The Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company (LPIC) played a crucial role in Northern Colorado irrigation history despite its short lifespan. Both it and the related Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District (GPID) were fraught with logistical and financial struggles throughout their existence, but the irrigation infrastructure these organizations left behind remains an enduring legacy of the vision and hard work of the men who ran these companies. The climax for Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company was the momentous Wyoming vs. Colorado lawsuit. Despite the death knell it sounded for the LPIC, the case would be one of the most significant water rights cases ever tried in the United States and would shape the nature of water rights and use up to the present day.

The Greeley, Colorado, area is rich in irrigated agricultural production. Starting with its founding in 1870, Greeley residents began irrigating land by constructing ditches and canals along the Cache la Poudre River. They started by constructing Greeley No. 2 and Greeley No. 3 ditches, and additional extensions culminated in 250,000 acres being under irrigation by 1910. Irrigation meant increased crop yields and farm production, which could not have been possible without water. Increased production kept the railroads busy, as the Colorado & Southern, the Denver, Laramie & Northwestern, and the Union Pacific railroads crisscrossed the valley carrying produce from sugar beet factories and potato fields to Greeley and Denver. [1]

The problem was that there was not enough water in the Poudre Valley for all the agricultural demands placed upon it. Many enterprising farmers and businessmen contemplated how to bring water from the Western Slope of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains over the Continental Divide to the Poudre River on the Eastern Slope. A diversion from the Laramie River to the Poudre River would bring much needed water to the farmers of Northern Colorado.

In August 1902, a group of men including Abram I. Akin, Harris Akin, Myron Akin, and Wallis Link joined forces as the Link Lakes Company to bring a transmountain diversion to fruition. Their idea was to construct a two and a half mile long tunnel across the Divide from the Laramie River to the Poudre River. Eventually the group and other engineers, ranchers, and irrigators joined the project, including the Mitchell Lakes Company. All of these interests combined and officially incorporated in 1907 as the Laramie-Poudre Reservoirs and Irrigation Company (LPRIC). [2]

The Water Supply and Storage Company was the first company to construct a successful transmountain diversion project. The company constructed the Skyline Ditch between 1891 and 1895 to divert water from the Laramie River to Chambers Lake in the Poudre River watershed. LPRIC’s tunnel would not be the first transmountain diversion on the Laramie River, but its success would rival that of the Skyline Ditch.

Planning and construction of the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel began in August 1902 under the leadership of the Links Lake Company, and progressed for the next seven years. After incorporation, LPRIC officially took over and filed for the construction of the tunnel on August 22, 1908, and began work on Christmas Day, 1909. Simultaneously, other canal and reservoir companies began construction projects along the Poudre River that would store and distribute LPRIC’s diversion water from the Laramie River. Among these agencies were the 1902 Poudre Valley Reservoir Company and the 1904 Eastman Canal and Reservoir Company. Benjamin H. Eaton organized the Poudre Valley Reservoir Company to build the Poudre Valley Canal. The Canal would play a central role in transporting diverted water to farmers in the Greeley area. The Poudre Valley Reservoir Company eventually consolidated its interests with LPRIC in 1906. [3]

LPRIC was the organization responsible for building the diversion tunnel and its related ditches and storage facilities in the mountains of Colorado, while other companies distributed LPRIC’s water. Central to the development of LPRIC was the creation of the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District (GPID) in 1909, with Daniel E. Camfield as a leading organizer and Delph E. Carpenter as attorney. The District organized farm owners to pay for the construction costs of the diversion tunnel and its ditches. LPRIC agreed to construct the works and transport the water to the District via the Poudre Valley Canal and its ditch system. The District controlled this system through purchase of shares from the North Poudre Irrigation Company and stockholders of the Poudre Valley Reservoir Company. [4]

The Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District was a district of irrigated lands which by 1910 consisted of 125,000 acres in the Poudre Valley. The GPID operated by financing the construction of irrigation works through bond sales, bonding its lands in the Poudre Valley system for $40 per acre at 6% on 20-year bonds. [5] As a c.1910 promotional brochure on the District claimed, these bonds paid “for all water supply, whereby its water rights cost less than rights under the old ditches and the terms being easy and lands of less price, afford excellent opportunity for investment and profit.” [6]

Despite the promise of offering irrigated lands to farmers through low-priced bonds, the District proved financially unstable. Less arable lands often did not pay off their assessments, and went into bondholder litigation for unredeemed tax sales. At these tax sales, landowners and tax buyers would not purchase these less desirable lands, requiring GPID to remove them from the District. A landowner and bondholder pool bought these lands in exchange for bonds maturing in the same year of the tax certificate. As a result, the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District could not maintain its investments and dissolved in 1945. The District sold 20,000 acres of unredeemed land and tax sales certificates totaling a face value of $1,020,000 at public auction for nominal prices. Weld County established tax deeds for these lands and sold them at higher prices, resulting in their bonds declining to ten cents on the dollar. Under the District, bondholders had bonded their land at $37.00 an acre. Because of the dissolution, many bondholders and investors lost thousands of dollars. [7]

After seven years of work, LPRIC finally completed the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel on July 27, 1911. The company held a celebration for 60 guests and 65 construction workers, who enjoyed a dinner and a visit to the construction site, power plant, and tunnel. [8] The entire project of the tunnel, its collection ditches, and the canals running out from the tunnel, had cost the company $300,000 in construction expenses. [9]

Unfortunately, a lawsuit marred the fanfare over the tunnel’s completion. Because the Laramie River flows through Wyoming, the State of Wyoming sued the State of Colorado and the LPRIC and GPID before LPRIC could begin diverting water through the tunnel. Wyoming claimed that the tunnel jeopardized the state’s prior rights to the water. The lawsuit went to the U.S. Supreme Court on May 29, 1911, and the case would last eleven long years, although an initial determination in 1914 allowed some water to begin flowing through the tunnel for the first time. Benjamin Griffith, attorney general of Colorado, represented the defendants in the case, and Delph E. Carpenter, renowned for his later work on water compacts, put up an excellent defense on behalf of the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District. [10] William Kelly, an attorney for LPIC in the 1930s, wrote about the case,

The complaint alleged all water of the Laramie had been already appropriated by Wyoming citizens and none remained for diversion by the tunnel from the Laramie into the Poudre River. It asked the Court to enter an injunction against all citizens of the State of Colorado from diverting any water from the Laramie River in Colorado. [11]

The final 1922 U.S. Supreme Court decision on Wyoming vs. Colorado split water apportionment between the two states, apportioning 39,750 annual acre feet of water to all Colorado ditches. The Supreme Court left it for the state courts and individual ditch companies to determine how they would split the cubic feet per second flow rate of diversion for each ditch. The result was that all divertees on the Laramie River (including Laramie-Poudre Reservoirs and Irrigation Company and Water Supply and Storage Company) scrambled to get their water down the mountain first before the others could fill their quotas. The scramble left dry meadows by midsummer as ditches and diversions went dry. Consequently, a treaty between the transmountain diverters split the acre-feet between meadow ditches and transmountain ditches in order to assure a constant flow of water. [12]

Many farmers, irrigators, and ditch company executives felt that the Supreme Court case unfairly split apportionment and caused hardship and water scarcity for Colorado ranchers and farmers. Many Coloradoans felt that they had more right to the water than farmers in Wyoming, because Coloradoans had built the diversion infrastructure in the first place. Additionally, when LPRIC had first planned the tunnel and its supply ditches, the company had made promises for how much water it could divert to the Poudre Valley ditch and reservoir systems. When the court case resulted in much lower allocations than expected, LPRIC was unable to fulfill its obligations to other irrigation companies. [13]

The Laramie-Poudre Reservoirs and Irrigation Company fell on hard financial times because of the drawn-out court case, legal fees, and the failed obligations to other irrigation companies. Debts, mortgages, and financial woes plagued the company for the rest of its life. Part of the problem was that most of the LPRIC system did not have farms directly along its ditches and canals. Instead, LPRIC rented the water it carried to farmers further down in Larimer and Weld Counties. Depending on the demand for water, LPRIC often was not able to make enough money from renting to pay for its massive construction costs, and because it often did not own the systems which carried its water, farmers along those ditches and canals had other options for where to purchase their water. As a result of financial difficulties stemming from these problems, the 1920s were a decade of massive transformations for the company. Harvey D. Parker became the president and started instituting major consolidation efforts. Under his leadership, the company reformed in 1923 as Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company (LPIC), and began consolidating its debts and mortgages by refinancing loans and discharging liens. LPIC came out of restructuring in 1926 more secure than it had been a few years before, although it still had significant mortgages on its infrastructure. [14]

Between 1922 and 1933, LPIC embarked on a long construction project to rehabilitate and expand the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel. While this improved the tunnel and increased water flow, construction costs added to the company’s debt and only made matters worse. However, improving the tunnel was necessary in order for LPIC to stay competitive with its other transmountain-diverting neighbor, Water Supply and Storage Company (WSSC). Beginning in 1929, the West Side Construction Company provided funds for LPIC to increase the available water supply for the tunnel by constructing a collection ditch. This ditch made the tunnel more productive than the nearby Skyline Ditch, owned by WSSC. The higher elevation of the Skyline Ditch meant that it took in the entire spring snow thaw. However, the Skyline’s higher altitude meant that water was already flowing through the lower Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel and its collection ditches before the snow had melted at the Skyline. In 1925 and for a few years after, the tunnel collected more water than Skyline Ditch. [15]

The LPIC system was an engineering and irrigation marvel. A lengthy system of collection ditches, reservoirs, tunnels, and canals carried water from high in the Rocky Mountains down to farmers and ranchers in the Poudre Valley hundreds of miles away. A promotional booklet published by the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District shortly before the tunnel opened, extolled the extent of the system:

The water supply of the district is derived in the main from the Cache la Poudre and Laramie rivers, diverted, carried, stored and distributed by a system requiring the greatest of engineering skill in design and construction. The system consists of mountain collection ditches through solid rock, tunnels, streams, rivers and reservoirs, distributing canals and laterals extending from the perpetual snow banks and glaciers along the crests of the Medicine Bow in the Laramie valley far out upon the plains along the Cache la Poudre, a distance from end to end of more than 160 miles. … The system comprises a total extend of canals and distributing mains of more than 200 miles and reservoirs having a total storage capacity of about one acre foot per acre of land served, and with the direct flow will afford to each acre irrigated [illegible] acre feet per annum. [16]

The Laramie River System of LPIC that supplied water to the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District began with the Link Lakes, a series of natural lakes at 11,000 feet in elevation. The lakes discharged their water into neighboring creeks, which then emptied into the West Side Collection Ditch. This ditch ran from Rawah Creek along the west side of the Laramie River to intercept all of the Laramie’s tributaries and discharge the collected water into the Tunnel Reservoir, which was located just above the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel. The East Side Collection Ditch ran from Deadman Creek along the east side of the Laramie River to intercept those tributaries and empty the collected water into the Tunnel Reservoir. [17]

The Tunnel Reservoir was located at the channel of the Laramie River at the west portal of the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel. It stored water to a depth of 42 feet, with a surface area of 200 acres and a capacity of 170,000,000 cubic feet. The Laramie River and West Fork of the Poudre River flowed into the reservoir, as well as their tributaries and the water collected by the ditches. The reservoir then discharged its water through the tunnel. The tunnel itself was 11,480 feet long, 9.5 feet wide, and 7.5 feet high. It extended from the Laramie River at the Tunnel Reservoir all the way to the Cache la Poudre River two and a half miles away. [18]

Water exited the east portal of the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel and entered a 34,500 acre feet reservoir on the Poudre River. From there, water could be stored or released into the Poudre Valley Canal and the Laramie-Poudre Canal. The Poudre Valley Canal and its extension, the Laramie-Poudre, functioned as the primary distributing main of the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District from the mouth of the Poudre Canyon along the Poudre River to the far eastern edge of the district. McGrew Reservoir (capacity 825,000,000 cubic feet), March Reservoir (capacity 450,000,000 cubic feet), and Camfield Reservoir (capacity 175,000,000 cubic feet) stored this water, and the canal extended to a system of lateral ditches over 300 miles to distribute water to individual farms. [19]

Starting around the time of the Great Depression, plans got underway on the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, which would become the largest and most extensive transmountain diversion project yet accomplished. The C-BT project, begun in 1938, would carry water from the Colorado River watershed on the Western Slope to the Poudre River watershed through a massive system of reservoirs, tunnels, canals, and ditches. Starting in 1933, LPIC heavily promoted the C-BT project because of the additional water it would provide to reservoir and irrigation companies for distribution. LPIC helped negotiate the portion of the project cost that irrigation companies would be required to pay, in order to save them money and maximize their profits from the project. [20]

The promise of more water could not help LPIC, however. The C-BT was a huge undertaking that would not produce water flow until 1956. Meanwhile, LPIC was still floundering in debt and mortgages. By the mid 1930s, many of its properties were in foreclosure. The Great Depression coincided with drought and the Dust Bowl in eastern Colorado. Lack of water was acute, which meant that many irrigation companies were unable to supply all the water that farmers needed. LPIC was not the only water organization struggling under the hardships of the Great Depression. The Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District was a casualty, as poor financial planning and organization since its inception finally came to a head. The district dissolved in 1945, and LPIC absorbed its infrastructure. [21]

The real blow to the financially struggling LPIC came in 1937, when through a series of transactions and a $250,000 acquisition of Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company properties, Water Supply and Storage Company absorbed the company and became the new owner and operator of the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel and its collection ditches. [22]

Legal and corporate maneuvering made the nature of this acquisition very complicated. William Kelly, attorney for LPIC at the time, wrote a history of the company, and accused WSSC of “freezing out” LPIC by seeking to buy its mortgage foreclosure for only $250,000, when the value was four times that. LPIC could not afford to refinance its mortgages and so was helpless to resist the acquisition. Lawrence R. Temple, lawyer for WSSC, facilitated the process of absorbing LPIC properties into WSSC. [23]

Kelly claims that the WSSC ignored past cooperation between the two companies. In 1938, he wrote a letter to A.C. Kluver, WSSC president, and Lawrence R. Temple, WSSC attorney. He reminded them that in 1925 when WSSC’s Skyline Ditch was in need of repairs, LPIC had agreed to let WSSC run their water through the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel while the ditch was being fixed. Kelly urged WSSC not to forget this gesture of good will, and to return the favor. LPIC offered to sell WSSC controlling interest in stock shares, but asked WSSC not to purchase its properties and system for a quarter of their value. Kelly believed that WSSC purposely forgot LPIC’s past cooperation and chose to freeze the company out instead. [24]

However, men like Harvey Johnson, on the Board of Directors for WSSC at the time, argued that it was impossible for LPIC to stay afloat. The company had built its tunnel first and ditches later and never purchased land along the ditches. The company rented its water rather than selling it, so had no control over who owned the infrastructure downstream. The LPIC could not salvage itself because poor planning decisions had kept the company from purchasing the land and infrastructure downstream where the farmers were. Johnson believed LPIC’s only viable option was to sell to WSSC. Furthermore, even though the LPIC system was valued at well over a million dollars, there was simply no way any irrigation company had the capital to purchase it for that much. For WSSC to even be able to raise $250,000 for the system was difficult in the last few years of the Great Depression. [25]

LPIC took the fight to the Larimer County District Court in 1938 to complain about the breach of trust committed against company stockholders. It eventually went to the Supreme Court. In the end, LPIC lost, and WSSC took the stock, infrastructure (including the tunnel, collection ditches, and other works), and water rights, all at bankruptcy prices. [26] Kelly bitterly remarked, “Some of these contributors [of the LPIC] and other ‘ditch men’ in Northern Colorado characterized this acquisition of another’s mutual ditch system in distress, as ‘cannibalism.’” [27]

While LPIC and the men who had built and managed its system held hard feelings against WSSC for their reputedly “underhanded” acquisition, in reality, LPIC had been slowly dying ever since the Wyoming vs. Colorado case. In the world of irrigation, some companies survived financially and many others did not. Constructing irrigation infrastructure was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, and involved many legal and jurisdictional settlements. Companies that stretched themselves too thin found themselves unable to make enough money selling water to pay off construction debts. One of LPIC’s fatal flaws was building massive irrigation infrastructure up in the mountains but not routing the water through its own ditches and canals in the Poudre River Valley, but instead through its competitors’ or subsidiaries’ systems. Without having farmers and ranchers along LPIC diversions, the company was forced to rent its water to others downstream. In years of drought or high water demand, LPIC might manage to struggle by. In other years, renting water alone could not cover the massive expenses the company had undertaken to build its infrastructure. Whereas the WSSC and other companies were quick to buy up or incorporate valley ditches and canals so that they had diversion infrastructure all along the route from mountains to prairie farmer, LPIC failed to secure their position in this way.

Kelly mourned the loss of the LPIC in the fact of the usurpers, Water Supply and Storage Company. He claimed that the hard work put into irrigation systems developed by the LPIC had been seized by men who had not put in the same amount of hard work and effort. [28] However, WSSC was not a latecomer to irrigation; it had been working on diversion projects in the mountains even earlier than LPIC, and had completed a transmountain diversion with the Skyline Ditch almost two decades before water started flowing through the Laramie-Poudre Diversion Tunnel. Kelly admits that the late arrival of LPIC to the irrigation scene meant that it was in many ways fighting a losing battle in competition with other companies that had already established themselves. [29] In the end, shrewd management and a far-sighted vision were what sustained companies like the WSSC through the most competitive years of irrigation and enabled them to hold onto their assets into the present day.

While the Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company and the Greeley-Poudre Irrigation District did not survive the test of time, the infrastructure of the companies remains a central part of Northern Colorado’s irrigation system today. Water Supply and Storage Company continues to manage old LPIC infrastructure and use it to transport Western Slope water to Eastern Slope farmers and metropolitan areas. The strong leadership of WSSC weathered the transition from agricultural to urban water use, and its increased control over infrastructure by World War II meant that it had the resources to supply and ever-increasing demand for municipal water. Without the hard work of LPIC, this would not be possible.

Central to the history of LPIC is the story of Wyoming vs. Colorado. Despite its devastating consequences for the company, the case was a landmark lawsuit in water rights history, and its settlement and consequent apportionment have had lasting consequences to the present day on how courts handle interstate water rights cases.

William Kelly finished his hagiography of the Laramie-Poudre Irrigation Company by waxing poetic about the legacy of the important irrigation system and the enduring significance of the company to Northern Colorado irrigation history.

The first builders of an irrigation works saw their quarry taken by others. The water supply they captured, however, survives to benefit other users.

The Laramie-Poudre Irrigation and the Poudre Valley Reservoir Companies’ story is one of hopeful men who built a difficult project, only to lose it. They pioneered by surveys and construction to add water from the Laramie River, a new source of supply, by new storage basins to conserve that of the Poudre supplies, and by ditches to lead the water to new lands, chiefly in Weld County. Their labors and expenditures on its works extended over the first third of this century.

Because relatively late in Cache la Poudre and Laramie ditch building, the effort had to be a sustained one, costly to its toilers. They are now forgotten by some, unknown to others. Many men contributed labor of their hands, their teams, scrapers, rock drills, shovels, taxes, and many of their money. When one team was flagging, a renewed relay took over from their forerunner shift in carrying on its initiation, construction and diversion of the water into the tunnel and canals.

These pioneers seasoned in effort to meet the need, but had to be new comers in priorities. Preserving under up-hill difficulties of construction and financing, they had brought this water supply by dams, ditches and a two mile transmountain tunnel, at high cost, from the Laramie River and Medicine Bow range into the Cache la Poudre in Laramie County, thence by canals and reservoirs to new lands from the Poudre.

In the end, its builders lost what they had created. Others reaped where these had sown.

But the water wets crops in the Poudre Valley. [30]