The Commissioner, the Irrigation Company, and the Water Everyone Else Wanted
A Yakima editor accuses Washington's state land commissioner of handing a private irrigation company the inside track on the reservoir sites at the head of the river — then lying about it.
The conclusion is inevitable that the state land commissioner had personal reasons for entering into the deal with the Washington Irrigation Company, which he knows well enough was the first step in the company's game of securing control of the reservoir sites at the head of the river. If he had been acting merely as the unbiased agent of the state he never would have made a contract with the company such as he has made; he never would have given out the absurd statement that the company will irrigate the state lands with water it already controls; he never would have asserted that the opposition to the deal he has made comes merely from speculators who want to secure control of the water supply, nor sought officially to convince the department at Washington that it was so. If he had had nothing in mind but to secure water for the Carey lands he would have at least made his plans public, and would have given others a chance to make the contract he made with the Washington Irrigation Company.
From the standpoint of Yakima and Kittitas county people there is no excuse for the commissioner's action in this matter. He is either corrupt, or he is playing favorites, or else he is entirely incompetent to be entrusted with any responsibility in connection with a matter so important as this. He has not advanced a single valid reason why this deal should have been made, or why he entered into it, and he cannot do so. — Yakima Republic
“He is either corrupt, or he is playing favorites, or else he is entirely incompetent to be entrusted with any responsibility in connection with a matter so important as this.”
Then as now, the fight in the Yakima basin was over who holds the paper to the water. A state official quietly contracting with a private company for reservoir sites at the river's headwaters is the 1904 version of every modern Yakima basin water-rights dispute, from the Teanaway purchase to drought-year curtailment among junior users. The charge — that a public servant negotiated in private and called his critics speculators — has an uncomfortably familiar ring.
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