The Arizona sentinel., 1911-02-02
P0SSI3ILITIES 0F YyAA
 RE0I0a UHFATHOHED The SoiI Simply Marvellous ia is
 Pf8duGiiV8naSS And the Climate is iatOxiCatiHgly
 SdIEbriOaS
BY GEORGE N. BU RTON. in Los Angeles Times.


 ] 5I.rce Iitile open beats under the dag Of Spain
 dl1t totched the waters Of the western hemi- ! sphere and revealed tLo new world to the l eyes or Europeans. IL is only a little over ] century since the United States Of America i snrang, so to speak, like Pallas Athene from
 the brain of love, a completely armed ad- i dtion to the family Of nations. It is but littie yer half century since California be- came part Of these United States Of America, and less than @ generation since the settle
 ment of the Great Southwest began.
 In all the I25 years since the Republic was founded, also in the half ceL tury since Cali fornia became o&e of the States of the Union. and during every year of the last thirty, a re- alizaJion olthe vast riches Of the American continent, of the territory Of the United Sta es and of this Great Southwest has been ~;core and more astonishing 10 the minds of men. Ore would suppose that by today we kne'y pretty thoroughly vEag the undcve!op- eG resources of lhe Great Southwest might reasonabl5 Ec expected to become. We have no. reached the depths ol this great ocean of wealth with our plummet line yet.
 in 9 residence Of forty years on the Coast tie writer thought he knew little about what there is on the Coast, and as most of these years have been spent in and around Los Angeles, he naturally had a little con- ceit that he was pretty well acquainted with the Great Southwest. Last week a trip to the Colorado RIvcT bottoms. below Yuma made h;m feel as a tenderfOCt who had come in on the last train. New to him, this wonderful region and it's possibilities are pretty well known to a great many readers Of The Times by the stories published, if not by the demon stration of their own eyes.
 Yuma lies on the map just twelve miles from where the government is putting in the great Laguna dam, at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. It is twelve miles from Yuma down the river to the Mexican boundry line on the Arizona side of the river At one point, just below Yuma. the inteTna- tiOnal bOunGry line runs up along the river which there takes a westerly trend and from Yuma to Mexico is only a few miles.
 ONCE MIGHTY STREAM.
 Ages ago when the mountain ranges Of Arizona and California lowered toward the stars, at least twice IS high as they do now, rains were very frcduert and came down in torrcntial volumes ali along these mountain ridges. The Colorado River in tLese past ages was mighty stream, sweeping down debris in tons every second Of it's flow. Tbc Cobra do sink was at that time great inland seq, which spread over the country on both sides of where the river now runs. As the erosion Of winds and storms, landslides and glaciers wore down the mountain ridges year by year, the great river carried down a vast amount Of silt, erosion from the rocks full Of phOS- paates, times and dIsintergrated graniies, as well as the vegetation along its banks; and this was all deposited n what are now the sinks of the Colorado.
 As the mountain tops were worn down, the rains became less frequent and less in volume but the erosion Of rocks and river banks, the frees and vegetable mould torn from the banks still came down and settled into the bn tom of the great inland lake. This geOgical process went on from age to age to OUT time, leaving the Colorado at Yuma 6 stream about half a mile wide and being at the present time about twenty feet deep il the deepest portion.
 | 1t is not necessary to remind Californians ] that the Spanish missionaries and explorers called this river the Colorado because of the
 reddish color Of it's waters It is the Colorado Up in the Grand Canyon in Arizona and G0wn past Thc Needles. But at this time Of tue year. after passing the mouth of the Gila, instead of the red river it becomes the brown river. II actually looks today as if ten per cent Tits flow was silt and only ninety per cent water.