Unsettled Waters. Eric P. Perramond

The dam would have been close to where the current and smaller Talpa Reservoir is located (see map 6). While originally popular in Taos in the 1950s, plans for the Indian Camp Dam met with real resistance once federal and state project officials proposed a conservancy district to reorganize water governance. Taoseños worried that the project would raise taxes on already poor farmers. Locals also feared a loss of water governance for the area’s acequias and domestic mutual water associations that provide drinking water from wells. The formation of the conservancy district near Albuquerque, decades before, fed these concerns in Taos.

      AFTER INDIAN CAMP DAM, THE INEVITABLE

      The Indian Camp Dam died because of local opposition to taxation and loss of governance.⁵ However, adjudication continued as the process had already been triggered by the OSE and the state’s attorney general. After all, a full water accounting was needed for the San Juan-Chama Project and its effects on water rights. The OSE was charged with mapping these lands, waters, and preexisting cultures of waters. It was hard work to envision, much less complete. What is remarkable was the amount of time, precision, and annotation for crops inserted into each map. Each map was made with care yet errors abounded, and the later files are replete with correction maps for boundary sliver issues, ownership changes, and crop annotations that changed over time. Water and water use never stay still, and the maps would have to be constantly updated to be correct.

      Mapping, field checking, and aerial photography of all water users and their fields in the valley ensued. OSE field staff came to depend on local irrigator knowledge in Taos. One day in 2011, I spoke with Bob, a retired OSE field technician then in his early seventies. As he recounted his experience in the Taos Valley, what seemed like an expert’s account quickly morphed into a humble narrative of long days, confusion, mistakes, and later corrections at the office in Santa Fe. The work was difficult, and Bob’s realm of expertise depended on local knowledge to execute it in any satisfactory way, as he related.

      We needed their help to make this happen. I mean, there was a lot of discussion … I sometimes felt like they were negotiating with us … or that they were trying to maneuver us into decisions that would make it on the map, talking about water duties, or what crops were planted when, bickering about crop rotation and that a fixed amount of water for any field was never set, right? People had a lot to say, and some of these old-timers questioned how or why we were doing all this in the beginning. That field checking must have been … in the spring of 1968 or thereabouts. We tried to pay attention to the important stuff on water, but sometimes, well, people just go off, and they got on these tangents how they were special, they ignored the state engineer or the thinking that this wasn’t state water, that kind of thing … We got it right, mostly, in the end, but a lot of the time we [OSE] were pretty generous about the water duties we assigned or dimensions of fields and how much water people actually needed. I think people were irrigating like crazy with us present [chuckles] … I mean they weren’t growing rice in places like Taos or Talpa, so that … [laughs] was pretty entertaining.⁶

      Locals were not always fully trusting of the process. Bob’s recounting also makes it clear that Taoseños were intent on being visible to OSE staff in their irrigation practices. They wanted to be seen making full use of their water at the time of mapping, often to the point of overwatering. The hydrographic surveys were the starting point for enjoining the various kinds of expertise necessary to make the 1907 water code work in New Mexico.⁷ However, mapping property lines in the valleys was complicated.

      Miguel A., a leather shop owner now in his sixties who used to run some cattle in El Prado, recalled local reactions to the new presence: