BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 31

MCCANDLESS AND DANIEL

As we made our short way north out of Blackfoot, Lewis greeted every other passerby with a Brother or Sister before their names, indicating to me their religion—I assumed those not greeted thusly to be Gentiles like myself. We crossed the river at the Porterville Bridge, just built, and went north a couple miles to where, Lewis said, the canal had made it in 1895, just before achieving the land segregation that started the three year court battle with the United.

From time to time, as Lewis explained the system's history, he interrupted himself with a short anecdote about his Lemhi runs, stretching his left arm out toward the Butte to the west and then facing north in remembrance to the short-lived Mormon Lemhi outpost. Intent on keeping my job and absorbing canal information, I let his tales pass by me as I waited for him to continue his explanation of the work already done and, additionally, what was expected on my watch.

Two canals lay side by side, and I knew from conversations with Bothwell and McConaughy that the United Canal, which started out on the north, was Mormon built, while the Skeen ditch to its adjoining south was Gentile, its membership open to anyone with money. The United would end up going beneath the Skeens' three times, so the two Nebraskans had told me, because the latter ditch had investors file on land at crucial points, a ruse to slow down their competitor.

The United, clever enough to work around the first two, could devise no option for the third, forcing their hand. The government saw their predicament and the United's insufficient grade created doubt as to their ability to irrigate the vast remaining acreage of the tract.

We eventually came upon the diversion at the river where the headgate was. The spring months would be devoted to an improvement on its design. Low water never was a problem, but high water washed out the canal. Winter water used for homes and livestock, though of minimal flow, tended to freeze up and collect ice dams that wrecked both the main and laterals. A better headgate with more control would alleviate that problem.

The new headgate would also allow us to work during high water by shutting off the flow. Lewis gave the rough numbers for the work to be done here, though I already knew them, then looked upstream where the United's diversion was cut into the Snake River. "Upstream always wins, Daniel. First to the table, first to the mouth," he said, and though his words weren't particularly prophetic, they did prove ominous for that particular year when the low snowpack shorted water users and the canals in the upper valley sucked the river completely dry.

Lewis' prophecy, or something akin to it, doubtless inspired the eventual court ruling that adjudicated water users' disputes by making the "first in time, first in line" rule. While upstream had always been able to "steal" water from those downstream, the first in time doctrine created a system where earlier rights trumped later ones. On low water years, then, the state started shutting off those latest to the water game, something many users never grasped and thus groused about, even to the point of violence.

Once we headed back and were facing the Big Southern, Lewis lapsed into two separate streams of the past, his last few years working with the Skeens and his early trips to Fort Lemhi and back. Though I tried to steer his monologue toward the remaining undone portions of the canal, there was a gravity that pulled him elsewhere, to his inner thoughts. I'd learned enough about water to put my shovel down and let the water—his thoughts—go where it would, the effort required for altering a flow just too much bother.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston