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Show Foreword War for a waterhole . In those four words the history of the West is com- pressed. Once the war was between individuals, with six-guns. Later it was between groups, with rifles. Later still, it was between sovereign states, with legal writs and acts of Congress. Sometimes blood was shed; sometimes tears. But always in the conquests of pioneer Americans - whether in the Nineteenth or Twentieth Centuries - the arid Southwest was the scene of the bitterest struggles over the one commodity which mankind in desert regions from earliest times has needed most to survive - water. The small waterholes over which feuding cowmen once contested gave way, as vast populations poured in, to rivers which constituted the life fluid for advancing civilization. Water became more than a word. It became life itself. And in the struggle one name emerged as epitomizing all the bitterness, all the controversy, all the ferocious efforts at survival amid aridity and the threat of famine and ruin - the Colorado River. |