Library of Congress
Left to right : Presidents Warren G . Harding , Herbert Hoover and Franklin D . Roosevelt were all involved in the early efforts to corral the Colorado during their presidencies .
43-foot-high dam helped irrigate parts of Southwestern Arizona and Southeastern California . Even before it was completed , however , it became obvious the Laguna would be inadequate to satisfy California ’ s growing needs for water to support both agricultural and economic development . That state ’ s population was on the way to increasing by 1,942,000 from 1900 to 1920 , thus adding 857,000 more residents during the period than the other six states in the Colorado River Basin combined .
After studying the problem of irrigating many rich agricultural regions throughout the Southwest , the Reclamation Service rejected the idea of merely building another canal to augment the Alamo . Instead , its engineers envisioned a larger project to build both a new canal and a series of dams on the Colorado far upstream from Yuma . In 1920 , Congress authorized the Service to develop the plans for such a program . Two years later , the Fall / Davis Report did propose the construction of a new canal to the Imperial Valley ; but it spent more ink focusing on the need for a high storage dam and associated reservoir on the Colorado , probably in the narrows of Boulder Canyon east of Las Vegas , Nevada . Moreover , it suggested that a 500-foot-high dam and a reservoir of more than 20 million acre-feet of water at that site could generate enough marketable hydroelectric power to cover most , if not all , the costs of construction .
Determining how to control the Colorado ’ s flow to help irrigate arid lands was an
engineering problem ; determining how to allocate that river ’ s water among the states in its basin was a political one . So even while federal officials were considering the former challenge , local political leaders and their representatives were working through their ideas on the latter . Rainfall and snowmelt from Colorado were the largest sources of the river ’ s water ; that state ’ s officials thought the allocations should be based on annual precipitation . Arizona had the largest proportion of its territory within the river ’ s basin ; its leaders thought a state ’ s share should be based on acreage . The headwaters of the Colorado ’ s tributaries were in Wyoming , New Mexico and Utah ; each of them thought they had a right to a large allocation . And since California had a greater population than the other six Colorado River Basin states combined , Golden State leaders believed their state should have the largest allocation of the river ’ s water .
Historically , states in the West had generally followed the doctrine of “ prior appropriation ” ( colloquially known as “ first come , first served ”) when determining the right to use a navigable body of water that ran through or between more than one state . The Supreme Court ’ s 1907 decision in Kansas v . Colorado neither affirmed nor rejected that idea , but merely suggested that each dispute should be handled on a case-by-case basis . Colorado State Senator Delph Carpenter became involved in such an argument when he defended his state before the Supreme
Court in Wyoming v . Colorado . In 1911 , developers from the Centennial State announced a plan to divert water from one portion of the Laramie River ( which flowed through both states ) to another . Wyoming sued , asserting its right of “ prior appropriation ” to that part of the river .
In 1920 , while awaiting the Court ’ s ruling on that dispute , Carpenter expressed his frustration with allowing the judiciary to control any plan for economic development in the West that involved the allocation of rights to the Colorado River ’ s waters . He suggested to the booster organization League of the Southwest that the seven states in the river ’ s basin should design a voluntary pact to allocate those rights among themselves . Congress authorized the states to negotiate such an agreement . President Warren G . Harding appointed Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as Chairman of the group , and in January 1922 Hoover convened the first meeting of the Colorado River Commission .
Chairman Hoover spent most of 1922 trying to resolve the conflicting demands of the seven state representatives on the commission . The Colorado River Compact that six of the seven men signed in November mollified everyone but pleased no one . But it did clear the way for Congress to finally consider the Swing-Johnson Bill , which had lain dormant in committee since being introduced in April . That bill would authorize the federal government to begin constructing both a high dam in the vicinity of Boulder Canyon
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