Plus, receive recommendations and exclusive offers on all of your favorite books and authors from Simon & Schuster. Offer redeemable at Simon & Schuster's ebook fulfillment partner. Grow Your Child's Library with Top Young Reader Series, 50% Off All Funko Wetmore Forest POP!, Plush, and More, Knock Knock Gifts, Books & Office Supplies, Buy One, Get One 50% Off Holiday Boxed Cards, Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser, 15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who. In time the levees would become unstable, their walls would collapse, and the stream, freed of its constraints, would inundate the desert basin, recharging the inland sea. Hiltzik combines exhaustive research, trenchant observation, and unforgettable storytelling to shed new light on a major turning point of twentieth-century history. The goal was to determine exactly how much of it was navigable, and therefore whether it could be used to supply the proliferating army garrisons strung across New Mexico and Utah like a giant necklace. On April 16, 1859, the California legislature approved it with barely a murmur of debate and with the sole condition that Wozencraft persuade Congress to agree to the transfer. From the rim of the canyon he would unburden himself of a misjudgment that still echoes along the corridors of history: “Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality,” he wrote in his journal. A small pilothouse stood aft, and a paddlewheel at the stern with a cowl on which crewmen were inclined to drape themselves in calm weather. Blessed with a favorable wind she reached Cabo San Lucas, at the southern tip of Baja California, in seven days, only to spend three weeks beating laboriously back against the same northerly gusts along the eastern shore of the Baja peninsula, toward the Colorado delta. The five days needed to reach it after it first appeared on the horizon had been fraught with danger: a dozen rapids, violent eddies that whirled the Explorer around “like a teetotum,” interspersed with innumerable reaches through which the boat had to be towed by a dozen men hauling upon fraying ropes or by a battered skiff with splintered oars. An illustration of two cells of a film strip. [Hiltzik] fixes the endeavor in its time and captures the personalities of the people involved. By any customary measure, the Colorado River is an unremarkable stream. Ives was a slender New Yorker with deep-set eyes and a dandified bearing who had been born to a family of socialites on December 25, 1828—hence his middle name. For embodied in the dam’s striking machine-age form is the fundamental transformation the Depression wrought in the nation’s very culture—the shift from the concept of rugged individualism rooted in the frontier days of the nineteenth century to the principle of shared enterprise and communal support that would build the America we know today. Unlike the Mississippi, Hudson, and St. Lawrence, to name three great riparian thoroughfares of the continent, the Colorado has never been a significant bearer of commercial traffic. But the river was a closed book to the army quartermasters—indeed, to the entire federal bureaucracy—beyond Yuma, which stood a mere 150 miles upstream of the head of the Gulf of California. From a Philadelphia forge he commissioned a fifty-foot flat-bottomed steamer, christened the Explorer, which was transported in disassembled form via rail to San Francisco.