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    Michael Hiltzik: The fight over the Colorado River is a 100-year-old interstate grudge match

    Arizona was girding for war with California over the Colorado River. The year was 1934 and the place was the construction site of Parker Dam, downstream from the nearly completed Hoover Dam. Arizona Gov. Benjamin Baker Moeur, irked that a federally approved interstate compact had awarded California more water from the Colorado than he thought it deserved, dispatched a squad of National Guard ...
    by Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times Feb 09, 2023 6 minutes
    A view of the 395- foot Arizona intake towers, left, and Nevada intake towers in front of the Hoover Dam and the "bathtub ring" that is visible at low water levels of Lake Mead, Nevada, Monday, June 28, 2021.

    Arizona was girding for war with California over the Colorado River.

    The year was 1934 and the place was the construction site of Parker Dam, downstream from the nearly completed Hoover Dam.

    Arizona Gov. Benjamin Baker Moeur, irked that a federally approved interstate compact had awarded California more water from the Colorado than he thought it deserved, dispatched a squad of National Guard troops to the river on a ferryboat to block the new dam's construction.

    The ferryboat Julia B., derisively dubbed the "flagship" of the "Arizona Navy" by a Times war correspondent assigned to cover the skirmish, promptly ran aground on a sandbar.

    After Interior Secretary Harold Ickes imposed a truce between the two states, the guardsmen returned home from the war zone to be hailed as "conquering heroes."

    This encounter, bristling with Gilbert & Sullivan absurdity, only hints at the bitter animosities among the seven states of the Colorado River Basin that have simmered since they reached

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