Indian Water Rights in Southern California in the Progressive Era: A Case Study

Historian Norris Hundley, Jr., described Indian water rights as a "dark and bloody ground."' Congress asserted its authority to allot Indian reservations under the Dawes Act of 1887. The Supreme Court asserted that water rights of reservation Indians were guaranteed via federal treaties in the Winters v. United States decision of 1908, establishing the "reserved rights" doctrine. Yet the landmark Winters decision-undergirding a national policy of converting Indians into self-supporting, landholding farmers-was stillborn. The reserved rights doctrine threatened the vested rights of non- Indians under the prior appropriations doctrine of state law. As secretary of the interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock informed President Theodore Roosevelt, if the Winters decision were enforced, the "development of the entire arid West [would] be materially retarded, if not entirely destroyed."