• living next to water you are allowed to take water for domestic use
• you have the right for the water to flow, not to have someone upstream take it all away
• in the west, first come first served--if you took water and used it productively you had a right to that water
  

• private water companies
• government projects--government both has more money and can use eminent domain
• the government will do the big projects necessary for lots of farmers to benefit from irrigation
  

points particularly relevant to the counternarrative:

• if decisions are made by vote of the landowners should it be one person one vote or do you get votes on the basis of how much land you own?
• farming using irrigation is more expensive so tends to favor large farms
• ambitious government projects were more expensive (and therefore the water cost was higher) than small local ones
  

guide to the government agencies involved

Water "running unused to the sea" (p. 245)--the attitude was maximum exploitation of natural resources
at least until a proposal to dam the Grand Canyon that was finally dropped in 1968

Great Depression

Hetch Hetchy dam fight