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Show APPENDIX IX IX-7 Mexico, a Mexican corporation was formed and a canal dug partly in Mexico and partly in the United States. Difficulties which arose because the canal was subject to the sovreignty of both countries generated hopes in this country that some day there would be a canal wholly within the United States, an all-American canal.7 During the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries, people in the Southwest continued to seek new ways to satisfy their water needs, which by that time were increasing rapidly as new settlers moved into this fast-developing region. But none of the more or less primitive diversions made from the mainstream of the Colorado conserved enough water to meet the growing needs of the basin. The natural flow of the Colorado was too erratic, the river at many places in canyons too deep, and the engineering and economic hurdles too great for amll farmers, larger groups, or even States to build storage dams, construct canals, and install the expensive works necessary for a dependable year-round water supply. Nor were droughts the basin's only problem; spring floods due to melting snows and seasonal storms were a recurring menace, especially disastrous in California's Imperial Valley where, even after the Mexican canal provided a more dependable water supply, the threat of flood remained at least as serious as before. Another troublesome problem was the erosion of land and the deposit of silt which fouled waters, choked irrigation works, and damaged good farmland and crops. It is not surprising that the pressing necessity to transform the erratic and often destructive flow of the Colorado River into a controlled and dependable water supply desperately needed in so many States began to be talked about and recognized as far more than a purely local problem which could be solved on a farmer-by-farmer, group-by-group, or even state-by-state basis, desirable as this kind of solution might have been. The inadequacy of a local solution was recognized in the Report of the All-American Canal Board of the United States Department of the Interior on July 22, 1919, which detailed the widespread benefits that could be expected from construction by the United States of a large reservoir on the mainstream of the Colorado and an all-American canal to the Imperial Valley.8 Some months later, May 18, 1920, Congress passed a bill offered by Congressman Kinkaid of Nebraska directing the Secretary of the Interior to make a study and report of diversions which might be made from the Colorado River for irrigation in the Imperial Valley.9 The Fall-Davis Report,10 submitted to Congress in compliance with the Kinkaid Act, began by declaring, "The control of the floods and development of the resources of the Colorado River are peculiarly national problems . . ."" and then went on to give reasons why this was so, concluding with the statement that the job was so big that only the Federal Government could do it.12 Quite naturally, therefore, the Report recommended that the United States construct as a government project not only an all-American canal from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley but also a dam and reservoir at or near Boulder Canyon.13 The prospect that the United States would undertake to build as a national project the necessary works to control floods and store river waters for irrigation was apparently a welcome one for the basin States. But it brought to life strong fears in the northern basin States that additional waters made available by the storage and canal projects might be gobbled up in perpetuity by faster growing lower basin areas, particularly California, before the upper States could appropriate what they believed to be their fair share. These fears were not without foundation, since the law of prior appropriation prevailed in most of the Western States.14 Under that 7"(The All-American Canal] will end an intolerable situation, under which the Imperial Valley now secures its sole water supply from a canal running for many miles through Mexico . . . ." S. Rep. No. 592, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. 8 (1928). •Department of the Interior, Report of the All-American Canal Board (1919), 23-33. The three members of the Board were engineers with long experience in Western water problems. •41 Stat. 600 (1920). I0S. Doc. No. 142, 67th Cong., 2d Sess. (1922). "Id., at 1. "The reasons given were: "1. The Colorado Rier is international. "2. The stream and many of its tributaries are interstate. "3. It is a navigable river. "4. Its waters may be made to serve large areas of public lands naturally desert in character. "5. Its problems are of such magnitude as to be beyond the reach of other than national solution." Ibid. "Id., at 21. "This law prevails exclusively in all the basin States except California. See I Wiel, Water Rights in the Western States § 66 (3d ed., 1911); Hutchins, Selected Problems in the Law of Water Rights in the West 30-31 (1942) (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Misc. Pub. No. 418). Even in California it is important. See 51 Cal. Jur. 2d Waters §§ 257-264 (1959). |