is8 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNTA. 
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 38°-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. 
