Definition of "Gila"

Some of its tributaries rise in the mountains to the south, in the territory belonging to the republic of Mexico, but the Gila gathers the greater part of its waters from a great plateau on the northeast.

1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961, page 20

On that map the Colorado River headed near the headwaters of the Del Norte (Rio Grande) and ran almost straight southwest to the Gulf of California. The Gila joined it at right angles, precisely at its mouth.

1954, Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, Houghton Mifflin, page 277

The dealers in live Gilas were paying local trappers twenty-five to fifty cents an inch; in turn the lizards were being sold to out-of-state dealers at one to two dollars an inch.

1964, Will Barker, Familiar reptiles and amphibians of America, page 92

In addition, area streams containing Gilas provide potential for far more fishing than any brown trout water — first, because the Gilas ...

1998, Rex Johnson, Ron Smorynski, Fly-fishing in Southern New Mexico, page 99

There were trout, they were small, and they were not Gilas.

2013, Bob W. Willis, Trout Adventures, page 109