Episode 205: The Colorado River Compact, Part 1: Stalemate

[music] James P. Girond had a vision for where a small, intermittent stream connected with the Colorado in Northwestern Arizona. Working in concert with copper mining interests, he had filed for a permanent in 1913 to build a hydroelectric dam along the river at Diamond Creek, directly north of Peach Springs on State Route 66 in case you're curious. By 1915, he had a preliminary permit in hand and a request from federal authorities for more detailed plans. There were some more back and forths, mainly because by the time he got his facts and figures together, a new agency, the Federal Power Commission, had been established and it wanted even more data. Durand got his figures together again, but when he submitted them in February 1922, he was told there was a whole new problem. Just a month earlier, there was a whole group of people meeting in Washington to discuss what to do with the Colorado River, and Girond's plans became a fly in that particular environment. Arizona officials, always willing to help business out, argued that the permit be filed immediately. After all, Girond had done his homework and invested a lot of private funding into his dam. However, the representatives from other states who had been at that meeting in Washington argued that no one should be allowed to do anything to the river until everyone's rights had been settled. And the Reclamation Service said a dam at Diamond Creek would be too small for flood control and it would kill the government's plans to put a dam further downstream at Boulder Canyon. Finally, President Warren G. Harding himself put in a request for the power commission to hold off issuing a permit until an interstate compact was settled. Girond's dam is a perfect example of the sort of issues that were even then splitting the delegates as they tried to settle on an agreement that was palatable to every state along the Colorado. But a variety of interests, fuzzy numbers, competing ideas, and strong personalities would keep them all at odds and almost kill the compact just days after the talks began. I'm your host, David Richousen, and you are listening to AZ, the history of Arizona. Episode 205, the Colorado River Compact Part 1, stalemate. Welcome back everyone. Last week we talked about the League of the Southwest, which originally had begun life as a generic booster organization concerned about the economy of the greater southwestern region. However, in some phrasing that I'm borrowing from state historian Thomas Sheridan, they all soon realized that the mighty Colorado River was going to be the biggest pie they ever cut up, and so they shifted to pretty much talking about that one issue. Following a meeting of the league held in Denver in August 1920, where serious cracks in the league's solidarity were starting to show, everyone agreed to the idea of Colorado lawyer Delph Carpenter to get congressional approval for an interstate compact to agree on how the various states would share the river. This week we're going to turn toward that idea, but be warned, it was still a very rocky road to get there, and the attempt almost went belly up right out of the gate. By late spring 1921, the legislatures of the seven states involved, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, had all voted in favor of forming a compact. The next look to the necessary step of getting congressional approval for this idea, with Carpenter and many of the governors going in person to lobby President Harding and their various senators and representatives for their support. There was no main problem here, though they did encounter one bit of absolute pettiness that is too juicy for me to gloss over. So, a senator from New Mexico was the one who actually introduced the legislation to allow for the compact, but then the House Majority Leader, a representative from Wyoming, decided that he was going to oppose the measure. The reason? Well, this representative from Wyoming had apparently decided that as the senior congressman from the Colorado River Basin, he wanted to introduce and control this particular piece of legislation. And as Asinine as that sounds, it was still a very real threat, so the bill from the New Mexico Senator was withdrawn, so the Wyoming representative could introduce his own bill calling for the compact. After that, the political drama was mostly over, except that some congressman objected to the payment the federal representative overseeing these negotiations was going to receive. However, before the president announced his choice for representative and that the negotiations could kick off, another controversy suddenly erupted that again showed a deep divide between the upper and lower basin states. The inciting incident was something innocuous. Arthur Davis at the Reclamation Service producing a report on the lower Colorado River, which he had been authorized to do in a previous congressional bill. He, of course, highly recommended building a dam at Boulder Canyon and suggested a couple different methods for financing this, including the selling off of hydroelectric power. Delph Carpenter, the man responsible for the idea of forming the compact, was one of those who saw this report as another sign of a conspiracy between Davis and California to monopolize the power and water coming from the proposed Boulder Canyon Dam. We talked about the upper basins distrust of how Cozy Davis was with California last week, and Carpenter and others were mighty concerned that Davis's report only mentioned Los Angeles when talking about allocating power. Now, to be fair, this was because Los Angeles was the only city to commit to buying said power, but that was not enough to ease tensions. And I think here is a good place to talk about how much every other state along the river, especially in the upper basin, feared California in general and Los Angeles in particular. Simply put, California was a thirsty, thirsty monster that took a lot and gave a little. Between the major tributaries of the green, the grand, and the San Juan rivers, an estimated 86% of the Colorado's flow was coming from the upper basin. By contrast, the river doesn't actually flow through California. It only forms its border with Arizona, and the state doesn't actually have any tributaries that contribute water to the river. What California did have was a farming and municipal population that was growing by leaps and bounds. By 1920, the population of Los Angeles was 600,000 residents and expected to double in the next 10 years. The city fathers were even worried that they only had enough electricity to meet the demand for the next three to five years. And that's not even touching the concerns over water. Believe it or not, because we have all been trained by movies and TV to think of California as the land of eternally mild sunshine and good fortune, but the native climate of Los Angeles is semi-arid, which means making sure people had enough water to drink and water all those non-native citrus trees. Early on, the city had capitalized on the entire Los Angeles river, but soon that wasn't enough, so they went elsewhere. They settled on the Owens River on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada's, more than 200 miles away, which they tapped with an aqueduct system. And that is a whole discussion in and of itself as the people in the Owens Valley were incensed by what they saw as the rape of their valley. And it kicked off what is known as the California water wars. I'm going to reframe from getting lost in those particular weeds, but I just want to point out that the man behind the plan to take water from the Owens River was the chief of Los Angeles's Bureau of Waterworks and Supply, William Mahalind. Mahalind is one of those characters that I definitely want to learn more about when I have free time again, because he seems to have walked that fine line between being appropriately aggressive and too aggressive in his policies. David Owens in his book Where The Water Goes also shares a possibly apocryphal story showing Mahalind's mindset when it comes to water reclamation. Mahalind is said to have told a member of the Forest Service that the federal government should pay a dozen of the finest photographers in the world to live in the Yosemite Valley for a year and take pictures of its natural beauty in all seasons. Then, when that year was over, Mahalind said, "I'd go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop that god damn waste." So, if you were someone in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, or New Mexico, and you know, that's the sort of man you're dealing with and that he has his eyes on the Colorado River, how would you feel? Worse yet, as the other states were thinly populated compared to California, they were all worried that it would monopolize all the water along the river now, using the sacred doctrine of prior appropriation that they all loved and leave no room for other states to grow in the future. Beyond those spheres, Arizona, one of the two states that the Boulder Canyon Dam would actually be in, wanted a large slice of the electricity for itself. That power, state leader said, could be put to use expanding copper mining operations and pumping groundwater to further irrigate farmlands. Additionally, Windfield Scott Norville, often referred to as just WS Norville, the state's water commissioner, also backed the idea of tapping the reservoir that would be created by this dam and running in aqueduct as far south as the Heila Basin. Believe me, when I say that this is an idea, we'll have much, much more to say about in the future. Also, I would suggest remembering Norville's name because he's not leaving our story for a while. For now, though, I want to turn our attention back to the league of the Southwest, and really, they're followed from prominence as talk of the compact ramped up. In December 1921, Davis and the secretary of the interior were going to be in San Diego to talk about the latter's report and its recommendations. Not to be outdone, the president of the league of the Southwest called for a meeting in Riverside, California, just a few days before. So their organization, which still had 3,000 civic and commercial members, could stay active on the issue. However, this meeting of the league would prove to be its last hurrah, as the Upper Basin now completely distrusted the Reclamation Service and California. And this particular meeting was packed with California delegates. Both Davis and the secretary of the interior decided to "pop" by this meeting, and at one point, this secretary rose to his feet to deny what a speaker had just said, which was that there was some sort of secret understanding between the federal government and California when it came to the proposed Boulder Canyon Dam. Also, during this meeting, the Upper Basin states tried to change the league's bylaws to allow voting only by states and then give each state only one vote. The reason for this is obvious. It, in fact, mirrors many such conversations in history, including the fight over congressional representation in the U.S. Constitutional Convention. But the California delegate heavy meeting was able to "swat" this idea aside. Those same delegates were even able to force an early adjournment of the whole meeting. This cantankerous meeting left the league in shambles, a state from which they never recovered. Though they had really brought the issue of how to split up the Colorado River to the attention of the nation, they're infighting, and the upcoming compact talks basically rendered them obsolete. However, before we move on, there was something else that came out of this last meeting. While he was there, this secretary, the interior, did let one thing slip. He announced that the president had appointed his secretary of commerce, one Herbert Hoover, to be the federal representative to the Colorado River Commission. For many people today, saying that Herbert Hoover was overseeing these talks around the compact would probably lead them to say that it was doomed to failure. But at the time, while there were some concerns, Hoover was actually a popular national figure, and seen as, at the very least, a good choice. Just so I don't go down the side road of the pre-presidential life in times of Herbert Hoover, here are his career highlights so far. In 1914, he had organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which had gotten food into this occupied country. In 1917, after the U.S. entered World War I, he was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to run the country's Food Administration. Following the end of the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to millions starving in Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, and which made him a popular household name in America. In his book Water and the West, historian Norse Hunley Jr. makes it sound like people accepted the president's choice, and we're glad that he took it seriously enough to appoint a member of his own cabinet. But no one was like, oh man, can you believe they got Hoover for this? Awesome! Part of that was because Hoover had gone to school in California, and had a house there. While many of the representatives, especially from the upper basin states, said they'd hope for someone not connected to the West at all so they would be impartial. And I mean, come on, the guy's connected to California? Really? Also, some questioned whether such a high-ranking federal officer had any business dealing with a state's rights issue. But both those objections are dealing with the nitty gritty of the political scene. No one was saying that Hoover was a bad choice, or that he was bound to ruin this whole thing. As you'll see, I think he acquitted himself quite well. His presidency, though, not so much, but that's a whole other podcast. The first meeting of the Colorado River Commission was set for January 26, 1922, in Washington, D.C. In the lead-up to this meeting, everyone put on a brave face, and the lower basin states in particular, tried to show that they were willing to cooperate and be good neighbors with the upper basin states. Various representatives from California tried to remove the bad taste that the last meeting of the League of the Southwest had left in everyone's mouth by stating that they weren't the greedy, thirsty monsters that everyone made them out to be. For example, an official with the Imperial Irrigation District said, "We wish to affirm in the strongest possible manner that we recognize the equitable moral and legal right of the state's upstream to be guaranteed the fullest opportunity of development of their own projects." Officials in Arizona, as well as Nevada, also made statements about the justice of the position held by the upstream states. Richard E. Sloan, who served as Arizona's last territorial governor and would represent the state on the Colorado River Commission in November 1922, would say, quote, "We not only recognize that," and by that he means the position of the upper basin, "but we stand ready to pledge that no adverse rights to the use of water may be permitted to be developed to the prejudice of the people of these northern states pending the solution of the question of the equitable distribution of the waters of the Colorado by the Colorado River Commission," end quote. So it was in that spirit of profess cooperation that the representatives from Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California gathered in Washington to discuss exactly how to divvy up the river. I'm not going to go into this in detail, but the men who gathered for the commission were a veritable who's who of water rights experts, including Delph Carpenter, whose idea had started this whole ball rolling. Many of them were state water commissioners, which was true for Arizona's delicate WS Normal. Yes, I did try to warn you that he would play a major role. Arizona's position was both much like and very different from the other lower basin states that attended this meeting. It was like because, much like California and Nevada, Arizona knew it would be demanding a lot more from the river than it put in. The air in states demands for water, but also hunger for hydroelectricity meant both that its residents were unusually invested in the commission's deliberations, and that it was hard finding one policy that would satisfy all Arizona's. But it was different from California and Nevada in that the river flowed for hundreds of miles through Arizona. In fact, 90% of the state was in the Colorado River Watershed. It's kind of astounding to look at the basin drainage numbers and realize that with 103,000 square miles, Arizona has by far the largest amount of land where water would drain into the Colorado. I mean, it's nearly three times the 39,000 square miles that Colorado the next highest state has. So I think Hoover really hit the nail on the head when in his opening address to the commission, he said, and I'm following Hunley here and he has cobbled together various excerpts from his speech, quote, "The commission has been established primarily to consider and if possible to agree upon a compact, providing for an equitable division of the water supply of the Colorado and its tributaries. The problem is not as simple as might appear on the surface." While there is possibly ample water in the river, there is not sufficient supply. To meet all claims unless there is some definite program of water conservation, the commission will inevitably be driven into the consideration of a program looking further than the immediate legalistic relationship of the states if it is to find a solution to the problem, end quote. So basically no easy solutions anyway, you slice it, or divide it as the case may be. One thing the commission did decide early on is that already having one bowl by the horn, they definitely didn't need a second. There had been a notion for them to try and take on a role in deciding where to place reclamation projects, but ultimately everyone agreed that splitting up the Colorado's water was going to be a big enough task. And sure enough, they were right. The first tact the commission tried was to divvy up the water based on the number of acres of airgable land in each state, which on the face of it isn't a bad idea because most people wanted the water for the purpose of agriculture. Davis and the Reclamation Service had determined that there were 2.65 million acres currently being irrigated with another estimated 4.35 million that could be irrigated. However, each state had its own estimates and they came back saying that there was actually a total of 7.16 million acres left to be irrigated. In Arizona for instance, Davis estimated that there were 676,000 acres of additional land that could be irrigated, but normal came back and said there were actually 1.17 million acres of additional land. This flabbergasted Davis, who, aside from being stung that they didn't trust his professional opinion, was sure there definitely was enough water to support that much land. And no one was willing to compromise on these numbers. Despite them all pretty much admitting that they were inflated. The self-interested logic was pretty obvious. No one wanted to short-change their state of water if Davis' estimates about the Colorado's capacity were wrong, better to have too much water allocated than too little. Hoover, sensing the talks becoming deadlocked, proposed to compromise. How about everyone agrees with Davis' numbers for the moment and it can be revisited in, say, 20 years? No one was exactly happy with this compromise and tried to hang little amendments on it to get something favorable for their state. Normal, for example, said that Arizona would gladly go with Davis' numbers, provided that the Hila River was exempted from any calculation for water usage. Arizona's were already using most of the Hila's water anyhow and it entered the Colorado so far downstream that it wasn't really fair to include it in the calculations he argued. This will become a major sticking point and we'll see more in the future how much Arizona really didn't want anyone else thinking they could get a piece of the Hila. It's here that Delph Carpenter stepped in again, with another proposal to hopefully untangle everyone. His idea basically boiled down to the fact that the lower basin states wanted their dams. So they could build them on the condition that they agreed that those dams would in no way affect future development in the upper basin. This sounds like a simple agreement, but what it basically amounted to was the rejection of the doctrine of prior appropriation and allowing the upper basin states to do whatever they wanted with the Colorado River water. Carpenter also took a page from Davis's book saying that if there was plenty of water as the reclamation service claimed, then surely it didn't matter what the upper basin states did in the future. No one went in for this proposal and Hoover pointed out that Davis's assurances about water were based on his numbers and Colorado along with every other state had come back to say that they wanted double the water Davis had estimated, so Carpenter's argument was invalid. The lower basin states in particular hated this idea. With Norville saying the Colorado and seemed to return quote, always to the same point, we cannot be limited by anything but the natural limitations that the maker of the world has given us. End quote. Things were seriously deadlock now, so Hoover tried to step in again, asking to put the water division question aside and go back to the beginning. Could they at least all agree to building a dam along the lower river as soon as possible? I mean, people have been talking about the Boulder Canyon site for years now and everyone seemed to think that it was a matter of if not when it would be built. However, this proposal massively backfired. Even those upper basin states like Wyoming and New Mexico who had been more moderate in their views threw up their hands to say that a dam on the lower river wouldn't benefit them at all, so why should they agree to it? Also, if they were to say yes, they would need a hard guarantee of their own water rights before signing off on California Nevada and Arizona's little pet project. Now, truly, the commission was at an impasse. So much so that some, including the delegate from New Mexico, suggested that they'll just throw in the towel. Everyone was split on the most fundamental question, so there was no chance that they were going to come to in an arrangement. To their credit, Colorado and Utah, who had been some of the most obstinate detractors of the proposal so far, said that they couldn't just give up now. What they did suggest was for recess. Everyone could head home, cool down a little bit, think seriously about the issue, and ponder how they could compromise. They also scheduled a series of public hearings for that spring in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Grand Junction, and Cheyenne. So on January 30, 1922, only four days after starting, everyone headed to their own little corner to think about the future. Over the next few months, various proposals were brought up and shot down, including an attempt to go back to trying to figure out the whole irrigable acreage thing. However, other issues started popping up to vastly complicate things as well. Up north, there was a hole to do over the issue of transferring water from one drainage basin to another. We're not going to get into that, except to say that Utah and Colorado, who had no problems with it, got a nice dig in on California, who hated the idea. That dig was that, if they hated the idea so much, why were they so interested in getting water to the Imperial Valley? Technically, all that water flowed into the salt and sea and was not part of the Colorado basin. Which, I gotta say, is a very fair point. But another controversy is one that started right here in Arizona, and that is the Quixotic Dream of George Maxwell and his Arizona High Line Canal. Maxwell is not a new acquaintance here on the podcast. He featured pretty prominently in episodes 162 and 163 as the founder of the National Reclamation Association and a proponent for the Salt River Valley Water Users Association and Roosevelt Dam. But with that project now realized, Maxwell turned his attention to the next major reclamation target, the Colorado. He was a big fan of the idea of building a dam at the Boulder Canyon site, or maybe that promising black canyon site a little ways downstream. What makes him a bit different, however, is he thought that the stored water behind that dam should then be tapped by Arizona and send hundreds of miles via a series of canals, tunnels, and pumping stations to irrigate some 2.5 million acres in the center of the state. The idea seemed a little crazy, and not crazy enough to work. Norville was fully aware of Maxwell's dream, but not a big fan of it at all. Still, in his duty as state water commissioner, he sent a man named Harry Blake, formerly with the US Geological Survey, to study the idea and make a report. Blake's report came back as a "hard no." He would write, quote, "Diverting and caring water across a hot, arid country without crossing any large bodies of irrigable land until 0.470 miles south of its diversion is reached would be a very precarious undertaking. In fact, it could not be considered feasible unless these lands under irrigation were of such value that cost could not be considered. This is not the case in Arizona." So when he joined the Colorado River Commission, Norville never brought up this idea. But Maxwell would not let the idea go, and when the commission had its public hearing in Phoenix in March 1922, he made sure that everyone knew that he considered Norville's negotiations as part of the commission as an absolute surrender of Arizona's rights. He also used the hearing as an opportunity to lobby for his Arizona Highline Canal, but with some modifications. First off, he argued that Arizona should just give up on this Nambi-Pambi compact nonsense and focus on flood control. He proposed a few dams to that end, including one on the Helet Sentinel, and a 700-foot rock-filled dam at Glen Canyon that, in his estimation, needed only to hold one flood's worth of water to solve Arizona's water problem. Arthur Davis, who was at the hearing, told the assembled crowd that he was hearing this plan for the first time along with them, but already it sounded about as feasible as Maxwell's former plan. This canal, too, would be up to 450 miles long and would have to travel through some seriously rugged mountain country before eventually reaching its destination. Davis minced no words when he said, quote, "The great length of this canal, and the character of the country which it was to pass, struck me and all other engineers as being so far behind the realms of possibility as to be a waste of our money and time, and I am still of that opinion." And Davis wasn't the only one scoffing at the proposal. GEP Smith, a professor of irrigation engineering at the University of Arizona, said the various sites Maxwell had selected to build dams had nowhere near ideal conditions. As for the Glen Canyon Dam and Canal scheme, Smith was as blunt as Davis, saying, quote, "My engineering instincts rebel when I try to contemplate it," end quote. Still, nothing would deter Maxwell. Hunley notes that in his calmer moments, Maxwell would insist that Arizona could best be protected by maintaining the principle of priority on interstate streams. But when he got excited as he did at the Phoenix hearing, he said things like, quote, "Our position is this. We insistently stand upon the legal, constitutional, moral, equitable, and physical condition and right that, as the water has been for ages coming through to the north line of Arizona, we are entitled to have it continued to come," end quote. To this last demand that Arizona have all the water and not a drop less, Hoover bluntly asked, if that's what Maxwell believed, was there any point to having the commission proceed at all? Maxwell disembleed a bit, saying, "Yeah, but only as long as the commission investigated and gathered the facts," at this Hoover asked another blunt question. "If we knew every single fact about the river below the Arizona line, would that change your opinion at all about every single drop needing to go to Arizona?" Maxwell then replied with his own blunt honesty, quote, "Not the slightest in the world," end quote. Hoover then snapped back instantly, saying, "Fine, then why should we continue discussing this at all?" There's one more part to Maxwell's contention that I think we need to address, and that is his casual racism when it came to having water go to Mexico, and not in the way you think. As I mentioned in episode 187, unlike in the US, people of Chinese or Japanese ancestry had been able to find some prominence in Mexico, especially before the revolution, and for people like Maxwell, that was a problem. Going into full yellow peril mode, he imagined these Asian people sucking water from the Colorado, like a giant tick at Arizona's southern border in Sheridan's colorful phrasing. One of the reasons that he pushed his high-line canal so hard was because the water taken from the Colorado would go to the fields of good, hard-working Arizonans with little or no return flow to the river for those parasites down south. He would warn ominously, quote, "If Arizonan is deprived of this reclamation resource, the water must inevitably go down to the lands in old Mexico, which are being colonized by Asiatic's," end quote. Even after the Colorado River compact was signed and done, Maxwell would be complaining to President Harding that the agreement was, quote, "a carefully camouflage ever to hamstring Arizona, and to establish a great Asiatic city and state in the Colorado River Delta," end quote. He also predicted that conflict would break out and result, quote, "in a war with Asia in which Arizona and California would be the shock country as was Belgium in the world war," end quote. There's no better way to say this than Sheridan, who just remarks that by this time Maxwell, the great crusader for reclamation had become a racist crackpot. Still, he was a very loud crackpot with a surprisingly vocal following, which made the other states nervous, especially because he was right about one thing. There were a lot of unanswered questions about how much water the river could provide, and there was a growing sense that maybe Davis and the reclamation service could be wrong about their projections. And Davis himself was also a little fuzzy sometimes on the numbers, and during the hearing in Los Angeles, he actually warned people that the state shouldn't make an agreement solely on the basis of his assertion that there was enough water, which is not a very reassuring thing to say. These sorts of things made any compromise dead on arrival to the commissioners, and proposal after proposal failed to gain any traction. Hoover was at the end of his rope, telling the delegates, quote, "if there is to be maximum development of the Colorado River and cooperation in the West, it becomes the serious business of sane men and women to put down all extremists and prepare to cooperate." After the last hearing in Cheyenne on April 2, 1922, Hoover ammonished the various delegates to take the next few months and just think about the costly time-consuming legal battles that each and every one of them would soon be in if they didn't find some way to reach an agreement. And you know, that seems a good place to leave things for this week, with the commission taking a break to really think about what was to be done. But join me next week when the commission will reconvene in November 1922 in Santa Fe and try again. This time, striking on the idea of ignoring individual states altogether and looking at the river closer to what it actually was, to competing interests, one upper basin, the other lower basin. Still, there would be a lot more hurdles to overcome, especially from the Arizona delegation, before they would finally walk away with a signed compact. I'm your host, David Rookhausen, and you've been listening to AZ, the history of Arizona. Goodbye.