“What happened to the Salton Sea?” That was one of the questions raised in our water course two weeks ago, which I mentioned last week. At first I thought it didn’t have much to do with the Tulare Lake Basin, the subject of our teaching. But I was wrong.
The Salton Sea’s story starts in Yuma, a place name taken from the resident tribe which means “sons of the river.” When I was five, my family visited the historic fort there at the insistence of my great-grandmother, who lived in the Imperial Valley most of her adult life. But the desert’s dryness and heat repelled us. We never went back.
In the 1850s, Fort Yuma was the place you had to get to, before crossing the Colorado Desert, to reach the California gold mines by the southern route. According to Donald Worster, most people chose the northern route across the Great Basin and Sierra, dropping into Sacramento’s foothills because it was less treacherous, despite Donner Pass.
When you left Yuma, there were sand dunes to cross, “a classic symbol of sterility,” Worster wrote. Beyond the dunes lay flat, hot, empty desert. But some dreamers who survived that trip saw potential in the dust if only water could be applied. And they were right, or right enough in the short run, to bring a few pioneering settlers to pitch tents and lay claim to desert plots. So the dreamers renamed the desert the “Imperial Valley” and brought more water, enough for tens of thousands of acres, by cutting into the Colorado River and installing a headgate, which opened in 1901.
This success brought more pioneering settlers: 14,000 people had created two towns and plowed up 120,000 acres by 1905, when the Colorado showed her cranky side and clogged the headgate with silt during spring’s high-water flows. Desperate to keep water flowing to his customers, chief dreamer Charles Rockwood made a new cut further downriver, but with no headgate. The Colorado took the bit in her teeth and gushed through his opening, and it took two years and one of the richest men in America, railroadman Edward H. Harriman, to plug the hole. In the meantime, the river filled the Valley’s low spot, which became the Salton Sea.
Fast-forward 100+ years, when the Sea has become so salty and toxic from irrigating desert soils that no life comes from it, no life lives in it. Those early settlers’ farms have been gobbled up by corporate operations; billions of dollars have been made from crops grown there since the Bureau of Reclamation harnessed the Colorado’s water behind Hoover Dam, stored in Lake Mead, crops harvested by giant pools of migrant laborers. Now the Colorado’s flows are shrinking from increased demands upstream and decreased snowmelt from the Rockies thanks to climate change. Additionally, the Imperial Irrigation District has sold some of its water in past years to thirsty urban centers on the coast. In August it agreed to leave some more in Lake Mead, which has dropped so low that its operators have been afraid they’ll be unable to deliver water to anyone, including Los Angeles. So, with less Colorado River water irrigating Imperial Valley lands, and tailwater being the Salton Sea’s only source, it’s drying up.
“That’s what happens anytime you have a closed basin with no outlet to the sea,” said one of our class participants. I thought about our lake. Until the construction of the Army Corps dams on our four rivers in the 1950s, floods sometimes flushed the lake across the low interfluve between the Kings River and the San Joaquin, sending water eventually to the Pacific. But the lands irrigated first on the basin’s northeast side generally did not contain high salt content, having been flushed by spring floods for eons. Salts are more a problem from soils on the basin’s west side, where no snowmelt provides runoff, only occasional rainwater through ephemeral creeks.
What this means is that the comparison of the Salton Sea and Tulare Lake is one of contrast, not similarity. Those gold seekers who came through Yuma and made it to the southern mines above Bakersfield and Ducor—when they had to give up mining and try farming, they found a much more hospitable place to homestead. Just ask my great-grandmother.
Trudy Wischemann is a land student who is glad her part of the family didn’t stay in Imperial Valley. You can send her your homesteader stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
