A very nasty muddy stream

Little Colorado River Flickr

The earliest Mormon settlers into Arizona in 1876 found the Little Colorado River to be "like a running stream of mud of reddish color." (Quoted from John A. Blythe in Tanner, George S., and J. Morris Richards. Colonization on the Little Colorado: The Joseph City Region. Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1977, page 32). Joseph H. Richards used the words in the title to this post to describe the river. See Tanner, page 33. For the settlers camped on the banks of this unpredictable stream, they would depend on the river for almost all of their water for forty years.

I drank the water from the Little Colorado River off and on for most of my earlier years and I can still distinctly remember the muddy taste of the water. The early journals describe filling large containers with the water and letting it settle over night only to find only an inch or so of clear water in the top of the barrel or kettle. Although the River enters the world as a clear, cold mountain stream, by the time it crosses the desert plateau, it is salty and bad tasting.

The main problem with the River however, was its unpredictability. In the Spring and early Summer it would flood and wash away the diversion dams. Within a few weeks the river bed could be bone dry. When the pioneers arrived on the river bank and established the four small settlements that are today combined in Joseph City, they began immediately to plow and plant crops. Just a few days later they began building a diversion dam on the river to turn the water into ditches to irrigate the crops. In that very first year, they planted a total of fifty acres or wheat, sixty acres of corn, and potatoes, melons and gardens. In July, a summer thunderstorm flooded the river and washed out that first dam. Without the water in the ditches most of the crops failed. See Tanner, page 32.

One early settler complained that they had no salt for their bread, but that the river water took care of the problem.

That first dam was only the beginning. Although many of the first settlers abandoned the mission and went back to Utah, those that stayed and those that came in later years, built and rebuilt the dams year after year from 1876 to 1923 when the last and most stable dam was finally constructed.