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Show 524 INTERSTATE ADJUDICATIONS mile. Twelve Mile Creek has a slope in its channel of 2% feet for 9 miles and l1/^ feet in the next three. It has higher banks than the others and a more marked channel and rarely overflows. The original Mustinka Ditch was intended to drain farm lands in Grant County east of Traverse County, and was built before 1900 from a point in the Upper Mustinka near the town of Norcross in a westerly direction along the valley of that stream some seven miles, cutting off its curves and crossing the Five Mile Creek south of its confluence with the Mustinka and emptying at right angles into Twelve Mile Creek. There was a great flood due to a succession of wet years in 1906 and 1907. The farmers in the lower watersheds of the Five Mile and Twelve Mile creeks concluded that the State Ditch, as it was called, was the cause of the flooding and in a petition they asked the Legislature by further work to relieve them from danger of fu- ture overflows. The Legislature was thus induced to pass an Act in 1911 containing a preamble, on the recital of which North Dakota strongly relies to support its case as admissions of Minnesota. The pre- amble recited that the ditch constructed before 1900 to drain lands in Grant County had in crop seasons of several years caused the flood- ing of 8,000 acres of farm land in Traverse County never before over- flowed, to the damage of farmers in that county of $-28,000, and had created a condition dangerous to the health of the inhabitants. The act then proceeds to authorize the expenditure of $35,000 by the State Drainage Commissioners to remedy the situation. The money was ex- pended in the building of a cut-off ditch two miles and a half in length, which continued the old ditch at right angles across the Twelve Mile Creek to the main channel of the Mustinka, and also in the straightening of the river from the mouth of the cut-off to the lake, a distance of some fifteen miles. The bend in the Mustinka which the new ditch cut off was about seven miles long, thus saying some five miles in flow of the water. The straightening of the river below the cut-off shortened the river's course from that point to the lake three miles. Half way down to the lake, the river runs by the town of Wheaton, near which in 1916 there was, notwithstanding these im- provements, a wide and prolonged overflow of its banks. The evidence in the case consisted, first, of the testimony of farmers in the overflow region in the valley of the Bois de Sioux, as to the ex- tent of the flood and their losses in 1915 and 1916; second, of farmers in the Mustinka watershed as to the floods of 1915 and 1916 and the effect in their neighborhood, and, third, of expert engineers and a geologist as to the part played by the ditches in these floods. The engineers who were called by North Dakota said that the im- mediate cause of overflow was the maintenance in Lake Traverse of a high water level of 977 feet above the sea during part of the summer of 1915 and all of 1916, that this was three feet above the mesne Lake level of 974 feet, that the last foot or more of this rise was caused by the state ditching of the Mustinka, which prolonged the floods two summer seasons. One of these witnesses, Ralph, who had been state drainage engineer, first of Minnesota and then of North Dakota, and who seems to have been employed to prepare the case for the latter State, says that the ditching on the Mustinka raised the lake from one to one and a half feet in 1916. Dean Shenehon, another engineer ex- |
