The Gila River: Highway of the Southwest

The Gila River runs six hundred fifty miles from the mountains of western New Mexico to its junction with the Colorado River near Yuma, crossing Arizona's driest terrain along the way. Its name is thought to come from a Quechan phrase meaning running water that is salty, shortened by Spanish explorers. For centuries before that, the Hohokam people irrigated fields along its banks with canal systems stretching more than two hundred miles, among the most sophisticated pre-Columbian water works in North America.

By the time the Mexican-American War ended in eighteen forty-eight, the Gila had become a boundary marker and a travel corridor. The Gila Trail carried forty-niners west to California. Later, the Southern Pacific followed the same route. Today the lower Gila runs dry through most of its length, its water allocated upstream to farms and cities. The river that was the Southwest's great highway now barely reaches the Colorado.