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Show COLORADO RIVER LITIGATION 557 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 main- stream 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 small farmers, larger groups, or even States to build storage dams, construct canals, and install the ex- pensive 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, espe- cially 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 farm land and crops. It is not surprising that the pressing necessity to transform the erratic and often destructive flow of the Colorado River into a con- trolled 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 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 Colo- rado and an ail-American canal to the Imperial Valley.8 Some months later, May 18, 1920, Congress passed an Act 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 Colo- rado 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 that "the control of the floods and development of the resources of the Colorado River are peculiarly national prob- lems . . . ." " 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 8DepartmeHt 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). io S. Doc. No. 142, 67th Cong., 2d Sess. (1922). " Id., at 1. 12 The reasons given were : "1. The Colorado River 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. |