Even the Wikipedia asserts that the basin where the Salton sea wasn't some prehistoric stretch of desert that we somehow man has converted to a lake, it has been the location of a lake on-and off (every 100K years or so), for the last million or so years... For example, Lake Cahuilla
Like nearly all endorheic basins, in prehistoric times, the Salton basin was periodically filled by water from rain. It is generally thought that in pre-historical times, the Salton basin took water from the Alamo and Nuevo rivers beds which periodically nearly run dry.
AFAIK, in historic times, a lake in the Salton Basin existed in some form in 1884, 1891, 1892, and 1895 due to seasonal Colorado river flooding into the Alamo and Nuevo river beds...
However, in 1900 a canal (the Alamo canal) cut for irrigation purposes to improve the flow between the Colorado and Alamo river. This canal eventually silted up. The so-called "accident" was actually a deliberate attempt in 1904 to rectify this by cutting a breach in the bank of the Colorado river to feed the canal . Seasonal flooding of the Colorado river from heavy rains over a few years after this breach was created diverted nearly all the water that formed the current Salton Sea until that breach was reversed. Of course after the construction of Hoover Dam, that portion of the Colorado river generally doesn't flood any more and the controlled flows through the Alamo and Nuevo rivers beds generally aren't high enough to keep the Salton Sea from receding which means in some sense, the Hoover dam is actually killing that Salton Sea in it's current incarnation.
In some sense, Man's actions in this case are likely somewhat akin to small blip in the timing of the on-going geological-time formation and destruction of new lakes in the ancient Salton Basin, and far from being some Man-made ecological disaster (unlike some nuclear plant disaster, or a coal ash spill) if that is what you are implying...