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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.
Based on archaeological investigations along State Route 85, this fourth installment in the Gila River Indian Community Anthropological Research Papers provides a close look at the subtle interface between the archaeological cultures of the western Hohokam and eastern Patayan, including chapters on geomorphology, ceramics, lithics, shell, pollen, and ethnobotanical remains. An abundance of well-preserved trails and historical roads, including the Anza and Butterfield Trails, also provides the foundation for historical overviews and incisive theoretical discussion. This unique collaboration between ASU's Office of Cultural Resource Management and the Gila River Indian Community's Cultural Resource Management Program also provides an unusual account of Depression-era African American homesteading at the Warner Goode Ranch based on oral history, archival research, and archaeological data. Historic transportation corridors, homesteads, and prehistoric occupations on trails traversing cultural and geographic transitions make this a coherent and engaging view of this centuries-old crossroads and a valuable reference for the archaeology and history of the Gila Bend.
By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. Moreover, crops from their fields provided an additional source of food for the Mexican military presidio in Tucson, as well as the U.S. mining districts centered near Prescott. For a brief period of about three decades, the Pima were on an equal economic footing with their non-Indian neighbors. This economic vitality did not last, however. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights. With plentiful maps, tables, and illustrations, DeJong demonstrates that maintaining the spreading farms and growing towns of the increasingly white population led Congress and other government agencies to willfully deny Pimas their water rights. Had their rights been protected, DeJong argues, Pimas would have had an economy rivaling the local and national economies of the time. Instead of succeeding, the Pima were reduced to cycles of poverty, their lives destroyed by greed and disrespect for the law, as well as legal decisions made for personal gain.
First edition published in 1941 under title : Summarized data on Federal reclamation projects.