WSP11181

• File Number: 8200.300.40
• Description: Colorado River Compact
• Basin: Colorado Mainstem
• Date: 9/1/1991
• Author: CSU
• Title: Delph Carpenter - Father of Colorado River Treaties - Text of Gov. Ralph L. Carr's 1943 Salute to Delph Carpenter
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Publication

SALUTE TO DELPH CARPENTER

Address by the Honorable Ralph L. Carr
Former Governor of Colorado
to the
Seventeen States of the National Reclamation Association
Denver, Colorado
October 29, 1943

To Delph Carpenter: - the Father of Interstate
River Treaties - we offer a Salute.

Wherever water users have settled their
differences over river flows without expensive
and protracted litigation, they owe a debt of
gratitude to the man whose efforts, more than
those of any other individual, have pointed
the way. But, like so many men who have
devoted their lives to a cause, Delph
Carpenter's hope of recognition or reward
would seem to lie in that far distant future
whose blueprints we have never yet been
permitted to scan.

The Father of Interstate Treaties on Western
Rivers lies in his bed at Greeley, Colorado,
practically unknown to this generation, and,
surely, unsung. Of course, the handful of
men, lawyers, engineers, and legislators who
employ the tools which he fashioned to
broaden the uses of water through the West,
know and love and respect the Colorado
lawyer, but the general public - the people
who should know, do not even recognize the
name.

But the times are busy ones. The problems
of life - the business of earning a living - the
necessity for getting things done, the war -

keep even those who understand from doing
the things they feel should be done - from
acknowledging his greatness and in some
small measure meeting the obligation of the
West to one of her most valuable sons.

As the West stopped sowing its wild oats,
and learned that there were other ways of
earning a living beside the activities of the
boom days of mining camps with Millionaire
Row adding new members daily, with their
gambling hells, their stock sales and their
glamour, it was realized that the quieter
brothers who had crossed the plains in the
wake of the gold seekers and the
adventurers had been at work also.

This was the region which Major Stephen T.
Long in 1820 had condemned with the
opinion that the country lying west of the
Missouri and on either slope of the Rockies
could never support human life and should
be known as the Great American Desert. But
the men who had tilled the soil "back there"
discovered that the land covered with sage
brush and buffalo grass which comprised the
prairie dog's kingdom would produce crops,
such as the Middle West and East never
experienced, simply by the application
of water through irrigation canals. With the