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-3- Like all frontier laws, water allocation rules were simple and well suited to their times. The remarkable thing is that, with very few changes, these rules remain the iaw today. The western view of water rights was fundamentally different from that of the East which inherited its law of "riparian rights" from England. Under the eastern system, each person owning land bordering a waterbody--a lake, stream, or river--shares equal "riparian rights" in that water. He or she does not "own" the water as such, but has a right to its continued flow, and the right to some limited, reasonable use (within the watershed) so long as that use does not unreasonably interfere with the water needs of other riparian landowners. Determ~n»g what is reasonable and what is not, is left to the courts to sort out as the need arises. But where water is plentiful, few conflicts occur and there is little need to sharpen the rules. Out West the riparian rights system would never have worked. If everyone shared equally, no one's share would be large enough to be useful. Eastern riparian rights quickly were rejected, and the western doctrine of prior appropriation firmly took hold. The principles of the prior appropriation doctrine are simple: First, there is no need to own riparian land to gain a right to water. Indeed, many private water rights are obtained from streams on federal land. Second, a person's "priority date" (the date a person initiated his or her diversion) matters more than anything else. If a miner at the lower end of a creek was the first to divert water, his or her water right was "senior" to all others, and miners upstream had to yield to that superior right in time of shortage. This principle is completely unknown to eastern water law where every riparian landowner shares equally regardless of when they or their ancestors appeared on the scene. Third, in the West, a water right can be lost through disuse. This, too, is in stark contrast to the eastern riparian rights doctrine which allows a landowner to assert riparian rights even if they have laid dormant for many years. Fourth, the eastern limitation that water must be used within the watershed was eliminated. In the West it is often necessary to construct elaborate delivery systems across hills and even mountains to get water to where it is needed.' Mines Give Wav to Farms While the mining towns of the West cycled through boom and bust, the land surrounding them was undergoing a more lasting transformation. Sagebrush and tumbleweed gave way to wheat and corn as early pioneers plowed the desert and flooded it with water. Most of miners eventually left. But the farmers stayed, and they kept the water law which the miners had fashioned out of necessity. In the early years, water was allocated without resort to lawyers, judges, or scholarly treatises. But the formality of the law was not far behind. Every western state came to recognize the prior appropriation doctrine as the official rule, and most of them wrote it into their state constitutions. Nine states with wetter climates6 did graft elements of the riparian doctrine onto their state water law. But the basic principle of water allocation in the West came to be prior appropriation. `In Colorado, for instance, 80 percent of the water is found on the western elope of the Rocky Mountains, while 80 percent of the people reside on the eastern aide of the mountains. Dozens of huge tunnels have been constructed at enormous coat to bring water under the Continental Divide for municipal and agricultural use on the front Range. The "dual system" states are California, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington.