OCR Text |
Show 290 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER average of over ten million acre-feet per year - the quantity assumed to be available when the Hoover Dam power con- tracts were made in 1930, and when the Mexican Water Treaty was negotiated in 1944-to about 7,500,000 acre-feet. This would reduce the Lower Basin power production, prin- cipally at Hoover Dam, thirty per cent or more, and curtail the Lower Basin's supply for consumptive use in about the same proportion. In these circumstances, California asked the Supreme Court to make the Upper Basin states parties to Arizona's lawsuit. The Historical Background The dispute, on both fronts, turns primarily upon conflicting interpretations of the Colorado River Compact and the Boulder Canyon Project Act, which, ironically, were them- selves supposed to settle the conflict between the Upper Basin and the Lower. The chronology is as follows: DEVELOPMENTS PRIOR TO 1922 Irrigation in the Lower Basin developed much more rapidly than in the Upper. Palo Verde Valley commenced irrigation in 1877; Imperial Valley's appropriations date from 1891; those of the Yuma project in Arizona from 1904. By 1916 the whole natural flow had been appropriated, and the river was dry for long periods in the summer at the Mexican boundary. Nevertheless, the spring floods, depositing great quantities of silt and raising the river bed several feet in some years, were an increasing menace to lands in Imperial Valley, lying below sea level, and to lands in the Yuma Valley in Arizona. A great storage dam was a necessity not only for flood con- trol, but also to make possible any further development at all in either the Upper Basin or the Lower, and for power genera- tion. But the Upper Basin, knowing that the Lower had a 2-to-l population advantage (now over 4 to 1), better lands, flatter contours, and a longer growing season, rightly feared that if the flood waters were stored, the Lower Basin would appropriate and use them, unless in some way the Upper Basin could be insulated against the law of priority of appropriation, which is "first in time, first in right." The United States Su- |