The Dolores Project (original) (raw)

The environment defines Colorado and its people. Throughout its history as region, territory, and state, visitors and inhabitants have pointed to the mountains, forests, and wildlife that characterize its natural landscape, serving as both the lure and mainstay. From the first communities of indigenous people, to the Ute, and later, to its Euro-American explorers and settlers, the region's land and animal inhabitants provided sustenance and identity. Anglo settlers envisioned a western landscape filled with promise and as the building block to success. However, people quickly realized that water, above all another natural features, determined their prospects and fate. In 1890, Hubert Howe Bancroft concluded, "For with all its numerous streams...Colorado is a dry country." 1 His comment came at a formative moment, a period bridging the gap between settlers' initial efforts at individual and cooperative irrigation, state control of water, and federal reclamation. Like most residents of the state, the people that called southwest Colorado home relied on natural resources for their livelihood. Utilizing water for human endeavors proved to be a traumatic, frustrating, and constant struggle that would not come to any relatively equitable conclusion until the end of the twentieth century. 2 Almost every group of people that passed through or settled in the Dolores River Valley of southwest Colorado used its water resources. The centuries-old practice of using and diverting the rivers and streams of the area culminated in the construction of the Dolores Project beginning in the late-1970s through the mid-1990s. Conflict, negotiation, and accommodation characterized the undertaking as divergent groups of people reconciled different interests and aspirations. The ambitious project serves as an ideal example of the way Federal reclamation 3.