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<br />all landowners on a stream) was replaced by the doctrine of prior <br />appropriation (first-in-time-first-in-rightl. Two years later the <br />Colorado State Constitution endorsed the concept in Article XVI. During <br />the next twenty years most western states embraced this western water <br />doctrine in one ~orm or another. <br />As a law student at the University of Denver, Carpenter studied <br />the ramifications of prior appropriation. His father told him that if <br />he wanted to specialize in water law, he would have to write his own <br />text books. He attended classes at night, graduated from the University <br />of Denver with a law degree and returned to Greeley to set up his <br />practice. Early on he had to take whatever cases came his way, but <br />gradually he became known for specializing in water. He defended his <br />neighbors' irrigation rights, using the rules of priority and when <br />elected state senator in 1908, he successfully pursued legislation that <br />allowed reservoir companies to be included under the same prior <br />appropriation doctrine that governed the operation of ditch companies. <br />He also insisted that Colorado owned all of the water originating within <br />its b9undarles. First-in-time-first-in-right seems at that time to ha'le <br />been something of an immutable principle for him. But once appointed <br />Colorado's representative to the Colorado River Compact Commission in <br />1921, equitable apportionment was all he could talk about. Why? What <br />happened? <br />In 1896, the year Carpenter graduated from Greeley High School, <br />the Department of Interior placed an embargo on construction of <br />reservoirs and canals on the Rio Grande pending consummation of an <br />agreement with Mexico. For the next ten years, four projects in <br />Colorado's San Luis Valley were rejected by the United States <br />Reclamation Service (USRS) because of the government's concerns about <br />maintaining adequate flows in the river during treaty negotiations. <br />When the Root-Casasus Treaty was signed in 1906, Mexico was guaranteed <br />60,000 acre-feet of water annually from the yet-to-be-built Elephant <br />Butte Reservoir.' The embargoes should have ended in 1906, but the USRS <br />modified its policy only slightly. For all intents and purposes, the <br /> <br />5 <br />