E.C. LaRue’s 1916 Colorado River and Its Utilization was a pioneering effort to quantify how much water was in the Colorado River and what we might do with it. I was happy to find that the USGS had digitized it, albeit in a somewhat funky format that required some minor hackery to extract and read.*

Happily, the USGS also digitized LaRue’s maps, which are a joy. Here’s the Salton Sea and Lower Colorado, circa 1916. If you want to see the full size, click through, as I’ve uploaded the highest resolution Flickr would let me get away with.

* For future reference, the files are in a format called “DJVU”, for which a free reader exists here.