the order of priority in which each tract of land in Salt River Valley that had been regularly cultivated down to 1905, or to within five years of that time, was entitled to receive the waters of the Salt River, was determined and established.
This decree is of great significance, for it follows—
that lands which could claim the beneficial use of water upon them at a date not later than 1880, and were and are entitled to their proportionate share of the normal flow of the river up to the amount deemed by the Kent decree to be necessary for their proper irrigation, may be considered as having valuable water rights—rights under which they are reasonably assured of ample water during the entire season for the growing of practically any crop. But the lands upon which the application of water appears to have been of a later date must be content with water at such times or during such periods only as the records show the river to have furnished more than was necessary for the user of prior appropriations. They can only hope to be cultivated intermittently, during the season of high normal flow, and their cultivation likely must be confined to crops requiring the least amount of water. Such a right, it is plain, is of comparatively small value.
In the meantime the effort to cultivate more land and the constant demand for the development of more water had brought the United States into the work of permanent reclamation; for washouts came, droughts followed, fields went to waste, and highly improved farms reverted to their desert state until finally the United States Government was petitioned to intervene and save the valley through the national reclamation law enacted in 1903. The United States took over the larger part of the system of canals; old rights were then swept away or surrendered, and all that remained was the priority of right, later legally established by the “Kent decree,” accruing and attaching to the land itself and not to any individual, either owner or lessee, to the normal flow of Salt River. These rights, to the extent only that they were dependent upon the river’s normal flow, were and are recognized by the United States Reclamation Service, which controls not only the normal flow of the river, but the stored waters of the Roosevelt reservoir. Thus the old monetary values ceased to exist after the advent of the Reclamation Service. This service has indeed proposed that the school lands be denied the right to contract for the stored waters of the Roosevelt reservoir, while individuals have thought that the clause in the reclamation act which provides that “no right to the use of water for land in private ownership shall be sold for a tract exceeding 160 acres to any one landowner,” would exclude the school lands altogether, but this view was rejected in the interpretation of the Secretary of the Interior, and the final recommendation in the matter, as reported in 1909 by the Reclamation Commission, was that school lands, both cultivated and uncultivated, were not then to be considered a part of the project at that time, but might be considered as a new unit dependent upon the
