The record, open
The Archives
A hundred and eighteen documents. Open any of them — and know which county to search.
Everything the District's History asserts rests on something a reader can open. This is that material, gathered in one place: the founding documents of 1905, the films and story maps, the federal studies and legal opinions, and the District's own archive.
Before you search
Which county holds the record
One thing to settle before looking for anything early. This ground did not sit still on the map. A deed, a ditch, a water notice or a court order from these years was filed in whichever county the land then belonged to — and that changed four times in thirty years. Searching the wrong county's files is the commonest reason an early Klamath document cannot be found.
The Klamath County Historical Society traced the sequence:
- Jackson CountyAll of this country lay east of the Cascades in Jackson County. The first three post offices — Linkville, Yainax and Langell's Valley — were authorised there in December 1871.
- 24 October 1874Lake County is created out of Jackson County, with Linkville named the county seat.
- 7 January 1876Lakeview supersedes Linkville as the county seat of Lake County, by election. Klamath Basin records now go to Lakeview.
- 17 October 1882Klamath County is created out of Lake County, and Linkville — renamed Klamath Falls in 1893 — becomes the county seat and has remained it since.
So the Nurse-Conger ditch was dug in Jackson County, the Linkville Water Ditch Company incorporated under Lake County, and Steele's 1884 appropriation recorded in the newly made Klamath County. It also explains why the Van Brimmers filed their 1883 notice in Siskiyou County, California and had to file again the following year: on ground this often redrawn, the question of which jurisdiction you were standing in was a real one. Documents from before 1882 are in the Jackson and Lake County records, not in Klamath County's.
Part two · Building it
1902 – 1905
The Reclamation Act, and the Association
Congress passed the Reclamation Act on 17 June 1902, and with it a method: the United States would advance the capital to build irrigation works in the arid West, and the landowners who benefited would pay it back. Nothing was granted. Everything was lent.
For that to work here, somebody had to be liable. In the winter of 1904 the Chief Engineer of the Reclamation Service came to Klamath Falls and told a large audience what the Project would cost them — twenty dollars an acre, and only up to the point at which it was turned over to the water users. On 4 March 1905 the landowners incorporated the Klamath Water Users Association to accept that liability; on 1 April, at Houston's Opera House, they raised its capital stock to three million dollars and adopted By-Laws whose Article I named the territory “the Klamath Irrigation District” — twelve years before the District existed.
Congress had already cleared the ground. An Act of 9 February 1905 authorised the raising and lowering of Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes for a federal project, and Oregon and California ceded their rights in those lakebeds the same year. The Secretary authorised construction on 15 May 1905 for $4.4 million.
On 3 November 1905 the stockholders met at the Courthouse and directed their Board to sign. The contract with the United States is dated 6 November 1905. Three hundred men had guaranteed the cost of a Project that did not yet exist.
1906 – 1916
Building the Main Division — K.I.D. becomes a mega-district
The Project came together canal by canal over three decades. Work on the “A” Canal began in March 1906, with the B, E and F Canals started the same year and the First Unit Main Drain installed. By 1907 the “A” and B Canals had been carried to Olene, thirty-three miles of laterals and drains were finished, and works existed to serve 20,500 acres — of which 8,900 actually took water that year.
The promise the Association had incorporated on came due in 1908, when the Secretary announced a construction charge of $30.00 an acre for the Main Division. The Klamath Water Users Association passed a resolution denying any obligation to pay more than the originally estimated maximum of $20.00 an acre — the figure Newell had given them in 1904. Secretary Garfield's response, as one of his last acts in office, was to suspend construction on the Klamath Project in January 1909. The Association retracted the resolution. His successor, Richard Ballinger, ordered the work resumed.
1909 — The ceiling breaks
On January 25, 1909, Reclamation raised the construction charge above the $20.00 per acre that Newell had promised in 1904. The water users objected. Secretary of the Interior Ballinger ordered construction suspended until they agreed to pay the higher figure. They agreed. By 1913 the stockholders were telling the Secretary that their payments had been “largely derived from sources other than the produce of the soil” — that they had exhausted their credit beyond what the farms could earn. They were paying with money the ground had not made.
The C Canal followed in 1908 and 1909, including 4,300 feet of flume. By the end of 1909 there were 23.5 miles of main canal and 47 miles of laterals, and roughly 21,620 acres taking Project water. Contracts for the Lost River Diversion Channel and the Lost River Diversion Dam were let in 1910 and both were completed by 1912. In 1913, local farmers working under the direction of the Reclamation Service began expanding the D Canal — the one Frank Adams and his neighbours had dug by hand in 1886.
Reclamation settled the question itself in 1953: by 1912, 23,034 acres were irrigated in what was later called the Main Division, and nearly all the initial distribution system was complete.
The year-by-year record is in the Reclamation Service's own history of the Project for 1903 to 1912, written by Assistant Engineer I. S. Voorhees. By the 1909 season the Service was prepared to furnish water to 30,000 acres, and about 21,000 were irrigated. In 1910 the area rose to 23,000. In 1911 and 1912 it stood at 24,000 acres. The East Branch reached Olene in the spring of 1912, and the Second Unit laterals were taken up from there.
The archive
Film, story maps and further reading
Before the Project
The founding record, 1905
Everything the Association was made of, in the order it was made.
The Association and the federal government, 1907–1912
The District, 1913–1965
Deep time
The founding documents
None of the above is recollection. Every date, name and figure in this section comes from the Association's own papers, which the District still holds.
Films and documentaries
An overview of the Project and how it works.
Farming families of the Klamath Basin.
The Klamath Project, more than a century on.
The 2021 curtailment as it happened.
What irrigated agriculture carries beyond the fence line.
A film by Anders Tomlinson.
Story maps and other perspectives
The history of this Basin is not the District's alone to tell. Alongside the District's own story map above, the collection below includes work by others — tribal, academic and independent — and they do not all reach the same conclusions. They are collected here because the record is better served by being complete than by being comfortable.
From the District's archive
Primary records the District holds, for anyone who wants to check the history above against the documents themselves.
Studies, legal opinions and training materials
Summary of the NAS review of the science underlying Klamath Basin water management.