Read this first

Two organizations, one name

There have been two bodies called the Klamath Water Users Association, and confusing them makes nonsense of the record.

The Association of 1905 was a stock corporation of landowners, formed under Oregon law, whose members pledged their land as security for the Project's construction cost. Its meetings were curtailed after 1918 and on 6 April 1929 A. M. Thomas was appointed secretary to wind up its unfinished business. Its obligations and its standing passed to the irrigation districts formed within the Project — to this District by Contract Ilr-173 of 6 July 1918.

1904

Why they formed it

In November or December 1904, F. H. Newell, Director of the Reclamation Service, stood up in Klamath Falls and told the landowners of the then-proposed Project what it would cost them. Not more than $20.00 per acre share — the highest possible amount they would ever be called upon to pay for any part of it. And that sum, Newell said, covered construction and maintenance:

Read that clause again, because it is the whole of what follows. The costs Newell quoted ran only up to the point of turnover. The Project being handed to the water users was not a hope the landowners formed later, and not a demand they invented when the debt came due. It was the premise on which they were asked to sign, and the premise on which they did. Every request the District has made since — in 1924, in 1969, in 1977, in 2021 — is a request that the original understanding be honoured.

That Newell was here to say it is not in dispute. Reclamation's own project history records that Newell came to Klamath in 1904 to assess the Project's possibilities and, while there, addressed a large audience — telling them he believed the Secretary would approve construction. The 1913 minutes record what he told them it would cost.

Morris Bien, Legal Adviser of the Reclamation Service, concurred. Relying on those representations as inducements, the landowners organized the Association. Had the statements not been made, the minutes record, they “would not at any time or at all incorporated their lands into the Klamath Water Users Association.” There is no Klamath Project without them joining.

Source: Klamath Water Users Association annual meeting minutes, 6 June 1913, pp. 82–83, Houston Opera House, Klamath Falls. Abel Ady, President; Albert E. Elder, Secretary. The resolution was introduced by John Irwin and adopted unanimously by rising vote.

February – March 1905

Who they were

The Association came out of the U.S. Irrigation Committee, which met on 25 February 1905 to draw up the articles of incorporation. It incorporated on 4 March 1905 under Oregon law with a capital stock of two million dollars — about $75 million today — in shares of twenty dollars each — a hundred thousand shares, one to the acre.

The founding directors were Nathan Smith Merrill, Jacob Rueck, Orson Avery Stearns, Pleasant L. Fountain, W. F. Hill, Horatio Hill Burnham, Elmer Ivan Applegate, Thomas D. Pryor, William C. Dalton and C. T. Silvers — for whom R. L. Oliver was substituted before the articles were signed — with J. Scott Taylor as secretary. By 10 October 1905 Jerome P. Churchill was President and Elmer Applegate Secretary; B. S. Grigsby and M. F. Orr had joined the board by 3 November.

Several of those names appear elsewhere on these pages, and the overlaps are worth noticing.

• O. A. StearnsEmigrant of 1853 over the Applegate Trail, soldier at Fort Klamath, and the first homesteader in this Basin — the man whose 1870 letter describes rye grass tall enough to hide a mounted rider. He was a founding director in 1905 and President of the Association in 1906. Sterns Elementary is named for him.
• Nathan Smith Merrill“Uncle Nathan,” who bought a ranch in 1894 and laid out the town that carries his name — and who seconded the 1913 resolution recording Newell's twenty-dollar promise.
• Elmer Ivan ApplegateGrandson of Lindsay Applegate of the 1843 migration, and an important early Oregon botanist known for his monograph on the trout lilies. Secretary of the Association 1905–1908.
• William C. DaltonNephew of Jesse D. Carr, took over management of the Carr Ranch in 1900, and managed the termination point of the Adams Canal where it reached the ranch from Lower Klamath Lake.
• Jerome P. ChurchillPresident in 1905, and an investor in power development and in White Lake City. In 1910 the Churchills hired a new Berkeley engineering graduate as a field surveyor on the Copco No. 1 project: John Christie Boyle — the man the John C. Boyle dam is named for.
• Abel AdyPresident 1910–1915, and the man who told the 1913 meeting the water users “did not propose to repudiate” the debt. The Ady Canal carries his name, and it is still named in federal law.
• Albert E. ElderSecretary of the Association from 1909 until 1917, then its attorney — and the District's. It was in Elder's office that the directors of Klamath Irrigation District met to organize on 18 December 1917. The Association's secretary handed the work across the room.

Nine districts, then five divisions

In March 1906 the by-laws were amended so that directors were elected by voting district rather than at large. There were nine: Langell Valley · Yonna Valley · Poe Valley · Klamath Falls and the valley north of Wilson Bridge · Stukel, south of Wilson Bridge · Merrill · Keno · Lower Klamath · and one at large. Later amendments consolidated them again and again — six by 1910, five by 1911.

The board shrank as the districts consolidated — nine directors, then seven by amendment of 3 June 1910, then five. And in the amendment adopted just before the District was formed, the Association settled on the arrangement its successor still uses: a board of five directors elected to serve three years, with the first election staggered so that two served one year, two served two, and one served three, “Thereafter, as the three year terms expire, their successors shall be elected for a term of three years.”

That is where the District's five divisions come from. The principle that a director represents a piece of ground rather than the whole is older than the District itself, and it was settled in 1906.

Every officer, 1905 to 1929

Officers were elected annually, so a “term” is a run of re-elections. Set out by the years each man actually held the office:

Names you already know

These are not strangers. Most of them are still on the map, and some are still on the board. If you drive this Basin you have been reading the 1905 roster all your life without knowing it.

• MerrillN. S. Merrill chaired the general committee that organised the Association and signed the Articles first. The town is named for his family.
• AdyAbel Ady, three-term President. The Ady Canal carries his name, and so does the town of Ady — formerly Teeters Landing, then Holland. The railroad named the station after him when his own suggestion, Aard, was passed over. Aard was his son.
• ApplegateElmer I. Applegate, first Secretary, grandson of Lindsay Applegate of the Applegate Trail — and a botanist of standing; several Basin plants carry his name. The family appears twice more on the ordinary shareholders' roll.
• KuykendallD. V. Kuykendall drew the Articles of Incorporation and notarised them on 4 March 1905. By 1917 he was Judge of the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for Klamath County — the court that would enter the order establishing this District.
• ChurchillJerome P. Churchill, first President. When H. E. Green rode through in October 1903 he passed “Dry Lake, a large ranch owned by Mr. Churchill of Yreka” — the same man, on the ground, two years before the Association existed.
• StearnsO. A. Stearns, founding director and second President — and the first homesteader in this Basin. He introduced the February 1909 resolution that restarted the Project.
• AdamsJ. Frank Adams signed Trust Deed No. 1. Two years earlier a federal engineer had named him as the man “in charge” of the Lower Klamath reclamation works. The Adams Canal and Adams Pumping Plant are his.
• Henley · Ankeny · Van BrimmerNot officers, but on every page of this history — and the Henley-Ankeny tracts are named as their own class of land in the District's founding federal contract of 1918.

And some never left

Read the Association's roster beside the District's Warren Act schedules of 1955 and the same surnames are still there, fifty years on, farming the same ground:

• StevensonJ. G. Stevenson was a director in 1908 and 1909. George E. Stevenson holds Warren Act contract 18r-582 on sixty-three acres in 1955, and is still named as a Warren Act contractor in Reclamation's cost allocations for 1964.
• MarshallA. L. Marshall sits on the Association's board in 1917 and again in 1929. John A. Marshall holds contract 18r-677 in 1955 — and as President of Klamath Irrigation District signs the letter of 4 May 1965 enclosing the final payment on the whole debt.
• CheyneRobert D. Cheyne is on the Association's board at the wind-up in 1929. Leland Cheyne holds contract 18r-1088 on a hundred and fifty-three acres in 1955. Rodney Cheyne is President of this District today.
• Laughlin · Drew · Peterson · Nichols · ShortAll on the 1905–07 rolls, all still holding contracts or water rentals under the Project half a century later.

Two gaps. No officers are recorded here for 1914 or for the individual years 1920 to 1923; both fall inside runs the record treats as continuous, and the minute volumes will confirm them. And one conflict. The February 1909 letterhead shows Alex Martin Jr. as President and C. P. Chastain as Secretary, while a later roster gives John Irwin and Albert E. Elder for 1909 — the annual election of 4 June 1909 is the likely dividing line, but the minute book should settle it.

And the last officers

From 1918 to 1928 the Association's President was G. W. Offield and its Secretary A. L. Wishard — the same two men who appear in Stoutemyer's correspondence file over the canal sale, Offield appraising the Ankeny in 1919 and Wishard receiving the Assistant Secretary's letter about it. Offield was also the first President of Klamath Irrigation District. In 1929, with Offield still in the chair, A. M. Thomas was appointed Secretary to wind the Association up.

The full year-by-year rosters, the successive by-law amendments and the district boundaries are in the extracts from the Association's minutes.

The shareholders

The people who actually signed

Nearly everything above is officers and directors, because officers and directors are who sign minutes. But 8,598 votes were cast at the Court House on 3 November 1905, and every one of them was an acre of somebody's ground. The papers carry their names too, and they are worth reading.

The 1907 ballot, for and against

When the Association put the question of becoming a construction contractor to its members, it circulated a sheet with two columns. The names came in on both sides, in their own hands. Jacob Rueck — a founding director — signed in favour, with Manuel Vera, Michael Ruseck and Peter Distersheiner.

The opposing column ran longer: Thomas Michael · John Ling · the Flackus family — A. Flackus and Theo. W. Flackus — C. C. Pearson · M. Anderson · Chas. Drew · V. Uhrmann · Margaret Buck · Charles Woelk · H. J. O'Brien · Robert Laughlin. German, Irish, Portuguese, Yankee names on one page, arguing about the same corporation.

That is a man changing his mind in public, in writing, and asking a director he evidently trusted to see it done. It is the most human document in the District's archive.

The roll, with acreages

Bound with the District's certified copy of the 1905 contract is the shareholders' roll as it stood that November, each name against the shares he held — and since not more than one share could be allotted to an acre, the share column is an acreage column.

Jas. Jory, 1,000 · B. S. Grigsby, 913 · P. L. Fountain, 400 · O. R. De Lap, 382 · W. F. Hill, 360 · J. C. Ferguson, 328 · C. Gardner, 320 · Galarneau, 200 · Grant Harrison, 161 · V. R. Evans, Fitch, C. Hoagland, Cyrus Grafis, 160 each · T. R. Griffith, 100 · C. Hill, 80 — and on through Jno. Koontz · Gottfried Konzuck · Robert Laughlin · Albert Merk · Thos. Martin · George W. Moe · B. H. Moore · E. L. Moore · C. N. Meyer · J. B. Nichols · Jos. Nichols · T. Nelson · L. P. Neilson · H. S. Newton · M. F. Orr · Peter Distersheiner · Van Pattee · Jacob Rueck · Andrew Ryan · Fred Steenen · C. Sherman · C. Short · J. H. Sims · W. S. Slough · W. T. Smith · O. A. Stearns · J. G. Stevenson · S. T. Summers · A. Van Meter · P. Van Meter · T. Willits.

A thousand acres against eighty, on the same sheet, bound by the same guarantee. And under the By-Laws the thousand-acre man could cast no more than a hundred and sixty votes.

What they did while the votes were counted

The same record shows the tellers — P. L. Fountain and Jacob Rueck, under the inspection of the whole Board — carrying the ballots away to count them, and the meeting filling the wait with another resolution. It thanked the federal engineers: F. H. Newell for the interest he had shown in the country, J. B. Lippincott for his “loyal devotion of his energies,” and project engineer T. H. Humpherys for work they called “intelligent, efficient, honest and successful.” Bids for the first construction, they noted, would be opened on 29 December.

Then the count came back: “Total vote for the ratification and adoption of the contract… 8598: total vote against said ratification and adoption, nothing.” Two independent copies of that afternoon's record give the same figure.

A note on provenance. The District's copy of the 1905 contract is not a photocopy. It is a certified exemplification issued by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation on 31 December 1940 under the Act of 24 August 1912, certifying the annexed text as “a full, true, and literal exemplification of said contract contained in the official files in the custody of this office.” The United States certified this contract to the District, from its own files, twenty-two years after the Association was dissolved.

The names in the cancellations

In January and February 1907 the Board released some fifty subscribers whose land the Project could not reach, and listed them by subscription number. The roll reads like a census of the Basin at the moment it was being remade:

Nannie Stiles · L. A. Stiles · P. J. Stiles · W. Streubel · Wm. Stallman · E. J. Wood · W. H. Wood · Fred Beck · Louisa Beck · Godfrey Beck · Teresa Bennett · C. F. Brower · Alice Collman · Lindsay · Mrs. Della Miller · Hattie Applegate · Elmer Applegate · Breitenstein · Paul Baumann · L. Baum · Biehn · Conger · R. Critchlow · August Liskey · Caroline Liskey · Mrs. Hedel · A. L. Meier · Henry Oden · Philip Oden · Mrs. Peterson · E. W. Roberts and Verner Roberts · Geo. Witter and Caroline Witter · Susie Pool — and dozens more.

Some of those names are still on ground this District serves. Applegate is on the roll twice, and the family that gave the Applegate Trail its name gave the Association its first secretary. Conger is the Conger of the 1868 garden ditch. Roberts refused to sign a second subscription and had his first one cancelled and handed back to him — the Board resolving that it be executed in duplicate and delivered “only upon their endorsing their full acceptance thereof on both copies.”

4 March 1905

What it was for — and where the District’s mission comes from

The U.S. Irrigation Committee met on 25 February 1905 in the office of the County Judge at Klamath Falls to take steps toward incorporating a water users' association. Ten men sat on it. A sub-committee of P. L. Fountain, O. A. Stearns and Elmer I. Applegate was appointed to do the preliminary work, and the committee's attorney, D. V. Kuykendall, drew the articles. They reconvened at the County Court House on 4 March 1905 and signed them in triplicate.

Article I gave the corporation its name and set its duration as unlimited. Article IV fixed the capital stock at two million dollars, Article V the par value of a share at twenty. And Article II stated what the Association was for:

Set that beside the mission this District adopted a hundred and twenty years later:

Acquire. Maintain. Provide for. Distribute. An adequate supply of water. All other beneficial uses. The four verbs and the two nouns of the modern mission are all in Article II, written in 1905 by ten farmers and a country lawyer at the Klamath County Court House. The District's mission statement is not a modern summary of an old purpose. It is a paraphrase of the purpose clause of its predecessor's charter.

Two other powers in the same clause

Article II runs on, and two of its remaining powers explain things that happen later in this history.

• Power generationThe Association was empowered to own and operate “electric or other power plants, and transmission lines” and “to generate, create, transmit, use and sell power and electrical energy.” That is why the stockholders could resolve in 1913 that power on this Project be developed for their own benefit — and why the districts objected when the Ankeny and Keno canals were sold to a power company six years later. They were not overreaching. It was in the charter from the first day.
• Trustee for excess landsThe Association could “act as trustee, agent, or attorney for the sale, disposal and transfer of lands… in order to facilitate the disposal of such lands… to persons qualified to perfect rights to the use of water” under federal law. That is the authority behind the Excess Land Trust Deeds — written into the charter a full eight months before J. Frank Adams signed the first of them.

All quotations in this section from the Articles of Incorporation of the Klamath Water Users Association, signed in triplicate at the Klamath County Court House on 4 March 1905 before notary D. V. Kuykendall — Articles I, II, IV and V. The same file carries the record of the U.S. Irrigation Committee's meeting of 25 February 1905.

1 April 1905

What a man was handed before he signed

The Board had the whole thing printed: National Irrigation Act, Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws of the Klamath Water Users Association, Klamath Falls, 1905, “published by authority of the Board of Directors.” Thirty-two pages — the Act first, the Association's own instruments after it. A man being asked to pledge his farm could read the law and the rules together, in one hand, before he put his name to anything.

The title page describes the Association as “organized with the sanction and at the request of the Secretary of the Interior,” and names the general committee that acted before organisation, with N. S. Merrill as Chairman and P. L. Fountain as Vice-Chairman.

Section 6 of the Act — the promise that the works would pass to the owners — is set out above. What follows is everything else he would have read.

One rule, stated three times

The single most important thing in the booklet is a rule about ownership, and it appears in all three documents, in the same words. The right to use the water belongs to the ground, and cannot be taken off it.

• The Act, Section 8The Secretary “shall proceed in conformity with” state law on the control, appropriation, use and distribution of water, and any vested right acquired under it — and “the right to the use of water acquired under the provisions of this Act shall be appurtenant to the land irrigated, and beneficial use shall be the basis, the measure, and the limit of the right.”
• The By-Laws, Article I, Section 7Every certificate must describe the land, “to which the aforesaid rights and shares shall be perpetually appurtenant” — and thereafter “all rights, whatever their source or whatever their manner of acquisition, to the use of water for the irrigation of said lands shall forever be inseparably appurtenant thereto.”
• The subscription formEvery shareholder signed a contract binding his shares “inseparably appurtenant to the following described real estate” — a blank left for the legal description of his own ground.

Two neighbouring by-laws close the door completely. Section 8: every transfer of the land operates — “whether it be expressed therein or not” — as a transfer of the water right and the shares with it. Section 9: any attempted transfer of shares without the land “shall be of no force or effect for any purpose, and shall confer no rights of any kind whatever” on the person receiving them. You could not sell the water off the ground. It was not possible.

And what it cost him to sign

The subscription was executed “in the same manner as required by law for the execution and acknowledgment of deeds for conveyance of real property” — signed, sealed, witnessed and notarised, with his wife joining. It was not a form. It was a deed.

• A lien on his landPayments and assessments became a lien on the land and the shares, enforced “by foreclosure and sale… in the manner provided by law for the foreclosure of mortgages.”
• ForfeitureIf he failed to apply promptly for his water right once water was available, he forfeited the shares to the Association — and forfeited stock could never be “renewed, revived or reissued.”
• One share to the acreNot more than one share could be allotted for each acre, so a man's holding in the corporation was exactly the size of his farm.
• But his seniors were safeArticle VII: nothing in the Articles or in joining the Association affects “the vested rights of any person to the prior use or delivery of any water.” The senior ditches of this Basin were protected on the first page.

The governance was recognisably this District's. Nine directors serving one year, each required to own land inside the boundaries and to live there. One vote per share, capped at a hundred and sixty. Nothing over ten thousand dollars without a two-thirds vote of the shareholders. And no provision of Article I amendable at all except with the approval of the Secretary of the Interior. Source: the By-Laws filed 1 April 1905 — Article I sections 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 13; Articles III, IV, V and VII; and the Act as printed at pages 4–9 of the same booklet.

One detail of the printing is worth recording. The title page gives the capital stock as $3,000,000 in 150,000 shares while Article IV inside still reads $2,000,000, and a marginal note against Article I, Section 13 reads “amended 1911.” The District's copy is a working document, reprinted after the increase of May 1910 and corrected by hand after 1911.

5 August 1905

The agreement with the United States

Before the contract of 6 November there was an agreement of 5 August 1905, adopted by resolution of the Board and executed for the Association by President Jerome Churchill and Secretary Elmer I. Applegate, with E. A. Hitchcock signing for the United States. It is eleven numbered paragraphs, and four of them are law the District still stands on.

The By-Laws became part of the federal contract

The agreement recites that the articles of incorporation and by-laws are appended to it and are “to be deemed, held, read and considered as if fully written out or printed herein, and deemed as a part hereof” — and that any later amendment approved by the Secretary “will be deemed, held and considered to such extent a change or modification of, or addition to, the terms of this contract.”

And the agreement says it again in its own words: the rights the shareholders would acquire “shall be, and thereafter continue to be, forever appurtenant to designated lands owned by such shareholders.”

The adjudication was anticipated in the agreement

The eighth recital is remarkable for a document of 1905. It records that “neither the relative priority nor the extent of the individual appropriations… which are now vested rights, have been ascertained or determined” — and that the shareholders had agreed among themselves, in the by-laws, on the rules by which those priorities “should be hereafter recognized.”

The parties knew in 1905 that the vested rights of this Basin had never been adjudicated, said so in the contract, and provided for the day they would be. That day came in 2014.

Beneficial use, and state law

• Paragraph 3The total of rights issued could not exceed the acreage irrigable by “(1) the amount now appropriated by the shareholders… and (2) the amount to be delivered from all sources in excess of the water now appropriated” — the Secretary's determination “to be based upon and measured and limited by the beneficial use of water.”
• Paragraph 10The members' water rights are to be “defined, determined and enjoyed” under the Reclamation Act and “also by the laws of the States of Oregon and California.” Section 8 deference to state water law, written into the Association's founding agreement.
• Paragraph 8If the Association failed to make rules the Secretary could prescribe them — but “the Secretary of the Interior shall impose no rule or regulation interfering with any vested right of the shareholders.”
• Paragraphs 4 and 5Payment in not less than ten equal annual instalments, the first due when water was first delivered; and the Association “hereby guarantees the payments” apportioned to each shareholder. The guarantee, in terms.

All quotations in this section from the Articles of Agreement between the United States and the Klamath Water Users Association, 5 August 1905 — recitals and paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 8 and 10, adopted by resolution of the Board and executed by President Jerome Churchill and Secretary Elmer I. Applegate.

3 November 1905

What they signed, and what it cost

On 3 November 1905, the stockholders met in special session at the Court House, President Jerome P. Churchill in the chair and Elmer I. Applegate acting as secretary. The notice mailed to every shareholder twenty days earlier stated the purpose plainly: to consider and ratify or reject the contract with the United States, under which the Association would guarantee payment of the cost of the irrigation works apportioned to each of its shareholders. On a motion by W. S. Slough, they unanimously authorized and directed the Board to enter into it. The contract itself is dated 6 November 1905. Construction began in 1906. The farmers were paying from the first shovel.

They paid a second time, in ground. The Project needed land to put canals on, and the landowners deeded it over. In 1905 Sophia S. Henley of Klamath Falls signed a warranty deed conveying her land — already fenced, already cultivated, already irrigated — to the United States of America and its assigns forever. The consideration recited on the face of the deed is one dollar.

And the United States could not have built the Project around them in any case:

So the government bought its way in. On 7 April 1905, Reclamation paid $337,500 for rights to land and water from the owners of three concerns — the Little Klamath Ditch, the Ankeny-Henley Canal, and the Jesse D. Carr Land & Livestock Company. It paid another $150,000 to the Klamath Canal Company — three men who had incorporated in May 1904 and filed on water rights equal to the entire flow of Link River, and who were, in Reclamation's own account, the only company that threatened the Project's authorization. Companies were paid for canals. Individual landowners, like Sophia Henley, deeded their ground for a dollar.

What the Association had bought, the United States then built. The contract for the “A” Canal was let in December 1905, work began in March 1906, and water ran on 22 May 1907. That construction — the canals, the branches, the pumping units — is told on the History page. This Association did not build anything. It secured the policy, the law, the finance and the contracts, dealt with the federal agencies, and represented the people the works were built to serve.

The government bought the ditch. It never bought the water.

It never brought the water either. Irrigation ran here on the natural flow of the river from 1878 until the first storage in 1919 — and when storage came, a power company built it. See Who brought the water.

And the Project was authorized on terms. Reclamation's history sets out four conditions on which approval rested: cession of rights in Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes by Oregon and California, Congressional approval to destroy navigability, surrender of certain rights on those lakes — and, first among them, the adjudication of all vested and conflicting water rights. The Klamath Basin Adjudication was not something that happened to the Project a century later. It was a condition of the Project existing at all.

That condition is the foundation of everything the District argues about water and about title. It is set out at length on Title Transfer.

7 October – 6 November 1905

Eight thousand five hundred and ninety-eight to nothing

The contract of 6 November was not signed on anyone's say-so. The whole chain of authority survives, sworn to and notarised, and it takes exactly a month.

• 7 October 1905At its regular meeting the Board resolves to call a special meeting of the stockholders, at the Court House, on 3 November at one o'clock, “to consider and ratify or reject by an election to be held for that purpose” the proposed contract. Unanimous.
• 10 October 1905Secretary Applegate mails notice to every stockholder at his last known residence, twenty days clear. The notice states the proposition plainly — that the Association “proposes to guarantee the payments for that part of the cost of the irrigation works which shall be apportioned by the Secretary of the Interior to each of its shareholders” — and adds: “No stockholder will be allowed to vote at this election on any stock on which any assessment is delinquent and unpaid.”
• 3 November 1905Churchill presides, Applegate keeps the record, the roll is called and the names of those present entered. Seven directors are appointed tellers and inspectors: Applegate, P. L. Fountain, M. F. Orr, O. A. Stearns, B. S. Grigsby, W. F. Hill and Jacob Rueck. Ballots are distributed and the polls closed.

Eight thousand five hundred and ninety-eight votes for. None against. Every vote weighted to an acre of ground, and not one acre in this Basin voted no.

What they adopted was an authorisation, not the contract itself: the Board was “specially authorized and directed to enter into an agreement, on behalf of said corporation, with the United States of America in the words and figures as follows” — the whole text set out in the resolution, so that nobody voted on a document they had not seen. The stockholders added that they “ratify and confirm the same, and all else that said Board of Directors shall lawfully do in the premises.”

The Board met the next day, 4 November, and resolved to execute. On 6 November 1905 Jerome P. Churchill and Elmer I. Applegate signed and sealed it, witnessed by D. V. Kuykendall — the lawyer who had drawn the Articles eight months earlier — and P. L. Fountain, both of Klamath Falls, and acknowledged before a notary the same day as “the free act and deed of the said corporation.”

The distinction matters and is often got wrong. The stockholders did not ratify a signed contract on 3 November; they authorised and directed their Board to sign one, and the contract itself is dated 6 November. Applegate swore to each step separately — the call, the mailing, the meeting, the count, the Board's resolution — and had every affidavit notarised on 6 November so the package would stand on its own.

3 November 1905

What “pledged their land” actually meant

It is easy to write that the landowners pledged their land against the cost of the Project. The Excess Land Trust Deeds show what that sentence meant in practice, and it is stronger than the phrase suggests.

The Reclamation Act would not let a man perfect a water right on more than a hundred and sixty acres. Owners holding more than that were, in the deed's own words, “not at present qualified to perfect a water right.” So they conveyed the land itself — “grant, bargain, sell and convey unto the party of the second part, in trust FOREVER” — to the Klamath Water Users Association, for one dollar.

And they gave the Association the power to sell it:

Not less than a quarter down, the balance over five years at eight per cent, four weeks' notice in the newspaper. The owner appointed the Association his “true and lawful attorney… and that this power shall be irrevocable during the life of this trust.” The trust ended only when he qualified as a subscriber and took his stock — or if the United States decided not to build, in which case the land came back to him.

Trust Deed No. 1 was signed by J. Frank Adams and his wife Martha — the man who had built the Adams canal, William Steele's son-in-law, one of the men who had stood up at White Lake City five months earlier urging his neighbours to sign. He went first.

The District still holds these deeds, together with the stock subscriptions and contracts numbered into the hundreds and the 1919 releases of lien recorded against them. They are the physical record of what this Basin put up.

18 – 20 May 1907

The year it nearly became a builder

Four days before the first water reached the “A” Canal, the stockholders met in adjourned session and took up a proposition that would have made this a completely different organization:

A committee of five was appointed to look into it and report to the Board on 1 June. The circular went out with two columns for signature — one to APPROVE and one to OPPOSE — and the sheets that survive show the names filling up on both sides, with the opposing column considerably the longer. The Association never became a contractor.

The margin of that page carries something better than the vote. One shareholder wrote across it: “I hereby authorise J. Rueck to remove my name from the petition being circulated… as I signed by mistake.” These were farmers arguing in the open about what their own corporation should be, and changing their minds in writing.

It matters because of what it settles. The Association could have built the Project — its charter empowered it to construct and operate irrigation works, and it had the stock to assess. It considered doing so, in the open, and declined. What it chose to remain was what it had been organised as: the legal and financial instrument of the landowners, holding the contract, guaranteeing the charges, and dealing with Washington on their behalf.

The 1907 letterhead names Alex Martin Jr. as President, O. A. Stearns Vice-President, Elmer I. Applegate Secretary, G. W. White Treasurer and R. S. Smith Attorney; the directors include J. Frank Adams — who had signed Trust Deed No. 1 — and D. F. Driscoll. Applegate is listed on the same letterhead as Secretary of the National Federation of Water Users Associations: two years after incorporating, this Basin's association held the secretaryship of the national body.

18 November 1908 – 25 March 1910

The thirty dollars

Newell had said twenty dollars an acre. On 18 November 1908, Secretary of the Interior James Rudolph Garfield issued the Public Notice that fixed what the landowners would actually be charged:

Half as much again as the figure on which the Association had been organised — roughly $1,090 an acre in today's money against Newell's $760. The first instalment — three dollars for building and seventy-five cents for operation, $3.75 an acre, about $136 today — fell due on 1 May 1909, five years after Newell spoke and two after the first water ran. That is the charge the stockholders were still protesting in the Opera House in 1913.

Three other terms of that notice are worth recording, because they set the pattern the Project has followed ever since.

• The duty of waterThe instructions accompanying the notice state that “the amount of water to be furnished is 1.8 acre feet per acre per annum.”
• No payment, no water“No water will be furnished in any year until all operation and maintenance charges then due shall have been paid.” Non-payment — and only non-payment — was the ground for withholding water. It is the same ground the 1954 contract states today.
• The 160 acres, and thirty milesWater-right applications for land in private ownership were limited to 160 acres of irrigable land for each land owner — the rule that made the Excess Land Trust Deeds necessary. Residence “in the neighborhood” was fixed at thirty miles.

The Association refused — and the Project stopped

What the stockholders did about the thirty dollars is the most consequential thing this Association ever did, and it nearly destroyed the Project.

George Moss Driscoll's account, drawn from the Reclamation correspondence, sets out the sequence: the Association passed a resolution denying any obligation to pay in excess of the originally estimated maximum cost of $20 an acre. Secretary Garfield, in one of his last official acts before leaving office, suspended construction on the Klamath Project in January 1909. Only when the Association retracted its resolution did the incoming Secretary, Richard A. Ballinger, order the work resumed.

The Board's resolution book survives, and the retraction is in it, dated 23 February 1909 and introduced by founding director O. A. Stearns:

They regretted that their December letter had been read “as to cause suspension of work on the Project,” because suspending construction and diverting the funds “would result in a greater loss to this community than we could hope might be gained by a reduction of the estimated cost.” And they closed by naming where they would go instead:

That is the sentence the District has been acting on ever since. Not repudiation, not default — acknowledge the obligation, pay it, and take the hardship to Congress.

And what Washington actually asked for was six million

On 23 July 1909 the Board recorded that supervising engineer E. G. Hopson had asked it to obtain the stockholders' agreement to increase the capital stock from $2,000,000 to $6,000,000, and the par value of a share from twenty dollars to sixty — on the understanding that once a favourable report came, “the price of water in the Upper Project will soon be announced.” The Board resolved to render “all assistance within its power,” and a special meeting of stockholders on 8 November 1909 authorised it.

A note in the Association's own book records what happened next: “This increase was never certified to Secretary of State.” What was certified, on 12 May 1910, was an increase to three million at thirty dollars a share.

Through 1910 the shareholders repeatedly refused to increase the Association's capitalisation to match the repayment obligation Reclamation now expected — until supervising engineer E. G. Hopson threatened to divert that year's appropriations to other projects. The increase to three million dollars, certified at Salem on 12 May 1910, was made under that threat.

It was ugly, and both sides knew it. Two factions had formed inside the Association — the “Ranchers Ticket” behind Abel Ady, and the “Conservative Ticket” of men who favoured cooperating with the government. After a Senate committee took evidence at Klamath Falls on 9 November 1909, Alex Martin — former President of the Association and leader of the conservatives — got up a minority report signed by 120 shareholders representing 39,000 acres, asking that the Project not be judged on what the Board had told the Senators. Newell wrote to founding director O. A. Stearns that “it looks as though the project would lie under the condemnation of its own people,” and that it had “probably the worst showing of any project in the West.”

And the Project was reorganised around the argument

On 17 February 1910 Ballinger wrote to Secretary Elder with his decision. Construction costs for parts of the Project would far exceed the estimates, so he would “exclude from the general project” the lands of Langell and Yonna valleys — the Upper Project — together with the elevated tracts that could only be served by pumping. Those lands were released from their stock subscription contracts and from the liens on them.

Reclamation stayed willing to serve them if some arrangement could be made to secure the construction charges. The arrangement, when it came, was the Warren Act of 1911 — and that is where the Project's contract classes come from.

So the pattern the District still lives with — some lands holding water-right applications under the 1902 Act, others holding Warren Act contracts — was not designed. It is the residue of an argument about thirty dollars an acre, settled in 1910 by a Secretary of the Interior drawing a line around the ground he thought too expensive to serve.

And Washington told the Association to collect it

On 25 March 1910 Secretary R. A. Ballinger wrote reminding the Association that it had “guaranteed the payment of the charges… against the lands of its shareholders” and directing it to make a call and assessment of $3.00 a share for building and 75 cents for operation, in force before 1 May 1910 — and if unpaid, “immediately enforced by way of the foreclosure of the assessment lien provided for in the bylaws and stock-subscription contracts.”

He enclosed a draft set of rules for the Association to adopt, noting that its provisions had “been carefully considered in connection with other projects” and asking that any amendments be sent by telegram to save time. The guarantee the landowners gave in 1905 was being called in, and the instrument for calling it was the lien on their own farms.

Public Notices of 18 November 1908 and 7 December 1908 over the signature of James Rudolph Garfield, and of 24 August 1909 over that of Acting Secretary Frank Pierce; letters from Secretary R. A. Ballinger to the Association of 25 March and 20 April 1910. All in one file, with the township plats listed.

January – February 1909

How it dealt with Washington

This is what the Association's work actually looked like between the founding and the wind-up: not building, but reading contracts closely and corresponding with the Department of the Interior about what they meant.

On 19 January 1909 the Secretary of the Interior wrote to the Association about an apparent conflict he had spotted in his own paperwork. Section 4 of the contract of 6 November 1905 required that payments for water rights be divided into “not less than ten equal annual payments.” But his Public Notice of 18 November 1908 allowed the building charge to be paid “in not more than ten annual instalments” — which left open the option of paying it off faster.

The Board met on 6 February 1909 and replied three days later over the signatures of its President and Secretary. It accepted the Secretary's reading, undertook to attach his letter and its own reply to the copy of the agreement held in its office, and to “regard same as sufficient evidence of this construction of the contract.”

The Association's letterhead of February 1909 names its officers: Alex Martin Jr. President, Jacob Rueck Vice-President, C. P. Chastain Secretary, G. W. White Treasurer, R. S. Smith Attorney — with J. R. Dixon, W. C. Dalton, John Irwin, O. A. Stearns, H. T. Anderson, J. G. Stevenson and E. R. C. Williams as directors.

1905 · 1910 · 1912

The capital stock, and what happened to it

One share to the acre, twenty dollars a share. That rule from Article I means the Association's capital stock is a direct measure of how much ground the Project was expected to serve — and the Oregon Secretary of State's file records every change.

• 4 March 1905 — $2,000,000Article IV of the Articles of Incorporation. 100,000 shares, and so 100,000 acres. About $75 million today.
• 12 May 1910 — $3,000,000The certificate of increase filed at Salem. 150,000 shares — about $104 million today. The Project was growing, and the Association's books grew with it.
• 6 December 1912 — $1,800,000Voted at the Houston Opera House and certified at Salem twelve days later. 90,000 shares. Sixty thousand shares cancelled in a single afternoon — roughly $41 million of subscribed capital, in today's money, struck off the books.

The reduction was not a failure of nerve. It was the By-Laws working exactly as written. Article I, Section 10 provided that if the United States determined the available water insufficient to irrigate an acre for every share, “then the number of shares shall be so reduced as not to exceed the number of acres determined by the United States as irrigable.” Washington measured the ground; the stock followed the measurement down.

The question — “Shall the Capital Stock of the Klamath Water Users Association be reduced from THREE MILLION DOLLARS to ONE MILLION EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND?” — had been put in the call for the annual meeting of 31 May 1912 and carried over to an adjourned session on 6 December, introduced by A. B. Libbey, seconded by C. A. Bunting, and adopted by ballot.

A small thing in the file is worth keeping. Secretary Elder, remitting the five-dollar filing fee, pointed out that under Chapter 100 of the Laws of Oregon for 1907 the Association had been “relieved from the payment of any corporation tax whatever” — then paid the fee anyway and left the question to the Secretary of State. Ben Olcott replied that he did not understand the exemption to reach a fee of this kind. The Association had its own act of the Oregon legislature, and still argued the five dollars in writing.

And it defended the Project's boundaries

In 1910 R. A. Emmett, O. A. Stearns and others applied to have the lands under the Keno Canal excluded from the Klamath Project altogether. The Board considered it at its monthly meeting on 3 June and answered the Secretary of the Interior in one sentence:

O. A. Stearns had been a founding director of the Association and its President in 1906. He applied to take his own ground out, and the board he had helped create told Washington no. Nine years later the Keno Canal was sold to the power company, and the districts fought that too.

6 June 1913

What the stockholders put on the record in 1913

Eight years in, the Association met for its annual meeting in the Houston Opera House — the same room where they had raised the capital stock in 1905. Abel Ady in the chair, John Irwin as Vice-President, Albert E. Elder as Secretary. They passed four resolutions unanimously, on a rising vote, and the minutes record every word.

The twenty dollars, sworn to by the men who heard it

The first is the one the District still relies on. Eight and a half years after the promise was made, the men who heard it put it in the minute book:

Read that last clause twice. The promise was not merely a price. It was a price good until the Project was turned over to the water users — turnover assumed, in 1904, as the ordinary end of the arrangement.

The resolution goes further than a recollection. It states that the landowners organised the Association “relying upon such verbal representations and statements as inducements”; that the representations “were concurred in by Morris Bien, Legal Adviser of the Reclamation Service”; and that but for them, the landowners “would not at any time or at all incorporated their lands into the Klamath Water Users Association.” It was introduced by John Irwin and seconded by N. S. Merrill — the man Merrill is named for.

And they refused to have the debt forgiven

Later in the same meeting a Mr Robinson of the Pacific Telegraph and Telephone Company put it to the stockholders that the Government ought to build irrigation works and charge them to general expenses, as it did with rivers and harbours. It was an invitation to have the whole obligation written off.

They were, on their own account that afternoon, struggling. A second resolution asked the Secretary of the Interior to consider graduating the payments, stating plainly that what had been paid so far had “been largely derived from sources other than the produce of the soil, having to date hereof exhausted our credit beyond the product of the soil.” They were paying the United States out of borrowings and outside income — and in the same meeting they declined to be relieved of the debt.

And they asked for the power

The resolutions, the vote and Mr Ady's reply are recorded in the minutes of the annual meeting of 6 June 1913, pages 82–83, attested by Secretary Albert E. Elder and President Abel Ady.

A third resolution instructed the Board to take up with the Secretary “the question of power development under the Klamath Project… for the purpose of creating electrical power under said project for the benefit of said Stockholders, both from domestic and commercial standpoints.”

That is 1913 — four years before the Copco contract and five before the canal sale began. The water users had already asked, formally and unanimously, that the power on this Project be developed for the people who were paying for the Project. When the districts objected to the sale of the Ankeny and Keno canals in 1919, they were not raising a new idea. They were defending one they had put on the record six years earlier.

1907 – 1929

What it did with the power it held

The Association held an extraordinary power over its own members. Assessments were a lien on their land and their shares, enforceable “by foreclosure and sale… in the manner provided by law for the foreclosure of mortgages.” Shares could be forfeited outright and never “renewed, revived or reissued.” The excess-land trust deeds gave it an irrevocable power to sell a man's farm at the courthouse door. And in March 1910 the Secretary of the Interior instructed it to use that power on anyone unpaid by the first of May.

So the question worth asking of the Board's own resolution book is what it actually did. The pattern in it is not foreclosure. It is release.

• January – February 1907Resolution after resolution cancelling and satisfying stock subscriptions and returning them to the signers — in one sitting, some fifty subscriptions listed by number and name, for land the Project could not reach. Each cancellation executed in duplicate, one copy kept, one delivered, and only on the subscriber's written acceptance of both.
• October 1907With no work yet begun on the Lower Klamath marshes or the Upper Project, the Board removed the penalty for non-subscription on those lands for ninety days — reasoning that “the reasons for enforcing the penalty… are not applicable to said lands.” It also began accepting contract and bond-for-deed holders, not just those with title.
• 4 January 1908The Board rescinded the penalty resolution altogether, and directed that back assessments on land subscribed thereafter go into a sinking fund “for the purpose of refunding all penalties collected previous to this date.” It gave the money back.
• May 1908G. W. White's sixty acres, found not to be irrigable from any source, released from the subscription and the contract so that he could “make other arrangements for irrigating said lands.”
• October 1908Rather than sell the trust-deeded land, the Association set itself up as a land agent to help owners of excess acreage find qualified buyers — a dollar to list a quarter-section, and trust-deeded land “given first consideration… but not to the extent of the losing a possible sale.”

And in 1919 it let the liens go

The District still holds the volumes: the stock subscriptions and contracts, numbered one to beyond six hundred and fifty — and bound with them, the 1919 Releases of Lien Under Stock Subscriptions and Contracts. The year after Contract Ilr-173 passed the Association's obligations to Klamath Irrigation District, the liens on the shareholders' land were released.

The Association's meetings were curtailed after 1918. On 6 April 1929, with G. W. Offield still in the chair, A. M. Thomas was appointed secretary to wind up its unfinished business. It had lived twenty-four years, guaranteed a federal project, and let its members' land go free.

Those volumes have never been read. They run from ninety-five to three hundred megabytes apiece — the largest files in the District's archive — and they hold every subscriber's name, acreage and release. Whether the Association ever foreclosed on anyone is answerable, and the answer is in that folder.

1905 – 1925

The other thread: who the power belonged to

There is a second argument running through these papers, and it has never been told in one place because the pieces sit on four different pages. It is about who the power on this river was supposed to be developed for.

• 1905 — in the charterArticle II of the Articles of Incorporation empowers the Association to own and operate “electric or other power plants, and transmission lines” and “to generate, create, transmit, use, and sell power and electrical energy.” It is in the founding purpose clause, beside the water.
• 1907 — the Keno Canal fightA petition went to the Klamath Falls City Council to prohibit open canals inside the city limits. The Board's Resolution No. 25 called it what it was: aimed “directly… at the construction of the Keno Canal by the U.S. Reclamation Service in an endeavor to hold up the construction of the same, or to mulct the Water Users Association of a large sum of money… while the benefits to be derived from such canal will inure to the whole country.” The Board asked the Council to vacate a street instead, to clear the right of way.
• 1908 — finish itIn November the Board recorded that it had secured a city franchise for a conduit, that the Keno Canal was complete only as far as the Moore Brothers' power plant, and that “there will be no beneficial use to irrigators from the said canal until it is fully completed.” It urged completion in 1909 and asked that rights-of-way be secured and condemned at once.
• 1913 — develop it for usThe stockholders resolve unanimously that the Board take up with the Secretary “the question of power development under the Klamath Project… for the purpose of creating electrical power under said project for the benefit of said Stockholders, both from domestic and commercial standpoints.”
• 1918–19 — soldThe Ankeny and Keno canals pass to the power company. The districts object. They were not raising a new idea; they were defending one their own corporation had chartered in 1905 and resolved on in 1913.
• 1925 — written into a draft contractThe District's own draft transfer contract provides that all lands of the original Project “shall have the first right to and call upon the waters of Upper Klamath Lake and its tributaries before the same is used for power or other purposes than irrigation.” Two years after the sale, still asking.

The middle of this story — the Association's own minutes for 1918 to 1924, when the canal sale was fought — has never been read. It is in the two large minute volumes in the District's archive. Until those are opened, this thread runs from the charter to 1913 and picks up again in 1925, with the years of the argument itself missing.

6 July 1918

The handover

The Association did not simply fade. It signed itself out of existence in a three-party contract with the United States and its own successor, and that contract survives. Its recital is plain about whose idea it was:

G. W. Offield signed it twice — as President of the Klamath Irrigation District and as President of the Klamath Water Users Association. Albert E. Elder attested for the District, A. L. Wishard for the Association. One man handing an obligation from his left hand to his right, before a notary, on 21 August 1918.

What the District took on: $1,363,036.26

Article 3 fixes the number. “The maximum aggregate sum payable to the United States under this contract, exclusive of operation and maintenance charges, penalties, and interest, shall be One Million, Three Hundred Sixty-three Thousand and Thirty-six Dollars and Twenty-six Cents” — about $29.8 million today — payable in two instalments a year, on 20 April and 20 October, beginning in 1919. No interest on deferred payments; one per cent a month if late.

The sum expressly excluded future drainage, replacement of perishable structures, and “any rights to the Ankeny Canal.”

And Article 6 puts Section 6 in the District's own contract

This is the provision that matters most, and it names the statute:

Two more things Ilr-173 settles

• The liens were to be released — by contractArticle 2: when the Association's affairs permit, “the lien contained in the stock subscriptions to the Association will be discharged of record,” the United States assenting to that release, to the discharge of the Association from the 1905 contract, to its dissolution, and to the release of all liens created or evidenced by water right applications on land within the District. That is why the 1919 Releases of Lien exist. They were not a kindness; they were Article 2.
• The Henley-Ankeny tracts stood apartArticle 1 sorts the District's ground into five classes, and the fifth is “Lands known as the Henley-Ankeny tracts which are understood to have a pre-existing water right under contracts, which lands will not be covered by public notice and whose owners are obligated to pay for no part of the cost of irrigation works heretofore constructed under the authority of the United States.” In 1918 the United States acknowledged in writing that this ground carried a right that came before the Project and owed the Project nothing.

One further echo. Article 4 gives the District's officials “full and free access to the project books and official records… with the right at any time during office hours to make copies” — the same right the District holds under Article 11 of the 1954 contract, and the same right it was still asking Reclamation to honour in 2024.

What it all amounts to

The thread through all of it

Read separately, the documents on this page are the papers of a farmers' corporation. Read together, they are one argument made continuously from 1902 to the present, and the District is still making it.

That the works would pass to the people who paid for them

• 1902 — the statuteSection 6 of the Reclamation Act: when the payments are made for the major portion of the lands, “the management and operation of such irrigation works shall pass to the owners of the lands irrigated thereby.” Printed by the Association in its own booklet and handed to every man asked to sign.
• 1904 — the promiseNewell's twenty dollars an acre, covering construction and maintenance “up to such time as the proposed Project should be turned over to the proposed Klamath Water Users Association.” Turnover assumed as the ordinary end of the arrangement.
• 1905 — the securityThe landowners guarantee the cost, pledge their farms in trust with an irrevocable power of sale, and vote 8,598 to nothing to bind themselves to it.
• 1908 — the confirmationThe federal Soil Survey tells the landowners the cost will be paid in ten annual payments, “after which the system will become the property of the landowners.”
• 1913 — sworn toThe stockholders put Newell's promise, and its turnover clause, unanimously into the minute book — and in the same meeting decline an invitation to have the debt written off.
• 1925 — draftedThe District writes its own transfer contract and sends it to Reclamation's counsel: it runs “until the project is turned over to this organization, which, according to law, is ultimately to succeed to the interests of the United States.”
• 1965 — paidThe District clears the construction charges three years early, by warrant, and holds the receipt.

And that the right to the water belongs to the land

The second thread is shorter and even less broken. Section 8 of the Act: the right acquired under it “shall be appurtenant to the land irrigated, and beneficial use shall be the basis, the measure, and the limit of the right,” and the Secretary “shall proceed in conformity” with state law. Article I, Section 7 of the By-Laws: rights “forever inseparably appurtenant” to the described ground — and by the agreement of 5 August 1905 those By-Laws are a term of the contract with the United States. Article VII: nothing in joining affects “the vested rights of any person to the prior use or delivery of any water.” And the 1905 agreement recites that those vested rights “have not been ascertained or determined” and provides for the day they would be.

That day was 2014, and the Klamath Basin Adjudication reached the same conclusion the founders had written into their own by-laws in 1905. The District did not discover this position. It inherited it, in writing, from the men who guaranteed the Project.

Where this leads next is set out on Title Transfer 101 and in the Warren Act page. This page's business is to show that the argument is not new.

A note on the figures

What these sums are worth now

The dollars on this page are small numbers describing very large commitments, and the gap between the two is the whole difficulty of reading a hundred-and-twenty-year-old record. Converted for inflation, at roughly thirty-six to thirty-eight times for the years around 1905:

• $20 an acre → about $760Newell's promise of 1904, and the par value of one share.
• $30 an acre → about $1,090The Public Notice of 18 November 1908 — the charge as actually fixed.
• $3.75 an acre → about $136The first instalment, due 1 May 1909. On a quarter-section of 160 acres, about $21,800 in one payment.
• $337,500 → about $12.7 millionWhat Reclamation paid on 7 April 1905 for the Little Klamath Ditch, the Ankeny-Henley Canal and the Jesse D. Carr Land & Livestock Company together.
• $150,000 → about $5.6 millionWhat it paid the Klamath Canal Company — three men who had filed on the entire flow of Link River.
• $4.4 million → about $165 millionThe construction the Secretary authorised on 15 May 1905, with a million of it allocated immediately.
• $2 million of capital stock → about $75 millionWhat the landowners subscribed and guaranteed at incorporation, on 4 March 1905, before a shovel moved.

How these were worked out, and what they are worth. Each figure is the sum in the year stated, multiplied by the change in consumer prices to 2026. Consumer price data before 1913 is estimated rather than measured, so treat the earliest conversions as indicative. And a price index is the most conservative comparison available: measured instead against wages, or against the size of the national economy, a public work of this kind would translate to a very much larger figure. These numbers understate rather than overstate what this Basin took on.

The papers

The founding documents

Nine documents carry this bargain, from the Reclamation Act to the contract that made the District the Association's successor. They are gathered in the archive at the foot of this page, and every one of them can be opened and read.

Where the rest of this is told

Found an error? The District would rather correct the record than defend it. Contact us.