A Town At The Crossroads

  Yuma was settled partly because of its strategic location at the confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers. It was also located at a ford, or shallow place, of the Colorado River which made it an ideal place to cross the river on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon train. Also, at the time, the Colorado River was big enough and deep enough that  barges could navigate all the way to Yuma and beyond. They would enter the river from the Sea of Cortez and sail about 70 miles upstream to Yuma. This made Yuma a seaport in the desert.  At the time, the Colorado was, for the most part, about 1/3 to 1/2  mile wide, except for the place where it squeezed between two bluffs just below the confluence with the Gila River. Now, the Colorado is usually about 20 to 30 feet wide when it flows past Yuma, a sad testament to the manipulation of a river that serves as the lifeblood of an extremely dry area. 
  Yuma grew on the south bank of the river, the Arizona side. At the time of Yuma's founding, Arizona was a teritory and was attached to New Mexico for administrative purposes. So that means the residents of Yuma, which was initially called Colorado City, then Arizona City, had a very long way to travel to get to the territorial capital at Santa Fe. The people of Yuma identified more with California than anything else.
  Downtown Yuma today is very historic, with alot of adobe buildings and narrow streets. While that may make you think it looks like Santa Fe or Taos, it really doesn't. In the early days of the city, it was very flood prone, due to the convergence of two rivers on the eastern edge of town. What made the floods so devastating was the fact that the adobe buildings, dried mud brick buildings, would simply melt when exposed to alot of water. They were dried mud, after all. Another thing that made floods in Yuma so devastating was the tidal bore. A tidal bore occurred when the swift current of the Colorado River, which was augmented by the flow from the Gila River, clashed head on into tidewater making its way up from the Sea of Cortez. Today, the tidal bore is no longer an issue since the river's flow has been drastically diminished due to all the dams and the overallocation of its water, coupled with the fact that the Gila River is now usually dry.