flood irrigation, Mexicali Valley, March 2014

In no part of the wide world is there a place where Nature had provided so perfectly for a stupendous achievement by means of irrigation as in that place where the Colorado River flows uselessly past the international desert.

– William Smythe, Sunset Mangazine, 1900, quoted in Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords”: The Colorado River Delta, the Yellow Peril, and the Movement for Federal Reclamation, 1901–1928, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (February 2009)