Douglas daily dispatch., 1926-10-03
ADDRESS OF JAMES II. GRAND,
President of the Phoenix Chapter o
American ASSN Engineers Before
the Tucson Engineers Club,
Sent. ~. 1926.

the IucSOm En&AmeeERS NAuUS
Sept. %, 1925.
1 want to thank you for your kind
invitation to address you. The papers,
noticed, state that l am to deliver a
on-political address on the engineer
ing features of the Colorado river. /
am like the little girl, informed by her
Sunday school teacher that Sampson
with his bare hands tore down the
great temple, replied, "He couldn't do
it," This question has become 50
stepped in politics that my remarks
must necessarily SAVIOR of the political
but, trust, not extensively so. / am
not going to take up your time by
indulging in lengthy discussion of a
maze of intricate statistical engineer
ing data. This has been done at too
brains have become confused with mill
lions of acre feet millions of electrical
h. p. and hundreds of millions of dollars
to the exclusion of the paramount issue,
which is the immediate development of
the river for Arizona.
1t is most unfortunate that the prob
lem has been turned from an economic
to a political one. We people have been
fed up on the Colorado river. We have
been led to believe that the time is not
far distant when the revenue from the
Colorado river would pay Arizona tax
burdens. We have been told that more
than four million h. p. could be de-
veloped in the state of Arizona, at such
low h. p. cost without ever once reckon
ing that it would cost the tidy sum of
$500, 900, 900 and who would put up such
a sum, and who could use such an
amount of power. We have been told
that three and one half million acres
low cost of fifty dollars an acre, which
it couldn't; the cost would be $175,0OO.
DR.. Newell, former director of the
Reclamation Service, states there are
twenty million acres of land in the
western part of the United States of
America subject to reclamation and
that it will require two hundred years
and two billions of dollars to do the
work 1t would not only cost eight
hundred millions of dollars to develop
the four millions of h. p., but in order
to put to beneficial use the four mill
lions of h. p., it would require a capital
investment of ten billions of dollars at
the rate of $2,500 per h. p. of invest
ment capital. Now don't you think that
it is high time that we rebel at those
astronomical figures and get down to
earth again.
Fortunately for us the physical con-
ditions surrounding the river are such
that practically full development of
irrigation, power and flood control may
mil afAo ofov.i 11cr
with the other
In the first place I am going to tell
you that power developed in the Col
orado river will never be cheap simply
on account of long transmission dis
tance.
I will ask your indulgence for brief
time to lay down historical back
ground before explain the important
questions as they appear to me. My
first contact with the Colorado river
was in 1898, when as engineer for Lom-
bard, Goode and Company, of Boston,
I made preliminary surveys for the To-
cation of the Sante Fe and Grand Can
yon railway, which company had a
franchise to build railroad from the
town of Williams to the Colorado river.
/ spent much time in exploratory work
in the Grand Canyon. Subsequently
from 1902-1905 as chief engineer of the
Cataract and Grand Canyon railway, I
spent some two and one-ha1f years in
projecting surveys for an electric road
from the present terminus of the Santa
Fe and Grand Canyon railway along
the south rim of the canyon and down
into Cataract canyon to its junction
with the Colorado river. Had this road
been built, it would have rivaled in
scenic beauty the electric road up the
Jungfrau. 1t would have been a great
advertising medium fo rour state and
a source of much revenue both in tour
lists and taxes. We were amply fin
anced, yet our purpose was defeated
through the action of the then Secre-
tary of the Interior in refusing to grant
us license or permit to cross the
Coconino forest reserve. In this con-
nection it was a significant fact that
our projected enterprise met with oppo-
sition from the Santa Fe railway.
These two adventures into the realm
of Colorado river engineering awak-
ened in me the possibility of power de-
velopment and for the next few years
entire Canyon section. In 1918 I filed
on several dam sites covering some 120
miles of the river of which Diamond
creek was central point. Diamond
creek was located because here were
the two essentials so necessary in the
determination of the location of dam
site in the Grand Canyon of the Col
orado river, viz: accessibility and red
rock conditions. Later on, public at
tention was directed to the possibilities
of the Colorado river in the organiza-
tion of the League of the Southwest
The World war interviewed to still this
attention. When the control of the
League of the Southwest passed from
the master minds who had framed it
and had practically gone on the rocks,
these minds devised the formation of "a
Colorado river commission with con-
gressional authority to act. This was
accomplished easily as President Hard
ing and Secretary Fall were in thor
ough accord with the ideas Of the
trainers. The bill was passed and the
commission created, which began func-