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<br />mostly Indian country. The Navajo reservation, the size of West Virginia, was the largest in the country. Many
<br />would say that the Hopis were, as they are now, the most traditional Indian tribe in the United States. Lands bad
<br />also been set aside for the Hualapai, the Havasupai, the Zuni, the Paiutes, and the Utes. There were a couple of
<br />dozen small Mormon towns in southern Utah and northern Arizona, most of them baving been establisbed after
<br />a party of Monnons survived the rigors of the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail in 1880 to reacb Bluff, Utah. Tbere also
<br />were towns settled by Hispanos, wbo had moved over from the Cbama River valley into the Colorado Plateau to
<br />settle in the San Juan River basin. The largest of these towns, to which I will return, was called Rosa But to
<br />the outside world, the Plateau was an extraordinarily remote, desolate area.
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<br />It is revealing to look at the cities that would play sucb a big role in remaking the Colorado Plateau. In 1900,
<br />Pboenix was a town of 5500 souls. There wasn't a block of paved street. Arizona, like New Mexico, was still a
<br />territory and would not acbieve statebood until 1912. El Paso was the largest town in the deep Southwest, with
<br />a population of 16,000. Las Vegas didn't even exist in 1900 and would not sbow up in the national census until
<br />1930 because it could not meet the minimum requirement of having a population of at least 2500. Denver (a
<br />population of 134,000), Los Angeles (102,000), and Salt Lake City (54,000) were the only areas in the region
<br />that we today migbt classify as cities.
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<br />By the end of World War 11, there bad been no fundamental changes on the Colorado Plateau. A poll still would
<br />bave given the God-forsakenness award to the Plateau. The towns bad become cities, but small ones. Tbe
<br />Pboenix metropolitan area was still just 250,000 people -- today, it is pushing 2.5 million. Los Angeles,
<br />Denver, and San Diego were larger than Pboenix, but most -- Albuquerque, El Paso, Tucson, Salt Lake City,
<br />and Las Vegas -- were all smaller. All of them would expand, over the next fifty years, by eigbt, ten, times, or
<br />more.
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<br />For as the post-War era began, the nation was looking west and the boomers and boosters in the West were
<br />poised to respond. The cities of the Southwest, bowever, had already run out of resources and they looked far
<br />away, to the Colorado Plateau, for water and energy. We proceeded to engage in one of history's most intensive
<br />drives for industrial development. Hoover, the world's tallest dam -- the height of a seventy-story office building
<br />and using enough concrete to build a five-foot wide, four-incb thick bike path from the North Pole to the South
<br />Pole -- had already been completed in 1935 in the southwest comer of the Colorado Plateau. Many others were
<br />installed during the twenty-five years after World War II. They included Glen Canyon Dam, creating Lake
<br />Powell, 180 miles long, the largest man-made lake in the world; Navajo Dam on the San Juan River; Flaming
<br />Gorge; the Curecanti Project on the Gunnison; and many others. Ten major diversions were constructed to
<br />transport water out of the Colorado River watersbed.
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<br />Numbers of coal-fired power plants also sprung up. Fresh water Cretaceous seas helped create vast deposits of
<br />low-sulphur coal, high in energy content. The San Juan, Four Comers, and Navajo generating stations ranked
<br />among the largest in the world. More than a dozen others went in, on the Yampa, near Price, on the Sevier,
<br />elsewhere. TIle biggest prize was Black Mesa, holding perhaps the finest coal in the world. It also happened to
<br />be sacred ground for the Hopi. The Black Mesa leases for the Hopi and the Navajo, like many other tribal leases
<br />of the 1950s and 19605, were terrible business deals, imposed on the tribes by their federal trustee. The coal was
<br />sold at below market value, with no escalator clauses. In several cases, the leases required tribes to waive their
<br />sovereign authority to tax and regulate. Tribal water rights, too, were transferred away at bargain-basement
<br />prices, in spite of the fact that they were the senior rights on the river.
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<br />We need to pause and look at the ideas that drove this extraordinary post-World War II era on the Plateau and
<br />across the West. You know the doctrine of prior appropriation but let me take a moment to summarize it.
<br />Traditional prior appropriation worked on the basis of frrst-in-time, frrst-in-right -- at least if your water use was
<br />the right kind of water use. It allowed only certain favored uses, those extractive uses that qualified as so-called
<br />beneficial uses. This regime flatly excluded fish and wildlife, recreation, and the beauty and spirituality of a
<br />living river. Prior appropriation effectively excluded Indian uses as well.
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<br />But if you did qualify, no matter how far you were from the watershed and its communities, no matter how
<br />mucb water you needed, you had carte blanche. Appropriators could take all they wanted, even to the point of
<br />drying up whole rivers. Appropriators obtained a vested right, protected by the Constitution, for their
<br />extractions. There was no enforcement against wasteful practices. On top of that, water, supposedly the West's
<br />scarcest resource, was free, absolutely free. You might have to pay for a diversion ditch, a dam, or a tunnel, and
<br />you might have to pay operation and maintenance fees to the Bureau of Reclamation, but the actual water itself
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<br />American River Management Society
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