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Western water It is not so simple as saying that a line was drawn, with the industrial revolutionaries on one side and the agrarians on the other. If anything, it wu one set or industrial revolutionaries, mostly but Dot entirely is the Upper Basin. who had Dot yet bad their main chance at riches, drawing a line apin5t their down.river competitors. The Upper Basin com- petitors couldn't win iftbey played by the dominaDt rules, so, almost against their wills, they had to change the rules. Tbey had to modify the doctrine of prior appmpriations. They bad to say that "take it" wasn't always the beat rule for the West. It must have been 8 hard swallow, but they got it down. Their leader was Delph Carpenter, 8 Color-ado lawyer involved in the slow passage_ from 1911 to 1922 - of Colorado VI. WYOming (the Laramie River case) throUih the courts. He was probably one of those whose heart was torn by the American Industrial Revolution; he was a native IOn of Greeley, Colo., whieb had begun as an intelligent agrarian community. But as it grew, Greeley gave in to the industrialization of agrit:ulture imposed by the transportation and finance networks overlaid on the West. It was Carpenter who suggested, to a con- fezence of governors, that the seven states of the Colorado Basin negotiate an interstate treaty for "equitable apportionmimt" of the Colorado River. He pointed out to California's governor that this was even in California', interest. California was relatively ricb and pow_ erful, but it still needed oubicle capital. U California wanted federal funding for the mu- sive structures nece88ary to control the Lower Colorado River, it would bave to make a deal with the other states in the bllsin. Besides, he predicted, even tbe biggest Upper Basin state, Colorado, would never be able to COI1SWDe DlOn ..han 5 percent of the river" water. ADd .since :alifomia was downStrealn oran the'Uppef !iF" Basin states, it would inevitably get their water. t: ""'-..: -"UF. The governors cautiously agreed to discus. "" a treaty, and each appointed a comminioner to Ie 01. 0 D ........,tit.Seonta..,..fComm.............. .,I\DO Hoover represented the United States, chairina what came to be known as the Compact Commission. The first meeting was held in Wubillgton, D.C., in January 1922, with subsequent meetinp in Phoeoix. Los Anpl_, Salt Lake City, Grarid Junction (Colontdo), Denver, Cheyenne and, finally, Santa Fe. The future of much of the river might bave been predicted fJ'OD." the location, of those meetings - only the Grand Junction meeting was in the riftr', natural basin. The rest took place in Colorado River Basin nata, but outside of the river" watershed. The meetinp took place in what Carpeoter called '"8emi-ezecutive _jon,.with each commis- sioner entitled to one legal or engineering advisor. The prell was excluded. The commission began with fluitl.. efforts to divide the river hued on the amount ofinigable land. But these poweNUited guys were not gathering in the emerging cities of the West to dicker over farmland, and that effort went nowhere. ';'.,,'^ 1lIlIl.. naturol dmde Tbe breakthrough came from Carpenter, who suggested something unprecedented: look to the nat- ural POgraph, of the region, and divide the water between the two ObviOUl and distinct '"regions of set- tlement. above and below the C8DyoDS. Chairman Hoover agreed, and be drafted a memo worth quoting from: 'The drainage area falls into two basins naturally, from a geographical, hydrographi- cal, and an economic point of view. They (the two basins) are separated by over 500 miles of barren canyon, wbich serves as the neck of the funnel, jnto which the drainage area com- prised in -the Upper Basin pours its waters, and thee,,! waters &pin spread over the lands of the Lower Basin ... 'The climate of the two basins is different; that of the Upper Balin being. generally speaking, temperate, while that of the Lower Basin ranges from semitrop. ... ical to tropical. The growing 'easons, the crops, and the quantity of water consumed per acre are therefore different.- Carpenter's *broad visionary ,hoke- was what the conuniaion agreed upon. The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) and the !..ower BaBin states (Arizona, California and Nevada) would each be entitled'to consumptive use of no more than balf of the river's water; the states in each basin would then allocate their half of the RIVER 13ASIN water among themselves. California asked for 80me more definite quantity ofwaterto work with than "balftbe river,. so an effort was made to quantify the amount. 4roUDd the tUrD of the century the United States Geological Survey (USGS) bad begun measuring the river's flow near the Lee', Ferry access in northeastern Arizona, jl.:st above itl desc:ent into the Grand Canyon, but below most oftbe river's major tributarle$. 1be USGS "loug-term- measurements (two decades) indi- cated that the river was averaginc 17 million to 18 million acre-feet Ofwater a year at Lee's Ferry. So the Commission based the di-rision on 15 million acre-feet, leaving what appeared to be a healthy margin for low-flow years and other demands (i.e., from Mexico, wbieb beld the bottom 90 miles of the river and wbich they knew might eventually obtain a claim on the river). 'The Upper Basin we, thus charged with assuring that an average of 7.5 million acre-feet Rowed past the Lee's Ferry gauge every you. It was also necessary to take other legitimate but complicating claims into account. For example, they acknowledged the possibility offuture claims from the Indian nations - since the Supl't!me Court had already declared. in 1908 (WinUrs VS. UniUd SUIte.) that the reservation of lands for the .civiliz- ing" of the !ndjans implied the reservatiOll of sum. cient water to accomplish that purpose. At the eighth meeting of the Commiuion in Santa Fe in November 1922, ,ix nates ligned the compact. The Upper Basin states were haPPY because Los Angeles, the thousand-pound gorilla, had been caged by the compad. But the compact put Arizona and Nevada in with the gorilla. NtlVada was little more than a hangoyer from mining booms. Arizona, harboring its own California dreatns, found itaelf in the cage with the gorilla and refused to sign something that might let Southern California appro- priate all of the Lower Colorado River ahare. California and.the Bureau were eater to begin reconsb:ucting the river, 110 to get around Arizona's boycott, California got a rider added to the Boulder Canyon Project Act (Hoover Dam was initially called Boulder Dam) that finally passed. Congress in 1928, saying that six out of seven states were enough to make the Compact binding. In return, California had to agree to limit its claim on the Lower River's 7.5 million acre-feet to 4.4 MAF (with 2.8 MAr for Arizona, and 0.3 MAP for Nevada). More than half of the Lower River for California - but Jess than all of ;L With the Boulder Canyon Project througb Congress, the Bureau of Red am at ion and Southern California's Metropolitan Water District began their great works on the river. There is certainly more to be said about the development of the Lower River these past 75 years, but rm not going to say it here. The story of ,the Desert Empire and its plumbing system bas dominated past discourse over the river, and would, if we let it, tie us up in the details of water development. So at the 75th anniversary of the Compad, we will practice .cultural triage": we will concede the Lower River to the Industrial Revolution, to those who would tum everything into cities, fac. tories and bigh density, and regroup around the other river, the Upper Colorado River, and its role in the ongoing laRD of the fragile, incipient, but increasingly necessary counter-revolution. "'-, ~ :.' .;-: '.'" '. While this America BeUIes in tM mould of its lJulgarity, MafJiIy thicJuning to empire, And protut, onI>' 0 bubble ill the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and 1M mass hankns, I sadly smi/.i.ng remember that tM {lmJIu Slew slari fer Ibe Upper B.si. The Colorado River below the canyons bas been a recoenizable kind of landscape for five or six thou- sand years now, going back to the Nile and Euphrates. In a desert. region with a river running through it, you can add water to sunblasted earth, stir - and voila! Food in unprecedented quantities - food enough to supply an anny of accountants and manacera and soldiers to protect the farmers, keep the neighbors in line and keep the society organized - civilization, in sbort. But an inland mountain river, like the Colorado above the canyons, was diff('Tent. These kinds of places have slwaya been home to those on the fringe of civilization: the Scots of the British Isles, the Israelites in the desert, the Appalachian people in their "hollows.. At once spectaeular and intimate, mountain val- leyalike those through which the secondary and ter. tiary streams of the Upper Colorado flow seem made to fit the Jeffersonian dream. But his is not an easy dream. Long winters made general agriculture possi- ble only up to around 6,500 feet altitude; hay and grass farming was possible above that to about 8,500 feet. Higher yet, it was pasturage only - or urban- industrial sports like mineral-mining, timber-mining and nee-Paleolithic indulgences like hunting, fishin, and playing around outdoors. Moreover, the counter-revolutionaries in search of a rural way of life retreated into the mountain vnl- leys after 1880 to find the spreading networks or the Big Busineu.Big Government industrial jUh'"ernaut already in place. There were cut-and-run factories for mining and rough-milling everything from gold to grass to trees, railroads to haul it 311 off to the city for the real value-added work, and by the early 19006 great blocks of undiEltributro land put into for~t preserves by ftoogcvclt and Gifford ~nchot continued OIl /Iexl petRI' ;l; 'I.; --"" High Country N('w~ - No\'("nl!x'r 10. 1997 - 1:1