For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. Today, for at least half its length, the Gila is dead, like so many of the West’s great rivers, owing to overgrazing, damming, and other practices. This richly documented cautionary tale narrates the Gila’s natural and human history. Now updated, McNamee’s study traces recent efforts to resuscitate portions of this important riparian corridor.
By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors. This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights. Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
Field Guide to the Trees of the Gila Region of New Mexico is the definitive guide for field botanists, researchers, students, and avid nature lovers who wish to explore the natural history of native and introduced tree species across the Gila. The book documents over seventy-five tree species in the first wilderness area in the United States—and the largest in New Mexico—known for its wildness, remoteness, and significant recreation opportunities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the authors feature detailed individual species accounts and special ecological and ethnobotanical information, providing full dichotomous keys to the families, genera, and species of all trees in the region. Color photographs of the species provide diagnostic clarity for easy identification, showing the whole tree, trunk, and foliage as well as macro photos of the flowers, fruits, or cones and other significant features. This comprehensive and user-friendly guide will be welcomed by residents and visitors studying and discovering the diverse trees of the Gila Region.
Diverting the Gilaexplores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of Arizona's Gila River among residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Indians in the early part of the twentieth century. It is the sequel to David H. DeJong's 2009 Stealing the Gila, and it continues to tell the story of the forerunner to the San Carlos Irrigation Project and the Gila River Indian Community's struggle to regain access to their water.
This latest volume in the Gila River Indian Community Anthropological Research Papers series by John P. Wilson provides a narrative history of the Akimel O'Odham and Pee Posh peoples who lived along the middle Gila River in south central Arizona. The manuscript covers the period between AD 1694 and 1945 for which written documentation exists, and is largely based on descriptions that were recorded by explorers, missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and others who traveled through the area. The document is an essential reference for the Historic period in southern Arizona, and considerable information is compiled in this book that has previously been unavailable elsewhere.
This literary historical novel follows the U.S. Army and a Mormon Battalion-with families in tow-on an 1840s perilous trek across the daunting wilderness of the American Southwest-the longest march in U.S. infantry history. Part adventure, part coming-of-age, part military history-their story is a unique challenge of human resilience. This cast of engaging characters includes: an alcoholic eastern intellectual, a young man running to and from love, pregnant Mormon women fleeing religious persecution, and stoic Army officers, each with distinctive stories and voices, who share humor, hardship, and intrepid perseverance.
." . . Traces the history of this fabulous land of New Mexico and Arizona from the days of the dinosaurs to the present-day dam building and land reclamation through irrigation. Every phase of development is taken up in detail."--Library Journal. "Mr. Corle, who knows a great deal about the Southwest, has been handed a writer's dream of an assignment and has carried it out in fine style."--The New Yorker. "The Gila is a remarkable bit of Americana, written by a man who knows every inch of the country."--Chicago Sunday Tribune. "Mr. Corle has shown before that he knows how to swing a book of this kind--a combination of history, geography, anecdote, and atmosphere. He accomplishes the task here, moreover, in particularly fine style. The Gila belongs up among the top few in the Rivers of American series. Mr. Corle's done a real job on it."--Joseph Henry Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle.
"The careful reconstruction of the September 1, 1857 battle at Maricopa Wells, combined with the thorough and well-written summary of available information on patterns of regional conflict, makes this book a valuable contribution to the ethnohistory of the middle Gila and Lower Colorado River area." --American Anthropologist "Rarely do the skills of historians and anthropologists mesh so admirably." --Western Historical Quarterly "Kroeber and Fontana are meticulous professionals. Their study of this neglected slice of Southwestern history deserves applause." --Evan S. Connell, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A rich feast for the curious and theorist alike." --Pacific Historical Review "Kroeber and Fontana describe a little-known event, provide an effective analysis of the cultures of Indian groups in southwestern Arizona, and attempt to understand the broader causes of warfare. The result is an interesting and provocative study." --Journal of American History
