9337

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9337
• Author: Colorado River Water Users Association.
• Title: The Colorado River of Many Returns.
• USFW Year: 2001.
• USFW - Doc Type: Coachella, California.
• Copyright Material: NO

THE FIRST 50 YEARS
The hostile, dry, barren lands outside the doors of the Last
Frontier in Las Vegas on January 12, 1945, mirrored the angry
frustrations of those gathered inside for a meeting called to
launch a protest. With their jaws set with a grim, no-nonsense
determination and their suits showing only slight signs of travel from
Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and California as well as within
the state of Nevada, these protesters entered those doors with
purposeful strides. They emerged into the casual, fun-filled ambience
of one of the newest hotels and casinos in a town gaining prominence
as a tourist attraction.
Built three years earlier on open land south of the glittering
downtown casinos on a stretch that was destined to be called
The Strip, the Last Frontier was the second major gaming hotel to
venture into such uncharted territory - the first having been the
El Rancho Vegas.
Yet the hotel's devil-may-care spirit and return-to-yesterday
decor did little to quiet the churning anxiety that gnawed at each
single-minded protester.
Those gathered were Colorado River water users, veterans of
what many regard as the greatest war for a waterhole of all time -
certainly one of the most bitter and controversial. It was a war among
seven states whose lands drained into the Colorado or its tributaries, a
war of survival amid aridity, a war over how best to control the river's
violent unpredictability, over division of the use of its waters, state
against state, sometimes even neighbor against neighbor. It had its
villains, it had its underhanded dealings and trickery, it had its politics.
And not all of its battles were over yet.
The Colorado was not a large river as rivers go, but it drains
one-twelfth of the nation's land area, running some 1,400 miles from
the high country of Colorado and Wyoming to the Gulf of California.
And its once muddy waters were liquid gold to the dry Western states.
For years there had been talk of a treaty between the United
States and the Republic of Mexico that would guarantee the latter a
specific yearly amount of the river's water. The 1922 compact dividing
the use of the water between the upper and lower Colorado River
basins had skirted the Mexican issue, making only a vague reference
to the future possibility of a treaty.
For the time being, that country would receive any surplus
waters that were above and beyond the claims of the seven states. In
times of shortage, the upper and lower basins equally would supply
an unspecified amount to Mexico. Then-Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover, who helped negotiate the compact, in speaking of
the country to the south's place in division of the use of the river's
waters, voiced an often unspoken feeling of the day: "We do not
believe they ever had any rights."
The subsequent Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 had
simply stated, "Nothing in this act shall be construed as a denial or
recognition of any rights, if any, in Mexico to the use of the water of
the Colorado River system."
In 1929, brief negotiations between the two countries
collapsed when the United States offered 750,000 acre-feet each year
and, incredibly, Mexico asked for 4.5 million. The negotiations
resumed in 1939 when Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles wrote
the Mexican ambassador proposing a swap of Rio Grande River water
for Colorado River water.
Since 1938, a group called the Committee of Fourteen,
composed of two members appointed by each of the governors of the
seven basin states, had been dealing with Colorado River issues and
most water users assumed the best interests of the states was their No. 1
priority. In 1943, the International Boundary Commission began work
THE WATER IS FAST AND GLISTENING IN COLORADO ROCKY MOUNTAIN
NATIONAL PARK, SITE OF THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLORADO RIVER.
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