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1] :~ Engineer to court over rights to the Republican River. Again, Carpenter was " involved in Colorado's defense betl,een 1911 and 1922 in both the Wyoming and 41 NebrasJ;a cases. , " This sudden proliferation of interstate water litigation was unprecedented. The federal push for reclamation of the arid West and the, increasin~ scope of . western irrigation projects made it evident that stream use and diversion were no longer exclusively intrastate matters. States, in turn, lool<ed to the Supreme 1 .. Court as a forum to obtain relief from infringements upon their \{ater rights. 4 The Court itself aclmmlledged in the 1907 opinion that "this court is practically b . A' h . b d . t I 42 ull~mg up \{ at may not lmproperly e calle lntcrsta e common aw. " " J ~ ., j ~ ,1 " Carpenter was one who saw that continuous recourse to the Supreme Court each time a dispute over interstate streams occurred was expensive, time-consuming, .:j and sometimes ineffective. He vielled the negotiation of interstate compacts, I I , ~ as allowed by the United States Constitution, as a more effective method of apportioning rights to interstate waters.43 C~rpenter also saw compacts as a 44 way of protecting' state control of streams from federal encroachment. " Carpenter, then, perceived a variety of circumstances 1/hich led him to espouse " . " ~ .' the signing of the Colorado River Compact in 1922. He saw, along with many other Coloradans, the threat of the lower basin monopolizaiton of the Colorado through prior rights for such expansive projects as Imperial Valley agriculture and Hoover Dam. He also had experience as an attorney with the means of continuing litigation, especially in the Supreme Court, as a 1/ay of solving the increasing case load of '. interstate water disputes. This e),:perience told him that the ounce of prevention " ., that a compact \{ould provide would be far more effective in promoting the equitable developnent of the Colorado River Basin than the pounds of cure that the Supreme Court was trying to provide.. .~ _.