[2] “The Imperial Valley and Salton Sink,” by H. T. Cory, formerly Chief Engineer of the California Development Co., p. 49; San Francisco 1915 (embodying paper read Jan. 8, 1913, before the Amer. Soc. of Civil Engineers and published in its Transactions as “Paper 1270”). THE CREATION OF THE OASIS In 1891, John C. Beatty, of California, another man who had imagination and foresight, became interested in the agricultural possibilities of the Colorado Desert, and formed a corporation under the name of “The California Irrigation Company” for the purpose of carrying water into the Salton Sink from the Colorado River. He engaged as his technical adviser Mr. C. R. Rockwood, who had been in the employ of the U. S. Reclamation Service, and who was regarded as “a shrewd and clever man and engineer.”[3] Mr. Rockwood made a careful survey of the Colorado delta, and found, as Lieutenant Bergland had found in an earlier survey, that between the river and the Sink there was a natural obstacle in the shape of a range of sand hills, which extended southward to the border line of Mexico. All natural overflows of the river, in prehistoric times, had been south of this barrier, and Mr. Rockwood thought that it would be easier and more economical to follow the river’s ancient track than to put a conduit through these hills on the American side of the boundary. He proposed, therefore, to take water from the Colorado at Potholes, twelve miles above Yuma, carry it southward into Mexico, thence westward around the promontory of sand hills, and finally northward, across the line again, into southern California. This plan would involve the digging of a curving canal, forty or fifty miles in length, through Mexican territory; but it would obviate the necessity of cutting through the sand hills, and would perhaps enable the diggers to utilize, on the Mexican side, one of the dry barrancas, or ancient overflow channels, through which the Colorado discharged into the Sink in ages past. [Illustration: Relief Map of Imperial Valley and Its Environment] Owing to the lack of public confidence in reclamation experiments, Mr. Beatty and his associates were not able to secure as much capital as they needed for their enterprise, and when the monetary panic of 1893 came, they found themselves involved in financial difficulties from which they could not extricate themselves. In the latter part of 1893 the California Irrigation Co. went into bankruptcy, and its maps, records, and engineering data were turned over to Mr. Rockwood, in satisfaction of a judgment that he obtained in a suit for his unpaid salary.[4]