Yuma, AZ, USA
The area's first settlers were Native American tribes whose descendants now occupy the Cocopah and Quechan reservations. In 1540, expeditions under Hernando de Alarcon and Melchior Diaz visited the area and immediately saw the natural crossing of the Colorado River as an ideal spot for a city, as the Colorado River narrows to slightly under 1,000 feet wide in one small point. Later military expeditions that crossed the Colorado River at the Yuma Crossing include Juan Bautista de Anza (1774), the Mormon Battalion (1848) and the California Column (1862).