TABLE I MEASUREMENTS OF WIDTH AND DEPTH OF CHANNEL OF RIO PUERCO COMPILED FROM SURVEY NOTES ON FILE IN UNITED STATES LAND OFFICE, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO. CROSS-SECTIONS TAKEN UNDER DIRECTION OF GEORGE M. POST IN 1927 AND OTHER SURVEYS BY MIDDLE RIO GRANDE CONSERVANCY DISTRICT ARE GIVEN FOR COMPARISON TABLE I-Continued § San Luis diversion dam, a structure of logs and brush, holds river channel to or above original depth in this area. Il Measurement may refer to water in the channel, and not to channel. occupies a "new channel," 198 feet wide. J. H. Walker, in 1906, found that this "new channel" was in the same location and was 224.4 feet wide and 20 feet deep. These surveys establish considerable lateral shifts of the river channel, which took place in spite of its high banks, and were, as will be seen, in part induced by the activity of settlers. Meliton Cordova, now a resident of Albuquerque, went to Cabezon about 1870, when he was a small boy. The flood plain of the Puerco was without a deep channel. There were large groves of cottonwood trees and high grass and weeds. It was necessary for the settlers, in order to find the cattle, to climb the hills and look down into the valley. There was a bridge over the river, but it was small, such as is used to cross an acequia, or irrigating ditch, in the Rio Grande Valley. One man could build a dam for diverting the river by felling a cottonwood tree across the channel and using the branches to fill in the chinks of the dam. The dam at San Luis was built about 1875, but it was then a very small affair of brush and poles. The river washed around it during a flood and this caused the channel change, recorded in the surveys of the north boundary of the Montoya Grant by Watts & Pradt (1877) and Pradt (1899). Similarly, the channel change at the lower end of the Montoya Grant, recorded in the survey of Watts & Pradt of 1877, was caused by the activity of William Kensenbach, a settler, who in that year diverted flood waters from the hills into a line of little ponds and depressions on the west side of the valley. Thus a channel was begun, and when a flood on the Rio Puerco washed around the Cabezon dam, which lay upstream, the waters enlarged this channel and made it permanently the channel of the river. Don Amado Chaves, now a resident of Santa Fe, crossed the Rio Puerco frequently during several years after 1876 on the road from Santa Fe to San Mateo by way of Cabezon. During this period the river channel was shallow and the bottom was corduroyed with large logs so as to make the muddy bottom passable for carriages. These logs were occasionally washed away. Restituto Sandoval, a resident of Cabezon, visited the place first as a boy of thirteen, in 1882. There was then a small bridge over |