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RE: The Wednesday Walk Wet Edition
It was the only place to cross within about 500 miles of river. Whoever held the ford held the area around it. It's been a battlefield for a long time. Probably 10,000 years. The other part is the agriculture right there. De Anza said that the locals gave his party 3000 watermelons as they were on their way to Southern California. In the 1540s.
If you had room to carry the watermelons they were a pretty good deal out in the desert to come.
Wow! Very interesting and that makes a lot of sense about the strategic implications of the crossing. It also reminds me of a trip my parents and I took out to New York one time. We were driving down a road in the area of the Erie canal (the tourist site) and found ourselves on an old road along a very large ditch that had a well worn path next to it. We figured it had to be part of the original canal, but it had faded into somewhat obscurity much like your ford with the fancy bridges going right over top of it.
Ohhhh. How cool!
The bridges of the Colorado definitely took the strategic impact off of several places. This is now just a beautiful park that looks like anything but a serious battleground.