HoleInTheRiverHistoryOfGroundwater

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management. Finally, human designs for ma naging groundwater were enmeshed in uncontrolled natural processes, and each influe nced the other in unant icipated ways. This conceptual foundation helps to explain a complicated story – to understand how longstanding methods of western water mana gement, which for mo re than a hundred years authored economic development, could somehow become inverted to obstruct the 2 same goal; to decipher how a discussion about re source management was transmuted into a battle over property rights; to fathom how farmers, both those using surface flows and those tapping groundwater, could be ruined by drought while standing above an 3 underground reservoir filled with more water than Lake Powell. The history of groundwater use in the South Platte va lley is a search for explanations. Groundwater in this region is fused by na ture to a living surface stream; water moves freely between river and aquifer. This exchange – water’s motion independent of human purposes – is at the hear t of groundwater’s history in the South Platte valley. Yet existing paradigms for water history have not fully appreciated the importance of this type of historical agency. Even the most prominent historians have focused on human manipulations of water, especi ally in terms of reclamation, dams, and diversions, and on 2 Historians have recognized western water law as a driving force for economic development since the nineteenth century. Donald Pisani argued that prior appropriation sparked enterprise in the American West while stifling economic equality; Donald Worster argued that the system had a monopolistic effect, contributing to dangerous hierarchies of wealth and power. See Pisani, “Enterprise and Equity: A Critique of Western Water Law in the Nineteenth Century,” The Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (January 1987): 15-37; and Worster, Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). 3 In 2006, groundwater users of 440 wells in the South Platte valley, some of whom had already planted crops, were forbidden by law to pump water for irrigation because surface rights were not adequately protected. By contrast, a study at Colorado State University found that severe drought in 2002 forced surface-water users to give up farming at a higher rate than groundwater users. See Marshall Frasier and Eric Schuck, “Coping with Natural and Institutional Drought,” Current Agriculture, Food & Resource Issues 5 (2004): 119-130. An acre-foot of water would cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot. The South Platte valley aquifer contains an estimated 25 million acre-feet; Lake Powell currently holds about 21.5 million, though its full capacity is higher. See An drea Aiken et. al., eds., The Colorado Ground-Water Atlas (Lakewood, Colo.: Colorado Ground-Water Association, 2000), 23-27. 2