The Reservation the Sea Swallowed

The accident that created the Salton Sea in nineteen-oh-five has a casualty that almost no roadside sign acknowledges. The Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians held reservation land along the edge of the Salton Sink, land that was, in nineteen-oh-five, dry desert. When the Colorado River broke through the irrigation canal headgates and flooded the sink for eighteen months, it did not flood an empty landscape. It flooded a reservation.

Thousands of acres of Torres Martinez tribal land went permanently underwater. The tribe was not the entity that broke the headgates. The tribe was not the Southern Pacific Railroad, which owned the canal and employed the engineers who were supposed to maintain it. The tribe simply had the misfortune of holding reservation land in the path of an engineering failure that the federal government allowed to run for a year and a half before it was stopped.

The federal government added some unflooded acreage to the reservation in nineteen-oh-nine, but a broader settlement for the submerged land did not come until nineteen ninety-six, roughly ninety years after the accident.

Neither of these facts, the flooding of tribal land or the delay in compensation, appears in the standard interpretation of the Salton Sea as an environmental curiosity. The sea is presented as an accident, which it was. The part that is not presented is who paid for the accident, and for how long.

The Torres Martinez reservation abuts the Salton Sea's southern shore. The tribe is still there. The land that went underwater in nineteen-oh-five is still underwater.