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'> >;(, c".', ;~ ,,>'~ Cities outcompeted farmers for continued {rom page 8 - technology unprecedented in such migrations. Although they all called themselves. Americans; they were divid- ed in eConomically brotal and often overtly violent eon- flict over the kind of a West they wanted to build Following the relatively recent abandonment of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, histori- ans have been trying to sort out what happened west of the Mississippi in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the Colorado River Basin, it makes most sense to see the American advent as a usually civil war (I am not counting the conquest of the Native American peoples here) between a mass of people successfully advancing a revolution, or a pro-development agen- da, and a kaleidoscopically changing coalition attempting to assemble a counter-revolution around rural or agrarian ideas. The revolution being advanced was the Industrial Revolution. It was a coming-together of economic ideas (corporate capitalism and individual- ism), the primacy of property rights, technological advances (steam power followed by electrical power and advances in applied chemistry and metallurgy), and new socio-political structures (b.ureaua:acies and industrial cities). Because of the twin barriers of geography and aridity, this attempt at industrial development. and the opposing attempt to craft a non-industrial way of life, came last to the Colorado River region. For example, my adopted town of Gunnison, Colo., on one ~fthe Upper Colorado River's main tributaries, was not settled until the 18805; the most recent town in our valley, the industrial ski village of Mount Crested Butte, was Dot incorporated until 1974. Initially, at least, it went even slower in the desert regions of the Lower Colorado River. Hit-and- run industrial mining towns came and went, and stable agricultural settlements were preca.rious along the lower Colorado River, where irrigating was like trying to drink out of a fire hose tbat either ran in huge bursts or put out only a muddy tricltJe. In my Upper River valley, the valley of the Gunnison River in western Colorado, both the rev0- lutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries arrived at the same time. A company of relatively serious agrarians came into the valley in the late 1870s, just as gold and silver were discovered up the valley above the subsequent mining camps of Crested Butte, Irwin and Gothic. The agrarians - high- minded, sober, religious but not driven by religion- settled "West Gunnison; while, about four blocks to the east, main-st~t "Gunnison" grew as a standard mining-region railhead. Gunnison and West Gunnison soOn enough grew over and through each other; what was unusual was having the dichotomy so distinct at the start. In most of the start-up places of the Colorado River region, the two cultural strains mixed from the start in tension and contention. Knots of agrarians and socialists and just-folk who lacked the genes for accumulation, shared mud streets and raw-wood walls with the mob offortune.hunters wanting only to get in on a "ground floor" in time to high-grade it, get rich and move on. . For many; it would bave been'hard to say which side of the war one earne down on, so tangled is the human heart. As it is hard to say today. Although the West, even today, looks rural and downbome in 'places, it's a mirage. We may pine now for the Old West and its simpler life, but we fool our- selves. As early as 1890, the West was not -agrari- an.- There were cows and crops in fields, and farm- houses and villages with trees along the streets. But already the farmers were industrial worker bees in the same job-for-wage sense as the miners upvalley, producing raw materials to send out on city-bound trains that brought back manufactured goods - with everything, including their debt, bought and sold at the cities' prices. The industrial revolutionaries, and the counter- revolutionaries, whom we c:an roughly lump together as agrarians, brought into the West very different cultural baggage. But the rules were the same for everyone. The basic law (or the distribution of land, water and natural resoun::es of material value was "first come, first served." And as it became dear that there was a lot less water than land, the distribution of rights to water became pivotal. Since water cannot be surveyed and comer- 12., Hi~,COI,I~trY,.~e:'"YS T Nove~.bt;~ ~O" .19~?i:l , - LUGGING A lOAD: Mules drag a section of the Los Angeles Aquecluct inlo place. At the time, no motorized vehicle existed that could haul ~ing 51? heavy. (Photo l?OOrtesy the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) staked like land, its appropriation depended on "ben- eficial use" _ anything a human wanted to do with a dollop of water so long as it involved diverting it out of the stream. "Consumptive beneficial use" used up the water. What you "'beneficially consumed" was yours - so long as you kept using it; stop using it . and you lost it. 1b use it better and thereby conserve it, or to use it instream was not "'beneficial- and you lost your claim to it. ; _"", ,'. It is banI' to imagine' a . more 'destructive bias: John Wesley Powell - the first counter-revolution- ary to infiltrate the developers' power structure, circa 1890 - aTg\'~ vigorously against the se'para- tion of water from .he land. But the developerS suc- cess(ully resisted. 10 cite one terrible example, in the mining regions they took the water out of the streams and turned it against the earth, using high- pressure hydraulics to reduce whole hills to gravel to get out the gold. . As the West filled, however, and ever larger ditches led ever more water ever farther from its streams of origin, the consequences of appropriation and privatization grew more complex and alarming. So alanning that some developers were forced to try . to rein in their fellows. The'lreatest good" was LA. Take the Owens Valley incident. In 1902, Congress had created the Bureau of Reclamation, ostensibly to get down on the ground with small (armers and help bring the agrarian dream into being. But the Bureau was, from the first, full of an idealistic breed called American Progressives, (or whom "the greatest good for the greatest number" was an intuitive belief. It was also full of engineers who were captivated by visions o( (onnerly unimag- inable things that new construction materials and financial 'resources were making possible. But for a while - five years, to be precise - the Bureau did what its enabling legislation said it was supposed to: . It worked on irrigation projects that were a little too ambitious for a group of local farmers. One of the first projects the Bureau explored was an irrigation development in the Owens River Valley, a small, closed basin on the east side of the California Sierras. But Los Angeles was also looking at that valley. It was 240 miles away and downhill all the way. The movie Chinatown missed the point of this drama. It w8slft the relatively quiet fuss involving urban corruption and incest that the movie por- trayed. This was the biggest Dare-up in America's frontier war since Shay's Rebellion. And when President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in, he resolved. it in favor o(the industrial revolutionaries and their urban vision in Southern California. He acknowl- edged some vali.djty to the plaints of "a rf!w~ <>Wens Valley farmers, and their desire for a small-scale irrigation system, but he came down on the side of ~e infinitely greater interest to be served by putting the water in Los.Angeles." 'There it is," Los Angeles Water and Power man- ager William Mulholland had said, in dedic:ating the Owens Valley Aqueduct, "take it. ~ And elsewhere in the Colorado River region, developers and agmrians alike shuddered. Powerful as. the river ,was, it was dearly not so big as the dreams coalescing around it. It looked as if Los Angdcs anu otj'l"r California dreamers would notjUl't ~lake it,~ but would take it all. And the law uf the land and river would let them, thanks to legal precedents being set elsewhere in the West at about the same time. The most serious thn>at to the nun.California part oUhe Culorado River Basin was tht, Laramie River case betwe>'n Colurado and WyuminR. Buth states distributed their water through prior arpro-- priation and beneficial use; in oth{'r words, first come-first served, and get it out of the stream or it's not yours. In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court treated the Laramie as though it wrre a !:ingle legal river, even though it crossed state line!!. Whirhever appropriator in whichever state got to the water first would own the water. If Wyoming irrigators diverted the entire river first, it was theirs. It was the handwriting on the wall: If the six other states in the Colorado River region wanted a share of the river's water, then they had better nego- tiate some "equitable apportionment~ before Southern California spread the whole river out to dry in its unlimit{'d desert reaches. They were encouraged to move in that direction by a ca~\'! that occurred outside the Colorado Basin, when Kansas suc<! Colorado over the diminishing Dow of the Arkansas River. The Supreme Court refused to choose between the appropriations laws of Colorado (all legal uses bad to be out-o(-stn!am) and the riparian laws of Kansas (only in-stream uses were legal, the common law in humid regions). Instead it ordered the states to negotiate an "equi- table aJ'portionm{'nt~ of the river's waters between the two states. Th<lt decision indicated a possible solution to the threat from California: an interstate agreement to limit California's ability to consume the entire river. e The road to a treaty Which ,brings us, finally, to the Colorado River Compact: not, AS has been said more than once this year in commelnorating it, at "the beginning of the development of the Colorado River,- but at the begin- ning of the end of the Industrial Revolution's unchal- lenged conquest of the West. It was the compact that first put up a !xlrrier to the intense development of the entire West; .' . ...1 e