BOARD01106

• Board Meeting Date: 2/3/1962
• Description: Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

I

MR. STAPLETON:

MR. SPARKS:

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someone else can use it, can have it.
Our ancestors said the same thing when
they came to the great American desert.
All this land and the Indians and they
thought the Indians weren't using it for
beneficial use so they chased them off;
then they saw the grass there up to the
stirrups on the horses that they rode
and they said, "We'll put this to beneficial
use," so they brought thousands of cattle,
thousands of sheep and hundreds of goats
and, believe me, now in Texas you could
ride for hundreds and hundreds of miles
and what do you see? Nothing. Not much
grass, lots of brush, lots of cactus, lots
of mesquite and oak allover and that
wasn't there when our ancestors came there.

But they used it for beneficial use
as they thought. Now the buffalo are gone,
the grass is gone and all we have is big
bulldozers out there trying to eradicate
the cactus, get it back to grass.

You know what is going to happen when
you lower the water eight feet out between
Moffat and Hooper and Saguache, you lower
the water table sixteen feet and the rabbit
brush will dry -- the old brush that we
call "bruce weed" will dry and the grass
will go away and the sacatonewill be gone
and then it will blow away but we tried --
started in to use it for beneficial use.

I'll ask Mr. Sparks to comment at
this point, if you will, Mr. Sparks?

I have just one comment. Pertaining
to the lowering of the water table. Now,
we have tried to emphasize throughout this
study that we are talking about water which
is lost by evaporation or transpiration.
There is approximately a million acre-feet
of water annually lost in the Closed Basin
drain which accomplishes no purpose whatso-
ever. We are talking about salvaging that
water, not lowering the water table up and
down the valley.