# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdKbzqEEqwD
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70299976-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/c6cd52a419.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11T22:00:31.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

In 1934 Arizona declared martial law, called out the National Guard, and started a navy. Arizona is landlocked.

Here is how it happened. The Bureau of Reclamation began building Parker Dam on the Colorado River, funded by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District, to move water Arizona considered its own out to southern California. Arizona had never agreed to the deal.

Governor Benjamin Moeur sent six National Guardsmen to the site to look around. They patrolled for months and reported that crews were working on the Arizona side of the river. The state’s attorney general said that made it illegal.

On November 10, 1934, Moeur declared martial law along the east bank and sent 100 troops from the 158th Infantry Regiment. They set up camp at the site and put machine gun positions facing the construction crew. He wired President Roosevelt to say he was preventing an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the State of Arizona.

Then he needed to get his men out on the water to inspect the work. No boats. No coastline. No navy.

So he commandeered two ferryboats, the Nellie Jo and the Julia B., and made their owner Nellie T. Bush the admiral of the fleet. She was a licensed steamboat captain, a seventeen year ferry operator, and a sitting member of the Arizona Legislature. She is the only person in state history to hold that rank.

The papers called it the Arizona Navy as a joke. Moeur liked it and kept it.

On the first run out, the boats got tangled in the dam’s construction cables and California workers had to come free them. The national press had a field day.

It worked anyway. Washington paused the project. Construction restarted in 1935 once the federal government reauthorized it and Parker Dam finished in 1938.

That dam created Lake Havasu. Lake Havasu is where the Central Arizona Project pulls the water that runs to Phoenix and Tucson right now.

Arizona sent troops to stop the thing it drinks from.

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#ParkerDam #ColoradoRiver #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Tags

coloradoriver, downinnadesert, arizonahistory, arizonanews, parkerdam

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