THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



333 



should be studied, determined, and mapped and there- 

 after become a matter of State control. Future claims 

 against the State's water supply should only be hon- 

 ored to the extent of the needs of the land and then 

 only when such claims do not interfere with vested 

 rights. The State, as owner, dispenses water rights, 

 then why should not the State list her water resources, 

 study the requirements for water and adjudge the con- 

 flicting interests she has nursed into being? 



(2) Water sources should be surveyed and a 

 rational system of dispensing water rights established. 



afford to go against the more powerful claimants who 

 dam the river and divert large quantities of water under 

 a loose, ineffective statute that fosters this kind of 

 robbing. 



If the State undertakes to dispense the water 

 rights, common justice would require that she should 

 protect her prior grantees in so liberal a use of the 

 waters of the State as they may reasonably require for 

 their particular classes of land and free them from 

 expensive litigation in securing such rights. 



When the squeeze for water finally comes the 



Thousand Springs, near Hagerman, Lincoln County, Idaho, 180 feet high. 



This is one of the greatest sources of wealth to 

 the State and to her citizens, yet the statutes governing 

 the appropriation of water are so meager, so weak, and 

 so utterly inadequate as to permit of the rankest frauds 

 under cover of law. 



Under present conditions no man really knows 

 whether his water right protects him in the use of a 

 stipulated amount of water, or whether the water he is 

 using is by sufferance of some more powerful or senior 

 irrigator. The rule, "first in time is first in right," 

 sounds well, but the State has made no provision to 

 enforce such doctrine except through expensive litiga- 

 tion. And thus the small farmer, the senior irrigator 

 on rocky land close down by the streams can not well 



senior appropriators, the small farmers close down along 

 the streams will be the first to suffer. They will not be 

 strong enough financially to cope with the more power- 

 ful modern corporations organized to handle large vol- 

 umes of water. 



The State of Washington needs a hydrographic 

 survey and legislation and supervision that will pro- 

 tect these minor holdings against the greed of more 

 recent appropriators. 



If the present methods of acquiring water rights 

 and of selling them is to be perpetrated, then we should 

 have a statute making the holder of every water right 

 a guarantor to the perpetual use of water enough to 

 irrigate the lands alienated and of the title to said 



