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2 mostly Indian conntry. The Navf\jo reservation, the size of West Virginia, was the largest in the country. Many would say that the Hopis were, as they are now, the most traditional Indian tribe in the United States. Lands had also been set aside for the Hualapai, the Havasupai, the Zuni, the Paiutes, and the Utes. There were a couple of dozen small Monnon towns in southern Utah and northern Arizona, most of them baving been establisbed after a party of Monnons survived the rigors of the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail in 1880 to reacb Bluff, Utah. Tbere also were towns settled by Hispanos, wbo had moved over from me Cbama River valley into me Colorado Plateau to settle in the San Juan River basin. The largest of these towns, to wbicb I will return, was called Rosa. But to the outside world, me Plateau was an extraordinarily remote, desolate area It is revealing to look at the cities that would play sucb a big role in remaking the Colorado Plateau. In 1900, Pboenix was a town of 5500 souls. There wasn't a block of paved street. Arizona, like New Mexico, was still a territory and would not acbieve statebood until 1912. El Paso was the largest town ill me deep Southwest, with a population of 16,000. Las Vegas didn't even exist in 1900 and would not sbow up in the national census until 1930 because it could not meet the minimum requirement of baving a population of at least 2500. Denver (a population of 134,(00), Los Angeles (102,000), and Salt Lake City (54,000) were the only areas in the region that we today might classify as cities. By the end of World War II, there bad been no fundamental changes on me Colorado Plateau. A poll still would bave given the God-forsakenness award to me Plateau. The towns bad become cities, but small ones. Tbe Pboenix metropolitan area was still just 250,000 people -- today, it is pushing 2.5 million. Los Angeles, Denver, and San Diego were larger than Pboenix, but most -- Albuquerque, EI Paso, Tucson, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas.- were all smaller. All of them would expand, over the next fifty years, by eigbt, ten, times, or more. For as the post-War era began, the nation was looking west and the boomers and boosters in the West were poised to respond. The cities of me Southwest, bowever, bad already run out of resources and they looked far away, to the Colorado Plateau, for water and energy. We proceeded to engage in one of history's most intensive drives for industrial development. Hoover, the world's tallest dam -- the beight of a seventy-story office building and using enougb concrete to build a five-foot wide, four-incb thick bike path from the North Pole to the South Pole -- had already been completed in 1935 in the soumwest comer of the Colorado Plateau. Many others were installed during me twenty-five years after World War II. They included Glen Canyon Dam, creating Lake Powell, 180 miles long, the largest man-made lake in the world; Navajo Dam on the San Juan River; Flaming Gorge; me Curecanti Project on the Glll1nison; and many omers. Ten major diversions were constructed to transport water out of the Colorado River watershed. Numbers of coal-frred power plants also sprung up. Fresb water Cretaceous seas helped create vast deposits of low-sulpbur coal, bigb in energy content. The San Juan, Four Corners, and Navajo generating stations ranked among the largest in the world. More than a dozen others went in, on the Yampa, near Price, on the Sevier, elsewbere. The biggest prize was Black Mesa, bolding perbaps me finest coal in the world. It also happened to be sacred ground for me Hopi. Tbe Black Mesa leases for the Hopi and the Navajo, like many other tribal leases of the 1950s and 1960s, were terrible business deals, imposed on the tribes by their federal trustee. The coal was sold at below market value, with no escalator clauses. In several cases, the leases required tribes to waive their sovereign authority to tax and regulate. Tribal water rigbts, too, were transferred away at bargain-basement prices, in spite of me fact that they were the senior rights on me river. We need to pause and look at the ideas that drove this extraordinary post-World War II era on the Plateau and across the West. You know the doctrine of prior appropriation but let me take a moment to summarize it. Traditional prior appropriation worked on the basis of frrst-in-time, frrst-in-right -- at least if your water use was the right kind of water use. It allowed only certain favored uses, those extractive uses that qualified as so-called beneficial uses. This regime flatly excluded fisb and wildlife, recreation, and the beauty and spirituality of a living river. Prior appropriation effectively excluded Indian uses as well. But if you did qualify, no matter bow far you were from the watershed and its communities, no matter bow mucb water you needed, you bad carte blancbe. Appropriators could take all they wanted, even to the point of drying up wbole rivers. Appropriators obtained a vested right, protected by the Constitution, for their extractions. There was no enforcement against wasteful practices. On top of that, water, supposedly the West's scarcest resource, was free, absolutely free. You might bave to pay for a diversion ditch, a dam, or a tunnel, and you migbt have to pay operation and maintenance fees to me Bureau of Reclamation, but the actual water itself American River Management Society