THE WESTERN FARMER 's WATER RIGHT. 7 



been, since the laws providing for them are comparatively recent and 

 the time for them to have been abandoned is short. 



Certificates or licenses representing rights acquired in accord- 

 ance with permits issued by States and as the results of adjudica- 

 tions made by State boards or officials and based on surveys made 

 and testimony collected by State officials are the best documentary 

 evidence of the possession of rights which are lively to be supplied 

 by streams in average years, since they are based on proof submitted 

 to a State board or official whose duty it is to protect the public and 

 are usually issued after inspection by those officials; court decrees 

 and certificates rank next; while permits from State boards or offi- 

 cials and copies of filings in county or State offices rank last. 



The preceding discussion may create the impression that there are 

 no good titles to the use of water, but that is not the case. The 

 point is that documentary evidence alone is not sufficient to establish 

 either the existence of a water right or its value. Documentary evi- 

 dence must be backed by evidence of the existence of a water supply 

 in excess of the demands of prior rights. This involves the study 

 of records of stream flow and of existing use. If a stream supplied 

 continuously a given quantity of water, and each holder of a right 

 continuously used all the water to which he is entitled, the determi- 

 nation of the value of a right would be the simple matter of adding 

 the amounts of all the prior rights and comparing the sum with the 

 total supply of water. But neither the total supply nor the demand 

 made oh that supply is uniform. The flow of any stream varies 

 from hour to hour, from day to day, and from season to season, while 

 the demand made by any one user may vary in the same way, so that 

 the probability of receiving water under any right when there is not 

 enough water for all rights is extremely hard to determine. On the 

 same stream there will be early rights whose holders can get water 

 whenever they need it, rights whose holders usually get water as 

 they need it, and other rights whose holders get water only in flood 

 season— with all degrees between these extremes. 



In States having water commissioners, these officials keep records 

 of the ^dates when each ditch received water and how much it 

 received. These records, covering a series of years, will disclose 

 what ditches have good rights and whether there is water in any 

 source beyond the demands of existing rights. Where such records 

 do not exist, it is usually possible to learn from local disinterested 

 persons what ditches receive a good supply, what ditches ordinarily 

 are short of water, and whether, in ordinary seasons, there is more 

 water than is demanded by existing rights. A prospective pur- 

 chaser of a water right should look carefully into both the docu- 



