The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (12 page)

By this point, however, powerful and poorly understood forces were arrayed against Cory. As the breach expanded to a quarter of a mile, end to end,
virtually the entire Colorado was now diverting north through the desert and roaring into the Salton Sea, which had already spread to cover four hundred square miles and was leaving farms and homes submerged in an inexorably rising tide of
sediment-saturated water as thick and dark as a pot of gumbo. Even more alarming than the sheer size of this reservoir, however, was the “cutback,” a strange and rarely witnessed phenomenon in which a river equalizes the gradient of its streambed by creating a waterfall that actually migrates upstream.

The mobile cascade, which started
at the point where the water was pouring into the sparkling inland sea, was more than twenty feet high and spent most of that spring clawing its way south toward the main channel of the Colorado at about a mile a day, cutting deeper and deeper until
the drop of the waterfall grew to eighty feet. To anyone standing along the banks, the river appeared to be eating its own entrails at the pace of a slow walk. As this rather grotesque and frightening process—which essentially created a brand-new canyon—marched upstream, the current gouged into the banks on either side,
widening the channel to half a mile. For the settlers of the valley, it seemed as if the river had gone berserk. All along the banks of the channel, enormous chunks of soil were now cracking, giving way, and plummeting into the boiling current like walruses returning to the sea.

When the cutback reached the border town of Mexicali, whose buildings had expanded to the channel’s edge, the brown serpent slowly began devouring the streets. Residents watched in disbelief as the walls of one adobe house after another trembled, teetered, and collapsed into the river, where they dissolved like lumps of sugar. On June 30, 1906,
a brick hotel, the railroad station, and a dozen other buildings in the main business district all crumpled and slid into the current, sending
geysers of water shooting forty feet into the air.

Knowing that it would take a colossal effort to bring the runaway river under control, Cory asked his boss, the head of the Southern Pacific, how much money he was authorized to spend.

“Damn the expense,” came the reply. “Just stop that river!”

O
rders in hand, Cory started battling the Colorado in toe-to-toe combat using every weapon he could think of. He stationed pile drivers on opposite ends of the breach and ordered his men to begin pounding a vertical row of ninety-foot logs into the riverbed to create a picket line across the now-submerged bank of the river. As the wall of pilings extended toward midstream, a pair of steamboats
lumbered up and down the channel with loads of freshly cut arrowweed and willow bush, which a gang of laborers hired from the Cocopahs and half a dozen other indigenous tribes—
the only men willing to work for standard wages in the crushing heat—wove into brush “mattresses” in front of the pilings. When this was done, a pair of railway trestles was constructed on top of the line of pilings.

Meanwhile, Cory was putting together a fleet of special freight trains using three hundred flatbed dump cars, known as battleships, which he had requisitioned from the Union Pacific. When the trains were assembled, he ordered them to begin hauling huge granite boulders from quarries as far away as Los Angeles. As the trains arrived at the work site, they clattered onto the trestle and lined the battleships up directly over the breach. Then men with crowbars began upending the boulders into the current. The dumping proceeded until
a makeshift dam began to rise above the brown surface of the river.

Over the next few months, Cory and his crews built a series of several rock dams, each larger and more expensive than the last, then stood back and watched as a succession of floods methodically obliterated their work. After every defeat, he regrouped and redoubled his efforts, flinging more men, more money, and more material at the river. By the end of the year, his crew had grown to fifteen hundred laborers, recruited from all over the Southwest at top wages. He exhausted every rock quarry within four hundred miles and consumed every available piling in Southern California, forcing him to request that trains hauling lumber and piling from New Orleans be given special right-of-way.

Six work trains were now lumbering across the trestles night and day. A battleship was being dumped every five minutes. Boulders that were too big to be rolled off quickly were dynamited inside the battleships and their pieces kicked into the current. Finally, on February 10, the largest dam was completed and, unlike the six that had preceded it, resisted the efforts of the river to wash it away. After an all-out campaign that had cost in excess of $3 million, the breach was finally plugged and the Colorado was forced to resume its course through the delta to the Sea of Cortés.

The flood was unlike anything that had been seen in the Southwest. When it was over, the northern portion of the valley was underwater. The Salton Sea, which stretched for more than five hundred square miles and was seventy-eight feet deep in the middle,
was now the largest lake in California (a distinction it still holds, although it has shrunk by almost half). Most of the rest of the valley was marred by ruined fields, deep arroyos, washed-out railroad tracks, and partially destroyed towns. Four-fifths of Mexicali had simply disappeared.

T
o those who participated in the events of 1906 in the Imperial Valley, perhaps the only thing more astonishing than the havoc wrought by the flood was that the river had managed to unleash all that chaos by exploiting a gap in the riverbank no wider than the door of a barn. That single detail underscored perhaps the most salient feature of the Colorado, the kernel of truth that transcended everything else, which was that it was totally out of control. The river that had carved the Grand Canyon was basically an outlaw, a renegade that moved according to its own rules. Which imbued it, in the eyes of everyone, with a unique status.

True, the Colorado was decisively outranked and outgunned when it came to the mundane metrics by which rivers are conventionally measured—length and flow, volume and power, navigability and biological richness. By those yardsticks, the Colorado surely took a backseat to the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Missouri, the Hudson, and a dozen other waterways, each of which occupied a more important niche within the country’s economy and had woven itself more deeply—and with far more poetry—into the nation’s mythology. But when it came down to headstrong exuberance, the refusal to permit itself to be corralled into any scheme other than its own, and a willful insistence on asserting its autonomy, the Colorado was in a class by itself: the most
American
river on the continent. The canyons it had carved, the rapids it framed, the silt it carried, and the annual saturnalia of flooding in which it indulged rendered it the scourge of the Southwest.

Thanks to those attributes, the Colorado simultaneously thwarted and held the key to the development not only of the Imperial Valley, but also of the entire region. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before the country whose spirit the river embodied with such savage eloquence would turn to the task of breaking it. And, as it happened, a brand-new agency was keen to handle the job, a branch of the federal government, established under the Department of the Interior, whose mission would include opening vast areas of the West to agriculture through the construction of massive water projects.

Like everything else that happened on the Colorado, this organization was directly, albeit somewhat distantly, connected to the one-armed Major. In June of 1902, three months before Powell died at his summer home in Maine,
Congress had created the Reclamation Service, and among the engineers who were transferred to this fledgling agency to help it get off the ground was Powell’s nephew, Arthur Powell Davis. Not surprisingly, he had been immersed in the lore of his uncle’s river since early childhood.

When Davis first started out, the Reclamation Service was small potatoes
among the federal bureaus, concentrating mainly on building irrigation canals. But Davis,
who was appointed Reclamation’s chief engineer in 1903 and became the head of the organization in 1914, was determined to change all that—and the Colorado was the means by which he intended to realize his ambition.

As his star rose within the service, Davis began to advocate for something considerably more far-reaching than a project that would merely buffer floods and aid irrigation in the Imperial Valley. He championed hydropower—using falling water to crank dynamos and produce clean, reliable kilowatts that could be wholesaled to factories and towns. The process had already been pioneered in 1882 at
a diminutive plant in the tiny town of Appleton, Wisconsin, and was later
scaled up at Niagara Falls during the early 1890s. Now, Davis proposed hydropower as the rationale behind a series of dams on the Colorado that would not merely control the river and prevent flooding, but actually
harness
the river’s energy and sell it.

It would take another decade for the political forces to properly align themselves, including
dividing up the water rights among the seven states through which the river flowed and surveying it from top to bottom. But when everything
came together during the final weeks of 1928, the groundwork had been laid for what probably qualifies as the greatest dam ever built.

T
o subdue a river such as the Colorado—not simply to whip it into submission for a season or two, but to break and yoke the thing by taming its rampages, vanquishing its moods, and converting its kinetics into energy that serves human beings—such a task is not only a colossal technical undertaking but, perhaps even more significant, a monumental act of audacity. The challenge requires more than merely superb competency and monstrous ambition; it also demands a level of hubris that was utterly unimaginable to the world of Cárdenas, an undertaking that lay far beyond even the boldest dreams of the Renaissance and the ages of exploration and discovery that followed. It required the kind of ruthless, steely certainty that humans only began to touch for the first time, perhaps, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the age of iron and steel—not only in terms of materials but also in the way the world was understood: a place whose laws were rigid and immutable, but also now capable of yielding to the even stronger forces of man’s intellect and will.

The site where Davis proposed to build the structure that would aim to subdue the Colorado was located in a place so perfect, so ideally suited in every possible way, that it left dam experts half-convinced that God must have had a
degree in civil engineering. At the point where the southern shard of Nevada stabs into the side of Arizona, many miles upstream from the diversion channels that lead to the Imperial Valley and roughly eighty miles downstream from the Grand Wash Cliffs, lay the last real gorge on the Colorado, a place called Black Canyon, where Lieutenant Joseph Ives had reached the “end of navigation.”

The walls of Black Canyon were almost vertical and rose nearly fifteen hundred feet from the surface of the river, paltry by the standards of the great canyon that lay just upstream, but more than sufficient for the task at hand. The gap between those walls was relatively narrow—less than four hundred yards—and the bedrock that supported them lay less than forty feet beneath the bottom of the river. But the best feature of all was the stone itself. A mixture of micaceous schists and pre-Cambrian granites that formed the core of the craton, the backbone of the tectonic plate that was the foundation for most of the contiguous United States, it was as immutable as the continent itself.