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UUll'iLl , 1957] THE PELTON DECISION 233 at least as may be necessary for the beneficial uses of the government property," and the power of a State over navigable streams and their tributaries is further limited by the superior power of the general government to secure the uninter- rupted navigability of all navigable streams within the limits of the United States. Necessarily, these limitations are equally applicable in restraint of the legislative branch of a territorial government, controlled, as is such body, by Congress4G Thus, in 1903, the Supreme Court reiterated its Rio Gmnde dictum: . the United States, so it asserts, had retained the right to the continued flow of waters of nonnavigable streams through its own unpatented lands, "at least" to serve the beneficial use of that land. Two questions may be asked: (a) Was the court still imbued with the rationale of the California doctrine, and was it thus thinking of the acts of 1866, 1870, and 1877 as "grants" of specific water? (b) In sustaining the right of the territory and the corporation chartered under its laws to make provision for disposal of "surplus" waters, was there not at least a tacit admission that requisite Congressional sanction had been obtained? Thus, could it not be argued that the logic of an affirmative answer to the second question makes untenable the theory of a latent riparianism which seems to be implicit in the reservation of a right to "continuous flow"? Maintenance of continuous flow is, obviously, the very antithesis of the doctrine of appropriation. Conversely, the law of appropriation comprehends the right not merely to impair but to destroy rights to reasonable use and to continuous flow as postulated in the riparian scheme, It may be suggested at this point that in 1903 the Supreme Court's thinking had not developed, either in logical or historical pro- gression, sufficiently so that it could be said that the full import of the law of appropriation had been recognized, \Vhether this development came about later remains to be explored. (3) The issue in Hough v, Porter, decided in 1909, was squarely be- tween riparian plaintiffs and appropriative defendants, with the former asserting rights based on long-continued use of riparian waters.47 In accordance with the common-law doctrine, plaintiffs claimed the right to such flowing waters regardless of the extent of previous use, In other words, they were insisting on the continued flow of the stream, as it had flowed in past times, undiminished by the diversions which Porter and others had effected by means of dams and headgates to further the irrigation which they had actually developed on their lands. The issue thus raised was squ.arely met by the decision, based, as it was, on the argument that the Desert Land Act of 1877 had abolished riparian rights for water fgr mining, agricultural, and manufacturing purposes, and re- stricted,-as the court held, the riparian owner to the residual right to a ..-/ . 46 Id, at 554-55. (Emphasis added.) 4751 Or. 318, 95 Pac. 732, 98 Pac. 1083 (1909),