
“Today the Big Ditch is a hideous, deep gash in the earth, straight-walled, littered along its course with tin cans, rusting fenders and such debris,” journalist Ross Calvin wrote for the soil conservation magazine The Land in 1942. “In its present aspect, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that it was ever the main street of a busy mining town.”
Nobody’s quite sure why the planners of Silver City, New Mexico laid out Main Street along an existing arroyo. Maybe because it was flat and smooth—and, as late as 1891, was at the same level as the surrounding land. Water sometimes flowed along the street during heavy rains, but it wasn’t much of a problem. Landowners felt secure enough of their position on Main Street to build substantial brick buildings. The hills above town were “well clad with brush, pinyon, and juniper,” and this vegetative groundcover slowed down runoff before it reached the town.
But of course, this was the bad old days of the Wild West, and the only value most locals could see in those trees was for firewood, fence posts, or mine props. Large herds of cattle over-grazed the hills during times of drought, leaving the hillsides bare of all vegetation. Nobody had plowed up the soil, but removing the vegetation had a similarly devastating result. Now there was nothing to hold back the floodwaters when one of the region’s occasional rainstorms came.
The first major flood occurred on July 21, 1895. “Down through the heart of the town, through the principal business streets swept the flood, entering houses through every crack and crevice, filling cellars full and overflowing, bursting open doors and smashing large windows,” the Silver City Enterprise reported. The flood of August 24, 1902 was even worse, causing severe damage to the Enterprise’s brick building. As Ross Calvin reported, one of the casualties was a grand piano:
“With its emulsion of sand, silt and water leaping and swirling among the rocks, it came, battering its banks with floating trees, growling with the roar of a thundering herd in stampeded….Presently the front wall, badly undermined, fell with a crash. The floor, half robbed of its support, sagged quietly. The grand piano, a thousand dollar Steinway instrument, rolled forward a few inches. The floor sagged a little more. Some quick-witted cowboys thought of their lariats. The loops swished, the ropes tightened. As the floor sagged again, the great instrument broke with a ponderous lurch from its moorings, rolled forward, and plunged. The spectators gasped as the massive ebony case went bobbing and rolling downstream as though it had been a cigar box. Afterwards one of the watchers went to look for the piano. Seven miles downstream he found it, and broke off some of the ivory keys for souvenirs.”

The Big Ditch in Silver City kept getting deeper with each successive rainstorm, until conservationists made two important changes. They built stone walls in the ditch itself to keep the water from eroding it wider. Most importantly, the US Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service re-vegetated the surrounding hills with grass and trees, so that once again the vegetation could allow water to infiltrate instead of all rushing into the wash. The city was also smart enough to realize that putting Main Street in an arroyo was not a good idea. After several decades of using the Big Ditch as a garbage dump, the city cleaned it up and made it into a shady, tree-lined public park with a little brook flowing down the center. Like Providence Canyon, the Big Ditch is another fascinating example of a soil erosion disaster turned into a recreational area.

You are probably familiar with this Let the Water do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels | Rangelands Gateway.
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