arizona–California border, originally established for the Mohave and Chemehuevi people in 1865. In the 1940s, some Hopi and Navajo people were also relocated to this reservation. The four tribes now form a geopolitical body known as the Colorado River Indian Tribes.


title: Colorado River

text: Water rights of Native Americans in the Colorado River basin were largely ignored during the extensive water resources development carried out on the river and its tributaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The construction of dams has often had negative impacts on tribal peoples, such as the Chemehuevi when their riverside lands were flooded after the completion of Parker Dam in 1938. Ten Native American tribes in the basin now hold or continue to claim water rights to the Colorado River. The U.S. government has taken some actions to help quantify and develop the water resources of Native American reservations. The first federally funded irrigation project in the U.S. was the construction of an irrigation canal on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in 1867. Other water projects include the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, authorized in 1962 for the irrigation of lands in part of the Navajo Nation in north-central New Mexico. The Navajo continue to seek expansion of their water rights because of difficulties with the water supply on their reservation; about 40 percent of its inhabitants must haul water by truck many miles to their homes. In the 21st century, they have filed legal claims against the governments of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah for increased water rights. Some of these claims have been successful for the Navajo, such as a 2004 settlement in which they received a allotment from New Mexico.


title: Colorado River

text: During the 16th century, the Spanish began to explore and colonize western North America. An early motive was the search for the Seven Cities of Gold, or "Cibola", rumored to have been built by Native Americans somewhere in the desert Southwest. According to a United States Geological Survey publication, it is likely that Francisco de Ulloa was the first European to see the Colorado River when in 1536 he sailed to the head of the Gulf of California. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's 1540–1542 expedition began as a search for the fabled Cities of Gold, but after learning from natives in New Mexico of a large river to the west, he sent García López de Cárdenas to lead a small contingent to find it. With the guidance of Hopi Indians, Cárdenas and his men became the first outsiders to see the Grand Canyon. Cárdenas was reportedly unimpressed with the canyon, assuming the width of the Colorado River at and estimating -tall rock formations to be the size of a man. After failing at an attempt to descend to the river, they left the area, defeated by the difficult terrain and torrid weather.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1540, Hernando de Alarcón and his fleet reached the mouth of the river, intending to provide additional supplies to Coronado's expedition. Alarcón may have sailed the Colorado as far upstream as the present-day California–Arizona border. Coronado never reached the Gulf of California, and Alarcón eventually gave up and left. Melchior Díaz reached the delta in the same year, intending to establish contact with Alarcón, but the latter was already gone by the time of Díaz's arrival. Díaz named the Colorado River "Rio del Tizon" ("Firebrand River") after seeing a practice used by the local natives for warming themselves. The name "Tizon" lasted for the next 200 years. The name "Rio Colorado" ("Red River") was first applied to the Colorado by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino in his maps and written reports resulting from his explorations to the Colorado River Delta and his discovery that California was not an island but a peninsula (1700–1702). Kino's 1701 map, "Paso por Tierra a la California," is the first known map to label the river as the Colorado.


title: Colorado River

text: During the 18th and early 19th centuries, many Americans and Spanish believed in the existence of the Buenaventura River, purported to run from the Rocky Mountains in Utah or Colorado to the Pacific Ocean. The name "Buenaventura" was given to the Green River by Silvestre Vélez de Escalante as early as 1776, but Escalante did not know that the Green drained to the Colorado. Many later maps showed the headwaters of the Green and Colorado rivers connecting with the Sevier River (Rio San Ysabel) and Utah Lake (Lake Timpanogos) before flowing west through the Sierra Nevada into California. Mountain man Jedediah Smith reached the lower Colorado by way of the Virgin River canyon in 1826. Smith called the Colorado the "Seedskeedee", as the Green River in Wyoming was known to fur trappers, correctly believing it to be a continuation of the Green and not a separate river as others believed under the Buenaventura myth. John C. Frémont's 1843 Great Basin expedition proved that no river traversed the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada, officially debunking the Buenaventura myth.


title: Colorado River

text: Between 1850 and 1854 the U. S. Army explored the lower reach of the Colorado River from the Gulf of California, looking for the river to provide a less expensive route to supply the remote post of Fort Yuma. First in November 1850 to January 1851, by its transport schooner, "Invincible" under Captain Alfred H. Wilcox and then by its longboat commanded by Lieutenant George Derby. Later Lieutenant Derby, in his expedition report, recommended that a shallow draft sternwheel steamboat would be the way to send supplies up river to the fort.


title: Colorado River

text: The next contractors George Alonzo Johnson with his partner Benjamin M. Hartshorne, brought two barges and 250 tons of supplies arriving at the river's mouth in February 1852, on the United States transport schooner "Sierra Nevada" under Captain Wilcox. Poling the barges up the Colorado, the first barge sank with its cargo a total loss. The second was finally, after a long struggle poled up to Fort Yuma, but what little it carried was soon consumed by the garrison. Subsequently, wagons again were sent from the fort to haul the balance of the supplies overland from the estuary through the marshes and woodlands of the Delta.


title: Colorado River

text: At last Derby's recommendation was heeded and in November 1852, the "Uncle Sam", a 65-foot-long side-wheel paddle steamer, built by Domingo Marcucci, became the first steamboat on the Colorado River. It was brought by the schooner "Capacity" from San Francisco to the delta by the next contractor to supply the fort, Captain James Turnbull. It was assembled and launched in the estuary, 30 miles above the mouth of the Colorado River. Equipped with only a 20-horsepower engine, the "Uncle Sam" could only carry 35 tons of supplies, taking 15 days to make the first 120-mile trip. It made many trips up and down the river, taking four months to finish carrying the supplies for the fort, improving its time up river to 12 days. Negligence caused it to sink at its dock below Fort Yuma, and was then washed away before it could be raised, in the spring flood of 1853. Turnbull in financial difficulty, disappeared. Nevertheless, he had shown the worth of steamboats to solve Fort Yuma's supply problem.


title: Colorado River

text: George Alonzo Johnson with his partner Hartshorne and a new partner Captain Alfred H. Wilcox (formerly of the "Invincible" and "Sierra Nevada"), formed George A. Johnson & Company and obtained the next contract to supply the fort. Johnson and his partners, all having learned lessons from their failed attempts ascending the Colorado and with the example of the "Uncle Sam", brought the parts of a more powerful side-wheel steamboat, the "General Jesup", with them to the mouth of the Colorado from San Francisco. There it was reassembled at a landing in the upper tidewater of the river and reached Fort Yuma, January 18, 1854. This new boat, capable of carrying 50 tons of cargo, was very successful making round trips from the estuary to the fort in only four or five days. Costs were cut from $200 to $75 per ton.


title: Colorado River

text: Lorenzo Sitgreaves led the first Corps of Topographical Engineers mission across northern Arizona to the Colorado River (near modern Bullhead City, Arizona), and down its east bank to the river crossings of the Southern Immigrant Trail at Fort Yuma in 1851.


title: Colorado River

text: The second Corps of Topographical Engineers expedition passed along and crossed the Colorado was the 1853–1854 Pacific Railroad Survey expedition along the 35th parallel north from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, led by Lt. Amiel Weeks Whipple.


title: Colorado River

text: George A. Johnson was instrumental in getting the support for Congressional funding a military expedition up the river. With those funds Johnson expected to provide the transportation for the expedition but was angry and disappointed when the commander of the expedition Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives rejected his offer of one of his steamboats. Before Ives could finish reassembling his steamer in the delta, George A. Johnson set off from Fort Yuma on December 31, 1857, conducting his own exploration of the river above the fort in his steamboat "General Jesup". He ascended the river in twenty one days as far as the first rapids in Pyramid Canyon, over above Fort Yuma and above the modern site of Davis Dam. Running low on food he turned back. As he returned he encountered Lieutenant Ives, Whipple's assistant, who was leading an expedition to explore the feasibility of using the Colorado River as a navigation route in the Southwest. Ives and his men used a specially built steamboat, the shallow-draft U.S.S. "Explorer", and traveled up the river as far as Black Canyon. He then took a small boat up beyond the canyon to Fortification Rock and Las Vegas Wash. After experiencing numerous groundings and accidents and having been inhibited by low water in the river, Ives declared: "Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed."


title: Colorado River

text: Until 1866, El Dorado Canyon was the actual head of navigation on the Colorado River. In that year Captain Robert T. Rogers, commanding the steamer "Esmeralda" with a barge and ninety tons of freight, reached Callville, Nevada, on October 8, 1866. Callville remained the head of navigation on the river until July 7, 1879, when Captain J. A. Mellon in the "Gila" left El Dorado Canyon landing, steamed up through the rapids in Black Canyon, making record time to Callville and tied up overnight. Next morning he to steamed up through the rapids in Boulder Canyon to reach the mouth of the Virgin River at Rioville July 8, 1879. From 1879 to 1887, Rioville, Nevada was the high water Head of Navigation for the steamboats and the mining company sloop Sou'Wester that carried the salt needed for the reduction of silver ore from there to the mills at El Dorado Canyon.


title: Colorado River

text: Up until the mid-19th century, long stretches of the Colorado and Green rivers between Wyoming and Nevada remained largely unexplored due to their remote location and dangers of navigation. Because of the dramatic drop in elevation of the two rivers, there were rumors of huge waterfalls and violent rapids, and Native American tales strengthened their credibility. In 1869, one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell led an expedition from Green River Station in Wyoming, aiming to run the two rivers all the way down to St. Thomas, Nevada, near present-day Hoover Dam. Powell and nine men – none of whom had prior whitewater experience – set out in May. After braving the rapids of the Gates of Lodore, Cataract Canyon and other gorges along the Colorado, the party arrived at the mouth of the Little Colorado River, where Powell noted down arguably the most famous words ever written about the Grand Canyon of the Colorado:


title: Colorado River

text: On August 28, 1869, three men deserted the expedition, convinced that they could not possibly survive the trip through the Grand Canyon. They were allegedly killed by Native Americans after making it to the rim of the canyon; two days later, the expedition ran the last of the Grand Canyon rapids and reached St. Thomas. Powell led a second expedition in 1871, this time with financial backing from the U.S. government. The explorers named many features along the Colorado and Green rivers, including Glen Canyon, the Dirty Devil River, Flaming Gorge, and the Gates of Lodore. In what is perhaps a twist of irony, modern-day Lake Powell, which floods Glen Canyon, is also named for their leader.


title: Colorado River

text: Starting in the latter half of the 19th century, the lower Colorado below Black Canyon became an important waterway for steamboat commerce. In 1852, the "Uncle Sam" was launched to provide supplies to the U.S. Army outpost at Fort Yuma. Although this vessel accidentally foundered and sank early in its career, commercial traffic quickly proliferated because river transport was much cheaper than hauling freight over land. Navigation on the Colorado River was dangerous because of the shallow channel and flow variations, so the first sternwheeler on the river, the "Colorado" of 1855, was designed to carry while drawing less than of water. The tidal bore of the lower Colorado also presented a major hazard; in 1922, a -high wave swamped a ship bound for Yuma, killing between 86 and 130 people. Steamboats quickly became the principal source of communication and trade along the river until competition from railroads began in the 1870s, and finally the construction of dams along the lower river in 1909, none of which had locks to allow the passage of ships.


title: Colorado River

text: During the Manifest Destiny era of the mid-19th century, American pioneers settled many western states but generally avoided the Colorado River basin until the 1850s. Under Brigham Young's grand vision for a "vast empire in the desert", (the State of Deseret) Mormon settlers were among the first whites to establish a permanent presence in the watershed, Fort Clara or Fort Santa Clara, in the winter of 1855–1856 along the Santa Clara River, tributary of the Virgin River. In the lower Colorado mining was the primary spur to economic development, copper mining in southwestern New Mexico Territory the 1850s then the Mohave War and a gold rush on the Gila River in 1859, the El Dorado Canyon Rush in 1860 and Colorado River Gold Rush in 1862.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1860, anticipating the American Civil War, the Mormons established a number of settlements to grow cotton along the Virgin River in Washington County, Utah. From 1863 to 1865, Mormon colonists founded St. Thomas and other colonies on the Muddy and Virgin rivers in northwestern Arizona Territory, (now Clark County, Nevada). Stone's Ferry was established by these colonists on the Colorado at the mouth of the Virgin River to carry their produce on a wagon road to the mining districts of Mohave County, Arizona to the south. Also, in 1866, a steamboat landing was established at Callville, intended as an outlet to the Pacific Ocean via the Colorado River, for Mormon settlements in the Great Basin. These settlements reached a peak population of about 600 before being abandoned in 1871, and for nearly a decade these valleys became a haven for outlaws and cattle rustlers. One Mormon settler Daniel Bonelli, remained, operating the ferry and began mining salt in nearby mines, bring it in barges, down river to El Dorado Canyon where it was used to process silver ore. From 1879 to 1887, Colorado Steam Navigation Company steamboats carried the salt, operating up river in the high spring flood waters, through Boulder Canyon, to the landing at Rioville at the mouth of the Virgin River. From 1879 to 1882 the Southwestern Mining Company, largest in El Dorado Canyon, brought in a 56-foot sloop the Sou'Wester that sailed up and down river carrying the salt in the low water time of year until it was wrecked in the Quick and Dirty Rapids of Black Canyon.


title: Colorado River

text: Mormons founded settlements along the Duchesne River Valley in the 1870s, and populated the Little Colorado River valley later in the century, settling in towns such as St. Johns, Arizona. They also established settlements along the Gila River in central Arizona beginning in 1871. These early settlers were impressed by the extensive ruins of the Hohokam civilization that previously occupied the Gila River valley, and are said to have "envisioned their new agricultural civilization rising as the mythical "phoenix" bird from the ashes of Hohokam society". The Mormons were the first whites to develop the water resources of the basin on a large scale, and built complex networks of dams and canals to irrigate wheat, oats and barley in addition to establishing extensive sheep and cattle ranches.


title: Colorado River

text: One of the main reasons the Mormons were able to colonize Arizona was the existence of Jacob Hamblin's ferry across the Colorado at Lee's Ferry (then known as Pahreah Crossing), which began running in March 1864. This location was the only section of river for hundreds of miles in both directions where the canyon walls dropped away, allowing for the development of a transport route. John Doyle Lee established a more permanent ferry system at the site in 1870. One reason Lee chose to run the ferry was to flee from Mormon leaders who held him responsible for the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which 120 emigrants in a wagon train were killed by a local militia disguised as Native Americans. Even though it was located along a major travel route, Lee's Ferry was very isolated, and there Lee and his family established the aptly named Lonely Dell Ranch. In 1928, the ferry sank, resulting in the deaths of three men. Later that year, the Navajo Bridge was completed at a point downstream, rendering the ferry obsolete.


title: Colorado River

text: Gold strikes from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries played a major role in attracting settlers to the upper Colorado River basin. In 1859, a group of adventurers from Georgia discovered gold along the Blue River in Colorado and established the mining boomtown of Breckenridge. During 1875, even bigger strikes were made along the Uncompahgre and San Miguel rivers, also in Colorado, and these led to the creation of Ouray and Telluride, respectively. Because most gold deposits along the upper Colorado River and its tributaries occur in lode deposits, extensive mining systems and heavy machinery were required to extract them. Mining remains a substantial contributor to the economy of the upper basin and has led to acid mine drainage problems in some regional streams and rivers.


title: Colorado River

text: The Colorado River region in Mexico became favored place for Americans to invest in agriculture in the late nineteenth century when Mexico President Porfirio Díaz welcomed foreign capital to develop the country. The Colorado River Land Company, formed by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, his father-in-law Harrison Gray Otis, and others, developed the Mexicali Valley in Baja California as a thriving land company. The company headquarters was nominally based in Mexico, but its real headquarters was in Los Angeles, California. Land was leased mainly to Americans who were required to develop it. Colorado River was used to irrigate the rich soil. The company largely escaped the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), but in the postrevolutionary period, the Mexican government expropriated the company's land to satisfy the demand for land reform.


title: Colorado River

text: Prior to 1921, the upper Colorado River above the confluence with the Green River in Utah had assumed various names. Fathers Dominguez and Escalante named it Rio San Rafael in 1776. Through the mid-1800s, the river between Green River and the Gunnison River was most commonly known as the Grand River. The river above the junction with the Gunnison River, however, was known variously as the Bunkara River, the North Fork of the Grand River, the Blue River, and the Grand River. The latter name did not become consistently applied until the 1870s.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1921, U.S. Representative Edward T. Taylor of Colorado petitioned the Congressional Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce to rename the Grand River as the Colorado River. Taylor saw the fact that the Colorado River started outside the border of his state as an "abomination". On July 25, the name change was made official in House Joint Resolution 460 of the 66th Congress, over the objections of representatives from Wyoming, Utah, and the USGS, which noted that the Green River was much longer and had a larger drainage basin above its confluence with the Grand River, although the Grand contributed a greater flow of water.


title: Colorado River

text: About 40 million people depend on the Colorado River's water for agricultural, industrial and domestic needs. The Colorado irrigates 5.5 million acres (2.2 million hectares) of farmland, and its hydroelectric plants produce 12 billion kilowatt hours (KWh) of hydroelectricity each year. Hydroelectricity from the Colorado is a key supplier of peaking power on the Southwest electric grid. Often called "America's Nile", the Colorado is so intensively managed that each drop of its water is used an average of 17 times in a single year. Southern Nevada Water Authority has called the Colorado River one of the "most controlled, controversial and litigated rivers in the world".


title: Colorado River

text: In 1922, six U.S. states signed the Colorado River Compact, which divided half of the river's flow to both the Upper Basin (the drainage area above Lee's Ferry, comprising parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming and a small portion of Arizona) and the Lower Basin (Arizona, California, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico and Utah). The Upper and Lower Basin were each allocated of water per year, a figure believed to represent half of the river's annual flow at Lee's Ferry. The allotments operated under the premise that approximately 17.5 million acre-feet of water flowed through the river annually.


title: Colorado River

text: Arizona initially refused to ratify the compact because it feared that California would take too much of the lower basin allotment. In 1944 a compromise was reached in which Arizona was allocated , but with the caveat that California's allocation was prioritized during drought years. These and nine other decisions, compacts, federal acts and agreements made between 1922 and 1973 constitute what is now known as the Law of the River.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1944, a treaty between the U.S. and Mexico allocated of Colorado River water to Mexico each year. Morelos Dam was constructed in 1950 to enable Mexico to utilize its share of the river. Water allocated to Mexico from the Colorado River is regulated by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which also apportions waters from the Rio Grande between the two countries.


title: Colorado River

text: Large-scale development of Colorado River water supplies started in the late 19th century, at the river's headwaters in La Poudre Pass. The Grand Ditch, directing runoff from the river's headwaters across the Continental Divide to arid eastern Colorado, was considered an engineering marvel when completed in 1890. This was the first of twenty-four "transmountain diversions" constructed to draw water across the Rocky Mountains as the Front Range corridor increased in population. These diversions draw water from the upper Colorado and its tributaries into the South Platte River, Arkansas River and Rio Grande basins. Today, about 80 percent of Colorado's population lives on the Eastern Slope of the Rockies, while 80 percent of precipitation falls on the Western Slope.


title: Colorado River

text: While first planned at the same time as the Grand Ditch, construction on the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT) did not begin until the 1930s. Today, the C-BT is the largest of the transmountain diversions, delivering per year from the Colorado River to cities north of Denver. Numerous other projects followed, with the largest including the Roberts Tunnel, which delivers water from the Blue River to the city of Denver, and the Fryingpan–Arkansas Project, which diverts water from the Fryingpan River to the Arkansas River basin.


title: Colorado River

text: Combined, the transmountain diversions draw about of water per year out of the Colorado River basin. Historically, most of the water has been used for irrigation, although water usage is increasing for urban water supply and for recreational purposes such as snowmaking and increasing Eastern Slope streamflows for boating and fishing. Denver Water receives about 50 percent of its supply from the Colorado River basin. However, diversions have caused environmental harm to the upper Colorado River system by reducing streamflows in many tributaries. A number of reservoirs have been built to offset the impact of transmountain diversions by storing water for dry season release on the Western Slope, including Williams Fork Reservoir in 1959 and Wolford Mountain Reservoir in 1996.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1900, the California Development Company (CDC) envisioned irrigating the Imperial Valley, a then dry basin on the California–Mexico border, using water from the Colorado River. Due to the valley's location below sea level, water could be diverted and allowed to flow there entirely by gravity. Engineer George Chaffey was hired to design the Alamo Canal, which split from the Colorado near Pilot Knob, California and ran south into Mexico, where it joined the Alamo River, a dry arroyo which had historically carried overflowing floodwaters from the Colorado into the Salton Sink at the bottom of Imperial Valley. The scheme worked initially; by 1903, about four thousand people lived in the valley and more than of farmland had been developed.


title: Colorado River

text: The Alamo Canal experienced continual problems due to the Colorado's high sediment content and its varying water levels. During low flows, the river often dropped below the level of the canal intake, while high flows silted up the intake, forcing the repeated excavation of new cuts. In early 1905, flooding destroyed the intake gates and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. By August, the breach had grown large enough to swallow the entire flow of the river, which began to flood the bottom of the valley. The Southern Pacific Railroad attempted to dam the flow in order to protect their tracks which ran through the valley, but was hampered by repeated flooding. It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and restore the river's original course – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a lake, today's Salton Sea. The Imperial Valley fiasco demonstrated that further economic development of the region would require a dam to control the Colorado's unpredictable flows.


title: Colorado River

text: A large dam on the Colorado River had been envisioned since the 1920s. In 1928, Congress authorized the Reclamation Service (today's U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, or USBR) to build the Boulder Canyon Project, whose key feature would be a dam on the Colorado in Black Canyon southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada. On September 30, 1935, Hoover Dam was completed, forming Lake Mead, capable of holding more than two years of the Colorado's flow. Lake Mead was, and still is, the largest artificial lake in the U.S. by storage capacity. The construction of Hoover Dam stabilized the lower channel of the Colorado River, stored water for irrigation in times of drought, captured sediment and controlled floods. Hoover was the tallest dam in the world at the time of construction and also had the world's largest hydroelectric power plant.


title: Colorado River

text: The Boulder Canyon Project Act also authorized the All-American Canal, which was built as a permanent replacement for the Alamo Canal and follows a route entirely within the U.S. on its way to the Imperial Valley. The canal's intake is located at Imperial Dam, above Yuma, Arizona, which diverts the majority of the Colorado's flow with only a small portion continuing to Mexico. With a capacity of over , the All-American Canal is the largest irrigation canal in the world. Because the hot, sunny climate lends to a year-round growing season, the Imperial Valley has become one of the most productive farming regions in North America, providing much of the winter produce supply in the U.S. The Imperial Irrigation District supplies water to south of the Salton Sea. The Coachella Canal, which branches northward from the All-American Canal, irrigates another in the Coachella Valley.


title: Colorado River

text: Parker Dam was initially built as the diversion point for the Colorado River Aqueduct, planned by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to supply water to Los Angeles. The construction of the dam was opposed by Arizona, which feared that California would take too much water from the Colorado; at one point, Arizona sent members of its National Guard to stop work on the dam. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, with Arizona dropping its objections in exchange for the USBR constructing the Gila Project, which irrigates on the Arizona side of the river. By 1941, the long Colorado River Aqueduct was completed, delivering 1.2 million acre-feet (1.5 km) of water west to Southern California. The aqueduct enabled the continued growth of Los Angeles and its suburbs, and provides water to about 10 million people today. The San Diego Aqueduct, which branches off from the Colorado River Aqueduct in Riverside County, California, opened in stages between 1954–1971 and provides water to another 3 million people in the San Diego metro area.


title: Colorado River

text: The Las Vegas Valley of Nevada experienced rapid growth after Hoover Dam, and by 1937 Las Vegas had tapped a pipeline into Lake Mead. Nevada officials, believing that groundwater resources in the southern part of the state were sufficient for future growth, were more concerned with securing a large amount of the dam's power supply than water from the Colorado; thus they settled for the smallest water allocation of all the states in the Colorado River Compact. In 2018, due to declining water levels in Lake Mead, a second pipeline was completed with a lower intake elevation.


title: Colorado River

text: In the first half of the 20th century, the Upper Basin states, with the exception of Colorado, had developed very little of their water allocations from the Colorado River Compact. By the 1950s, however, water demand was rapidly increasing in Utah's Wasatch Front (Salt Lake City metro area) and the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, which both began exploring ways to divert water from the Colorado Basin. The Upper Basin states were concerned that they would not be able to use their full Compact allocations due to increasing water demands in the Lower Basin. The Compact requires the Upper Basin to deliver a minimum annual flow of past Lee's Ferry (measured on a 10-year rolling average). Without additional reservoir storage, the Upper Basin states could not utilize their allocations without impacting water deliveries to the Lower Basin in dry years.


title: Colorado River

text: In 1956 Congress authorized the USBR to construct the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), which planned several large reservoirs on the upper Colorado, Green, Gunnison and San Juan Rivers. The initial blueprints for the CRSP included two dams on the Green River within Echo Park Canyon in Dinosaur National Monument – a move criticized by both the National Park Service and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. The controversy received nationwide media attention, and the USBR dropped its plans for the Dinosaur dams in exchange for increasing the size of a proposed dam at Glen Canyon.


title: Colorado River

text: The controversy associated with Glen Canyon Dam did not build momentum until construction was well underway. Due to Glen Canyon's remote location, most of the American public did not even know of its existence; the few who did contended that it had much greater scenic value than Echo Park. Sierra Club leader David Brower fought the dam both during the construction and for many years afterwards until his death in 2000. Brower believed that he was personally responsible for the failure to prevent Glen Canyon's flooding, calling it his "greatest mistake, greatest sin".


title: Colorado River

text: In addition to Glen Canyon Dam, the CRSP includes the Flaming Gorge Dam on the Green River, the Blue Mesa, Morrow Point and Crystal Dams on the Gunnison River, and the Navajo Dam on the San Juan River. A total of 22 "participating projects" (of which 16 have been constructed) were later authorized in order to develop local water supplies at various locations across the Upper Basin states. These include the Central Utah Project, which delivers per year from the Green River basin to the Wasatch Front, and the San Juan–Chama Project, which diverts per year from the San Juan River to the Rio Grande Valley. Both are multi-purpose projects serving a variety of agricultural, municipal and industrial uses.


title: Colorado River

text: By the middle of the 20th century, planners were concerned that continued growth in water demand would outstrip the available water supply from the Colorado River. After exploring a multitude of potential projects, the USBR published a study in January 1964 known as the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, which proposed diverting water from the northwestern United States into the Colorado River basin. Arizona's water allocation was a significant focus of the plan, due to the growing concern that its water supply could be curtailed due to California's seniority of water rights. In addition, the plan would guarantee full water supplies to Nevada, California and Mexico, allowing the Upper Basin states to utilize their full allocations without risking reductions in the Lower Basin. The project would cost an estimated $3.1 billion.