 Aizan Longmont, offering a diversity of topics about our community that will inform and entertain you. We invite you to sit back and enjoy this edition of Aizan Longmont. Thank you for joining the Niewad Historical Society's Now and Then lecture series. We're honored to have Bob Krafazi with us this evening, and Leonard will introduce him. Thank you again. I hope you enjoy the video. Welcome. I met Bob through a mutual friend when we were hiking in southern Colorado. When we hit on the topic of ditches in the Niewad area, I quickly realized he knows a lot about it. Bob has previously worked as an environmental planner for the Denver Water and served for many years as the water resources administrator for the city of Boulder, open space and mountain parks. He served on 11 ditch companies and was president of several. From his intellectual curiosity and interaction with a lot of people who've had lifetimes of knowledge of water in the West, Bob has become a well-known source for facts, history and stories. His education includes master's degrees in geology and environmental science. That in 25 years of water resource management make him ideal for understanding and lecturing about this history. Bob has written a very good book about how the appropriation and development of water and repairing resources in Colorado has changed the face of the front range. An area that was once a desert is now an irrigated oasis suitable for habitation and supporting millions of people. The title is A Land Made from Water, and it's a thorough description of how continent-wide factors resulting from the Western expansion of the U.S. impacted this small part of the nation, yet resulted in law and politics that have affected the U.S.A. forever more. This book is very enjoyable reading. It's not a dry recitation of the history of water law. It's a wide-ranging storytelling about the people, the land and the water. You can understand that Bob is eminently qualified to give this lecture for the Niawatt Historical Society. We are fortunate that he has taken the time. Please sit back and enjoy this informative and engaging lecture from Desert Toasis, A Land Made from Water. Thank you very much for the very nice introduction. I appreciate being here. I enjoy talking about water, and this is a community that I really like. Left-hand ditch company has its offices just around the corner here. I've been in ditch meetings in this very building, so this is like home turf for me. So I'm going to enjoy being here this evening. What I'll talk about tonight is some of the stuff that is in my book, but a little bit more and slightly different from what Leonard described. And the title of the presentation tonight is From Desert To Oasis, A Landscape of Change. And what I'll be going over is what I would say is my main thesis here is that we can get a better sense of Colorado's development by seeing it from the long-term perspective of how people have interacted with the environment and how the environment has impacted the decisions that people make. It's all intertwined, and a lot of the decision-making that people have made over the last 150 years is a response to the environment that we have here. So I'll start a little bit with the course of development, but I'll tell you a little bit about this drawing here first because it's a pretty cool one. A fellow by the name of Elliot was a member of the Hayden Expedition, and for those of you who are not familiar with the Hayden Expedition, Vandermeer Hayden, they are some of the federal geologists and surveyors that explored the West with part of the four great American surveys of the 19th century. There was the Hayden Survey, Powell's famous survey, King and Wheeler. The Hayden Survey is probably best known for discovering or rather describing the geysers and some of the other features in the Yellowstone Basin. But a fewer people realized that they came down and spent a lot of time on the front range, and these drawings by Elliot are of this area. If you take a look at this drawing, you'll see Haystack Butte over there on the far right, and this was drawn in 1869 and before any photographs of the area are known. So this is one of the few images to show what the left-hand area looked like before there was really any development. But first, let's set the stage a little bit. Before even the white men came on the scene, we had the Native Americans, and they had been here for arguably 10,000 to 17,000 years, somewhere in that range. They found the Mahaffey catch up in Chautauqua Park several years ago that goes back to the late Pleistocene, and they had these points that are of Clovis-type points, had camel, horse, other megafauna that were then made extinct in North America. So going back that far, we had people changing the landscape and actively doing things out here on the front range, and so they were burning, they were hunting, they were manipulating the land for many thousands of years. We just don't have a written record of that, so it's hard to understand all of the changes that they brought. Of course later on, you had Cortez coming into Mexico, and then in 1540 and 41, Coronado came up the Rio Grande to New Mexico, and then had their epic journey across the high plains, and they ended up roughly where Omaha is today, near the mouth of the Platte and Mississippi, Missouri rivers. And they brought about change, the Hispanic people, they had their water management systems, eventually horses escaped, so that gave rise to the plains in the Enhorse culture and all of that. So we had a lot of things going on through those centuries where our riparian system in front range started to change in response to these human factors. By around the early 19th century, we started to have many of the bird traders come into the Boulder Valley, into the front range. Saran St. Vrain is probably the best known. He was part of the St. Vrain and Bentz Enterprise. They built Bentz Fort down on the Arkansas, and St. Vrain's Fort at the mouth of the St. Vrain Creek after Saran and the Platte River, South Platte River. And that was an enterprise working through the 1830s, and they were collecting furs from the various trappers and sending them back east or via Bentz Fort. They were also getting furs from the Indians in trade, and there were a lot of trading going on along the Platte River. We had Fort Lupton and some of the other forts that were taking the various peltries and hides that were being collected here and then sending them east. So that was part of the modifications that started to occur. We don't usually think of the front range as being one of those centers for the fur trade because it was so early. A lot of the action moved to the northwest up onto the Green River and Columbia later, but this area was heavily trapped in the early 19th century. We also had a lot of buffalo when John C. Fremont came through Bentz Fort. They discussed how many buffalo were on the high plains here. Those animals started to get trapped out. From here, east at Nywat, there were herds of buffalo as far as the eye could see, heading out onto the high plains. Fremont came up the South Platte again through St. Vrain Fort and where the REI story is in downtown Denver today, they were attacked by a grizzly bear. So it's a really fascinating story about how this was a, for the white men at least, a wilderness. It was pretty rugged terrain. There were wolves, there were grizzly bears, there were buffalo and a lot of other megafauna here. Of course, once the whites got here, they started to hunt a lot of this stuff out very judiciously and that started to change the land and water resources from how we see it today. So here's a couple of slides. Fort Lupton on the South Platte River, Bentz Fort, just to kind of illustrate that. Those structures still stand. There were other forts along the way and other kinds of activities occurring here. Now, one of the big changes that happened, as you all know, I'm sure, in the audience here, we had the Gold Rush that made Colorado famous. 1858 on the Platte River, South Platte River in Denver, they started to find some gold and then they went up on Clear Creek and found the first big place of deposits there. Within a few months, they were finding gold in the foothills up here near Gold Hill. So the rush was on and many, many people started to go up into the foothills to get the gold. But what was also occurring is, is that a lot of people were coming in and realizing that the money to be made wasn't necessarily in gold, but it was in supplying the miners that were up in the mountains. And that wasn't just pots and pans and mining equipment. They needed food. They needed mules to carry ore and to work the mines. And those mules needed hay. And so some of the earliest settlers in Boulder Valley were actually collecting hay and sending it up to Gold Hill and up to Central City. So there was a lot going on there. Very rapidly, we saw some of the creeks get settled. 1859 Boulder Creek, Left Hand Creek in 1860 were the first home setters. Coal Creek 1859, South Boulder Creek 1860. So very rapidly, they started to create farms in the bottom lands along the South Platte and then up into these various tributaries like Boulder Creek and so on. I have a couple of photos here. You can see the McGinn Homestead. They were amongst the first people on South Boulder Creek to build ditches. And as you can see, it was a log cabin. Very, very rugged living back then. The other photo is of the headgated Howard Ditch, which is near South Boulder Road and South Boulder Creek. You could go out there today and see that. If you were to go out there now, all you'd see is homes and trees and that sort of thing. It's in the south part of Boulder. Now, here's the earliest known map that I am aware of of Boulder. And this one was made around 1863. And it was created by the general land office, the precursor to the Bureau of Land Management. And they went around this area mapping so that they could identify resources and also record land claims. So this was before the land was even ceded to the United States by the Indian treaties. So anybody out here at this time were squatting on Indian land, yet the government did come out here and start to map and identify features and things like that. And what you could see is this is Boulder Creek. And on the west side, the left, you could see the town site for the city of Boulder. And there are various channels of South Boulder Creek. And I'll be getting back to that. I just wanted to point that out. You'll see the main channel of, and it's called North Boulder Creek. We just call it Boulder Creek today. But then there's a little channel just to the north of that that becomes important in the story a little later. And that's because they were starting to build ditches and people wanted to save in labor. So rather than just dig a ditch, they would use the various side channels or meander loops of the various creeks to start their ditches. If we could save them a half a mile of digging, well, that was a lot of labor. So they were doing that. And that was one of the ways that they were interacting with the environment and the environment was affecting their decision making. So they started in the bottom lands. They started claiming land in the bottom lands, like the Wellman Brothers and some of the other families that were acquiring land. And they started to make claims all the way out to where Longmont is today, all along the creek. Within just a few years, all the good bottom lands were taken. There were a lot of ditches already being constructed along the bottom lands. And they started to realize that there was a limit for development unless something else could be done. So a couple of the settlers started to think, hey, you know, we're building these ditches. The creek has a certain gradient. And if we build a ditch that has a lesser gradient, you could wind a ditch along until it gets to the top of these terraces that we have around here. So that's exactly what they did. The fellow that built the South Boulder and Bear Creek ditch is probably the first one to have done that. But in short order, other people started to dig ditches off onto the terraces. Here is a photograph of the construction of Davidson ditch when they were building it out onto the terraces there. Marshall is out in the background of this picture. So this gets really important for Western development in general, because in this area was the first time that people started to build ditches and bring them out onto the terraces to irrigate land. And William Davidson here was in the forefront of that for being one of the great entrepreneurs of the 19th century because he realized that if he dug a ditch and brought it out onto one of the terraces but bought the land out there first, he could have a great opportunity for a real estate development. And if you build a ditch, you can have land irrigated and then start selling irrigable parcels to prospective immigrants. You can build a ditch for $14,000 like he did, market the shares for $28,000 and then start selling the land that he got for $1.50 an acre for a couple of hundred dollars an acre and start selling land. So they started to buy land and couple that with ditch development. Right after he did this, the farmer's ditch in North Boulder was built and they brought water out to North Boulder to do that. And so the race was on to get land up on these terraces and start developing it for prospective farmers. Within a few years, all of the good terraces near the mouth of the canyon were taken. And as part of this progression from bottom lands to terraces, in order to get to further outlands, they had to start building the ditches further and further up into the high country. Now if you think about the logic of building ditches, it's sure a lot easier to do it out on the bottom lands where it's flat and then just dig a ditch there. You come a little closer to the mouth of the canyon and then you move it along and you can get it onto the terraces there. Well, Silver Lake Ditch, and we have Jim Snow in the audience here tonight, knowingly looking at this photograph. This is the construction of Silver Lake Ditch in about 1890. And if anybody is familiar with Boulder Canyon, you go up towards Elephant Butchers, you'll see a pipeline snaking along the side of the hill and that's the Silver Lake Ditch as it is today. But in 1890, there were several people that were starting to build this entrepreneurial ditch company and James P. Maxwell was the principal in this and he became an interesting guy at part of the water development story in the United States. He built the ditch, but he also built several reservoirs in what later became the Boulder Watershed Silver Lake reservoir. And then out at the end of the ditch, Mesa Reservoir. And so by building reservoirs in the watershed up in the high country and then another reservoir down at the end of the ditch, he could actually have a ditch system where you're coordinating the water use up and down the ditch and distributing it. One of the things that he did that was different from the other ditches is rather than selling the land, which he did some of that, but they mostly kept the shares of water and leased them to prospective farmers over long-term leases. So that was a slightly different thing. So now we have a progression that goes from the bottom lands to the terraces and up into the foothills. Well, around the same time and actually in the early 1860s, one of the things that occurred was they're starting to appropriate this water. And as more people started to appropriate water, they started to realize that by late August, early August at some times, there was insufficient water to bring your food crops to fruition. You couldn't grow a tomato if there wasn't any water in August. So they started to build artificial lakes. And the first artificial lake was down in what's now Westminster over there at Church Lake, I believe it is. The second lake that was built in the Denver metropolitan area was Pancost Reservoir in 1863. And that's out where the Balmont Power Plant is today. They've enlarged those lakes over the years. So the original Pancost Reservoir is underwater under other lakes. But anyhow, Pancost built a little ditch from South Boulder Creek and started to move water out onto his reservoir. They put sunfish in there and they were harvesting those and selling those to miners. They were also irrigating and building a pretty good livelihood. So as the water development started to progress, they realized, okay, we can start building these artificial lakes, which of course we know as reservoirs today. And as time went on, they started to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Well, back to the ditches. So as they started to march up the canyons to look for more water, people started to think, hey, why don't we take water from the west slope? That's not very developed. And so some of the very first transcontinental diversions were proposed in this area. The first trans basin diversion was the Left Hand Ditch Company. And that brought water from South St. Rain River over to Jim Creek, which was into Left Hand Creek. And that was in 1863. Years later, there were some proposals to bring ditches across the Continental Divide. Not much occurred. Then the Grand Ditch was built in the 1890s in what's now Rocky Mountain National Park. They brought headwaters of the Colorado over to the front range. And then up on the top of South Boulder Creek, they started to build what's now known as the Moffitt Tunnel. And what they did there is Moffitt wanted to build a railroad tunnel through the mountains. Of course, they have the Rollins Pass is where the railroad occurred. And it was snowing in in the winter. It was very hard operationally for a railroad. And so they built the Moffitt Tunnel. But before they built the railroad tunnel, they built the pilot bore of the railroad tunnel. That was 12 feet in diameter. It comes out over at what's now Winter Park. And Denver, the city of Denver, purchased the rights to run water through that. And that's when they started to divert water out of the Frasier base and down to Denver through the Moffitt Tunnel. And they took it off of South Boulder Creek and then moved it down to Denver. So that was in the 1920s. And here's a photograph of the construction of the tunnel. Then a little later, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which was a federal program run by the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Conservancy District, they started to also look at projects to divert Colorado river water over to the front range. And so they built Grand Lake and the reservoirs there. A tunnel, the Alva Bee Adams Tunnel under the Continental Divide underneath Rocky Mountain National Park to go over towards Horsetooth Reservoir. And then they started to distribute that water down the South Platte. The Boulder Feeder Canal, which leads into Boulder Reservoir, was constructed in the 50s to take Colorado River water down to Boulder. And an extension of that canal goes all the way out to Brighton. So that was a very big project that allowed further development in the front range, including here near Nye Wad and Longmont. So there were a lot of things going on there. Initially it was private capital that was building these things. The pioneer ditches that were being done by individuals. By the time you had Davidson come along, he started to raise capital so that they could hire people to build ditches. And so there was a progression there. They were getting bigger and bigger ditches. It started to require more and more capital. Before long, they started to have stock sales where they were selling shares to people in the East Coast in as far away as England. The English company up on near Fort Collins still called that because they had raised money from European capitals. So there is money that was good entrepreneurial money was coming in. Initially also, like Pankost, he was just doing it on his own. But before long to build a reservoir, the money was starting to get pretty big. And Stanley Reservoir is an example of that. That was private capital. That Stanley Reservoir is down in what's now Arvada. And you can see they had a little railroad being built there and they were bringing in and filling in. Long story there, some of the people that helped design the Panama Canal were involved with the design of Stanley Lake. So there was some really interesting things going on there. Colorado was a real hotbed for innovation for ditches and reservoirs. But eventually the cost to build reservoirs started to get beyond what even private capital can do. And that's when in the late 19th century, John Wesley Powell had encouraged that the United States get into reclamation. Shortly after he died, the United States passed the Newlands Act, which created the Bureau of Reclamation. So the federal government started to get into ditch and reservoir construction big time. That's how the Bureau of Reclamation came about. But also you had municipalities getting into the act as well. Here's a photograph of gross reservoir, which was constructed in 1950. And that was built by the Denver Water Board to bring water over to Denver. So now that they had them off the tunnel, they then had a 41,000-acre-foot reservoir up there in the mountains, west of Boulder, that they could store that water in and then they could divert it out and bring it down to Denver. So that accounts for about 25% of the city of Denver's water supply today. So it's a very important structure. Anyhow, they were doing this progression from small projects to big from the plains to the mountains and so on. And that's what this slide encapsulates. They started at the bottom lands, then you got into the close in reservoirs, I mean terraces. Then you started to do little reservoirs, started to go further up into the mountains. Eventually you had corporate ditches, then you had trans-basin diversions, then reclamation and municipal projects. So it's a juggernaut of water development that occurred. There was a lot more going on between that and just water development, because water development was inextricably tied with all of the other kind of activities that was occurring on the front range. We had railroads, we had timber extraction, we had agriculture, we had coal mining. And all of that was part of Colorado's early economy. Here is a Davidson stock certificate that incorporates all of those things in one stock certificate. And I love it for that because what you have here is, if you look where it says Davidson Coal and Mining Company, and Davidson crossed it out and said Davidson Ditch. So he took the stock certificate from his mining company and crossed it out and put it as a ditch company. So here you have the coal linking with the water and agriculture. And if you look to see who the owner of that stock certificate is and squint a bit, you'll see it's William A.H. Loveland, who founded the town of Loveland. And of course, for those of you that know a little bit about Loveland, he was involved with the railroad construction. And he was also one of General Palmer's early investors for the coal mines in southern Colorado and for the coal mining in this area as well. So here you have encapsulated in one stock certificate the early Colorado economy. And so there's a real story in that if you look through these things. So I mentioned, you know, the ditches going from small ditches to big affairs. Many aspects of the early Colorado economy mimic that. Labor went from being pretty specialized, you know, you're building your own ditch and all of that. But eventually it became very specialized. Instead of being a yeoman farmer, you started to become a farmer that was growing commodity crops. Instead of being a placer miner, suddenly you were a hired laborer at a gold mine. And so the nature of the labor force in Colorado shifted as well with this development. Here's an example of that, Russell Gulch, which was where they found the first gold up on Clear Creek. A lot of individuals doing some placer mining in flumes. You see one of these old wooden flumes. And by around 1890, 1900, they're doing a high velocity hoses to wash down whole hillsides with hydraulic mining. And this was a huge industrialized affair beyond the ability of individual miners. So it was a real shift. By this point in time, you couldn't, it didn't pay to be an individual miner. You had to be part of a mining company to succeed. And then by the 1940s, they were into hard rock mining. So that continued that progression as well. Now I'm going to shift a little bit and talk about some of the early history. I talked about appropriation. And early on I talked a little bit about the Native Americans and how they were here. And I really didn't get into this piece of history and it's one of the darker aspects in my view of Colorado history. And that is when the first settlers came to this area, late 1850s, early 1860s. This was Indian land. The Fort Laramie Treaty had recognized that from the North Platte River down to the Arkansas that it would be the land of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe forever. Then they discovered gold and people came in and started to dig the mines and create the farms. Morris Coffin, who had a farm out on St. Frank Creek east of Longmont, had reminiscences that he published in the early 1900s and those are really interesting reads. And one of the things he pointed out at that time is, of course, the first settlers in this whole region were squatters on Indian lands. They knew it. They were very aware that this history, that this was Indian land titled lands. And so if they wanted to secure title to their farms and ditches and mineral resources and trees, they had to do something about the Indians. Of course, the Indians saw it as their homeland and where they wanted to be. But what happened was in 1864, Governor Evans, our second territorial governor, authorized the raising of the United States Cavalry and granted and part of his proclamation that they keep all plunder taken from the Indians. And the fellow that became in charge of that group was Colonel John Shivington. And there were various units raised up and down the front range from St. Frank Creek, Left Hand Creek, the Boulder Creek, and they went and joined Shivington's unit at Sand Creek. I'll relate a very, very sad experience for me. When I first got on to the Anderson Ditch Board, I was asked to be on that board in the first season out there. We came down and walked along the Anderson Ditch and walked into Columbia Cemetery. And out there along on Columbia Cemetery is a military tombstone just six feet from the Bank of Anderson Ditch. And on the bank, it's right there, Jonah Anderson, who's the guy that founded Anderson Ditch. Well, I'm looking at it and I had just finished reading Elliot West's wonderful book about the Gold Rush. And I had been aware of the Sand Creek Massacre. And so when I looked at his tombstone, I saw a third Colorado cavalry and I knew immediately, my goodness, this guy was part of the Shivington campaign against the Indians. And so it struck me and it struck me hard. And here I am on a ditch board who was founded by somebody who had murdered Indians at the worst massacre perhaps in the United States history of Indian affairs. So that was just a really hard thing to grapple with. But that really set me in a decade-along interest to kind of research this grim history and understand it a little bit more. So what I went out and I got lists of the members of the various units for the various Shivington units that were involved with the massacre. And I started to compare them against the founders of various ditch companies in Boulder and Left Hand Valley. And I found that to my horror that many of the people who founded the ditches in Boulder were also in one way or another involved with the massacre. Donna Anderson, Green, who founded Green Ditch. David Nichols was involved with one of the ditches, the Boulder and White Rock. Arbeth Knott, who had been up here on Left Hand Ditch, many of these and many, many more were involved. They trained out near 63rd and Boulder Creek. They had a little fort there and went out to there. Now, when I went out to Sand Creek, I learned that descendants of Jonah Anderson had repatriated a scalp that he had taken at the massacre. And it was buried out there in the Indian cemetery. So it was really an awful thing. Some of the members from these units had taken scalps and traded them for shoes in Denver. So it was, you know, just a grim, grim experience. What they did, though, was is moving on because I know it's a little harsh talking about that. What they did was is they converted land that was of Indian title into the lands that we see as Colorado. Fort Laramie Treaty, 1851. Fort Wise, which allowed some of the mines to be part of, you know, to be utilized. The Pacific Railway Act of July 1, 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, made it the United States policy to extinguish titles to the Indians along railroad lands. And that's right there in the act. The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. Medicine Lodge Treaty was pretty critical because that's the one that the Indians finally ceded all the land of northeastern Colorado to the federal government. Now remember, John Evans had been the territorial governor. And lo and behold, he becomes a railroad man. He was a railroad man. And within two years of that land being transferred to the federal government, some of the railroads, the Denver Pacific, which he was an owner in, got these big railroad grants. So as soon as the railroad lands moved over to the private sector, some of the oligarchs of early Colorado were able to then get title to the lands that were formerly Indian lands. And so it goes. Now here's the Kansas Pacific Railway showing all of that land. Now you may be wondering, why am I showing you this as part of a talk about water? Well, it's really interesting because what they did was is they took the land that was Indian land and then put it into either private hands directly or via the railroads. The railroads then had this cornucopia of land in eastern Colorado that they then started to do what William Davidson did is they started to build large ditches and then sell that land and water to the various farmers that were coming out. So that's where all of the big development out near Fort Lupton and Fort Morgan and all of that on the high plains really took off after these privatizations of land. Longmont was land that had been privatized this way, Greeley Colony as well. So a lot of the things that we have here were occurring at that time. Our riparian resources weren't just impacted by the ditches, but there was a huge effort to take trees out of the high country. They were doing tie drives in these mountains. Up in Wyoming, it really happened in a big way to get ties and what I mean by ties is railroad ties. They were bringing those down and using that to construct the railroads. On South Boulder Creek and in the mountains west of here, they were actively taking ties out and one of the big people that were involved with that in fact where he made a lot of his money was Moffitt. He made some of his early money not building the railroad, well not owning the railroad, but supplying the railroad ties to the railroad and so they were taking that out. And here's a photograph of them throwing logs in one of the front range streams to bring it down to the front. Here's a photograph of one of the ties, tie drives, and you can see all of that lumber coming down from the mountains. And if anyone recognizes those hills, I've been trying to figure out which hills those are. So if you see that and you recognize it, I'd love to go back to that spot and try and take a photograph of that sometime. So by the late 19th century, 1883, what was the agriculture department had done a survey of lumber resources around Colorado. And they found that between one third to three quarters of all trees in Larimer, Boulder, Gilpin, Clear Creek, Jefferson, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont Lake, Park and Chaffee counties had been removed. So the gold rush was in 1859 and by 1883 this enormous amount of lumber had been taken for railroad ties, for fence posts, for making coke, for charcoal, for building the homes and such. So the whole watersheds in the west of here started to transform. 1874, another thing occurred that had major implications for the transformation of the landscape including the riparian zones. Because with the introduction of barbed wire, you could now have cheap fences that could impose the Cartesian order of township range in sections, the Jeffersonian coordinate system, the Cartesian coordinate system of land ownership onto Colorado. And so instead of just having cattle wander where they would go, they would be confined to different sections and so on. And so that imprinted changes on the landscape and land and water resources as another layer of the progression of change that we did here. Moving on again, one of the things that was kind of a salient feature in 19th century America was the commodification of nature. Think of pork bellies and grain silos of the Midwest. That was all pork belly futures and grain, that was something that they came up with in order to have commodity markets in Chicago in order to move these commodities and take the bounty of the Great Plains and move it to the east. Hides was another one. So all of these various natural products, they were commodifying. But how do you commodify water? If you want to commodify water, you have to measure it. A pork belly is a pig. If you have 100 pork bellies, you know what that represents. If you have certain grain qualities, you can measure that in cubic feet. Water is an elusive thing. So there was a big need developed in the late 19th century for figuring out how do you measure the amounts of water that are moving down these creeks. And so there were a lot of early devices that started to get invented and ideas from Europe that were brought in to measure water so that you can say, oh, we have this amount of water for our water right, and if you want to buy and sell it, you have to be able to quantify it. So they had these early devices that they were using. It wasn't until the first third of the 20th century when that became really refined with the work of Ralph Parchel. He was an engineering professor up at CSU, and he invented this particular flume that was coupled with a recorder device. So this flume, the only variable in there was the height of the water in the flume. And then he had a little drum rotating around, and so you could measure water flowing through time. And so you can figure out how many acre feet per day are going through your structure, and now you can start accurately measuring water. And then water rights administration became a lot more rational, and it became easier to buy and sell water rights. So water was finally a well commodified product. Mentioned a little bit of this, but as water became a commodity, we also had the commodification of our agriculture into the early 20th century with the sugar beets. That was a commodity product. At one point people were growing their food for themselves or for the mines, but once we had the railroads coming into Boulder and Longmont, you could have these big farms that were growing sugar beets and exporting that to the east coast or Chicago. The railroads started to monopolize the transport of these commodity products, and so in response to that you had buildings such as the one we're in get constructed. The Grange Halls, they were an agrarian labor union that was put up to make all these various Grange Halls around the northern front range and into other states to organize farmers so that they could have a way of pushing back against the railroads in terms of getting money for the right amounts for their transportation. So you had these radicalization of the farmers so that they would get paid appropriate amounts of money for their product. And so that was a little known piece of the Colorado puzzle as well. We had these radical farmers doing things like building co-ops, which some would call socialistic today, but they had these various grain co-ops, which were just coordination between multiple farmers so that they could push back against other corporate interests and be able to make a living. So in the mid to late 19th century, Colorado also became an epicenter for hydraulic engineering expertise. James P. Maxwell, our friend that built the Silver Lake Ditch, he went on to become one of the state engineers for the state of Colorado. He wound up mapping the town of Steamboat Springs. He was really well known amongst water engineers. His photograph was even on issue one of irrigation age, Smith's famous publication that publicized irrigation in the western United States. So he became very famous. L. Wood Mead was a young guy in the 1880s. I don't know if you know who L. Wood was. He started out measuring ditches for the state engineer on St. Frank Creek up north, up near Fort Collins on Boulder and South Boulder creeks. And he saw how people were managing water here. And then he eventually got a job as the state engineer in Wyoming. And he brought the prior appropriation system up to Wyoming and that got into their constitution. So they adopted prior appropriation. L. Wood then went on to become the head of the United States Bureau of Reclamation. And there's a little knight named after him out in Nevada called Lake Mead. And that was Colorado Boy that got started here in the front range. Now another thing that occurred in the late 19th century, we had all of these great progress with the invention of the light bulb and Tesla with the dynamo and all of that. So all of these things started to happen. They figured out how to electrify the east coast by having dynamos running at some of the big waterfalls, Niagara Falls, and so on. Well, they started to adopt that technology and do that in Colorado. So in the early 1900s, Barker Dam got constructed. Shoshone out on the Colorado River near Glenwood Springs. Those were built within a couple of years of each other to generate electricity. And so we went from just using water for agriculture in cities to now these industrial uses where we're diverting water out and generating electricity. Here's the Boulder Canyon Hydroelectric Project. This is where they bring water down to the power plant in the canyon out of Barker Reservoir. And this is it under construction. So I'll move on to sort of the last part of my talk and kind of bring some of these ideas together into how we transform Colorado's landscape and looking at all of this stuff. Here's another image from our friend Elliot. And this one is north, six miles north of Boulder. And those of you that know this area might recognize that as Table Mountain where the radio antennas are is that little platform. And this was roughly drawn where Potato Hill is up in that area looking south. And so, you know, there's nice, nice farms and such out of there today. We had this whole program of diverting water and I kind of described how that occurred. Well, that caused major, major changes. One of the things that the Hayden expedition noticed when they came down is that people started to say, you know, once we started to develop here water that used to dry up, these creeks that used to dry up have more water into them in the fall. And Samuel Augie picked up on that idea and said, rain follows the plow. And, you know, if we develop the high plains, we're going to be able to get more and more water coming down because rain follows the plow. Well, to a lot of people's very bitter disappointment, rain does not follow the plow. And they found that out. What we've learned is that once you started to move all of that water out onto those terraces and irrigate, some of it soaks into the ground and then starts flowing back to the creek. And then the creek gets that water and it keeps flowing. What they noticed was is that Boulder Creek, St. Frank Creek, Left Hand Creek, back in the 1860s, those would flow and out east past Port Lupton near Julesburg, the South Platte River went dry. And there are lots of anecdotes and letters and things like that to talk about people digging into the dry bed of the South Platte River during those years. But as time went on, there was more and more water in the tributaries and then finally down into the South Platte where they could actually start diverting water and building the big irrigation systems down there. And the State Engineers Office recognized that. And here's a really cool little chart from the Colorado State Engineer in 1929. Here is a chart and this is miles downstream from Denver. And here are flows in cubic feet per second, which is the number we use for managing, for watching flows. And at Denver, which is about here, there's not a lot of flows. In the 1880s, the flow out near the Colorado State Line had, you know, 5,600 CFS in it in the late spring. By the 1880s, the flow had consistently gone up to 800 or more CFS. By 1900, 1,100 cubic feet per second. By the 1920s, 1,400 cubic feet per second. And that's because as we reordered the hydrology in the area, that water, again, going out onto the terraces, and it takes time for it to soak back and get back to the channel. So this water that had come down really fast and dissipated was now in the channel of the South Platte, longer and further out east. And so that had major impacts on how the river looked. So here's a photograph from 1930 where Ralph Parcell, the engineer who came up with the measuring device, estimated that nearly one million acre feet of return flows were reaching the lower part of the South Platte that hadn't been available before. And so all of that water development that occurred down there was because of that. A lot of the early settlers, and this is just something important to think about, they didn't just build farms going up the South Platte and then to the foothills. They left eastern Nebraska and came all the way across the arid lands to the foothills and then settled. And then they started settling going back down the river. And as the ditches developed, it allowed them to start settling further and further east rather than coming up the river because there simply wasn't water in those creeks earlier. Here's a photograph down in Central Nebraska on the main platte in 1866 right around when the Union Pacific Railroad was being constructed. And I love this photo because here's a fellow sitting out there contemplating the South Platte River and behind him is a buffalo skull and you get a sense of what is going on out there. Well, move up a few years in time and here's an air photo of Cozad, Nebraska in 1979. In the 1860s, I'll jump back. 1860s it was just sand a mile across a couple of inches deep water. But because we had so changed the hydrology all the way throughout the watershed, a riparian forest was able to develop that came all the way up the platte and South Platte rivers up to where we are today. A lot of eastern United States species could migrate now up the river. It was no longer this vibrated stream but a narrow channel that was lined with trees. So really dramatic change. And then here is a bleak aerial photo of that same area in 2017. It's thinned out a little bit since then but still you have this braided channel but it's really heavily vegetated and this is because of all of the cumulative changes that we've done to the watershed since the gold rush essentially. Very close to the end here. I have to talk about Left Hand Ditch Company because that's here in NYWAT and is really one of the key things. 1866, the ditch itself began in 1863 and that's the ditch that's up west of Ward that takes the water from the South St. Frane over to James Creek. But the company itself wasn't incorporated until 1866. You know, think about it. They need water, they're going to go dig their ditch and then worry about the niceties of organizing a ditch company. So that's what they did. But the ditch itself was originally built three years before they incorporated. And one of the big things that occurred was here in Left Hand Valley was that Morris Coffin, Morris Coffin's brother Rubin had moved to east of Longmont after the Civil War and he noticed that there was a lot of these farms on Left Hand Creek and they were taking water and down where he was they weren't getting water. So they didn't really like that because they were being shut out. So Rubin and a number of his buddies got it in their mind that they would ride up to the high country and tear out the diversion dam for Left Hand Ditch. So they did that. And it was a dry year, I think it was 1878. They went up to the mountains, tore out the diversion dam and the Left Hand Ditch company noticed the day later that they didn't have any water and so they kind of freaked out and said there's something going on here and they realized that Coffin and his buddies had torn out the diversion dam. So they got quite upset and they hired an attorney at a boulder called Richard Whiteley. And he was an interesting guy. He was an ex-Confederate army officer from Georgia who left Georgia and came to Colorado and got a law degree and they hired him to sue Coffin and those guys for stealing their water. So they did that and they had a trial in Boulder. Coffin and his friends hired a gentleman out of Longmont who had lost his arm at Appomattox. So you had a little bit of a north-south kind of thing going on with the attorneys. Anyhow, the Left Hand Ditch company prevailed and the Coffin people appealed the case to the Colorado Supreme Court. And Chief Justice Albert, you've heard of Albert maybe, one of the peaks in Colorado. He was the son-in-law of one of the earliest Colorado governors and he ended up as the State Supreme Court Justice. And he realized, it was kind of interesting, as one of the oligarchs in a sense, one of the early power players, he realized that if they allowed water to be used as it had been in the East Coast, which was you can develop water rights based on riparian ownership. So if you had land along the river and diverted water only for that, you could essentially shut down all development in Colorado. So he realized that it would be very important for Colorado's development to have an anti-corporate populist ruling that would recognize a wide as possible use of water for the state. So he had an anti-corporate ruling. It had wide distribution of water. It affirmed that prior appropriation was the guiding doctrine in Colorado water law, and that in turn recognized the principle of first in time, first in right. So that's where you get your ditch priorities from. It recognized the right to move water away from the stream, which included from river basin to river basin. And it recognized that the location of use for water is not dependent on stream location. So there's very major things. That court case got replicated in the entire western United States and is the system of prior appropriation that happens all around the west, and all of that happened here in the left hand valley first. So it's really a rather pretty cool thing historically that that little legacy is part of our legacy here in the left hand valley. Thank you. I wrote a book, if anyone is interested, the University Press of Colorado was good enough to publish it for me, and you can find copies of this at the Boulder bookstore. And I plugged them because they're our local bookstore. They have copies of it there in stock. You can also find it on Amazon if you like to go that route and don't want to be out in public or directly through the University Press of Colorado. And this goes over a lot of the things that I talked about, but in a little greater detail and other stories and things like that about how water is run. So if you enjoyed what I spoke about tonight, you might enjoy the book. Thank you. Very nice presentation, Bob. I sure appreciate it. I'm curious, how many ditches are there in Boulder County? I did a count once and I came up with something like 200 or so incorporated ditches. But there's a lot more than that and I'm really not sure because there's a lot of unincorporated ditches as well. There's the main ditches, you know, like our Silver Lake ditch, your left-hand ditch, which are the slightly bigger ones. But then there were a lot of other smaller ditches that got constructed. Many of those are no longer in existence. There were ditches that were built for some of the mining operations, the sluicing operations, and they had made claims there. There were other ditches that were built to run some of the timber down to the creeks. So they actually had flume companies. And if you go up into the high country and are walking around, you'll see pieces of these things. Some of those had water rights, others did not. So there are a lot of those abandoned structures that are around Boulder Valley. Then there were also a whole series of seepage ditches that got claimed. So after the main ditches were appropriated, people, you know, and they were irrigating, suddenly these springs would pop up and dry gulches. And someone would figure out, oh, hey, I could make a claim on that. And so these secondary ditches as well started to get built. And they had an adjudication back in the 1880s, and most of the early original pioneer, so-called pioneer, and some of the earliest corporate ditches were adjudicated then. But then in the early 1900s, a lot more of these small, you know, quarter-mile little seepage ditches got claimed. And there are dozens and dozens of those around. I really don't know the total number. Classic front-range development. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all of these kind of things that, you know, progress. It's really interesting how a lot of that occurred. You know, as part of that, of course, these little ditches were actually really rather important for a lot of small farms. Some of them are still in use today. Some of them have really unique water rights because they were seepage ditches and away from the main creeks. There are a few decrees that say that they're not tributary to a creek. And so they can run outside of the prior appropriation system because they didn't think they were part of the regular creek. And so there's some interesting things with that as well that go on. So, yeah, there's quite a bit of stuff out there. Very good. Thank you. Sure. Thanks very much. Bob, that's an awesome presentation. It's so interesting. I have been told in Niawat here that it has a high water table. And I don't know if it's unusually high, but since you talked about the incredible changes of hydrology, I wonder if how much ditches in Niawat are contributing to that water table? I would have to look at a specific area, but I think that really our water table is generally higher after 150 years of use. So, yeah, there's a lot of irrigation that's gone on and it's elevated the water table. You also see some fluctuations. I can tell a story on Boulder Creek. One year when I was working for the city, a person wanted to build a house downhill from a ditch. And I was out there, you know, we were talking about it. They had to put a little bridge over the ditch and I was out there with them and they said, oh, we're going to put in a basement. And I said, did you do a test bore? And they said, yeah, we did a test bore. There's no water there. And I said, when did you do a test bore? And they said, oh, well, back in January, they said, well, you know, tell you what, you did the test bore in July and then decide whether or not you want to put a basement in. And sure enough, the owner was standing there and they heard that and they did do a test bore in July and they called back and said, well, there's a really high water table here in the summer. And that's because these ditches naturally seep. Now, an interesting thing too about that is under state law, that natural seepage out of ditches, you really can't sue a ditch company for that. That's a natural process. And many, many court cases with some seepage that have caused some damage to homes. If it's natural seepage, it's not negligence from the ditch company. After all, the ditch company was there back in the 1860s before the United States government even on the land. A lot of these people were squatting on Indian land. So, you know, putting a house there 150 years or so later, they should know that there's this seepage present. However, if you operate a ditch and the ditch bank blows out because of negligence and fails catastrophically, that is indeed negligence. And when that happens, the ditch companies are found negligent. So there's this interesting thing that goes on between seepage and ditch bank failure and all of this other stuff. I think the ideas around that, like that, management of ditch banks and easements is what's put more water attorneys' kids through college than almost any other water issue. Wow. It's so complicated. In Iowa, we get our water, our drinking water, and water from a left-hand ditch company. Water district. Water district. Okay. So from what you said earlier, it sounds like we're getting drinking water from the Frazier Basin and through that diversion of Grand Lake. Well, you all clarify that a little bit. So the Moffitt tunnel is the upper Frazier. Okay. And that goes down to Denver. And then you have the Alva B Adams tunnel, which takes Colorado River water, and that provides it over to the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. So they run water out the left-hand water district. It shares what they call units in the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. So they're able to utilize Colorado River water within this area as part of the water district's portfolio of water rights. And there are also farmers here that use that water to irrigate as well. And that's Colorado River water. That's roughly over near Windy Gap, over near Granby. That's roughly where that's coming out of. That's the tunnel that goes under Rocky Mountain National Park. That's correct. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Big system. Long trip for our drinking water. Yeah. Yes, it is. Thank you. Sure. Bob, thank you very much for coming. It was a pleasure and lots of information. I hope you'll enjoy watching the video. This video and any other videos are, there are links on our website, nighwatthistoricalsociety.org. And otherwise you can go to YouTube and type in the search engine of Nighwat Historical Society and there'll be a list of presentations. Thank you very much for our video team and have a good evening. Thank you very much.