8014

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8014
• Author: McDonald, W. J.
• Title: The Upper Basins' Political Conundrum
• USFW Year: 1997.
• USFW - Doc Type: A Deal is Not a Deal.
• Copyright Material: NO

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To some extent, the private efforts to undertake irrigation in the 1860s and
1870s were successful. The first systems to be constructed irrigated lands
immediately adjacent to local streams, were therefore the cheapest and
easiest ones to build, and the water rights which they held were senior
enough to permit reliance on natural streamflows. But as attempts were
made to bring lands further from a river under irrigation, and as new
appropriators found that a direct flow right22 would not get them through an
irrigation season because more senior rights could claim the entire flow of a
river as supplies dwindled in late summer, construction of storage reservoirs
and ever longer delivery systems became necessary. However, this made new
irrigation financially infeasible in many cases. As a consequence, the 1880s
and 1890s saw numerous failed attempts by the states and private investors
to reclaim the arid lands of the West.za

"' n movement" of the 1890s took
It was against this backdrop that the irngatio
hold.24 The movement, which viewed reclamation of the arid lands of the
West to be as much a matter of agrarian idealism as practical economics,
sought support for federal legislation which would provide the necessary
financing for irrigation works. The movement achieved its goal with the
enactment by Congress of the Reclamation Act of 1902,25 which created the
federal reclamation program. The Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Department
of the Interior (Reclamation), administers the progi,am.2s
Despite the availability of federal financing, the Reclamation Act of 1902 still
did not yield financially successful irrigation projects. Thus, over the next
~ A direct flow right is a right to divert water from a stream at any given moment and
immediately put that water to a beneficial use. In contrast, a storage right is the right to store
water in a reservoir for release and application to a beneficial use at a later time.
'~ Excellent summaries of private efforts to finance the development of irrigation systems
may be found in P. GATES, HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT 634-54
(1968) and M. ROBINSON, WATER FOR THE WEST: THE BUREAU OF RECLAMATION,
1902-1977 1-12 (1979). For a complete history, see D. PISANI, TO RECLAIM A DIVIDED
WEST: WATER, LAW, AND PUBLIC POLICY, 1848-1902 (1992).
24 See D. PISANI, supra note 23, at 127-272 and M. ROBINSON, supra note 23, at 10-18.
The irrigation movement was imbedded in the much broader conservation movement of the
1890s and early 1900s, the history of which is extensively chronicled in S. HAYS,
CONSERVATION AND THE GOSPEL OF EFFICIENCY: THE PROGRESSIVE
CONSERVATION MOVEMENT, 1890-1920 (1959).
~ Reclamation Act of 1902, ch. 1093, 32 Stat. 388 (codified in scattered sections of
43 U.S.C.A. ch. 12 (1986 & Supp. 1997)).
~ The agency which was created in 1902 by the Secretary of the Interior to carry out the
federal reclamation program was originally known as the Reclamation Service and was a
component of the Geological Survey, U. S. Department of the Interior. The Reclamation
Service became a separate bureau within the department in 1907 and was renamed the
Bureau of Reclamation in 1923.
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