8 The Delta of the Rio Colorado. 
vegetation along the shores may be seen to be leaning upstream as a 
result of the smashing effect of the uprushing bore, which is a serious 
menace to all but the largest craft which seek to navigate the river. 
In 1826 Lieut. R. W. H. Hardy, “Commissioner of the General 
Pearl and Coral Fisheries of London,” made up the lower reaches of 
the river in a small vessel to a point where a wide stream was seen 
coming in from the northwestward, which he mistook for the Colo- 
rado. This stream is now known as Hardy’s Colorado, and is the 
channel which binds together the ribs of the delta fan, gathering the 
water which leaves the Colorado in the Pescadero, Paredones, and 
other unnamed channels, and emptying it back into the main river 
before it reaches the Gulf. Not all of the water, however, which 
leaves the main river returns to it, or finds a way to the sea. 
The Hardy has its origin in a shallow body of water known as 
Volcano Lake, which lies in the western part of the delta on the crest 
of a gentle swell, and which receives the water of the Paredones 
running out of the Colorado. To the northwestward the drainage 
from this lake is toward the Salton basin, which is from fifty to a 
hundred and twenty-five miles in diameter, and which has its salt- 
covered floor more than three hundred feet below sea-level. Water 
which flows out of Volcano Lake through New River to the west- 
ward, as well as other channels coming directly or indirectly from the 
Colorado, trickles over the edge of the giant bowl and rushes down 
its steep slopes, forming a lake in the bottom of the basin. Such 
floods, re-forming Salton Lake, occurred in 1828, 1849, 1861-2, 1891, 
1905, and perhaps in other years. in which records are not available. 
This last flood poured enough water into the basin to form a lake 
with an area of about six hundred square miles, which in November, 
1905, was reported to be increasing in depth and extent. 
According to Indian traditions, this great basin has been filled to 
the brim in times past, abounded in fish, and people lived along its 
margin in many villages. ‘Poco a Poco” the floods receded, how- 
ever, until a desert remained. The floods within historic times have 
in some instances poured vast quantities of water into the basin; but 
this generally evaporates in a few months in the blazing heat of the 
sun, which gives temperatures of about one hundred and twenty 
degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and which has an evaporating capa- 
city of twelve to twenty feet of water yearly. 
The intake of additional quantities of water into the sunken basin 
is now facilitated by a huge canal led off from the Alamo Slough and 
the Colorado River for the purpose of irrigating lands lying around 
the upper rim of the bowl, and the reappearance of the ancient sea as 
a permanent feature is by no means among the impossibilities. 
