Against the current: four decades in water law and policy.

• Author: Huffman, James L.

I was born within a couple hundred yards of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Montana. I grew up a couple hundred miles upstream on Sourdough Creek, which flows into the East Gallatin River, and then into the Gallatin River which joins the Madison and Jefferson Rivers to form the Missouri. The fishing in Sourdough Creek was always good. One summer my mom and I pulled over 200 trout from Sourdough. We ate everyone one of them. No catch and release for us.

Dr. Roland Renne, who was president of Montana State College and later ran for governor as a Democrat, gave me permission to fish on his farm. I think I had an exclusive franchise, so the fishing was particularly good there. I supported him for governor, but he lost, so I became a Republican and went back to fishing. Sometimes I would walk a quarter mile across the valley to Spring Creek, a smaller stream with bigger fish for some reason--probably a combination of fewer fishermen and better food supply for the fish.

I don't know how the fishing is today in Sourdough, but I still fish Bridger Creek on the other side of Bozeman and never come home empty handed. Still no catch and release for me. There's nothing like fresh trout for breakfast.

My Dad was an agricultural economist at Montana State College. He grew up on a dry land wheat ranch ten miles south of the Great Falls of the Missouri River. His dad, whose name was James Lloyd Huffman (which explains the Roman numeral II on my birth certificate and passport), grew up in Rileysville, Virginia, and homesteaded in Montana in 1910.

I drove truck during harvest and helped with seeding in late summer. In a good year they might get forty bushels to the acre, but some years they only got ten. There were only 480 acres (320 homesteaded and 160 leased) and half of that was in summer fallow and a bit more was lost to alkali.

Maybe that's why my Dad's specialty was irrigation and water policy. He wrote a book about it, Irrigation Development and Public Water Policy, published in 1953. (1) Along the way he served as Head of the Agricultural Economics Department, Director of the Water Resources Research Center, Dean of Agriculture and Director of Experiment Stations, and Vice President for Research at Montana State. We still go to Bobcat games in his honor-and because we are fans.

My Mom grew up on a farm outside Miles City, Montana. It's a Godforsaken place to be a farmer. One hundred ten degrees is not unusual in August and it's a rare winter when you don't have a week or two at forty degrees below zero) Average annual precipitation is about thirteen inches, (3) but you lose some of that when all the snow is blown off to North Dakota and beyond. With a few thousand acres of leased Bureau of Land Management land and a couple hundred acres of irrigated cropland along the Yellowstone River, you could raise a few cows and almost as many kids.

My granddad on my mother's side emigrated from Switzerland when he was seventeen. He got tired of hauling baskets of eroded dirt back up the steep slopes of the family vineyard in Thal, a small village near Lake Constance. Eventually his parents and three brothers followed him. I guess they got tired of it, too. He preferred irrigating the parched lands of eastern Montana. His technique was simple. After sunset, you turn on the water at the top of the field. You ride your horse to the bottom end of the field, throw down your bedroll, sleep until the water wakes you up, and then move on to the next field.

Summer vacations for the family revolved around the Western Farm Economics meetings hosted each year by a different land-grant school. One summer we went to the American Farm Economics meeting in North Carolina, giving us an introduction to the American East and South, but otherwise we visited western cow colleges--Flagstaff, Corvallis, Fort Collins, Pullman, Davis, Logan, Reno.

Along the way we camped in national parks and visited dams. My Dad liked dams. Sometimes we got there before the dam. I got to see Indians fishing at Celilo Falls. There's a picture my dad took in Mike's salmon book. (4) But even with the loss of that spectacular Columbia River waterfall, there was no question that dams were a good thing--engineering marvels, like Grand Coulee and Hoover, helping to electrify the country and feed the world.

Like a lot of other people, I never wondered who was paying for all those dams, or what impact they might have on the fish. Not until the Allenspur Dam was proposed for the Yellowstone just south of Livingston, Montana, did it occur to me that sometimes a dam might be a bad idea. I liked fishing in Mill Creek and other tributaries that would disappear, along with a lot of the Paradise Valley, under an Allenspur Reservoir.

But I maintained a balanced view on the subject of dams. After all, how could Mike Blumm and I float the Deschutes River in late August without the benefit of Pelton Dam? This spring we were lucky--4000 cubic feet per second in the Owyhee River in the first week of June. (5) But that was unusual, maybe a record. With a dam upstream from Rome...