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Show Record trees up and down. It was practically confined to one fairly good channel, but since then it has been torn to pieces. We established a town at Bluff and we laid out farms and irrigating projects of several hundred acres. We irrigated with a gravity ditch which is still there. A great deal of the farm land has been washed 367 away by the river. The washing occurred year after year, cutting out a little more each year. I recall some placer mining that was down the river. I was engaged in taking supplies by wagon down to the placer mines. At the present time Bluff gets its supplies from Dolores on the D. & R. G. narrow gauge and from Thompson Springs on the D. & R. G. It is about 90 miles from Dolores to Bluff and about 150 368 miles from Thompson to Bluff. These supplies are carried in automobile- trucks. In the early days when the town was first established we hauled our supplies into Bluff in wagons 300 miles from Alamosa. The road was completed to Durango in 1882 and then we got out supplies from there. We only got mail or parcel post 369 from Santa Fe, New Mexico. I do not recall seeing any supplies brought into Bluff, Utah, by way of the Colorado River and then up the San Juan River. I remember some terrible floods on the San Juan River. The first worst flood was in 1886. It tore up, things and ruined our ditch. We do not get a great many floods on the San Juan River each year. We usually get along with them alright. The river will rise and fall very rapidly during rain storms. I cannot tell the amount of water in feet in these floods. The river changes its channel very often, over night; that is it will out from one side to the other from 300 feet to a half mile. At night it will be deep on one side and shallow on the other and the next morning likely the current would be going the other way. We usually have heavy rain storms in July and along in 370 September. The San Juan River freezes over solid in the winter at times. |