BOARD01026

• Board Meeting Date: 5/16/2006
• Description: History of Reservoirs in the San Luis Valley - Presentation by Melvin Getz
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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FORn.'ORD

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Charles A. Lory, President Emeritus
Colorado Agricultural and Hechanical College

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Archaeologists find irrigation was practiced in what is now Colorado
long before the region was known to the hunters and trappers who roamed
the mountain country in the first fe\-! decades after Captain Pike I s ex-
ploration in 1607.

These early irrigators who left traces of their work before the
Indians occupied the territory, disappeared and left no history of their
times, There are no trustworthy records that the Indians cultivated
crops under irrigation in Colorado.

Irrigation, as we know it, was first practiced by two groups of
settlers - one of Spanish Americans, racially experienced in irrigation
agricul ture, who settled in southern Colorado in the Basin of the Rio
Grand Del Norte; the other group, Pioneers fram the Eastern States and
Northern Europe, with no experience in irrigation, who settled in the
Basins of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers.

Spanish Americans were quite helpful' to their American neighbors in
southern Colorado in growing crops under irrigation, but distance, primi-
tive means of travel and language limitations prevented effective exchange
of irrigation 'experience with the pioneers of northern Colorado.

Spanish American settlers founded the town of San Luis in the Culebra
Valley in 1651 - the oldest town in Colorado. They began digging their
irrigation ditch the following year, using primitive hand tools and a
wooden plow drawn by a yoke of oxen. The quality of their work is shown
by the continuous use of this canal for a hundred years.

In due time they made the necessary filing for the appropriation of
water to the San Luis Peoples Ditch and for the adjudication of their
water right. In 1690 the District Court of Costilla County awarded them
Priority No.1 in Water District 24 of Water Division 3, dated April la,
1652, .lith an allotment of 23 cubic feet per second for irrigating 900
acres.

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This was the earliest priority in Colorado under the system of water
appropriation, adjudiciation and administration developed largely by
American pioneers in' irriga tion through experience gained in the rush of
development in the South Platte River Basin, .which began 7 years after the
building of the San Luis ,Peoples Ditch.

Along with developments in canal construction and operation and
methods of crop irrigation came difficulties in developing an effective
system for the use of the waters of our streams, and administration of
this system by the State engineer; the provisions for storage reservoirs, .
composing conflicting claims for the waters of our Interstate rivers -
first through State law suits in the United States Supreme Court, and
later through more effective Interstate compacts; the establishing of the
right of transmountain diversion of water; the formation of irrigation

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