KVIG Informative

A federal decree written in 1936 to settle a fight between cattle ranchers and irrigators over the Walker River still controls who gets its water today, even as the tribe named in the original lawsuit presses an unresolved claim to a senior right and the lake the river once filled has lost more than 90 percent of its volume.

Homesteaders and ranchers who settled the Walker River basin in the late 1800s diverted the river for hay, pasture and irrigated crops, and Nevada issued more water rights along the river than its average annual flow could support, according to the Walker Basin Conservancy’s own published history of the basin.

The first major fight over those rights reached federal court in 1902, when one land and cattle company sued another over river appropriations. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed federal jurisdiction over the case in Rickey Land & Cattle Co. v. Miller & Lux, 218 U.S. 258, and the litigation concluded in 1919, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s own account of the case’s history. In 1924, the United States filed a separate action on behalf of the Walker River Paiute Tribe to establish the tribe’s water rights on the river, the same appellate history states.

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Nine years into that litigation, the U.S. Indian Irrigation Service built Weber Dam and Reservoir on the Walker River Paiute Tribe’s reservation between 1933 and 1935, using Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division labor and Public Works Administration funding to store river water for irrigation on tribal land, according to the Living New Deal historical database, a public-works archive maintained by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The reservoir still supplies irrigation and recreation water to the reservation today under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which now operates it, according to the bureau’s own dam-safety records.

The 1924 case took twelve years to resolve. The resulting 1936 Walker River Decree adjudicated the water rights of hundreds of claimants under Nevada’s doctrine of prior appropriation and created the Walker River Commission and the United States Board of Water Commissioners to administer those rights, according to the Ninth Circuit’s history of the litigation. The federal district court that issued the decree has retained continuing jurisdiction over the river’s administration ever since, the court’s history states.

The Walker River Paiute Tribe intervened in the case again in 1987 to establish new procedures for reallocating water rights among claimants; those proceedings concluded in 1988, and the Nevada State Engineer began reviewing applications to change those allocations that year, according to the same Ninth Circuit account. In 1991, the tribe and the United States asked the court to recognize a tribal water right senior to every other claimant on the river, a claim the court’s own case history showed was still unresolved when the Ninth Circuit last reviewed the litigation in 2018.

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Mineral County, where Walker Lake sits, moved to intervene in the case in 1994 over the lake’s decline; the court granted that request in 2013, according to the Ninth Circuit’s account. By then the lake had already lost more than 90 percent of its volume over the preceding century as upstream diversions reduced its inflow, and its last stocked Lahontan cutthroat trout were removed in 2009 as the water grew too saline to support them, according to the Walker Basin Conservancy’s own history of the lake.

The Walker Basin Conservancy formed as a nonprofit in 2015 to buy water rights from willing sellers on the river and dedicate that water to the lake instead of irrigation. As of the most recent figures in the conservancy’s own published history, that effort had reached 57 percent of the roughly 50,000 acre-feet the conservancy says the lake’s fishery needs to recover.

Ninety years after a federal court issued the Walker River Decree in 1936, that decree is still the law of the river — and the tribe whose 1924 claim triggered it, the county whose lake it left to shrink, and the nonprofit now buying back water rights one parcel at a time are all still operating within the boundaries the decree drew nine decades ago.