In 1915 Arizona floated a bridge down the Colorado River and swung it into place. Before that, if you wanted to cross the lower Colorado at Yuma, you took a ferry. That was it. People had been running boats across there for decades, and by the 1910s, with cars getting popular and Good Roads associations pushing for a highway that ran ocean to ocean, a ferry was not going to cut it. Yuma residents had been demanding a bridge since the early 1900s. In 1913 their congressman, Carl Hayden, took it to Washington and got the money. Here is the interesting part. The federal funding came through the Office of Indian Affairs, and the justification Congress approved it on was that the bridge would connect Yuma to the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation on the opposite bank. That was the stated reason. The thing everybody actually wanted was a transcontinental highway. Construction started in the fall of 1914. Omaha Structural Steel Works built a 336 foot steel truss span, and on March 3, 1915, they...