Irrigation, Settlement, and Change on the Cache La Poudre River

IRRIGATION, SETTLEMENT, AND CHANGE ON THE CACHE LA POUDRE RIVER By Rose Laflin Special Report No. 15 Irrigation, Settlement, and Change on the Cache la Poudre River by Rose Laflin Special Report Number 15 June, 2005 Colorado Water Resources Research Institute Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado 80523 Colorado State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and complies with all federal and Colorado laws, regulations, and executive orders regarding affirmative action requirements in all programs. The Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity is located in 101 Student Services. To assist Colorado State University in meeting its affirmative action responsibilities, ethnic minorities, women and other protected class members are encouraged to apply and to so identify themselves. This special report is produced with funding from the National Park Service through a cooperative agreement with Colorado State University and printed by the Colorado Water Resources Research Institute and Colorado Water Center with funding from U.S. Department of Interior, Geological Survey and Colorado State University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government, the State of Colorado, or Colorado State University. 2 Acknowledgements Several people were invaluable in helping me see this project to fruition. First and foremost, I would like to thank Susan Boyle at the National Park Service for her unwavering support, advice, and encouragement. Additionally, Mark Fiege, professor of History at Colorado State University, guided me through the early stages of research and shared his knowledge of water and the American West with me. I am grateful to all those who reviewed the document throughout its various stages including members of the Poudre Heritage Alliance. I am especially indebted to Richard Seaworth for sharing his knowledge of irrigation and the Cache la Poudre and Brian Werner, of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, for opening his files to me while I was researching NCWCD. Robert Ward at the Colorado Water Resources Research Institute also graciously made CWRRI’s research library accessible to me during the summer of 2003. The staff at Colorado State University’s Water Resources Archive and at the City of Greeley Museums were also especially helpful in my multiple visits to their institutions. Colorado State University professors emeritus Daniel Tyler and Jim Hansen took time out of their busy schedules to read the manuscript and give me detailed and thoughtful comments that I sincerely appreciate. Their own works of history have inspired me when I needed it. Bob Stieben, a Cache la Poudre valley irrigator, along with George Varra and Shawn Hoff, current and former Cache la Poudre River Commissioners, allowed me to interview them and pick their brains for the details of irrigation along this river that only they know. I am truly grateful for their kindness, patience and candor. This is such a special river and all those mentioned here helped allow its story to be told. Thank you. 3 4 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………….…………………………………………6 Chapter One: Necessity and Imagination…………………………………………..…10 Chapter Two: Expansion……….…………….…………………………….……..……26 Chapter Three: Water Law……….…………….…………………………………..…41 Chapter Four: The Working Poudre……………..………………….………………..54 Chapter Five: Competition………………………..………………….………………..77 Chapter Six: Twenty-first Century Poudre……………..………………….………..102 Endnotes……………..………………….……………………………………………....121 Glossary……………..………………….……………………………………………….144 Bibliography……………..………………….…………………………………………..154 Photographs……………………………………………………………………………..174 5 Introduction This manuscript examines the water delivery system of Colorado’s Cache la Poudre River - the small ditches, large canals, and reservoirs that divert and store the river’s water, originally for agricultural purposes and later for municipal, industrial, and recreational use. The Poudre, as it is commonly called by northern Coloradoans, drains 1,890 square miles of land in the Mummy and Never Summer ranges in Colorado and Wyoming. It begins on the Continental Divide, flows through mountain canyons on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and onto the plains, before joining the South Platte River. American settlers first diverted the Poudre’s water into ditches and canals to facilitate irrigation on the plains in the early 1860s. It was among the first few rivers tapped for irrigation in Colorado. Settlers to the Cache la Poudre valley imagined transforming the dry grasslands that abutted the river into productive farmland through irrigation. They labored over canals and reservoirs that conveyed water to the dry but fertile land and stored water for late summer months when the river’s supply dwindled. In addition to building the water delivery system of canals and reservoirs, beginning in the 1870s and 18880s, they increased the Poudre’s supply with water from other watersheds, worked out a way of exchanges that made water use more efficient, and helped create legislation to govern water use that differed immensely from water law in the eastern United States. An agricultural boom in the first two decades of the twentieth century increased demand for irrigated acreage along the Poudre and made agriculture the largest contributing sector to Colorado’s economy. This created a need for more water, especially by the drought-plagued 1930s. New technology that was developed on the banks of the Poudre that made water use more accurate and efficient was not enough to satisfy the demand for additional water in northern Colorado. Poudre water users lobbied for a Bureau of Reclamation project to enhance the Poudre and other Front Range rivers. The Colorado-Big Thompson project brought water from the Western Slope to the Front Range, supplemented the Poudre’s supply, and facilitated prosperity and growth in northern Colorado in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cache la Poudre, augmented with Western Slope water from the Colorado-Big Thompson project, attracted new people and industries to northern Colorado. The economy diversified from extractive industries that took things out of the earth such as mining, logging, 6 and agriculture, to technology, tourist, and service-based industries. Cities and industries flourished and competed with the agricultural sector for the Poudre’s water. Urban and suburban residents used and perceived of the Poudre in ways that competed and conflicted with irrigators who had consumed the majority of the river’s water for generations. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, Poudre valley water users clashed over pollution in the river, the use of groundwater, new storage proposals, and issues of minimum stream flow for healthy forests and wildlife. Irrigators, cities, industries, recreators, and environmentalists hashed out agreements that resulted in new ways of using the Poudre’s water – still essential to life and the economy in its vicinity – in ways that reflected the values of the changing population. Diverting the Poudre’s water into canals and reservoirs and applying the river’s water to agricultural, municipal, industrial, environmental, and recreational uses altered the river, the landscape, and the population around it. This history of the Cache la Poudre’s water delivery system explores how people changed the river and then adapted to the unintended consequences of their interference. Some of these consequences included evaporation, transpiration, alkalinity, overuse, floods, weeds, and pests. The work of environmental historians influenced this manuscript. Environmental historians study the relationship between humans and nature and how particular environments shape human history. As the professor, naturalist, and environmental ethicist Aldo Leopold believed, culture is the result of the raw materials that humans have to work with. The types of foods people eat, the homes they build, the clothes they wear, their customs, laws, and economy reflect what their environment provides them. Environmental historians study the interaction between humans and nature and how this produces a hybrid landscape and society. Environmental historian Donald Worster wrote: As societies try to remake nature, they remake themselves, without ever really escaping natural influences. In this spiral of history the people are by no means like helpless passengers of a boat that is being tossed this way and that in a storm; there are options open to them at every point. But always they must respond to nature, then fit themselves to their response. And Mark Fiege, professor of environmental history at Colorado State University, asserts that often “people only modify something in the biophysical environment that was already there. In turn, nature changes what humans build, often in unanticipated ways.” The reciprocal relationship between humans and nature creates a new environment and society.1 7 The Cache la Poudre’s history exposes the broader narrative of water’s role in the American West. This river is not well known to those outside of northern Colorado; yet, it is essential to life in its vicinity. The Poudre’s existence made settlement possible in what was an inhospitable but, ultimately, transformable environment. The formation of the river’s water delivery system demonstrated nineteenth century attitudes towards

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