I have to admit to being more than a little skeptical about a book whose premise is that an earthquake, with an epicenter that was 120 miles away in Bavispe, Sonora, Mexico, could have a continuing impact on the flow of groundwater in my part of the world in southeastern Arizona. How could a little shaking, a momentary release of energy, even a great deal of energy, permanently affect the rate at which rainwater soaks into the earth and recharges aquifers, those great underground stores of wealth, that help to keep the dry West productive.
I guess that I had a lot to learn, and Mary Elizabeth Reynolds had just the book to enlighten me.
The Quake That Drained The Desert is divided into two parts. Part one is composed of a brief history of Southeast Arizona and Northern Sonora by the direct observations of the people who lived through the May 3, 1887, magnitude 7.4 quake, or their stories and lore passed down through the generations, and the investigations done by the inquiring minds of that time and place.
Part two examines the changes in water flow, post-quake, and the impact of the 20th century rush to exploit rich mineral lodes associated with the geology that produces the quakes, and to exploit the abundance of an agriculture built on year-round sunshine and water first diverted from rivers and streams and then pumped from below ground.
The author is a splendid storyteller, and all of the usual suspects of late 19th century southeastern Arizona history are accounted for. Geronimo and U.S. Gen. George Crook. Virgil Earp and his brothers Wyatt and Morgan. Doc Holliday, “Big Nose” Kate and The Cowboys.
We also encounter, in Tombstone, an early adopter of the photography arts, Camillus Sydney “Buck” Fly. C.S. Fly was the author of one of the more iconic photos of the wild west when he snapped four Apache warriors — Geronimo, Yanozha (Geronimo’s brother-in-law), Chappo (Geronimo’s son) and Fun (Yanozha’s half-brother) — all holding rifles in 1886. The photo became especially famous after 9/11, when it was turned into a poster captioned “Homeland Security — Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”
Buck Fly had set up shop, with his wife Mollie, in Tombstone in 1879. The couple built and maintained a boardinghouse and photography studio next to the OK Corral and so had front row seats to the 1882 shootout.
Buck and another Tombstone citizen, the town’s physician, Dr. George Goodfellow, undertook a horse and wagon journey to locate the quake’s epicenter. Based upon a letter published in Science magazine just a few short weeks after the quake, Goodfellow was commissioned by Capt. Clarence Dutton of the U.S. Geological Survey to observe and document the temblor’s reign of destruction.
Along the way to Bavispe, where 42 people had perished and the services of a doctor were probably needed, they likely passed through the quake-induced ruins of John Slaughter’s San Bernardino Ranch, east of Douglas.
Fly recorded images of both newly emerged scarps in the mountains along the way and the scenes of total devastation in Bavispe and the collapse of San Miguel de Bavispe Church in the center of town.
The second half of the book looks at the changes in water availability brought on by the1887 quake, where underground changes in faults caused some seeps to dry up even as others were created anew if only briefly.
The post-quake population increase in Tucson, coupled with more pumping for crop irrigation, such as water intensive cotton, and mineral processing from ever-expanding mine operations, led to a notable change in the water fortunes of the San Pedro and Santa Cruz River drainages.
Overgrazing of cattle led to land that shed its water rather than absorbing it. That began to undercut in the washes so that the breakpoints that had served as the intakes for canals were now far above the slack flow of these rivers, especially on the acres of farmland south of Tucson.
For millennia these fertile soils had fed generations based solely on the annual surface flow of groundwater. Now a combination of changes spurred on by the 1887 earthquake and by technological changes — railroads to ship grass-fed beef to distant markets, and steam-powered pumps to go lower and lower to extract the liquid gold — has led to the subsidence of the earth in Tucson and the scramble to slake the thirst of a burgeoning population.
Restoring the surface of our state so that it might better slow the flow of water across it and thereby increase its chances of being absorbed into an ever-lowering aquifer has fallen to the efforts of private individuals and foundations like The Borderlands Restoration Network. Patagonia’s own Zach Farley gets a shoutout for the “Zuni Bowls,” made of rocks embedded in streambeds, that prevent the type of undercutting and erosion associated with the rapid runoff from monsoon storms, that he and his crew have constructed for the BRN.
The Quake That Drained The Desert makes a compelling case for these efforts and for the adoption of water conservation techniques.
Maybe the next big quake with an epicenter close to southeastern Arizona will change things for the better and cause our current low-flow washes and riverbeds to once again gush with life-giving water. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
