BOARD02646

• Board Meeting Date: 1/12/1998
• Description: WSP Section - Colorado River Issues - Articles Regarding Draining of Lake Powell
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

, Western water

e It" not" ~mpl. ~ "",ng that a 10.. W~
drawn, with the industrial revolutionaries on one
side and the agrarians on the other. If anything, it
was one set of industrial revolutionaries, mostly but
not entirely in the Upper Basin, who had not yet had
their main chance at riches., drawing a line against
their down-river competitors. The Upper Basin com-
petitors couldn't win if they played by the dominant
rules, so, almost against their wills, they had to
change the rules. They had to modify the doctrine of
prior appropriations. They had to say that "take W
wasn't always the best rule for the West. It
must have been a bard swallow, but they got it
down.
Their leader was Delph Carpenter, a
Colorado lawyer involved in the slow passage -
from 1911 to 1922 - of Colorado liS. Wyoming
(the Laramie River case) through the courts. He
was probably one of those whose heart was torn
by the American Industria] Revolution; he was
a native son of Greeley, Colo., whic:h had begun
as an intelligent agrarian community. But as it
grew, Greeley gave in to the industrialization of
agriculture imposed by the transportation and
finance networks overlaid on the West.
It was Carpenter who suggested, to a con.
ference of governors, that the seven states of
the Colorado Basin negotiate an interstate
treaty for ~equitable apportionment~ of the
Colorado River. He pointed out to California's
governor that this was even in California's
interest. California was relatively rich and pow-
erful, but it still needed outside capital. If
California wanted federal funding for the mas-
sive structures necessary to control the Lower
Colorado River, it would have to make a deal
with the other states in the basin. Besides, he
_ predicted, even the biggest Upper Basin state,
, _COloradO, would never be able to. consum.e more
an 5 percent of the river's water. ADd since
: alifomia was downstream ofal! the.Uflper ,w
~. asin states, it would inevitably get their
, water. .~""",'.. ALIF.,
The governors cautiously agreed to discuss '.- .
a treaty, and each appointed a conunissioner to Ie 0[.0 R
represent it. Secretary of Commerce Herbert A DO
Hoover represented the United States, chairing
wbat came to be known as the Compact
Commission. The first meeting was held in
Washington, D.C., in January 1922, with subsequent
meetings in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City,
Grand Junction (Colorado), Denver, Cheyenne and,
finally, Santa Fe. The future of much of the river
might have been predicted frorr the locations of
those meetings - only the Grand Junction meeting
was in the river's natural basin. The rest took place
in Colorado River Basin states, but outside of the
river's watershed.
The meetings took place in what Carpenter
called "semi-executive session," with each commis-
sioner entitled to one legal or engineering advisor.
The press was excluded. The commission began with
fruitless efforts to divide the river based on the
amount of irrigable land. But these power-suited
guys were not gathering in the emerging cities of the
West to dicker over farmland, and that effort went
nowhere.

,

...

lcal to troptcal The growmg seaSons, the
crops, and the quantity of water consumed per
acre are therefore different."

Carpenter's "broad viSionary stroke" was what
the commission agreed upon. The Upper Basin
states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming)
and the Lower Basin states (Ari%ona, California and
Nevada) would each be entitled' to cl:lDsumptive use
of no more than half of the river's wllter; the states'
in each basin would then allocate their half of the

reconstructing the river, so to get around Arizona's
boycott, California got a rider al1ded to the Bou]der
Canyon Project Act <Hoover Dam was initially called
Boulder Dam) that finally passed Congress in 1928,
saying that six out of seven states were enough to
make the Compact binding. In return, California had
to agree to limit its claim on the Lower River's 7.5
million acre-feet to 4.4 MAF (with 2.8 MAF for
Arizona, and 0.3 MAF for Nevada). More than halfof
the Lower River for California - but less than all of
iC
With the Boulder Canyon Project through
Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation and
Southern California's Metropolitan Water
District began their great works on the river.
There is certainly more to be said 3bout the
de\'elopment of the Lower River these past 75
years, but I'm not going to say it here. The story
of the Desert Empire and its plumbing system
has dominated past dit::course over the river, and
would. if we let it, tie us up in the details of
water development.
So at the 75th anniversary of the Compact.
we will practice "cu]tural triage": we will concede
the Lower River to the Industrial Revolution, to
those who would turn everything into cities, fac-
tories and high density, and regroup around the
other river. the Upper Colorado River, and its
role in the ongoing sa~a of th(' fragile, incipient,
but increasingly necessary cc/Unter-revolution.

Dam as natural divide
The breakthrough came from Carpenter, who
suggested something unprecedented; look to the nat-
ural geography of the region, and divide the water
between the two obvious and distinct "regions of set-
tlement" above and below the canyons.
Cbairmao Hoover agreed, and be drafted a
memo worth quoting from:

e

"The drainage area falls into two basins
naturally, from a geographical, hydrographi-
cal, and an economic point of view. They (tbe
two basins) are separated by over 500 miles of
barren canyon, which serves as the neck of the
funnel, into which the drainage area com-
prised in the Upper Basin pours its waters,
and these waters again spread over the lands
orthe Lo~er Basin ... The climate of the two
basins is different; that of the Upper Basin
being, generally speaking, temperate, while
that of the Lower Basin ranges from semitrop-

RIVER. BASIN

water among themselves.
California asked for some more d.efmite quantity
of water to work with than -naJfthe river,~ so an
effort was made to quantify the amOUnt. Around the
turn of the century the United States ~logical
Survey (USGS) had begun measuring the river's flow
near the Lee's Ferry access in northeastern Arizona,
jt.:st above its descent into the Grand. Canyon, but
below most of the river's major tributaries. The
USGS "long-term" measurements (two decades) indi-
cated that the river was averaging 17 million to 18
million acre-feet of water a year at Lee's Ferry. So
the Commission based the division on 15 million
acre-feet, leaving what appeared to he a healthy
margin for low.flow years and other demands (i.e.,
from Mexico, which held the bottom 90 miles of the
river and which they knew might eVentually obtain a
claim on the river). The Upper Basin was thus
cltarged with assuring that an average of7.5 million
acre-feet flowed past the Lee's Ferry gauge every
year.
It was also necessary to take other legitimate
but complicating claims into account. For example,
they acknowledged the possibility of future claims
from the Indian nations - since the Supreme Court
had already declared in 1908 (Winters vs. United
States) that the reservation of lands for the uciviliz_
ing" of the Indians implied the resel'\>'ation ofsuffi-
cient water to accomplisb that purpose.
At the eighth meeting of the Coll:J.mission in
Santa Fe in November 1922. six states signed the
compact. The Upper Basin states were happy
because Los Angeles, the thousand-pound gorilla,
had been caged by the compact. But the compact put
Arizona and Nevada in with the gorilla. Nevada was
little more than a hangover from mbling booms.
Arizona, harboring its own Califomill dreams, found
itself in the cage with the gorilla and. refused to sign
something that might let Southern California appro-
priate all of the Lower Colorado River share.
California and.the Bureau were eager to begin

While this Anurica settles in the mould of its
r/ulgarity,
heauily thickening (-0 empire,
And protest, onl)' a bubble ill the molten
mass, pops and
sighs oat, and the mass hardens,
/ sadly smiling remembe,. that tM {lowtr

Slow start for the Upper Basin
The Colorado River below the canyons has been
a recognizable kind oflandscape for five or six thou-
sand years now, going back to the Nile and
Euphrates. In a desert region with a river running
through it, you can add water to sunblasted earth,
stir - and voila! Food in unpreC1!dented quantities
_ food enough to supply an army of accountants and
managers and soldiers to protect the farmers, keep
the neighbors in line and keep the society organized
_ civilization, in sbort.
But an inland mountain river, like the Colorado
above the canyons, was different. These kinds of
places have always been horne to those on the fringe
of civilization: the Scots of the British Isles, the
Israelites in the desert, the Appalachian people in
their~hoIlows."
At once spectacular and intimate, mountain val-
leys like those throuR"h which the secondary and ter-
tiary streams of the Upp!'r Colorado flow seem made
to fit the Jeffersonian drellm. But his is not an easy
dream. Long winters made ~eneral agriculture possi-
ble only up to around 6,500 felet altitude; hay and
grass farming was possible above that to about 8.500
feet. Higher yet, it was pasturage only - or urban-
industrial sports like mineral-mining, timber-mining
and nee-Paleolithic indulgences like hunting, fishing
and playing around outdoors.
Moreover, the counter-revolutionaries in search
ofa rural way of liCe retreated into the mountain \'n]-
leys after 1880 to find the spreading networks of the
Big Business-Big Government industria] jug,ernaut
already in place. There were cut.and--run factories
for mining and rough-milling everything from gold to
grass to trees, railroads to haul it all otTto the city
for the real value-added work. and by the early
1900sgreat blocks of undistributed land put into
forest preserves by RlIosevelt and Gifford Pinchot

colllinued 011 lie.>.:! PURC

High Country New~ - November 10. 1997 - 1:'1