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Show HUNGRY HORSE PREDICTION 17 Frying Pan-Arkansas bill, which proposed the building of a project to take water out of the Upper Colorado and transport it over the Continental Divide to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.12 Also, the case of Arizona us. California, the largest and most important water and power lawsuit in history, was then before the United States Supreme Court. Every legal resource California possessed which it be- lieved would be beneficial had been mustered for the court fight.* Now California had no alternative but to engage in another major conflict on another front - a costly, bitter and exhausting fight against the proposed crsp. In the spring of 1953, California found itself fiercely engaged on three flanks. The initial crsp plan submitted to Congress had been prepared by Reclamation Commissioner Straus, and approved by Secretary of the Interior Chapman, both stalwart advocates of more and bigger reclamation pro- jects. It contained the comments of the so-called "cooperating agencies." These were the federal agencies which assertedly had helped to formulate the over-all program, and most of them were in the Interior Depart- ment. Therefore, severe criticism of any Chapman- Straus proposal was hardly to be expected. Insubordi- nation was not a custom of Bureau officers who wanted to retain their jobs. Accordingly, it was unusual to find in the comments of some of the agencies strongly worded opposition to * See Appendix j for an analysis of the Supreme Court litigation, Arizona vs. Cali- fornia, which includes an explanation of California's opposition to the crsp. |
