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Show 10 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER ment - inadequately called the Colorado River Storage Project - had been completed in 1950. He must have known that not only Democrats but powerful Republi- can members of Congress were its sponsors. When he left office the crsp was ready to be hatched in the legislative nest. Nothing short of an atom bomb on Capitol Hill could have prevented Congress from con- sidering it. To understand the war over the crsp one must under- stand something of the basic issues which caused it. The original Colorado River Compact, formulated in 1922, divided the water between the Upper and Lower Basins of the river, but not between the individual states. It was presumed that the states in each basin would negotiate their own agreements by which the waters allotted to each basin would be equably divided. That did not happen. The Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada were never able to agree, and in 1953 their controversy was taken to the United States Supreme Court for an adjudication of their claims. Almost twenty-six years passed before the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona reached an understanding, and on October 11, 1948, signed an Upper Basin Compact.2 Congress approved it the following year.* The original Compact apportioned waters "for bene- * The dividing line between the Upper and Lower Basins was at Lee's Ferry, Ari- zona. Because a tiny portion of Arizona's border reached above that point, Ari- zona was both a Lower and Upper Basin state, thus was entitled to be a signer of the Upper Basin Compact. |