we were able to reach; and as it was now approaching the season of the year when we might reasonably expect the river surface to remain at an elevation that would allow sufficient water for the uses of the Valley to be gotten through the upper intake, we decided to close the lower.” (“Born of the Desert,” by C. R. Rockwood, Calexico Chronicle, May 1909.) At the time when the first attempt to close the intake was made, the cutting was about sixty feet wide. A dam of piles, brush and sandbags was thrown across it in March 1905, but it had hardly been completed when another flood came down the Colorado and swept it away. A second dam of the same kind, built a few weeks later, shared the same fate. By the middle of June, the river was discharging 90,000 cubic feet of water per second; the width of the lower intake had increased from sixty feet to one hundred and sixty; water was overflowing the banks of the main canal and accumulating in the deepest part of the Sink; and a new Salton Sea was in process of formation. [Illustration: Lower Intake at Time of Southern Pacific Loan] Such was the state of affairs when Mr. Harriman and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company first became directly interested in the problem of river control. Early in 1905, the California Development Co., finding itself in pecuniary difficulties, applied to Mr. Julius Kruttschnitt, General Manager of the Southern Pacific, for a loan, on the alleged ground that the Imperial Valley was furnishing a great deal of traffic to the railroad, and the irrigation company was therefore warranted in asking for financial assistance. Mr. Kruttschnitt, however, declined to consider the application. The petitioners then addressed the President of the railroad company, Mr. E. H. Harriman, who, it was thought, might be induced to give the necessary aid, even though he had no personal interest in the Valley and no connection whatever with the California Development Co. Mr. Harriman, as a man of imagination and far-seeing vision, was naturally in sympathy with the bold attempt to irrigate and reclaim the arid lands of the Colorado Desert, and when the matter of the loan was presented to him, he not only gave it immediate consideration, but ordered an investigation and a report. He finally consented, against the advice of Mr. Kruttschnitt and other counsellors, to loan the Development Company $200,000, “to be used in paying off certain of its floating indebtedness and in completing and perfecting its canal system.” Inasmuch, however, as the financial management of the irrigation company had not always been judicious, Mr. Harriman and the Southern Pacific stipulated that they should have the right to select three of its directors, one of whom should be president, and that fifty one per cent of its stock (6300 shares) should be placed in the hands of a trustee as collateral security for the loan. This stipulation was agreed to, and on the 20th