4202 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

I improving a regional society. It is enlightening and rejuve- nating to worry these transcendent issues through; to renew old friendships and make new ones; and, hopefully, to move by pointed but collegial debate toward building the kind of informed and cooperative community that we all want to achieve. So, for bringing to us one of the best events on the western scene, I would like to thank Marlene Zanetell and the many other people who have worked so successfully to create the spirit and sense of mission that we are so fortunate to find here. The formative era of Colorado water policy, and of nearly all natural resource policy in the American West, was the extraordinarily dynamic second half of the nineteenth century, when the region's resources were used to fuel the westward expan- sion, the single greatest movement of human beings in world history. It was a time of opportunity perhaps unlike any other. The federal and state governments threw open the land and other resources of the American West for the settlers. The Hardrock Mining Act of 1872 allowed miners to obtain absolute ownership of entire mineral deposits, and the twenty acres of land over them, at the moment they struck a valuable mineral deposit. Private railroad companies received, among many other things, over 120 million acres (an area about the size of Colorado and Wyoming) to build the transcontinental railroads. The public rangeland was left open to free grazing of domestic stock. The national -2-