The forest service and western water rights:: An intimate portrait of United States v. New Mexico

Lawsuits offer an arcane and fundamental way of making basic water law and policy. The tortured course of litigation set the course of natural resource policy for years to come. Mimbres Irrigation District v. Salopek et al., which reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978 under the more glamorous moniker of United States v. New Mexico, dealt for the first time with the important issue of U.S. Forest Service water rights on Forest Service lands. The decision both resolved the history of Forest Reservations with respect to water and narrowed and shaped Forest Service options with respect to future management. This article provides the intimate details of the Forest Service litigation. The portrait reveals how the case struggled to define the Forest Service's past and unwittingly set the course for its future. The details - the incomplete understandings of history, the legal posturing in an adversary system, the quirks of personality in a complex process - combine in this story to show how time and chance influence our eternal rules about our most basic resources. The article weaves materials from personal interviews and various state and federal archives to develop the tale.