History Makers: Great Surveys of the Colorado River
By Roy Webb
The Hayden, Wheeler, King, and Powell surveys are known to historians as the four Great Surveys of the American West. Just before, and immediately after, the Civil War, these four expeditions covered many different parts of the Intermountain West. Of those, John Wesley Powell’s time spent not only on the Colorado River, but in remote lands in southwestern Utah that could only be reached by pack train, is by far the best known. A lesser known series of surveys, though, have had an impact that continues to this day.
The story of the great surveys of the Colorado River is a TL/DR. It’s far too much to put into one blog post; it would take volumes to adequately recount the entire saga. So this entry into the History Makers series will be an introduction, an overview, to set the stage. After this, it will be an occasional series, with later posts that will go into each survey in more detail, as well as some that will highlight significant figures that participated in the surveys.
In the first years of the 20th century, the Colorado River was completely wild and untamed, with sometimes disastrous floods all along its length, and on all of its tributaries. In 1905, one flood, along with a little human help, changed the course of the river and what had been the Salton Sink became the Salton Sea. These floods wiped out mines, railroads, docks, and roads. By the 1920s, cities and industries in all of the seven basin states—Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California–were developing and requiring more and more water, but the Colorado could not be put to “beneficial use” because it was so unpredictable and powerful. So a movement arose to “tame” the Colorado River; a later generation of engineers would use the catchphrase “to turn a natural menace into a national resource.” This took the political form of the Colorado River Compact, signed by all the basin states, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 1922, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover presiding.
Even before the compact was signed, the US Geological Survey, along with the various state agencies and other federal land use offices, determined to do an extensive survey of the entire length of the river and its major tributaries, to provide data not only for the negotiators in Santa Fe, but for development of the river after the papers were signed. These were major expeditions, well outfitted and supplied with the latest survey equipment; in the case of the Grand Canyon survey, they even had a two-way radio to communicate with their base team. The crews were comprised of some of the leading water engineering experts of the day, people like E.C. LaRue, Claude Birdseye, W.R. Chenoweth, and some of the most iconic Colorado River runners, like Emery Kolb, Bert Loper, and Frank Dodge. The surveys were co-sponsored by large power companies, such as Southern California Edison and Utah Power and Light, who sent along representatives and their own engineers. Boats were all Galloway-style skiffs, scaled up for expedition use. The support crews were a mix of trained assistants, drifters, miners, cowboys, farmers, plus some experienced with the river. All were used to living hard in the outdoors.
These weren’t the first surveys along the river; there had been earlier government teams who were seeking out dam and reclamation sites; Julius Stone’s 1909 river party ran into a party at the head of the Canyon of Lodore in 1909 who were drilling tests for a damsite. And there were private ones like Robert Brewster Stanton’s railroad survey in 1889-90. But the expeditions that ran from 1921 to 1923 were by far the most comprehensive and extensive studies ever conducted along the river corridor up to that time.
The Colorado River surveys went on for almost three years, covering thousands of miles along the river corridor, by boat, by pack train and wagon and on foot. They surveyed dozens of dam sites, places for infrastructure such as roads and railroads, mineral resources, potential farmlands, not that was all that much of the latter. But if it was there they found it and they recorded it.
In 1921, there were three surveys along the San Juan River and Glen and Cataract Canyons. These were to “establish baseline elevation and gauge construction” sites (thanks to board member John Weisheit for the basics on the surveys!). They all met at the mouth of the San Juan River to coordinate their data. The next year, 1922, the Woolley survey, in tandem with Utah Power and Light, studied the Green River from the railroad town of Green River, Wyoming, to another railroad town, Green River, Utah. They identified 17 separate dam sites; fortunately, only one was ever built. The capstone of the Colorado River Surveys was the Grand Canyon survey in 1923. The crews, led by engineer Claude Birdseye, took 76 days to intensively study the inner corridor of the Grand Canyon, from Lees Ferry to Needles, California. Birdseye’s crew included some of the best known Colorado River figures of the time, like photographer Emery Kolb and Lewis Freeman, a journalist and author who later wrote two books about the river and his experiences.
For all their expertise and preparations and careful study, the engineers got one of the most basic facts they had been sent to establish dead wrong. One of their primary tasks was to determine the amount of water that flowed through the canyons, so that the lawyers and state officials in Santa Fe could determine how to divide the water between the upper and lower basin states. The surveyors decided that a figure of 15 million acre-feet a year was about right, and all subsequent legal maneuverings and raised voices as the Compact was hammered out were based on that amount. The actual amount, based on later trends and more sophisticated data, was around 10 million acre feet. Thus the fight over the waters of the Colorado River continues unabated to this very day.
Watch the History Makers page for more on the Colorado River Surveys, and other exciting stories of the Green and Colorado Rivers.
