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.. Cities outcompeted . farmers for continued from page 8 technology un~ented in such migrations. Although they all called themselves "Americans: they were divid. ed in economieally brutal and often overtJy violent con. tlict aver the kind of a West they wanted to build Following the relatively recent abandonment of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, histori- ans have been trying to sort out what happened west of the Mississippi in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the Colorado River Basin, it makes most sense to see the American advent as a usually civil war (I am not countinS' the conquest of the Native American peoples here) between a mass of people successfully advancing a rewlution, or a pro-development agen- da, and a kaleidoscopically changing coalition attempting to assemble a counter-revolution around rural or agrarian ideas. The revolution beinJ advanced was the Industrial Revolution. It was a cominif-together of economic ideas (corporate capitalism and individual- ism), the primacy of property rights, technological advances (steam power followed by electrical power and advances in applied chemistry and metallurgy), and new socio.politieal structures (b.ureaucracies and industrial cities). Becaun ofthe twin barriel1l of geography and aridity, this attempt at industrial development, and the opposing attempt to craft a non-industrial way of life, came last to the Colorado River rqicm. For example, my adopted town ofGunniaon, Colo., on one of'the Upper Colorado River" main tributaries. was not aetUed until the 1880si the most recent town in our vaUey, the industrial ski village of Mount Crested Butte, was not incorporated uutiI1974. Initially, at least, it went even slower in the desert reeions of the Lower Colorado River. Hit-and- run industrial mining town. came and went, and stable a,ncultural settlementB were precarious aloDg the lower Colorado River, where irripting was tik.e b'ying to drink out of a fire hose that either ran in hup burets or put out only a muddy tric:tJe. In my Upper River valley, the valley of the Gunnison River in western CoI0J'8do, both the rev0- lutionaries and the counter-revolutionarie8 arrived at the same time. A company ofrelatively .rious agrarians came into the valley in the late 1870s. just as !Old and silver were discovered up the valley above the subsequent mining camps of Crested Butte, l!'Win and Gothk. The agrarians _ high- minded, sober, rel.igious but not driven by religion- settled "West Gunnison; while, about four blocks to the east, main-street "Gunnison" grew as II standard mining-region railhead. Gunnison and West Gunnison soon enoUJb grew over and through each other, what W88 ununa! was having the dichotomy so distinct at the start. In most of the start-up places of the Colorado River region, the two cultural strains mixed &om the start in tension The -"test goodlt wu LA. and contention. Knots of agrarians and soc:ielists and Take the Owens Valley incident. Ita 1902, iu-t-folk who lacked the genee for aa:umulation, Congreu had created the Durau of Reclamation, shared mud streets and raw-wood. walls with the mob ostensibly-to get down on the ground with small of~hUDten wanting only to em in on a "Jl'OU:nd. farmen and help brinl" the agrarien dmun into 8oor" in time to high-grade it, get rich and move on. being. But the Bureau was, from the fint, full of an For many, it would have been hard to..y which side of idealistie breed called American Progrtuives, for the war one ctUlJe down on, so tancled is the human whom "the putest good for the greateR Dumber" heart. Aa it is hard to B8Y today. wu an intuitive belief. It was also full of engineers Although ,tbe West, even today, looks rural and who were captivated by visions of formerly unimag- downhame in places, it's a mirap. We may pine now inabJe things that new construction materials and for the Old West and its simpler life, but we fool our- financial retou.rclllI were making possible. But for a .Ives. As early .. 1890, the West was Dot "agrari- while - five years, to be precise _ the Bureau did an." There were cows and eropa: in fields, and farm- what its enabling lesislation said it was supposed to: houleS and villages with trees along the streets. But . It worked on irrigation projeet8 that were 8 little too already the farmers were industrial worker bees in ambitious for a group of local farmers. the same job-for-wage leDIe.. the mineri' upvalley, One of the first projeets the Bureau explored was producing raw materials to send out on city~bound an irription development in the OweD!! River Valley, trains that brought back manufactured goods - a small, closed basin on the east side of the witb everything, including their debt, bought and California Sienu. But Los Angeles Waf aI.o looking sold at the dtiea' prices. at tbat valley. It was 240 miles away aDd downhill Th~ industrial revolutionaries, and the counter- all the way. revolutionaries, whom we can roughly lump together Tbe movie Chbuuown missed the point otthU: as agrarians. brought into the West velj' different drama. It WIl8l)'t the relatively quiet (up invoMDc cultural baggage. But the rules were the 8IU1le for urban eorruption and iIK:est that the mcMe por. everyone. Tbe basic law for the distribution otland, trayed. This was the biggest flare..up iil. America" water and natural resources of material value was frontier war since Sbay's ReheJlion. And when. "flnlt: eome, first; served.. And 81 it Deeame clear that President Theodore Roosevelt .tepped iJl, he reeolved there w.. a lot lea water than land, the disUibution it in favor of the industrial revolutionaries and theit of rights to water b<<ame pivotal. urban vision in Southern CaUfomia. He acknowl. Since water cannot be surveyed and comer- edged. some vali,dity to the plaints of "a ~"q.,vens 12.) Ht~l;Col,1~lI:Y,.I'f~7 N~ ~,O,..I~!~; l.UlJGWG A lOAD: Mutes drag a sectiOn of the Los Angeles Aquedtx:llnto place. At the time, no motorized vehicle existed that COUd haul ~ ~ heavy. (Photo courtesy the Los Angeles Depa~ of Water and Power) staked like land, its appropriation depended on "ben- eficial use" - anythin, a hWNlD wanted to do with a dollop of water 80 long as it involved diverting it out of the stream. "Consumptive bene6dal use" used up the water. What you "beneficially consumed" was yours - so Ion, as you kept using it; stop using it . and you lost: it. To use it better and thereby eonserve it, or to use it instream was not "'beneficial" and you loetyourclsimtoit. ,~,..~' ^., It is hard to iinqine a'more destructive bias. John Weale,. Powell - the first counter-revolution- ary to infiltrate the developers' power structure., circa 1890 - argt'~ vigorously against the separa. tion ofwaterfrom .he land. But the developers suc- cessfully resisted. To cite one terrible eumpJe, in the mining regions they took the water Ollt of the streams and turned it against the earth, using high- pressure hydraulics to reduce wbole hills to gravel to get out the gold. . As the West filled, however, and ever larger ditches led ever more water ever farther from its streams of origin, the consequences of appropriation and privatization fRW more complex and alarming. So alarming that some developers were [oreed to try . to rein in their fellows. Valley farmers, and their desire for a small-scale irription syltem, but he came down on the side of "'the infinitely greater interest to be served by putting the water in Los Angeles." -rbere it ill,~ LoI Angeles Water and Power man- ager William Mulholland bad Sllid, in dedicating the Owens Valley Aqueduct, "take it. - And elsewhere in the Colorado River region, developers and agrarians alike shuddered. PoweTful as. the river wu, it wu clearly not 10 big as the dreams coalescing around it. It looked as if Los Angeles and oUler Califomia dreamers would not just "take it," but .-ould take it all. And the law of the land and river would let them, thanks to legal precedents bein, set elsewhere in the West at about the same time. The most serious thrE'at to the non-California part of the Colorado River Basin was th(' Laramie River case betw~'n Colorado and Wyoming. Both states distributed their water through prior appro- priation and beneficial usei in other words, first come-first served, and get it out of the stream or it's not yours. In its decision, the U.S. Suprl1me Court treated the Laramie as though it were a lingle legal river, even though it crossed state lines. Whichever appropriator in whichever state got'to the water first would own the water. lfWyomin, irrigators diverted the entire river first, it was theirs. It was the handwriting on the waD: If the six other states in the Colorado River region wanted II share of the river's water, then they had better nego- tiate some "equitable apportionment" befon Southern California spread the whole river out to dry in its unlimitf'd desert reacbe!l. 'I'btlY were enCO\ll'8pd to move in that direction by a case that OCCtnred outside the Colorado Basin, when Kansas SUi!!(J Colorado over the diminishing flow of the ArkanS8ll River. The Supreme Court refused to choose between the appropriations laws of Colorado (all legal uses had to be out-of.stn!am) and the riparian laws ofKans.. (only in-stream uses were legal, the common Jaw in humid regions). Inste8d it ordered the states to neJOtiate an -equi- table a~'portionment" of the river's waters between tbe two states. That decision ilJdicated a possible solution to the threat from California: an interstate agreement to limit California's ability to consume the entire river. The road to . treaty Which brings us, finally, to the Colorado River Compact: not, 8S has been said more than once this year in COnUnel110ratiD, it, at "the beginning of the development of the Coloredo River," but at the begin- ning of the end of the lndustrial Revolution's unchal- lenged conquest of the West. It W85 the compact that first put up a barrier to the intense development of the entire Wes~. :,''',.' . ..1