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<br />is the fact that a small town Colorado water lawyer, raised as a devotee <br />of the doctrine of prior appropriation, committed to the principle of <br />first-in-time-first-in-right, became a leading critic of that doctrine <br />when he realized that if applied to interstate streams, it would lead to <br />the loss of stat~ sovereignty, to United States' claims of ownership of <br />the unappropriated waters in the West, to endless and costly litigation, <br />and eventually to economic collapse. The origins of Carpenter's views <br />regarding equitable apportionment and the manner in which he applied <br />this doctrine to the Colorado River Compact are the themes addressed in <br />this essay. <br />'Carpenter was born in Greeley in 1877, the second son of Leroy S. <br />Carpenter and Martha Allen Bennett. Both parents came to Colorado from <br />Iowa in 1872 after ~ore than a year of courtship by correspondence <br />Leroy in Colorado, Martha in Iowa. Pioneers of the Union Colony, they <br />were strong advocates of temperance, charter members of the Methodist <br />Church and committed advocates of irrigated agriculture. Before they <br />were married, Leroy frequently wrote to Martha about the back-breaking <br />labor involved in extending ditches for water delivery from the Cache la <br />Poudre River to the two farms he and his father had purchased. As with <br />most easterners, Martha had trouble imagining what the ditches looked <br />like, how she would keep from falling into them, whether any <br />"carpentersn would be available to rescue her and how the ditches might <br />serve the utilitarian purpose of sobering up drunks.6 But after she <br />arrived and started a family, she soon realized that the farms on which <br />they depended for their livelihood could not raise a crop without <br />irrigation water supplied through the ditches. <br />When upstream Fort Collins came into existence in 1873, the lesson <br />was brought home even more forcefully. Irrigation by members of the <br />Fort Collins Agricultural Community lowered water levels in the Cache la <br />Poudre. River to such an extent that the Union Colony's ditches dried up. <br />Angry farmers from both communities convened midway between the towns.~ <br />From this contentious meeting emerged a new system of water managem~:~~. <br />The old concept of riparian rights {guaranteeing equal water rights to <br /> <br />4 <br />