Vernon
right maybe-- would get his water. It wouldn't just be diverted off, all of the water
wouldn't be diverted off--but if a guy was really hard-nosed, under the law he could leave
his gate open all the time because he had that right to the water.
But they've been a lot more hard-nosed about it in modifying those laws and so forth to
get more equal use of the water. They say that they can use it, and it has to have a
beneficial use. But how do you enforce that? Are you sure that he's irrigating or isn't
irrigating and all that? The irrigators would go out and shut down one guy's gate for
water and open his. They had ditch riders, they called them, who were hired by the
irrigation districts who had constantly, all during the irrigation season, go around from one
irrigation gate to another to make sure that the proper gates were opened and that nobody
had messed around with them because there's a lot of people trying to steal water.
If they were down the list in appropriated rights when they weren't getting any water and
other people were, why they would try to go and steal from someone. People would shoot
each other and everything else out there when it came to water.
Matters of livelihood are the key. Up in the upper Missouri, did you have a lot of
difficulty with water rights?
Well, there are state documents listing water rights. Wherever there are appropriated
water rights, you have a lot of problems with it, the state does, trying to maintain it.
Another thing, when it comes to the water rights that are given for people in a rural area
for irrigation, what happens when a community needs water. How do they get it. They
go out and buy some of this land that has a water right and then they convert the water to
M&I [municipal and industrial] use instead of irrigation use.
So the use of the water gets turned around. A lot of that has happened. A community,
for example, could buy land that had an appropriated water right, take that right and use
it for M&I, and then sell the land for somebody to do dry farming or development or some
other purposes.
Q ..
But the states were really the ones that control those things,
t they?
The Bureau of Reclamation does handle water rights, too. The Corps of Engineers never
A
gets involved in water rights, never, it was their policy--that's a state problem. But in a
lot of the Bureau projects in connection with the irrigation, they actually got a right one
way or another, I don't know, it depended on whether there was any rights left or not.
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