Western History Association

We analyze the economic determinants and effects of prior appropriation water rights that were voluntarily implemented across an immense area of the US West, abruptly replacing commonlaw riparian water rights. At the same time and place, vast private irrigation infrastructure added to the US capital stock. We build upon Ostrom and Gardner (1993) and model irrigation as a coordination problem to show how prior appropriation facilitated greater private infrastructure development than was possible under the baseline riparian system by i) securing access to water against future entry and ii) defining a property right that formed the basis for contracting around collective action problems among numerous, heterogeneous agents. We construct a dataset of 7,800 rights in Colorado, established between 1852 and 2013 including location, date, size, infrastructure investment, irrigated acreage, crops, topography, stream flow, soil quality, and precipitation to test the predictions of the model. We find that prior appropriation facilitated cooperation, doubling infrastructure investment and ultimately contributing between 3% and 21% of western state income in 1930. These outcomes are relative to the baseline alternative of a riparian system. The analysis reveals institutional innovation that informs our understanding of the development of property rights, prior appropriation, and contemporary water policy.

Journal Article Whose Home on the Range? Get access Karen R. Merrill Karen R. Merrill assistant professor of history Princeton University. This article emerged and has benefited from the comments of colleagues and audiences in a number of different settings: the departments of history at the University of Michigan and Princeton University and the meetings of the American Studies Association and the Western History Association. Martha Umphrey's incisive readings helped bring it to completion, as did the reports of the anonymous readers of this journal Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 27, Issue 4, Winter 1996, Pages 433–451, https://doi.org/10.2307/970532 Published: 01 November 1996

Journal Article The Continental Nation-Our Trinity of Revolutionary Testaments Get access John Porter Bloom John Porter Bloom editor of The Territorial Papers of the United States, Senior Specialist for Western History National Archives and Records Service, and twelfth president of the Western History Association, delivered this paper at the Fourteenth Annual WHA Conference, held in Rapid City, South Dakota, October 2–5, 1974 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 1975, Pages 4–15, https://doi.org/10.2307/966963 Published: 01 January 1975