18 EESOUECES OF CALIFORXIA. 



head of the gulf, thus cutting off from its connection with the 

 ocean that part of the gulf now dry. The evaporation in this 

 desert far exceeds the fall of rain ; so it was not long before 

 this lake was dried up. When the Colorado River is very- 

 high, it breaks over its banks about forty miles southward 

 from Fort Yuma, and sends a large stream, called New River, 

 northwestward a distance of a hundred miles or more, to the 

 lowest portion of the desert. A proposition has been made 

 to cut a canal from the river to the low ground ; so that the 

 land, which is said to be of excellent quality, might be irri- 

 gated and cultivated : but no accurate survey has yet been 

 made of a route for the canal, or of the district to be irrigated. 

 The Colorado River is navigable to Fort Yuma, a distance of 

 seventy-five miles from its mouth. The average depth is ten 

 feet, but there are shoals which have not more than two feet 

 at low water ; the tide rises ten feet. The channel is crooked, 

 and the bottom is of sand, which is constantly changing posi- 

 tion. The banks of the river are low and muddy. The aver- 

 age current runs at the rate of two and a half miles per hour. 

 The river is high in July, when the snows of the Rocky Moun- 

 tains (in latitude 3 8°-44°) melt, and then the flood covers the 

 low bottom-land along the river-banks. 



§ 19. Area of the State. — The total area of the state amounts 

 to about 155,000 square miles, of which there are, at my esti- 

 mate, 42,000 in the mountains and valleys of the coast, 40,000 

 in the Sierra Nevada and its plateau, 20,000 in the low land 

 of the Sacramento Basin, 30,000 in the Great Basin of Utah, 

 15,000 in the Colorado Desert, and 8,000 in the Klamath Basin. 

 In the 42,000 square miles of the coast slope, 16,000 may be 

 put down as valley and 26,000 as mountain. 



