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Show METHODS OF APPROPRIATING WATER OF WATERCOURSES 313 applications for unavailable water or the approval of which would conflict with existing rights or would not be in the public interest; and (c) recording all details of the proposed appropriation from start to finish in a central State office where they would be readily available for use as evidence in a judicial determination of the rights involved. There was nothing in the posting and filing method-as it operated in actual practice-to prevent an intending appropriator from initiating a right and beginning construction of work, so long as he was not stopped by litigation. This was the case even though claims on file often reached absurd totals. The administrative procedure, on the other hand, aimed at discouraging the making of applications for water in streams with respect to which the administrator had determined, for his own official purposes, that appropriative rights in being already laid claim to more water than the stream carried in ordinary seasons. It tended to warn the would-be appropriator of the risk, in quan- titative measure, that he would run of having his right attach to only high floodflows, if he insisted on carrying it through to completion. Of course, he might obtain a storage right of considerable value. But the only available direct flow right might be such as to give him access to water only in occasional years, or at least only in the early seasons. Of inestimable value were the accumulating of available records incident to operation of the, administrative programs, and results of the hydrographic surveys and hydrologic studies that were encouraged or commanded by the new laws. An important purpose of the legislation in some States, also discussed in chapter 6 (in connection with interrelationships between appropriative and riparian principles), was to make it possible, by reason of adequate legislation, to strengthen the standing of appropriative rights in the jurisdiction as against claims of superior riparian rights. Oregon took the first orderly and well-prepared step in this direction in its water code of 1909. In this act, an efficient system of acquiring appropriative rights and of adjudicating them was worked out. Provisions were made for affirming and protecting riparian rights put to actual beneficial use prior to the enactment or within a short time thereafter, and for adjudicating all rights under the procedure provided in the statute.439 In 1945 the Kansas legislature, faced with decisions of the State supreme court that resulted in leaving the appropriation, doctrine almost unworkable, enacted a new appropriation statute in which the Oregon precedent was invoked. Important amendments were made in 1957 for the purpose of strengthening the appropriation position in regard to riparian claims.440 South Dakota followed the lead of Oregon and Kansas.441 4*9Oreg. Laws 1909, ch. 216. 440Kans. Laws 1945, ch. 390; Laws 1957, ch. 539. 441S. Dak. Laws 1955, ch. 430. |