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Residents organized the I
mperial Irrigation
District and began a campaign for the All-
American Canal, which was soon attached to
a larger initiative: the Boulder Canyon Project.
The U.S. Congress saw the concerns of the
lower Colorado River as part of a problem
that covered the entire seven-state
region of the Colorado River Basin
(Colorado,
Wyoming, New
Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada,
and California), and that required
permanent federal oversight.
This expansion from local to
national concern began with the
Swing-Johnson Bill
of 1922,
which addressed issues of river
regulation, flood control, water storage
for irrigation and power generation.
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COLORADO RIVER COMPACT
In 1922, representatives of the seven basin
states signed the central piece of the Boulder
Canyon Project, the Colorado River Compact,
and sent it to the states for ratification.
California ratified the compact in 1925 because
it wanted the Boulder Canyon Dam and the
All-American Canal for flood control, storage
and reliability, which were benefits it could not
achieve on its own.
FROM LOCAL ISSUES
TO REGI
ONAL PROJECT
T
he seeds of the idea to i
mport water
from the Colorado River were planted
long ago. In 1856, Thomas H. Blythe, a
developer from San Francisco, diverted water
from the river to the Palo Verde Valley and
then filed a clai
m to irrigate 40,000
acres. In 1900, the California
Development Company built the
Alamo Canal to divert Colorado
River water through Mexico to the
I
mperial Valley. (At that ti
me, San
Diego County stretched east to the
Colorado River, but it became sepa-
rated from that water source when
I
mperial
County was established in 1907.)
The parched I
mperial Valley had previous-
ly been called the Valley of the Dead, but
water would change that i
mage. Within four
years, 700 miles of canals were irrigat-
ing 75,000 acres of the I
mperial Valley
for 8,000 settlers. While the I
mperial
Valley now had water, it had no flood
control. Flood waters devastated the
area when a temporary diversion levy
broke its channel in 1905. Over
the next two years, water from the
Colorado River filled the ancient
Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea.
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Chapter 7:
Colorado River
Water 1920s and on
“Nobody owns water,
nobody wants to steal any-
body’s water — just stop it
from wasting and going to
the ocean. God has given
us resources, and it’s up to
us to develop them.”
Hans Doe,
President of Vista Irrigation District
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Colorado River Aqueduct
Hans Doe