." . . Traces the history of this fabulous land of New Mexico and Arizona from the days of the dinosaurs to the present-day dam building and land reclamation through irrigation. Every phase of development is taken up in detail."--Library Journal. "Mr. Corle, who knows a great deal about the Southwest, has been handed a writer's dream of an assignment and has carried it out in fine style."--The New Yorker. "The Gila is a remarkable bit of Americana, written by a man who knows every inch of the country."--Chicago Sunday Tribune. "Mr. Corle has shown before that he knows how to swing a book of this kind--a combination of history, geography, anecdote, and atmosphere. He accomplishes the task here, moreover, in particularly fine style. The Gila belongs up among the top few in the Rivers of American series. Mr. Corle's done a real job on it."--Joseph Henry Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle.

Diverting the Gilaexplores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of Arizona's Gila River among residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Indians in the early part of the twentieth century. It is the sequel to David H. DeJong's 2009 Stealing the Gila, and it continues to tell the story of the forerunner to the San Carlos Irrigation Project and the Gila River Indian Community's struggle to regain access to their water.

Like many rivers of the arid Southwest, the Gila is for much of its length a dry bed except after seasonal rains. Yet a mere century ago it hosted a thriving biological community, and two centuries ago American Indians fished from its banks. It is no mystery how the desert swallowed up the Gila. Beaver trapping, overgrazing, and woodcutting first ruined natural watersheds, then damming confined the last drops of its surface flow. Historical sources and archaeological data inform us of the Gila's past, but its bird life further testifies to the changes. Amadeo Rea traces the decline of bird life on the Middle Gila in a book that addresses the broader issue of habitat deterioration. Bird lovers will find it a storehouse of data on avian migration patterns and on ornithological classification based on skeletal structure. Anthropologists can draw on its Piman ethnoclassification of birds, which links the Gila River tribe with various other Uto-Aztecan peoples of Mexico's west coast. But for all concerned with protecting our environment, Once a River offers evidence of change that might be apprehended elsewhere. It is a case history of a loss that perhaps need never have occurred.

For sixty million years, the Gila River, longer than the Hudson and the Delaware combined, has shaped the ecology of the Southwest from its source in New Mexico to its confluence with the Colorado River in Arizona. Today, for at least half its length, the Gila is dead, like so many of the West’s great rivers, owing to overgrazing, damming, and other practices. This richly documented cautionary tale narrates the Gila’s natural and human history. Now updated, McNamee’s study traces recent efforts to resuscitate portions of this important riparian corridor.

The seventh volume in the Gila River Indian Community Anthropological Research Papers series by M. Kyle Woodson examines the social organization of Hohokam canal irrigation management along the middle Gila River in south-central Arizona. Anthropologists have long recognized that the users of a canal irrigation system have to coordinate and cooperate with each other in the construction, maintenance, and operation of the canal system; the allocation of water; and the resolution of conflicts that arise. An irrigation organization is a social institution that manages and assigns the roles to accomplish these tasks. Yet the social organization of irrigation management cannot be fully understood without examining the link between irrigation organizations and political institutions. Woodson s study achieves this goal by analyzing canal systems and settlement patterns at the village of Snaketown, as well as the neighboring Granite Knob, Santan, and Gila Butte canal systems and settlements during the Pioneer to Classic periods (AD 450 to 1450). With this study, Woodson returns focus to Snaketown, where Emil Haury originally defined the Hohokam cultural tradition and which has revealed yet more insights into the prehispanic world of the ancient Southwest. "

Concerned with the relatively primitive tribes south of the Pueblo Indians, this is a basic work in the ethnography of the North American Indian. 15 photographs.

contributors - biologists, ecologists, geomorphologists, historians, hydrologists, lawyers, and political scientists - weave together threads from their diverse perspectives to reveal the processes that shape the past, present, and future of the San Pedro's riparian and aquatic ecosystems. They review the biological communities of the San Pedro and the stream hydrology and geomorphology that affects its riparian biota. They then look at conservation and management challenges along three sections of the San Pedro, from its headwaters in Mexico in its confluence with the Gila River, describing legal and policy issues and their interface with science; activities related to mitigation, conservation, and restoration; and a prognosis of the potential for sustaining the basin's riparian system." "Complemented by a foreword written by James Shuttleworth, these chapters demonstrate the complexity of the San Pedro's ecological and hydrological conditions, showing that there are no easy --