Arizona Declares Peace

Grudgingly, Arizona last week called off a 22-year-old undeclared war against six sister states. The armistice ended a conflict fought in the heights of the Supreme Court, on the desk-strewn plains of Congress, and on the banks of the Colorado. The weapons in this war had included machine guns, set up in warning but never fired. At stake since 1922 had been the use of the Colorado River, whose waters can make green irrigated empires out of sunbaked cactusland.

The Colorado knifes its way from headwaters down the Grand Canyon and out to eea across seven states. Each state, in land where water is liquid gold, has been anxious to harness its riches. Arizonans have always believed that the river belongs mostly to them. Half of its 1,200-mile journey is within its borders; most of Arizona has no other major water supply. But Arizona, alone of all the states, has never shared the river's wealth. By federal law it could not--until it signed a water-rationing compact with its sisters. Thus last week it was big news all over the west when Arizona at last gave in.

Spilled Water. Many an Arizona political career has skyrocketed on the two-gun contention that the state has been done wrong. Back in 1922 Governor George Wylie Paul Hunt refused to sign the compact. He was re-elected six times, his walrus mustache becoming almost as famous as the Arizona Biltmore. In 1928, and again, in 1935, the Arizona National Guard was called out to keep engineers from putting up Boulder and Parker Dams.

Villain of the Piece was always California. It is the Colorado's water which metropolitan Los Angeles and San Diego drink and wash in and from which the Imperial Valley gets the "flowing gold" to irrigate its crops. Other states long ago wearied of Arizona-California feuding. Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico made their own pact in 1925, and now divide the upper waters peaceably. Nevada's water wants are few. But Arizona has stubbornly insisted that California "slickered" it. No matter where Arizona deployed its troops, no matter how many times it sent lawyers to the Supreme Court California won. Mighty Boulder Dam got built--one side of its concrete face anchored firmly on Arizona's protesting hills.

The 22-year fight has been fought across deserts of legal doubletalk, with arguments that roamed way up the Colorado's branches, and across international borders involved in the Colorado's later trip through Mexico. Few men--notably among them Utah's famed white-bearded William R. Wallace--now understand all the details. But since 1929, when Boulder's go-ahead was given, many Arizonans could understand one unpalatable fact: they were crying over spilled water.

New Empire. Only one Arizonan above the rank of dogcatcher dared to say so. He is stubborn, bespectacled Sidney P. Osborn. There still exists a grade-school textbook in which a young student signed himself: "Sidney P. Osborn, Governor of Arizona." He first tried for the job in 1918. Today at 59 he has been governor three years. With the same persistence that got him in office, he has labored to get Arizona's signature on the Colorado Compact. Addressing a legislature that still feels wronged, Osborn knew how to lard his appeal with references to the hated enemy. Sample: "They are an ingenious lot in California. They have built a great state by their avariciousness." Last week, after the longest continuous session in the state's 32-year history, the legislature agreed to the compact. Cried a member of the opposition: "the blackest day in the history of the state."

But Governor Osborn has an eye to the future. Some day, when the Federal Government has money to spend, Arizona will have four million acre-feet a year of the Colorado River to use. Already U.S. surveys are under way to tunnel that water under a high range of Northern Arizona mountains--the Mogollons. Then the flowing gold will move down over the rich desert valleys of central Arizona, to irrigate two million acres of land that can grow year-round crops. When new empires are built Arizona will be ready.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.