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Show ELEMENTS OF WATERCOURSE 43 runs through a valley between rather low banks which usually, but not always, contain its waters, and where the land adjacent to the banks differs in character from the bed of the stream, and is composed of arable and fertile land." In the instant case, a large part of the land between the low and high banks was composed characteristically of boulders, sand, and gravel, although some parts were susceptible of cultivation and some actually had been cultivated. Five years later the supreme court cautioned that the discussion in the Ventura Land & Power Company case-as to the character of the ground lying between the edge of the stream at its ordinary flow and the line of high water when in flood-had no reference to the right of the owner of the intervening land, as a riparian owner, to use the stream water for any useful purpose which his position on the stream enabled him to make of it.105 The principle does not govern great rivers. -The principle above stated with respect to ordinary watercourses does not govern the major streamways of the nation. To apply it to a great valley through which a major river system flows would be an unwarranted and impracticable extension of the principle. Hence, the whole floor of such a great valley is not to be considered the high water channel of the river simply because in times of flood extensive areas are overflowed. In a Mississippi River case, the United States Supreme Court106 emphasized not only the unsoundness, but also the absurdity of the theory that: the valley through which the river travels, in all its length and vast expanse, with its great population, its farms, its villages, its towns, its cities, its schools, its colleges, its universities, its manufactories, its network of railroads-some of them transcontinental, are virtually to be considered from a legal point of view as constituting merely the high water bed of the river and therefore subject, without any power to protect, to be submitted to the destruction resulting from the overflow by the river of its natural banks.107 Nor, it has been held, is a great catchment area (Sutter Basin, California)-a very wide and very shallow basin that exists principally for the reception of the floodwaters of a long river (Sacramento River) that normally carries heavy winter and spring flows-a watercourse.108 "The whole space between the foothills and a river is not to be called the channel because it sometimes overflows." 105 Anaheim Union Water Co. v. Fuller, 150 Cal. 327, 328-329, 88 Pac. 978 (1907). With respect to the right of the landowner to make reasonable use of the water, the court was of the opinion that bottom lands riparian to a stream, even though lying between high bluffs on each side, are not to be distinguished from other land abutting on the stream. 106 Speaking through Chief Justice White, himself a native of the Mississippi Valley. 107 Cubbins v. Mississippi River Comm'n., 241 U.S. 351, 368 (1916). 108 Gray v. Reclamation Dist. No. 1500,174 Cal. 622, 647-648, 163 Pac. 1024 (1917). |