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-71- . "FUTUilli IRRIGATION DEVELJPi'ENT Ii; COLORADQ" , by Clifford H. Stone Director, Colorado ,"ater Conservation Board Paper ~elivered at Colorado Irrigation Centennial April 9, 1952 A discussion of "Future Irrigation Development in Colorado," im- ~ortant as that subject is to our people at the present time, may seem , somewhat prosaic in the light of the romantic story of the early begin- nings of water development in this State. . A centennial observation, such as the one we observe on this occasion, must'emphasize historical aspects of the event which is celebrated; we look back and turn the "spotlight," as best we may, on those individuals who played an imp'ortant role in the initiation of great institutions, enduring enterprises and wbrks which .time has demonstrated accrued to the hap~iness and well, being of those who came after them. Too often these individuals ~layed their great part unnoticed at the time; the significance of their acts' was not, realized in their day. This comment may surely be made c on- cerning those hardy and venturesome people who built the first irrigation ditches in Colorado. " It is a far' cry from the time the San Luis People 's Ditch was built to Colorado's irrigation development of this day. But the locatrc of that ditch brought with them the Spanish influence which, together with other factors, gave birth in Colorado to the appropriation doctrine of 'later law. They and settlers in other parts of the State initiated a sys- tem of water law ,which later ripened into a legal basis through the Colo- rado Constitution and Statutes. These first water seekers who would nurture crops on arid lands were endowed with but little of the worldly goods; they possessed only crude tools with which to build; and they faced insecurity in a country only partially explored. . . If a perspnal reference may be pardoned, the insecurity and un- certainities'which these early irrigators in Colorado faced are shown by the 'experie'nce of my father who settled in the' Cebolla Valley, just across the Contihental Divide from the San Luis Valley. He crossed the San Luis Valley in a stage coach nearly thirty years after the San Luis People's Ditch was built.';,hen he was fencing his land, which he had taken up under a placer claim because it had not yet been surveyed, Chief Ouray and a band of his ute Indians came along. The Chief told him he would have to get off the land which, he said, belonged to the Ute tribe. -f,hen the Indians had passed by, my father continued to fence his land, and later, after it had been surveyed, he proved up on it as a homestead. Not long after this encounter with the Indian chief, the Eeeker Massacre occurred and the Utes were removed frbm Colorado to the Uinta Basin in what is now "