Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/338

334 is actually two hundred and sixty-two feet below the level of the sea, say at the head of the Gulf of Lower California, about a hundred miles away! Indio, another railway station about one hundred and twenty-five miles west of Yuma and about twenty-five west of Salton, is almost at sea-level, so that it is evident that we have here a great depression not only below the Colorado which passes Yuma, but actually away below the



level of the sea. The extent of country actually below sea-level is included by the dotted lines upon our map. Now it is evident that if the volcanoes should once conclude to open up a way for oceanic waters, the sea might easily take possession of the Salton basin as the newspapers say; but have they done it?

It has been noted that the Colorado River at Yuma is far above the bottom of our basin, and it skirts along our southeast border to the gulf all the way, of course, far above the valley. In fact, with respect to the basin and its sloping sides, the river occupies exactly the position of a great irrigating main carried along some hillside above waiting fields. Some years ago enterprising men who saw the situation, realizing that large areas of the basin were not sand at all, but the finest sort of fertile alluvial soil, began to use this great natural main by constructing a secondary, carrying the waters of the Colorado out to the south part of our basin, near the Mexican boundary, where it was easy to bring under water some 100,000 acres of beautiful land. This artificial channel should bring part of the water of the river to certain old river channels