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Show 255 Another increasingly important aspect of water law concerns the right to return flow, the right of the original diverter of waters to reuse them. There is a considerable lack of uni- formity in the law respecting return flow. But the trend is toward its widest practicable use. Irrigation Water Companies and Irrigation Districts.- As the opportunities for use of simpler irrigation structures were exhausted, larger and more complex works were built to take water farther from the stream. The larger cost in- volved was often met through the formation of irrigation companies. The earlier companies were usually either mu- tual irrigation companies or quasi-public companies organized for profit. These types were largely superseded by the irri- gation districts. Each of the 17 Western States has an irriga- tion district statute. The powers and liabilities of such districts differ from state to state, an important feature fre- quently being the permission to part of the residents of an area to incur indebtedness for which all lands therein would be liable. Early Irrigation in the West.-The early practices of miners, Mormons, and Spanish missionaries contributed to the formation and development of the modern appropriation doctrine. In any event, nature suggests that the dominant factor was the aridity generally prevailing in the West, together with quantitatively disproportionate, highly irregular, and mal- distributed stream flows. Thus, judicial opinions have said that the riparian doctrine was not suited to the conditions and needs of the Western States. The impact of the appropriation doctrine was early reflected in federal legislation in 1866, 1870, and 1877. Another early statute of importance to irrigation was the Carey Act of 1894. It provided for grants to each public-land state of up to a maxi- mum of one million acres of desert land to aid the states in the reclamation of the land and in its sale in small tracts to actual settlers. Reclamation Law.-By the passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902, Congress established irrigation in the West as a 911611-51------18 |