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By Root 1603 0

River was a rampant horse in a balsa corral. The only way to control it effectively, and to give the farmers some insurance against its countervailing tendency to dry up, was to build a dam—a huge dam—to lop the peaks off the floods and provide storage during droughts. The problem with such a dam, from the point of view of the basin at large, was that California was then the only state in a position to use the water. Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico were still mostly uninhabited. Colorado and Utah had a few hundred thousand people each, but they had scarcely begun to tap the Colorado River and its tributaries; most of Utah’s irrigation had been developed in another basin. California, on the other hand, was gaining people like no place on earth, and most of the growth was occurring in the south. The Imperial Valley could have immediately used three or four million acre-feet of the river, the consumption of all the upper-basin states and then some. The Coachella Valley, farther north, and the Palo Verde and Yuma projects could swallow another million acre-feet. Los Angeles, growing like a gourd in the night, would soon overrun its Owens Valley supply; the next logical source of water—the only logical source—was the Colorado River. Under simple appropriative-rights doctrine, the water would belong to California as soon as it began to use it. If California perfected its rights in court, it would, in effect, monopolize a huge portion of the river for itself. And the real injustice in all of this was that California contributed nothing to the river’s flow. Nearly half the runoff came from Colorado and another third from Wyoming and Utah. Arizona and New Mexico contributed very little; Nevada and California, nothing at all. California’s efforts to get the dam authorized by Congress were soon beaten back. Finally, it realized that if it wanted the dam and a reliable share of the river, it would have to sit down with its neighbor states and divide it up.

The negotiation of the Colorado River Compact took place in 1922 under the guidance of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover at Bishop’s Lodge, a swank resort outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the time spent debating and drafting it—about eleven months—and its reputation as a western equivalent of the Constitution, the compact didn’t settle much. Using the Reclamation Service’s estimated average flow of 17.5 million annual acre-feet, the delegates from the seven states divided the river arbitrarily at Lee’s Ferry, Arizona—a point just below the Utah border—into two artificial basins. California, Arizona, and Nevada were the lower basin; the other four states were the upper basin; pieces of New Mexico and Arizona were in both. Each basin was allotted 7.5 million acre-feet. How they were to divide that among themselves was their problem. Of the remainder, 1.5 million acre-feet were reserved for Mexico, and the final million acre-feet were apportioned, with extreme reluctance on the part of some, as a bonus to the lower basin, whose delegates had threatened to walk out of the negotiations if they didn’t get a better deal.

The compact was signed by the delegates in November of 1922; they then took it home for ratification by the voters or legislatures of their respective states, which quickly tore it to shreds. California wouldn’t ratify without a conjugal authorization of Boulder Canyon Dam and a new canal running exclusively through American territory to Imperial Valley, a demand that gave the upper basin fits. Arizona wanted to divide the lower basin’s apportionment before it ratified anything. Harry Chandler, probably the most influential human being in the Southwest—he talked through his vast wealth and his newspaper—was delighted by the compact and the authorization of the dam, but he was too greedy to tolerate an All-American Canal, which would divert the river right above his 860,000 acres in Mexico, so he ended up opposing everything. George Maxwell, the head of the National Reclamation Association, should have been in favor of Boulder Dam, but out of principle he opposed