OCR Text |
Show 45 areas of desert land within the public domain, which lands are valueless and uninhabitable unless reclaimed by irrigation, and the irrigation whereof is impracticable except upon expenditure of large sums of money in the construction of a system of reservoirs and distributing canals. * * * Congress, being the owner of the lands and vested with unlimited authority over the same, as it has been held by numerous decisions of the Supreme Court, had unquestionably the right to expend money thereon for their improvement. Referring to the Reclamation Fund, a special fund reserved by the Act to be used in the prosecution of irrigation works, the Court said that:182 there is no difficulty in the way of holding that the use of the funds contemplated by the reclamation act is for the common welfare. It is as clearly as much so as are the grants of lands in aid of the construction of transcontinental railroads which have been judicially sustained. In the following year, the same Circuit Court held in Burley v. United States that the Federal Government can constitution- ally exercise the power of eminent domain to obtain private lands necessary for a project irrigating both public and private lands.183 It pointed out that "the public welfare" requires that public lands, "as well as those held in private ownership, should be reclaimed and made productive."184 And in regard to the objective to be attained in furthering reclamation of the arid West, the Court declared that:185 The policy of reclaiming the arid region of the West for a beneficial use open to all the people of the United 181167 Fed. at 885; for a discussion of the Reclamation Fund, see infra, pp. 198-202. 1W179 Fed. 1 (C. A. 9,1910). See also Griffiths v. Cole, 264 Fed. 369, 373- 374 (D. O. Idaho 1919) concerning the application of surplus water to non- project lands where there results a lessening of cost to project lands. w 179 Fed. at 9. 188179 Fed. at 11. |