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Show -102- Nearly two-thirds of all the waters of this North American Nile are con- tributed by the State of Colorado; and all that, remains to swell the flow of the stream comes from Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico except about four per cent» of its total volume which Arizona reluctantly yields from an area constituting nearly one-half of the river's whole drainage basin of 2!^;,000 square miles. Nevada and California drain no measurable Quantity of water into the stream while it flows more than three hundred miles alcng their borders; and Mexico, holding only 2^000 square miles of the drainage basin but both banks of the river in the last hundred miles of its course, contributes less than one per cent, to its waters. The flow of the stream is highly variable, reaching enormous volume in the season of melting snows and falling to insignificant proportions in the dry months of late autumn.^-9^ In times past, water craft of sorts ascended the river a distance of Ij.00 miles from the Gulf, but navigation of the Colorado has never been of much importance and will probably be inconsequential in the future. The destiny of the river is to supply water for domestic, mining and agricultural uses. Hardly one-fifth of its water supply is now so used; but eventually all of its waters will surely be needed for these and kindred uses other than navigation. Incidental to the task of reducing to possession and adapting the waters of the. river to these primary purposes is the utilization of the vast water power inherent in the flow of the stream over precipitous declines and through mountain chasms such as mark the course of no other great American waterway. Differences in altitude, elevation and topography have brought about, and in the future will continue to cause, great inequality in settlement and develop- ment of the seven States entitled to share in these waters. The situation has been f-urther complicated by the incompetent American diplomacy of 18i|.8 and 1853 which, ignoring the lessons of the Mississippi River controversy not long past, and the St. Lawrence adjustment then in feri, failed both at Guadalupa Hidalgo and in the Gadsden Purchase to acquire the terrain at the outlet of the Colorado or even one of its shores to salt water, although many precedents in like international agreements should have suggested the river as a natural boundary line coupled with a cession to the United States of that long peninsula now constituting the rather isolated and disconnected Mexican State of Baja California* How to remedy past mistakes, abate existing animosities and harmonize the conflicting claims of the seven States and of Mexico so as to insure tho greatest beneficial use of the Colorado River is the most far-reaching problem of the Pacific southwest, although not eaual in magnitude or in national im- portance to any one of several contemplated projects in other sections of the United States .-»-97 i^fcsee House Doc* Jjlth6, 70th Congress, 2nd Session, being the Report of Colorado River Board on the Boulder Dam Project, Nov. 2k, 1928, Ufa. L# Sibert, Chairmajij also the various United States Geological Survey Reports on the Colorado Riverj also "The Colorado River Compact," a very comprehensive thesis written^ and published by Reuel Leslie Olson, Professor of Law, University of Southern California, 1926, together with appendices disclosing much of the origina.1 sources upon which the thesis is based. ^^Consult Francis A. Collins, Our Harbors and Inland Waterways (The |