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Show ABANDONMENT AND STATUTORY FORFEITURE 283 and develop over a period of years, and if it does so, its demands for water, as well as other necessaries, would naturally increase.'*163 An interstate case.-The State of Washington brought suit in the United States Supreme Court against the State of Oregon, charging that Oregon was wrongfully diverting the waters of Walla Walla River to the prejudice of inhabitants of Washington. The special master appointed by the Supreme Court found that to limit the long established use in Oregon would materially injure Oregon users without a compensating benefit to Washington users. "These findings are well supported by the evidence."164 Much of the Court's opinion is devoted to this finding of the special master and its implications, such, for example, as the fact that there would be little benefit to Washington if all the waters in controversy were not obstructed within Oregon-that in all likelihood they would be lost in the deep gravel of the channel. However, abandonment was one of the issues. In this regard, the Court said:165 A priority once acquired or put in course of acquisition by the posting of a notice may be lost to the claimant by abandonment or laches. There must be no waste in arid lands of the "treasure" of a river. * * * The essence of the doctrine of prior appropriation is beneficial use, not a stale or barren claim. Only diligence and good faith will keep the privilege alive. * * * When these are shown to be lacking, the water right will fail, or fail to the extent that equity requires. Such, according to the master, has been the fate of the Gardena [Washington] filing. True, a court in Washington determined in 1928 that the priority was to be recognized as of 1892. The decree was of no force against Oregon or Oregon appropriators not parties to the suit. * * * As to them priority had lapsed, if the claimant had forfeited it by inequitable conduct. The label of the acts is unimportant, whether laches or estoppel or abandonment. What matters is their quality. Persistence in such conduct may extinguish the equitable right. It may bar an equitable remedy. Irrigators in another state, unaffected by the decree, are at liberty to show the facts, and upon the basis of that showing to fix their user of the stream. Laches and abandonment, chargeable to the Gardena users, are found in the report. * * * We have dwelt upon the question of abandonment, for it has been much considered in the report and in the arguments of counsel. In so doing we have not meant to hold that, in the absence of abandonment, there would be an inequitable apportionment calling for relief by injunction, unless indeed the flow of the stream should unexpectedly increase. We are to bear in mind steadily that 163Lower Nueces River Water Supply Dist. v. Cartwright, 274 S.W. (2d) 199, 208 (Tex. Civ. App. 1954, error refused n.r.e.). 164 Washington v. Oregon, 297 U.S. 517, 523 (1936). l6SJd. at 527-529. |