DitchInTime

*** Reporter Bert Hanna, in The Denver Post in 1963, describing the issues, actions, court cases, and negotiations that formed the context for the Blue River Decree of 1964. (Bert Hanna, “Trial Delay Raises Hopes for Out of Court Dillon Settlement,” The Denver Post, December 17, 1963.)

In 2010, Jim Lochhead, manager of the Denver Water Board, chose colorful, and not exactly neutral, language to characterize his agency’s history. “Denver Water was certainly at one point the evil empire,” he said. “We live in a much different time today.”1

The image of a city and its agencies operating as an empire—evil or otherwise—is both powerful and lasting. In 1933, in an influential book called The Rise of the City, 1878–1898, Arthur Meier Schlesinger either coined the phrase urban imperialism, or gave it new visibility. Writing of the dominance of Chicago over its hinterland, Schlesinger declared, “No better example could be found of what one contemporary called ‘urban imperialism,’” though he did not give a name to that contemporary. Schlesinger was more precise in pinning down the term itself: “As the world’s greatest corn, cattle and timber market, Chicago completely dominated the Mississippi Valley and, to some degree, the farther West as well.” Chicago’s urban empire centralized the flow of the resources of a vast hinterland, assigning the ambitions of the residents of that hinterland to a place in the queue well behind the ambitions of Chicago.2

Environmental historian Donald Worster contributed another memorable term to the lexicon of western water history with his influential book Rivers of Empire. In the management of western water and particularly in the operations of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, Worster found a pattern in which “power becomes faceless and impersonal, so much so in fact that many are unaware that it exists.” In a hydraulic society, a centralized elite ruled over both human beings and nature, Worster believed: “Accepting the authority of engineers, scientists, economists, and bureaucrats along with the power of capital, the common people became a herd.” This book, first published in 1985, glued the concept of empire to the history of western water development.3

In 1992, historian William Cronon provided fresh meaning to Schlesinger’s idea of urban empire by connecting the history of the city to the history of the environment, tracing Chicago’s acquisition and distribution of natural resources from rural hinterlands. “From the heart of the city,” Cronon wrote, “the frontier history of the Great West looks to be a story of metropolitan expansion, of the growing incursions of a market economy into ever more distant landscapes and communities.”4

For those on the receiving end of urban exercises of power, the accuracy of characterizing cities as empires has seemed indisputable. From the perspectives of residents of the hinterlands, the arrogant cities decreed, dominated, and exercised their unilateral will, indifferent to the resentment of their subjects. Episodes of resistance and rebellion only provided these empires with the opportunity to remind the rebels how weak they were and how unyielding were the agents of empire. Subdued, mastered, and unilaterally ruled, the rivers of empire and the residents of the colonized hinterland surrendered and submitted to urban imperialism.

The concept of urban imperialism might seem suited to the City of Denver and to the Denver Water Board. Consider the call to arms delivered in 1903 by the president of the Denver Chamber of Commerce, Meyer Friedman: “In the relentless war for commercial supremacy fought by cities, states, and nations, only that community can be victorious which brings to bear upon its rivals, a well-equipped and persistent army of citizens.” Friedman’s remark conveyed the spirit of many of his fellow business leaders; Denver had taken for itself the regal title of Queen City of the Plains and, in the words of historians Stephen Leonard and Thomas Noel, “strove to conquer the Rockies.” It had been the resources of “its big economic backyard,” Leonard and Noel wrote, that “assured Denver’s success.” Long after its founding, “the city’s role as a processing, transportation, trade, and service center remained constant.” Historian Kathleen Brosnan’s appraisal coincides with Leonard and Noel’s. The city of Denver, she explains, “dominated regional urban growth and environmental change. In what might be called a system of urban primogeniture, Denverites emerged early and never let go. The city became the center for directing people, resources, information, and capital into and out of the region.” Similarly, after its creation in 1918, and especially after its Western Slope diversions of the 1930s, Denver Water Board’s story also seemed to be a tale of expanding power over the city’s Front Range neighbors and over the hinterland of the Western Slope. By the truism “If the shoe fits, wear it,” Denver Water seemed fully outfitted for a major excursion into urban imperialism.5

And yet, at second glance, Denver Water’s history comes well-supplied with stories of the agency having to negotiate with competitors, to adapt to the growing authority of the federal government, to learn to work within constraints of nature, money, and political accident, and to recognize that many of its actions would trigger resistance and rebellion from opponents who did not defer to the idea of an empire that gave no room to opposition or resistance. As Leonard and Noel repeatedly observe, Denverites themselves also knew that “theirs was a colonial economy,” often dancing “on strings pulled in New York boardrooms.” However it might try to dominate its hinterland, the city itself “suffered from its lack of industry, distance from large markets, and the power exercised over its destiny by eastern financiers.” Brosnan ratifies this judgment: “As the Denver region moved closer to the center of the nation’s economy, both physically through improved transportation and communication systems and more abstractly through financial institutions and capital investments, its entrepreneurs discovered that the control they initially exercised had dissipated.” In the same way, if the Denver Water Board achieved any episodes of uncontested exercise of power, these episodes were not of long duration.6

Rather than steering an imperial course to the future, Denver Water often seemed to be pulled and pushed into action by an increase in population driven by distant changes. In many areas of the American West, World War II brought a boom in industry and population. The summation of Denver’s changes, offered by Leonard and Noel, deserves full quotation: “World War II triggered a tremendous transformation in Denver. Massive federal spending, an influx of newcomers, and a pent-up demand for new cars and new housing unavailable during the war led to a boom that changed a drowsy provincial city into a sprawling metropolis.” The sprawl moved laterally: “In the 1950s and 1960s Denver was not growing up anywhere nearly as fast as it was growing out,” Leonard and Noel note, leaving the relationship between new suburbs and the city chronically unsettled.7

By the 1950s, the Denver Water Board looked out at this sprawling and thirsty metropolitan area—now home to 566,000 people and many trees—and felt that they needed to limit their service area until they could provide more water.

By the early 1950s, an expanding population caused Denver’s water managers to return to another performance of the two-step maneuver of the 1930s: try to limit consumption while also seeking new sources of water. This time, the board went beyond trying to persuade consumers to avoid waste, taking the big step of limiting the population the department was obligated to serve. In August 1951, as growth throughout the metropolitan area edged the water supply toward its projected limits, board commissioners drew boundaries around the area in which the Denver Water Board would be able, with its already operating projects, to supply water. The Blue Line enclosed an area 114 square miles, of which 56 square miles were the City and County of Denver.8

Areas outside the Blue Line would not receive service from Denver Water. Individuals and companies would have to think hard before locating homes or businesses outside the Blue Line, since water service would be uncertain. Developers, officials at lending institutions, merchants, and aspiring homeowners would invest in the outside districts only at their peril. For those outside the city limits but within the Blue Line, Denver Water would offer contracts for service that charged much higher rates than those inside the city. These contracts, moreover, operated only on a year-to-year basis, allowing Denver Water to adjust the amount of water it would deliver according to fluctuations in the unpredictable annual snowpack.9

It was not that the previous arrangements had been marked by either great generosity or flexibility. Under a policy established in 1948, the board asserted the right to a “reasonable return” on the investment needed to provide water to out-of-city customers. The most striking consequence was this: all out-of-city customers had to be metered and charged according to the scale of their use, while in-city customers enjoyed flat-rate billing, so that higher consumption did not result in a higher bill. Finally, and most troubling to suburban communities, the Denver Water Board reserved the right to stop outside service when it was in the “best interest” of the City of Denver.10

The Denver City Charter’s mandate to provide water, first and foremost, to residents of Denver explained each of these conditions. There was, finally, no avoiding the charter’s insistence that the agency’s first obligation was “supplying the City and County of Denver and its inhabitants with water for all uses and purposes.” Any leases to supply water outside those limits must be “subject to the future needs and requirements of the City and County and its inhabitants.”11

The Denver City Charter is clear about the Water Board’s top priority: “Supplying the City and County of Denver and its inhabitants with water for all uses and purposes.” And by the 1950s, Denverites of all ages had come to enjoy numerous uses and purposes for water, such as these children playing at a pond in City Park.

Denver citizens had good reason to appreciate the vigilance with which the Water Board watched over their interests. But officials of cities like Aurora, on Denver’s eastern flank, could not see much compatibility between these conditions and their own well-being. In the decades after World War II, Aurora’s leaders wanted to embrace their own opportunities for growth, and they did not want to leave their city’s destiny dependent on the plans and preferences of the Denver Water Board. In 1949, Aurora secured its own Western Slope water rights on Homestake Creek and five of its tributaries. Joining forces with the City of Colorado Springs, south of Denver, Aurora completed the Homestake Water Collection and Storage System in the late 1960s. The Denver Water Board hoped to participate in this project, but Aurora rejected any such overture. Aurora had become a competitor with the Water Board, setting a trend in the metropolitan area away from centralized regional management and toward a fragmentation of the water supply among many small and competitive organizations. From a point of view situated on the Western Slope, it might have been possible, in the last half of the twentieth century, to perceive a united, imperial opponent called the Front Range. But the conflicting interests of Denver and its suburbs created fault lines and canyons that fractured that supposed monolith, and the Water Board found itself on increasingly tenuous footing in its efforts to act as the coordinating and orchestrating force on the Front Range.12

Unwilling to comply with the Denver Water Board’s requirements or to accept the Blue Line’s arrangements of insiders and outsiders, other suburban governments, such as Englewood, to the south of Denver, followed Aurora’s inclination for independence. One approach led to the establishment of special government districts. By 1962, at least twenty-six of those special water districts were scattered around the periphery of Denver, as well as another thirty-three water and sanitation districts. Many of these special districts, particularly the smaller ones that did not have the resources to build their own systems, depended wholly or partially on the Denver Water Board. Others aspired, on a smaller scale, to the success achieved by Denver. But their late start put them at a competitive disadvantage, with Denver far ahead in infrastructure and its portfolio of senior water rights.13

The growth of suburbs was raising enormous questions for the future of the Front Range, while also calling into question the ostensible imperial power of Denver to direct or limit the processes of development and land use. In sharp-edged commentary, Leonard and Noel pointed out characteristics in the mind-set of suburban residents and their officials: “On this suburban frontier . . . people continue to pursue the American dream—capitalizing on nature’s bounty, demanding individual freedoms and opportunities, and resisting government regulations and taxes.” Denver’s neighboring counties steered by the values of privatism, trying “to perpetuate the mobility, individual freedoms, property rights, and rural ideas of the Old West in new subdivisions.” Even if the Western Slope seemed to be the Denver Water Board’s obvious rival and opponent, the individualistic suburbs in the metropolitan area represented as substantial a challenge to the agency’s efforts to centralize its power.14

In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer used the word suburb in The Canterbury Tales. Scholars have identified this as the second time the word appeared in English. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer did not, however, set any precedents in suburban boosting. “In the suburbs of a toun,” Chaucer wrote, lurked “robbours” and “theves” in “fereful residence.” By the mid-twentieth century, city leaders all over the nation were struggling with the ungainly challenge of suburbs that demanded services for which their residents were not always willing to pay. Coordinating the governance of a city and its suburbs could have tempted knowledgeable city officials to consider adopting the Chaucerian tradition in characterizing suburban qualities. As urban historian Jon C. Teaford summarized this challenge, “Bands of suburban municipalities ringed many central cities, and in a single metropolitan area scores of municipalities shared governing power.” In the Denver area, as in many metropolitan areas, the result “was overlapping authority, conflicting policies, and yet another barrier to the unity of the metropolitan population.” This national trend was the result of purposeful choice: as Martin Melosi put it, “Suburbs themselves added to social, economic, and political fragmentation by sometimes resisting consolidation with the central cities.” This situation presented many domains of vexation, with water supply proving to be particularly fruitful of friction.15

Patterns of precipitation were, in any case, producing conditions that discouraged generosity among Front Range communities. The years between 1950 and 1956 were dry (with the brief exception of a snowy winter in 1951–52), dropping water supplies to uncomfortably low levels. Even when reservoirs were refilled in 1957 by one of the wettest years in recorded history, the Denver Water Board had found in the drought an unnerving reminder that foresighted action could never give way to complacency.16

Since the drought hit the whole state, every Colorado locale received a similar message of scarcity, making it seem urgent to secure more water for the future. Plans to increase Denver’s water supply led to a seemingly paradoxical shift in the Water Board’s stance toward out-of-city customers. Anticipating expensive improvements to its system, the agency looked for opportunity to increase its revenues. The Blue Line had turned into an obstacle to Denver’s best interests, constraining its ability to bring in those revenues. In a 1959 letter to the board, Denver Water manager Robert Millar wrote frankly of the effects of the Blue Line on metropolitan development and on the relationship between Denver Water and the suburbs:

The Blue Line policy of the Board is so well known that many who expect to apply for the water have refrained from making those applications as long as a fixed geographic boundary exists. . . . [T]here is strong emotional resentment against Denver’s attempts to plan and regulate the lives of people outside city limits.17

As Millar observed, the relationship between Denver Water and some neighboring communities had curdled, even if the Blue Line policy and the terms imposed on out-of-city customers had made sense in the context of the Water Board’s charter responsibilities and the uncertainty of water supplies.

The chances for the coordinated development of a metropolitan water supply, bringing city and suburbs into a sense of their shared interests, had taken a plunge. Years later, assessing this era in Denver Water’s history, historian J. Gordon Milliken reflected a common judgment when he remarked that the Blue Line policy had “led to fragmentation of the metropolitan water supply system, competition for water supply sources, competitive pressures to serve new customers, unwise suburban growth dependent on water supplies of dubious reliability, and destructive political feuds between Denver and its suburbs.”18 Milliken’s judgment carried important freight, but it stopped short of recognizing and respecting the important experiment that ran from 1951 to 1960 (the year that the Blue Line was lifted). The Blue Line had raised two very important and persistent questions: To what degree did Denver Water’s advantages in rights and infrastructure give it a corresponding power (whether or not the commissioners chose to exercise it) to shape and direct settlement and growth in its vicinity? And even if the Denver Water Board presented its neighbors with an opportunity to reappraise their expectations of an ever-expanding water supply, sufficient to support every local dream of growth and expansion, would the neighbors reduce their demands and accept any limits? Without answering those big questions about the future of Front Range growth, the Blue Line simply made the Denver Water Department seem even more imperial to its suburban neighbors.

In earlier times, when officials had presumed that Denver would annex satellite towns and cities as they emerged and entered the Water Board’s territory of service, the charter’s mandate to serve residents of Denver created comparatively little friction. In the first half of the century, Denver had annexed many contiguous communities and taken on their public properties, legal obligations, and debts. Metropolitan officials and planners had every reason to believe that this would continue. The Home Rule Amendment of 1904 (also called the Rush Amendment, and properly Article XX) provided not only that school districts of annexed areas would merge with Denver’s school district and that Denver would assume all school bonds, indebtedness, and obligations; it also made it possible to extend to those communities the security of Denver’s dependable water supply.19

In the context of drought and tight supplies in the 1950s, the city council reinforced and seconded the board’s Blue Line policy by adopting a more conservative annexation policy. To discourage annexation, Denver passed a city ordinance in 1956 that required annexed areas to pay a fee of $2,000 per acre of residential land for capital improvements to the water system. This fee effectively halted new annexations and also the extension of water supplies to new communities.20 When communities pursued self-governance separate from the City of Denver, the mandate of the charter restrained and even prohibited the Denver Water Board from acting as a centralized authority providing water for the whole metropolitan region.

By 1960, having lifted the Blue Line restrictions, the board had resumed the old policy of extending water service to communities that met its requirements. They did so under the auspices of a new charter, adopted in 1959, that cast off the old requirement that water-service contracts outside of the city were limited to one-year terms and instead allowed the board to negotiate permanent contracts with users beyond the city limits. The new charter specified that the board’s priorities had not changed—its first responsibility was still “to provide an adequate supply of water to the people of Denver” at rates “as low as good service will permit”—but the creation of perpetual lease arrangements shifted the dynamics of the Water Board’s relationships with outside communities.

With the Blue Line erased and the new charter in place, the City of Denver again looked to absorb contiguous territory in the neighboring Adams, Arapahoe, and Jefferson Counties. However, some suburbs at this time began to conclude that annexation to Denver was not necessarily in their interests, suspecting that Denver sometimes used its advantage in water to force annexations. Suburban officials feared that the City of Denver would raid their tax bases for its own needs, especially for public education. Some retailers resisted annexation because of Denver’s 3 percent sales tax. Business owners also wanted to avoid paying Denver’s relatively high property tax, and county governments did not want to lose property tax revenues by having their most vital areas reassigned to Denver. In a classic denunciation of Denver as empire, written to state legislators in 1961, George Creamer, an attorney who fought on behalf of property owners in the community of Glendale against Denver annexations, declared that “we know of no basis for annexation by Denver save its own insatiable desire for territorial expansion, tax and revenue increase, and economic dominance.”21

Following its familiar two-step course of action, the Denver Water Board had actively sought new sources of water even as it was limiting its service by observing the Blue Line. With remarkable accuracy, Denver Water planners in 1953 predicted that Denver Water would have to supply 725,000 people by 1963, and “in excess of one million” by the early twenty-first century. “With no new water,” Denver Water official Earl Mosley told a reporter, “we’ll have to halt the metropolitan area’s growth and expansion by 1963.” Given the time needed to build the projects to bring new water into the system, the grace period seemed alarmingly short. With no direct authority to restrict the movement of people into its service area nor to demand that they change their expectations for a properly green landscape, Denver Water’s leaders felt compelled to extend the reach of the system of water collection further into the Western Slope. As a 1953 Water Board report explained, “Since the South Platte River supply has already been developed to capacity, the needs of the next ten years must be met by prompt expansion of available facilities located on the headwaters of the Colorado River.”22

Declarations of the need to expand the Denver Water Board’s domain stirred up Colorado’s internal sectionalism. To residents of the Western Slope, Denver’s further ambitions for acquiring water from the Colorado River Basin were disquieting. But on the Front Range, already facing drought and a growing population, a variety of voters, candidates, agencies, utilities, and nonprofit organizations found the Water Board’s call for more development to be urgent and convincing. In 1955, Denver voters overwhelmingly approved a $75 million bond measure for capital improvements to tap Western Slope water sources. In 1959, another successful bond issue added $40 million to the package.23 Equipped with these bonds, the Denver Water Board moved into its next phase of transmountain diversions.

Why was the Denver Water Board asking for more Western Slope water even with the certainty of riling up their fellow Coloradans on the other side of the Divide? First, the Denver City Charter unambiguously identified the agency’s obligation to provide the City and County of Denver with adequate water. Second, Denver Water Board planners rigorously calculated how much water their collection systems could produce and projected how much water their customers would demand; those calculations and projections identified a narrow margin that left little room for miscalculation and no room for lethargy. Third, the agency carried an institutional memory of the trying times of the 1930s, when drought fueled a fear of a looming water famine. The drought of the 1950s reconfirmed and reactivated the concerns of the 1930s. And the fourth factor was the combination of energy, ingenuity, persistence, and determination that went under the name Glenn G. Saunders, lead counsel for the Denver Water Board (readers should review chapter 3 if, inexplicably, they skipped it). With these four consequential factors in play, Denver Water was going to choose action over passivity.

Anticipating the future meant focusing on the Blue River, a stream flowing down from the Tenmile Range through valleys of conifer forests and merging with the Colorado River in arid sagebrush steppe near Kremmling. In the waters of the Blue, Denver Water planners saw an opportunity to divert to the Front Range a flow of water that would nearly double the system’s holdings.24

Denver’s claim on the Blue River originated long before the Water Board tried to put it to use, hearkening back to the surveys commissioned by the Denver Public Utilities Commission in 1914, before the Water Board had even been created. The possibilities identified in these earliest reports were elaborated in the 1920s, when the board sent consulting engineer George Bull to survey Summit County’s watersheds for likely opportunities for diversion to Denver. Bull identified possible locations for dams and diversion structures and even filed claims on behalf of the city to water rights on several streams, including the Blue. In the next decades, the Great Depression, World War II, and the shortage of men and materials forced the Water Board to scale back its ambitions for development. The agency conducted no field surveys to follow up on Bull’s claims until the 1940s. That delay in establishing the board’s definite interest in the Blue had big consequences, leaving the date that would be assigned to Denver’s rights open to dispute. Thus, the board’s effort to assert and to act on its claim for Blue River water rights launched a protracted, tangled struggle with Western Slope interests.25

In 1942, Denver Water filed a request in the state District Court for Summit County for adjudication (that is, for a definitive allocation and affirmation of a claimed water right) of its Blue River rights, to be heard in the courtroom of Judge William Luby. Opposition came quickly into play as a consortium of Western Slope water districts and providers disputed Denver’s claim. They were joined and strengthened in their opposition by the federal government’s Bureau of Reclamation.26

What brought Reclamation into this fray? Remember the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s big diversion, the Colorado–Big Thompson Project. A key feature of that project—the first component of the project to be built, in fact—was the 152,000 acre-foot Green Mountain Reservoir, completed in 1943 to store water from the Blue River. Under the agreement negotiated between the water users of northeastern Colorado and the Western Slope, the purposes of the Green Mountain Reservoir were (and are), first, to provide replacement water in exchange for the water redirected from the Western Slope under the mountains to northeastern Colorado and, second, to compensate the Western Slope for the water taken out of the basin with a 100,000 acre-foot supply newly earmarked for present and future uses. This compensatory water within the reservoir was often referred to as the “power pool” because its release was used to generate electricity, the reservoir’s third purpose, supplying power as well as revenue that was used to pay off the construction debt for the whole project.

The timing and intentions of the Denver Water Board’s interest in the Blue River would become central questions in the legal wrangling over Dillon Reservoir’s water rights. This photograph shows a group of men identified as a triangulation party working on the Blue River Tunnel Survey in September 1921.

The Green Mountain Reservoir was downriver from the new site of diversion proposed by the Denver Water Board. Thus, because Denver claimed 1914 as its priority date for the Blue, Denver’s suit threatened the 1935 priority date of Green Mountain Reservoir. A reliable flow of water from the Blue River was essential to Reclamation’s plans for the reservoir, to fill it and thus to supply the downstream users and also to drive the hydroelectric power plant. Reclamation argued that the Denver Water Board’s dam would prevent the annual filling of Green Mountain Reservoir and would thereby interfere with the bureau’s ability to deliver on its obligations.27

By Colorado’s doctrine of prior appropriation, the plan to acquire and move water from the Western Slope would be justified and viable if Denver Water could prove the validity of its rights in court and establish an early priority date for them. Rights with earlier dates were senior rights, and senior rights prevailed over later, junior rights, regardless of any claims to agrarian virtue, pioneer values, urban sophistication, or cosmopolitan civilization that any claimant might make. Prior appropriation law also made it clear that a mountain range poses no legal impediment to the appropriation, transport, and use of water.28

While Denver’s request for adjudication lingered in Summit County district court, a very complicated tale of litigation over rights to the Blue River and its tributaries began its twists and turns. The Bureau of Reclamation, which had first joined Western Slope water districts in their suit in state court, withdrew from the suit brought by the water districts and on June 10, 1949, filed a separate claim in federal district court to affirm its right to Colorado River waters over the claims of Denver and other Front Range communities (Colorado Springs and Englewood, which also claimed Western Slope waters for themselves; similarly, the South Platte Water Users Association claimed standing). As readers are surely realizing, the parties converging in various courtrooms for litigation over the Blue River made for a complicated cast of characters.29†††

††† These parties included the US government (in particular, the Bureau of Reclamation in the Department of the Interior), the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Palisade Irrigation District, the City and County of Denver, the City of Englewood, the City of Colorado Springs, and the South Platte Water Users Association.

In 1952, ten years after the filing of the Denver Water Board’s initial request for adjudication in state court, Judge William Luby ruled that Denver’s claim to Blue River water rights was legitimate. To that degree, Denver was the winner. But Judge Luby’s next finding reduced the scale of that victory considerably. The Denver Water Board had asked for a priority date of 1914 for those rights. The judge rejected that request and assigned the rights a priority date of 1946. The agency had failed to demonstrate a substantial and sustained intention to develop those waters, he said, until the summer of 1946, when they had begun work on the portal of what would become the Roberts Tunnel. The designation of the later priority date meant that the Denver Water Board had secured only about half of the water from the Blue River that it wanted.30

Denver Water Board lead counsel Glenn Saunders was not in the habit of accepting defeat, whether partial or complete. Two months after Judge Luby’s decision, Saunders, along with attorneys for Colorado Springs, appealed the decision to the Colorado Supreme Court. As he waited for the Court’s decision, Saunders also argued his case before the public. “Denver’s Water Crisis Not Over, Expert Warns,” the headline in The Denver Post read on October 1, 1954. With a drought under way, Saunders cautioned that it “might take several years to get the city’s water supply up to normal.” But if the city’s plans for the Blue River succeeded, “its water problem will be solved for all time.” Dismissing the opposition from the Western Slope, Saunders declared that there was “enough water in Colorado for both East and West Slopes.” Moreover, he asked all Coloradans to recognize that “we all prosper if Denver prospers.”31

On October 18, 1954, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision with a 4–3 decision against Denver. In an alignment full of meaning for the state’s history, the judges split along geographic lines: the three from Denver sided with the Denver Water Board, and the four from outside the city proved to be the majority. In the next weeks, the Colorado Supreme Court denied several motions from Denver requesting a rehearing.32

“Court Kills Hope for Water,” the headline on October 19 shouted. The Rocky Mountain News characterized the decision as “probably the most devastating legal blow ever delivered against this city and its possible development.” If it stood, “it would mean an absolute end to the growth of Denver within boundaries already clearly drawn,” and it would “make impossible the provision of a single additional drop of water outside the already defined limits.”33 The city’s residents were unsettled and alarmed. Real estate developers suspended plans for large residential projects. The famed Del Webb abandoned a plan to build a six-thousand-home community. Newspaper columnists predicted that the city, if unable to expand its population and economy, would stagnate and decline. The statement that the Colorado Supreme Court’s “decision would clamp a lid on Denver’s growth by 1963” became a common feature of public commentary, accompanied by the short-term threat that “Denverites may be told to quit watering entirely for the rest of the year.”34

“It is hard to say what the total effect of the ruling is or what our next step will be,” Glenn Saunders said in mid-December 1954, concluding with an entirely characteristic confidence: “One thing we know—Denver must have that water from the Blue.” Appearing undaunted by this setback in the state courts, “Saunders gave the impression of a man with an ace in the hole,” one reporter noted, quoting the attorney’s promise that “We’ll come up with something” to get Denver the water it needed.35

At this juncture, events took an improbable turn away from litigation and toward negotiation. Despite the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling, the US District Court for the District of Colorado had agreed to hear the suits over the Blue River in federal court.‡‡‡ Dismay over the prospect of another prolonged battle in the courts played a part in the multiple decisions that added up to a shift. Just as important, the larger context of regional water issues placed a premium on unity within the state of Colorado. When the Colorado River Compact divided the river’s flow between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin in 1922, the Lower Basin had been much more active than the Upper Basin in developing water; unless it got to work fast, the Upper Basin risked being left behind and ending up with a less than equitable share. The bill creating the Colorado River Storage Project, with a package of projects for the Upper Basin, was stalled in Congress. If the state of Colorado remained fractured and divided, it would be nearly impossible to get this bill passed. The necessary demonstration of unity was, unmistakably, a compromise on the Blue River. Another push toward negotiation came from a very high level indeed, as President Dwight Eisenhower made it known that he thought compromise was in order.36

‡‡‡ The two cases from the state District Court for Summit County (Civil Actions No. 1805 and No. 1806) had been moved to the US District Court for the District of Colorado in May of 1955, where they were consolidated with Civil Action No. 2782, the original action launched by the US government. The date for the trial of these consolidated cases was then set for October 5, 1955, laying out an unmistakable deadline for compromise.

A pending court date of October 5, 1955, offered an incentive to negotiation and set a clear framework for action. In September 1955, lawyers from the Denver Water Board, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and the Colorado River Water Conservation District met to try to reach an out-of-court settlement. Each organization could send an attorney and an adviser. One change in the usual cast of characters may have carried particular consequence: Glenn Saunders was ill, and Harold Roberts, a man with a more conciliatory temperament, took his place. Just weeks before, as historian Dan Tyler put it, “conciliation [had] appeared as unattainable as ever.” But, as the trial date bore down upon them, the participants forged a compromise on October 4, presented this “stipulation” to the presiding federal judge on the morning of October 5 in place of making opening statements, and on October 12, Judge William Knous signed the agreement and gave it official standing as the Blue River consent decree of 1955.37

The settlement recognized Senate Document 80—the agreement of collaboration between the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and the Western Slope that made possible the Colorado–Big Thompson Project—as a governing document that set the parameters of the Blue River agreement. This meant that when it came to the 52,000 acre-feet held in Green Mountain Reservoir as exchange water to replace the Colorado–Big Thompson’s diversions, Front Range claims were junior to the claims of Western Slope users. The decree reaffirmed the priority dates handed down by Judge Luby, giving the Reclamation Bureau’s Colorado–Big Thompson Project (and thus the Green Mountain Reservoir as well) a priority date of August 1, 1935, senior to the Denver Water Board’s date of 1946. Denver and Colorado Springs agreed to release diverted water back to Green Mountain Reservoir if it failed to fill in a given year. The two cities pledged to recompense the Bureau of Reclamation for any loss of revenues from electrical power it could not generate because of their diversions from the Blue River. Despite these conditions—the key for the Denver Water Board—Denver and Colorado Springs were given the right to divert Blue River water, if they stayed within their priority, to the Front Range for municipal uses. The Western Slope litigants did not prevail with their demand for the metering of all Denver customers or for the limitation that Blue River water be used only by customers within the city limits, but they did win an agreement that the Denver Water Board would exercise due diligence in reusing return flows of water imported from western Colorado.38

The Blue River Decree seemed to settle the major arguments among Denver, the Western Slope, and the Bureau of Reclamation. One newspaper did make the important observation that, while leaders from both the Eastern and Western Slopes saw the accord as “a stepping stone to fuller use of water,” the “Western Slope leaders were somewhat more reserved in their acclaim.” In its most immediate result, the decree revived the feasibility of Denver Water’s Blue River Diversion Project and paved the way for Congress’s passage of the Colorado River Storage Project on March 28, 1956 (the act included, by reference, the terms of the Blue River Decree). The peace achieved by the decree would not prove to have much in the way of durability, but the process that produced the decree still signaled the arrival of a new era. Rather than an omnipotent empire, the Denver Water Board was now only one participant in a big group of well-represented contenders competing for the same supply of water.

Figuring out how to operate in this new era had tested—and would continue to test—the willingness to negotiate and the flexibility of an organization that had grown accustomed, in its early years, to achieving its goals by strength and force of will. Even if representatives of the Denver Water Board sometimes played the part of urban imperialists, their institution operated in a tangle of contesting interests and external authorities. Adopting the posture and speaking the scripted lines of empire was proving to be a very different matter from actually exercising imperial power.39

By the time the federal court approved the Blue River Decree, the Denver Water Board was well launched on building the first major element of the Blue River water collection system: the tunnel that would convey water under the mountains from the base of the planned reservoir that would store Blue River water, to near Grant, Colorado, on the Eastern Slope. The name Harold D. Roberts Tunnel would honor the attorney who stepped in for the ailing Glenn Saunders to negotiate the 1955 Blue River Decree. At 23.3 miles long, the Roberts Tunnel marked another engineering triumph as one of the world’s longest water tunnels. The system’s second component would be a storage dam located at the confluence of the Blue River, the Snake River, and Tenmile Creek, at the town site of Dillon. Water from Dillon Reservoir would then travel to the Front Range through the Roberts Tunnel.40

Even as construction got under way, the Denver Water Board continued its campaign, conducted around the negotiating table and in the courtroom, to secure as much water as possible from the Blue River. The 1955 decree seemed to have settled disputes over the river, but the agreement contained ambiguities that were open to reinterpretation, and the restless mind of Glenn Saunders was made for this mental sport. He made one more try to secure more of the water stored in Green Mountain Reservoir. He found his inspiration in 1959 when the paper company Crown Zellerbach asked the Bureau of Reclamation for Green Mountain Reservoir water for use in a plant to be located near Kremmling. If a paper-producing company could request water from the Bureau of Reclamation, Saunders thought, why couldn’t a city? Green Mountain water, Saunders suggested, “may find its highest and best use for the people of Colorado in Eastern Colorado.”41

Even as litigation over diverting the Blue River dragged on, the Denver Water Board pressed ahead with the construction of the diversion tunnel, which would come to be called Roberts Tunnel. The work spanned more than two decades, a strategic pace that helped secure Denver’s water rights claim during the long legal dispute. The photo shows a prominent inspection party, including Denver mayor Quigg Newton, at the tunnel’s east portal in August 1949.

Federal officials and Western Slope advocates felt differently. The Department of the Interior, the home of the Bureau of Reclamation, gave “a flat denial to Denver’s claim.” Saunders’s response was predictable: the official from Interior who issued this response, Saunders said, “leaves us no alternative but to ask the court to correct him.” At a meeting in Washington, DC, convened by officials of the Department of the Interior in November 1959, Saunders was unyielding. Prominent Western Slope advocate John Barnard, attorney for the Colorado River Water Conservation District, voiced the suspicions of many when he argued that Denver did not actually need Blue River water for its own use but wanted to sell it to downstream farmers in the South Platte Basin, in order to generate revenue to pay off the expensive expansion of its system. The city had, Barnard claimed, “secretly planned an ambitious, comprehensive, and entirely ruthless scheme.”42

In a manner that did not seem to qualify for Barnard’s adverb secretly, Saunders and the city leadership pressed ahead on every front, continuing to assert an interest in the water stored at Reclamation’s Green Mountain Reservoir and moving forward with their own dam at Dillon. By the fall of 1960, the peace achieved with the Blue River Decree of 1955 was thoroughly frayed. Headlines declaring “City’s New Water Plan Draws West Slope Ire” and “Inter-Slope Water Warfare Erupts Again” proclaimed the reopening of the battle.43

One dimension of the new round of controversy arose from the Denver Water Board’s hope to insert a role for the Williams Fork Reservoir into this already very complicated system. This reservoir did not store water for diversion to the Front Range but, instead, provided the Western Slope with water to replace what had been sent out of the Colorado River Basin, from the Fraser and Williams Fork Rivers to the Front Range. Originally built in 1938 to replace water diverted through the Gumlick Tunnel, the Williams Fork Reservoir had been expanded in 1959 to account for the increased diversion due to the Vasquez Tunnel’s completion, and now Denver Water wanted to expand it once again so that the reservoir would also provide replacement water for water diverted from the Blue River.44

While the use of the Williams Fork Reservoir was one point of contention, the core of the conflict hinged on the Denver Water Board’s position that “its proposed domestic use of Blue River water should take precedence over the use of Blue River water by the United States for power purposes.” The Bureau of Reclamation insisted that it needed water to maintain a 100,000-acre-foot power pool to produce electricity in Green Mountain Reservoir’s turbines. Saunders and the Water Board had anticipated this objection with the enlargement of the Williams Fork Reservoir in the late 1950s; at that time, they had installed a generating plant over the objections of the local water districts. This generating power plant made it possible for Saunders to pledge that Denver would make up for the loss of power generated at Green Mountain either with Williams Fork–produced kilowatts or with monetary compensation. But Reclamation sided with the Western Slope, where its facilities and water holdings were intended to spur development; indeed, the proposed Crown Zellerbach plant was one example of the kind of development that Reclamation wanted for the Colorado River Basin. Thus, the Department of the Interior refused the Denver Water Board’s initiative to secure water stored in Green Mountain Reservoir for Front Range purposes.45

After the failed effort at negotiation in Washington, DC, a coalition of western Colorado water districts, including the Colorado River Water Conservation District, responded to Denver Water’s claims. On October 4, 1960, the coalition filed a petition in federal court to prevent Denver and Colorado Springs from claiming any share of the water in Green Mountain Reservoir. Moreover, Denver’s intention to use Williams Fork Reservoir to provide replacement water would, the petitioners contended, pose a serious obstacle to another possible Bureau of Reclamation enterprise (the Parshall Project), a prospective dam on the Williams Fork that would provide water to Western Slope ranchers and farmers.46

Pending court actions did not slow down construction of the Roberts Tunnel, completed in 1962, nor did it delay the building of Dillon Dam. Despite the lawsuits, the Denver Water Board’s leaders assumed that eventual decisions and rulings would allow for storage and diversion of Blue River water, and workers began constructing the massive earthen berm that would hold back the river. Perhaps surprisingly, the fact that Dillon Reservoir would flood the site of the existing town of Dillon did not arouse much public concern. The small town was nearly nomadic, having already gone through three relocations—the first for a better situation along the Snake River, and the next two to accommodate railroad lines—and most Coloradans (those who did not call Dillon home) were not particularly upset about one more move. There was some irony in the coinciding of Denver Water’s two parallel challenges: arriving at a plan to move the town and figuring out how to house 350 construction workers near their workplace. Along with nearly two hundred living residents, the preparation of the site required the relocation of the town’s cemetery. In 1961, after condemnation proceedings completed the acquisition of houses and properties, Dillon residents moved to their current town site directly south of the area that would be submerged by the reservoir.47

The old town of Dillon stood at the three-way confluence of the Blue River, the Snake River, and Tenmile Creek. This view, taken before 1960, looks south from near the site that would become the west abutment of Dillon Dam.

The Denver Water Board relocated the town of Dillon in order to make way for Dillon Reservoir. This photo shows the Dillon church being moved to its new site in June 1962.

In July 1963, Western Slope water districts tried one more legal action (a petition to amend their 1960 petition!) to prohibit the filling of Dillon Reservoir. Denver’s plans to begin filling the reservoir, the city’s opponents contended, would undercut Green Mountain Reservoir’s senior rights to the Blue River and thus take the water needed for Colorado–Big Thompson replacement and for power generation. Neither the Bureau of Reclamation nor the Western Slope water districts found anything to like in Denver’s plan to replace Blue River water with Williams Fork water; the result would be an equal amount of water downstream in the Colorado River, but the water would bypass Green Mountain Reservoir and its power turbines. The Western Slope’s legal efforts evoked the usual rhetorical pep from Glenn Saunders. As The Denver Post paraphrased, “in the opinion of Glenn Saunders,” this litigation added another layer to “harassments of long standing to impede and obstruct ‘for selfish motives’ Denver’s development of water resource for growth and increasing needs of the metropolitan area.”48

The pace and tenor of events began to bear some resemblance to a classic Western showdown. Secretary of the interior Stewart Udall, on behalf of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, ordered Denver not to finish the dam until the federal litigation was resolved. The Water Board did not give an inch. In “the face of an order issued by Udall not to use Dillon Dam,” Denver Water manager William Miller and attorney Glenn Saunders pushed ahead toward the completion of the dam as scheduled, ever certain that the city’s future—not to mention millions of dollars in bonds—hung in the balance.49

By the beginning of September 1963, the Denver Water Board was facing down a coalition of opposing Western Slope interests and the federal government. With the critical moment approaching, Saunders’s theatricality, along with the joy he took in a no-holds-barred public feud, was on conspicuous display. “No federal court or department can keep Denver from acquiring water,” he declaimed. “That dam is being paid for 100 percent by Denver,” and, in Saunders’s interpretation, Denver was in full compliance with the 1955 Blue River Decree. Federal officials had no standing to intervene in the operation of Dillon Dam; “it’s none of their damn business, and I’d like to see them try it,” Saunders said. “We’re not violating any decree of court.” While Denver’s leaders earnestly prepared for the future, Saunders said, “These people in Washington sit on their fat fannies” (this phrasing surely missed its target with Stewart Udall, one of the most physically fit public officials in American history).50

On September 3, 1963, the Denver Water Board stood its ground and defied the Department of the Interior as crews began to close Dillon Dam and impound the waters of the Blue River. Contrary to Interior’s orders, Dillon Reservoir began to fill.51

Saunders remained defiant, claiming full legitimacy for Denver’s actions within the scope of the Blue River Decree of 1955: “We think we have complied with the decree with the greatest care.” Federal attorneys expressed their disagreement in a motion filed in district court on September 6, charging that the Denver Water Board’s plan to fill Dillon Reservoir in fact violated the decree by interfering with Reclamation’s obligation to provide replacement water out of Green Mountain Reservoir for its Colorado–Big Thompson diversion. The government’s attorneys argued that storage of Blue River water in Dillon Reservoir constituted “direct and major invasion of the prior rights of the United States.” A number of Western Slope organizations soon asked to be included in the federal government’s motion.52

On the Western Slope, observers looked at Denver Water’s defiance of Interior and saw just one more demonstration of the city’s arrogance. Articles in the Western Slope’s Grand Junction Sentinel in this era sizzled with anger, with Glenn Saunders as the principal target. Denver, the editors wrote in September, was “financially and morally bankrupt,” guided by leaders who “don’t care about right and wrong. They care nothing about the rights of others just so Denver’s needs are taken care of. Glenn Saunders, in riding roughshod over everyone, is a fair example of all Denver’s official family.” They returned to the complaint the following month: “As long as Saunders runs the Denver Water show on the theory that might makes right and to the devil with anyone who disagrees there will be no chance of unity” within the state of Colorado. The negative reviews of Saunders’s performance were not entirely limited to the Western Slope, either: an editorial in the Denver Democrat urged Denver’s mayor to fire Saunders, who had put in place “the jagged rocks of hatred, envy, and jealousy that characterize Denver’s relationships with the rest of the state.” Saunders, his opponents said, shifted tactics and arguments in an expedient and unpredictable way; “trying to pin him down,” wrote William H. Nelson in the Sentinel, “is like trying to step on a glob of mercury.”53

And yet, shifting to the point of view of the Denver Water Board, the agency had spent more than $70 million to bore a twenty-three-mile tunnel, build a reservoir with a capacity of 250,000 acre-feet, and relocate an entire town and its surrounding highways, thus rendering the Interior order not only too late, but beside the point.54 From this angle, high-handed Washington, DC, authority should not stand in the way of the foresight of the city. While the lively rhetoric condemning Denver’s (and particularly Saunders’s) imperial stubbornness catches our attention, it is important to note a provision of the 1922 Colorado River Compact that seemed to validate Saunders’s argument. “Water of the Colorado River System,” the compact declares, “may be impounded and used for the generation of electrical power, but such impounding and use shall be subservient to the use and consumption of such water for agricultural and domestic purposes and shall not interfere with or prevent use for such dominant purposes.”55 In arguing that the 100,000 acre-feet held in Green Mountain Reservoir for the generation of electricity should be made available for the domestic purposes of Denver, Saunders’s thinking was aligned with the hierarchy of uses put forward by the compact. But he was also calling into question the widely accepted assumption (one that he usually shared) that prior appropriation, as the law of the state, prevailed over an interstate compact.

Judge Alfred A. Arraj of the US District Court of the District of Colorado set April 13, 1964 (initially December 9, 1963, then given a ninety-day postponement) as the date to begin hearing arguments from the federal government and the Western Slope against the Denver Water Board. With the court date on the horizon, the litigants began to find reasons to consider an out-of-court settlement, realizing that court cases were likely to go on for an inconveniently long time.56

Even with episodes of grandstanding and bluster, the Denver Water Board’s leaders kept a door open to compromise. In a diplomatic overture, Saunders asked assistant attorney general Ramsey Clark for a parley on the issue, and the two met in Washington in September 1963. Back in Colorado, Saunders experimented with a different tone and style of public expression that may have surprised his critics: “Both Denver and the Western Slope would benefit materially in improved relations, if we could all sit around a table and try to iron out some of the major issues,” he said. “It would mean greater harmony and both could work together to develop Colorado’s remaining water resources for the benefit of all Colorado.” In an effort to court such harmony, the Water Board offered an olive branch by discontinuing the storage of water in Dillon Reservoir until the litigation was resolved. In early 1964, newspapers began cautiously reporting that such a resolution might be in the works, noting “the possibility of an out-of-court settlement of a controversy that resembles a horrifying jigsaw puzzle.”57

The approach of the scheduled trial date of April 13, 1964, galvanized the negotiators. Two days before, on April 11, headlines announced “Denver Water Board OK’s Blue River Pact,” though with a telling additional subheadline: “Western Slope Approval Awaited.” Denver had made a major concession in giving up any claim on Green Mountain Reservoir, but the Western Slope interests still withheld their approval. The negotiators were now engaged in serious edgework. Without an agreement in place, the long-anticipated trial began on Monday, April 13. On that first day, Judge Arraj “left no doubt that he was dissatisfied” with the Western Slope’s case, “and felt attorneys should try to agree on certain key issues.” Speaking with a bluntness that could make an attorney’s hair stand on end, Judge Arraj told Frank Delaney, the attorney for the Colorado River Water Conservation District, that he should cut back on overheated rhetoric and “come into this court and tell me precisely what it is you want. Until you’re ready to do so, I think we have heard enough for today.” And, showing equity in his forthrightness, the judge spoke with equal harshness to Glenn Saunders. “Mr. Saunders . . . let me make a suggestion. There’s a conference room upstairs. All of you participants go up there and sit down at the table. When you have come to some agreement, you come back and tell me. I’ll be glad to listen.” He then continued the case until Wednesday morning, April 15.58

Completed in 1963, the expansive 254,000-acre-foot Dillon Reservoir is the largest storage facility in the Denver Water supply system. It was also, at the time of its construction, the most intensely litigated.

On Monday afternoon and during the day Tuesday, an intense discussion occurred among the attorneys for the various parties. Delaney, representing the Colorado River Water Conservation District, assumed his place as the one dissenter. But by Thursday, April 16, Delaney had conceded, and Judge Arraj filed a consent decree, “agreed to in a closed-door meeting of attorneys representing the Federal Government and Eastern and Western Slope water interests.” Glenn Saunders cheerfully observed that the “most important thing to come out of this entire proceeding” would be “harmonious relations” between water interests in eastern and western Colorado.59

The Second Blue River Decree “provided that neither Denver nor Colorado Springs had any right, title or interest in Green Mountain Reservoir,” a significant victory for the Bureau of Reclamation, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and, to a degree, Western Slope interests. In return for this concession, Denver secured the right to substitute water from the Williams Fork System for the water it diverted to the Front Range from Dillon Reservoir. As long as Green Mountain Reservoir was able to fill, senior rights downstream were satisfied, the Denver Water Board relinquished all claims on Green Mountain Reservoir’s water, and the board either replaced or paid for any power that Green Mountain could not produce because of these arrangements, Denver could store water in Dillon Reservoir. The implementation of the agreement was subject to the approval and supervision of the secretary of the interior, installing a significant federal presence in these intrastate relations. The decree did not take a position on the anticipated conflict between Denver’s Williams Fork Reservoir and the prospective Bureau of Reclamation Parshall Project.60

On July 17, 1964, what The Denver Post reporter had christened “a horrifying jigsaw puzzle,” the long and tangled story of maneuverings, negotiations, initiatives, and counterinitiatives turned into the material reality of water traveling from Dillon Reservoir through Roberts Tunnel and into the city of Denver. “The new supply,” declared one newspaper reporter, “has rescued the city from what could have been a critical water shortage.” The Denver Water Department had released some water “to fulfill obligations to Green Mountain Reservoir,” satisfying the Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of the Interior. Glenn Saunders drew the improbable conclusion “that the arrangement marks a new era of improved relationships between Denver and the Western Slope.”61

And what, in heaven’s name, is the moral to this maddeningly complicated story?

Did Glenn Saunders, representing the Denver Water Board in every sense of the word, actually “ride roughshod over everyone,” as the editors of the Grand Junction Sentinel had charged? Did he get his way, albeit by a route that came closer to a zigzagging broken-field run than a line drive? His attempt to secure water from the Green Mountain Reservoir had been thoroughly stymied, although securing an abundant flow of water from the Blue River surely softened the pain of defeat. Did it still make sense to place Denver Water in the category of urban imperialism, if empire periodically had to surrender unilateral decision making, submit to the determinations of umpires and referees, and make the best of a negotiated settlement?

One thing was certain: the playing field for control over Colorado’s water had gotten crowded and congested. Rivals and competitors—a variety of Western Slope interests ranging from ranchers and farmers to oil shale developers, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and the farmers downstream from Denver on the eastern plains—were impossible to silence, control, or avoid. The suburbs of the metropolitan area were, on their own, proving to be a sufficiently rowdy group of subalterns. And, one level above this whole boisterous and contentious cluster, the federal government was emerging more and more as an external force—a fountain of funds and, in a trend that was just getting under way, also a fountain of regulations and restrictions.

The Denver Water Board, in the judgment of one sharp-eyed policy scholar, was confronting an increasing incompatibility between the persistence of its “core tasks” and the arrival of a new set of “unwanted functions,” many of them involving the management of increasing public involvement and the whole process of strategic negotiation. These functions required a capacity to navigate through a social and political labyrinth of growing complexity. For all its strengths, the Denver Water Department entered this world with considerable vulnerability and even weakness. “The water commissioners,” Brian Ellison wrote, “viewed their core tasks in the starkest engineering and business terms.” They saw “storing, treating, and delivering water to the citizens of Denver and leasing unneeded water to the suburbs” as “a technical problem that was dependent on the services of engineers and lawyers.” A form of urban imperialism steered by engineers and lawyers was certain to mean that this particular ship of state was going to have a tough time charting its course, avoiding rocks and reefs, and reaching its intended destination.62

Extremely off course in his own voyaging, Lemuel Gulliver awoke to find himself in the company of human creatures who were less than six inches tall. It might have seemed that this difference in scale meant that the power was all on his side. Gulliver, however, soon discovered that even miniature opponents could seriously constrain his actions. “I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir,” he said. “I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs.” When he pulled his left arm loose, his situation did not improve. “In an instant I felt above a hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which pricked me like so many needles,” causing Gulliver to groan “with grief and pain,” and to conclude that “it was the most prudent method to lie still.” The Lilliputians may have been tiny, but like the first one Gulliver saw—“with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back”—the Lilliputians were not exactly pacifists.63

By 1964, the Denver Water Department’s leadership was tied up in its own version of Gulliver’s troubles. It was big, strong, and yet remarkably constrained in its ability to move vigorously and purposefully. Urban imperialism was proving to be as difficult for the city to practice as it was easy for the hinterland to condemn. But Gulliver had an option that Denver Water did not have: he could decide that “it was the most prudent method to lie still” and thus avoid further friction with the Lilliputians and their arrows. Denver Water had no such option. In 1963, just as Dillon Reservoir was close to completion, and just before the Roberts Tunnel would begin delivering Blue River water to Denver, the engineering firm Black & Veatch submitted a comprehensive review of the water system. James Lee Cox summed up its findings for the future: the firm declared that “present facilities will be inadequate by 1979.”64

With sixteen years to go before the next projected crisis, the Denver Water Department did not have the option to choose prudent repose. There would be no rest for this weary if not wicked empire. According to the well-established customs of the organization, anticipating the threat of scarcity and securing the increased supply that would neutralize the threat, it was time for Gulliver to get up and get braced for the next barrage of arrows.