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Show PROPERTY CHARACTERISTICS 463 In addition, the attachment of reservoir rights to land in Wyoming is optional with the reservoir owners and those to whom they grant storage water rights. This provision was added to the statute in 1921.144 The previous rule, established in 1909,145 was that no water rights, whether direct flow or storage, could be detached from the land for which acquired, without loss of priority. The primary purpose of making the change, according to the Wyoming Supreme Court, was to permit reservoir rights to be diverted from any particular land, which "was doubtless to enable the waters of the state to be utilized more extensively than would otherwise have been possible."146 Some discussion of this Wyoming situation with respect to reservoir waters appears in chapter 7 under "Methods of Appropriating Water of Watercourses-Storage Water Appropriation." Nebraska. An 1895 statute included a provision the extant version of which requires an application for a permit to appropriate water, if for irrigation purposes, to include "a description of the land to be irrigated thereby and the amount thereof. . . ."147 In 1904 the Nebraska Supreme Court declared that by enacting this statute the State adopted a policy "by which the right to use the water shall not be granted separate from the land to which it is to be applied, and that the right to use the water should attach to the land, and, when the land is sold, be sold with it; for this reason, the statute is explicit in requiring a description of the land to be irrigated, and the amount thereof, to be set forth in the application."148 A statute enacted in 1889 provided that one entitled to the use of water "may change the place of diversion if others are not injured by such change and may extend the ditch, flume or aqueduct by which the diversion is made to places beyond that where the first use was made." As amended in 1911, the statute provided that an owner of a ditch, storage reservoir, or other water appropriation device "may change the point of diversion, or the line of any flume, ditch or aqueduct if others are not injured thereby," with ap- proval of the State administrative agency. The extant version is similar 144 Wyo. Laws 1921, ch. 141, Stat. Ann. § 41-37(1957). 145 Wyo. Laws 1909, ch. 68. 146 Sturgeon v. Brooks, 73 Wyo. 436, 454, 281 Pac. (2d) 675 (1955). See also Condict v. Ryan, 79 Wyo. 211, 225-230, 333 Pac. (2d) 684 (1958), 335 Pac. (2d) 792 (1959). I47Nebr. Laws 1895, ch. 69, Rev. Stat. § 46-233 (1968). 148 Farmers' In. Dist. v. Frank, 72 Nebr. 136, 138-139, 100 N. W. 286 (1904). The court at the outset mentioned as a feature of such a doctrine "that the right to the use of water should never be separated from the land to which it is to be applied. ..." 72 Nebr. at 138. Orders of the Nebraska Department of Water Resources approving petitions to change points of diversion have specifically stated that the right to make such change does not carry with it any right to irrigate lands not entitled to water under the appropriation at the original point of diversion, as was stated in a letter to the author from Dan S. Jones, Jr., Director of the Department, dated September 5, 1963. |