Today is known in some parts of the American West as Colorado River Day, because of a measure passed in 1921 that redefined what the Colorado River was.
It’s important to note that there was a Colorado River before there was a state of Colorado.
The state might have been named Arcadia, or Jefferson, or Idaho, but Congress decided that since the Colorado River was rooted in the mountains, the state should share that name.
But the river ran mostly through neighboring states, not through Colorado.
The state of Colorado had the Grand River, and as a result, it had a lot of places with the word “grand” in them.
There was Grand County, Grand Lake, Grand Valley, Grand Junction, and so on.
All of this grandness grated on Colorado lawmaker Edward Taylor.
To him, the state and the river were meant to be together.
For more than a decade he pushed for the state government and the US government to more or less annex the Grand River into the Colorado.
He made a hydrological case for the name change, but he also made an appeal to civic pride.
Taylor said the name Grand River was kind of pointless because everything in Colorado was grand.
And since the area essentially had one river with two different names for two different stretches, so why not just simplify the whole thing?
Opponents said, not so fast, the watershed was a lot more complicated than Taylor was making it out to be.
But the tenacious Taylor pointed toward that debate over the name of his state, and how it derived from the name of the Colorado River.
Finally Congress agreed to call the Grand River the Colorado River.
July 25 then became known as Colorado River Day to mark the moment when this river naming debate was finally settled… which means that right now is probably a bad time to point out that there is a completely separate Colorado River in Texas.
I wonder what Edward Taylor would’ve said about that.
There’s a new art project called Human After All.
It’s a collaboration between photographer Jan Kriwol and a CGI artist, Markos Kay.
They took what look like candid photos of people in a variety of settings, except in place of a full human person, you only see their circulatory systems.
It’s the kind of art that gets your blood pumping!
How The ‘Grand’ Became The ‘Colorado’ And What It Says About Our Relationship To Nature (KUNC)
Many years ago, the Colorado River was just Grand (Summit Daily)
Uncanny Human Portraits Depict People Only Through Their Circulatory Systems (My Modern Met)