Durango by Gary Hart Page B

expanded its potential revenue base.
    Almost simultaneously, Indian water rights were being addressed by the federal government as well. In 1988, Congress took up the Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, which sought to resolve age-old disputes about what water rights, if any, Indian tribes were entitled to. Colorado, like certain other Western states, had early on adopted the so-called appropriation doctrine—shorthanded as “first in time, first in right”—to determine water rights during the frontier days. This doctrine evolved over decades into a complex system for guaranteeing water rights based on who got there first and how much they used. It did not, however, resolve the rights of those who had been using water for centuries before the white man trekked west on his horse and in his covered wagon.
    After considerable deliberation, the Southern Utes agreed to forgo their senior water rights in exchange for water from the stalemated Animas–La Plata project. This had the sudden and unexpected effect of substantially altering the economics of the project and giving it a whole new lease on life. Virtually overnight, a lot of farmers, developers, and local boosters discovered the Southern Utes as their new best friends. One writer in a newspaper called Westword summed up this revolution with these words: “Conservative white farmers and ranchers, as well as ‘good ol’ boy’ developers in Durango, started championing Native American rights like born liberals.”
    So, with energy and water reaching a dynamic political mix, Southern Ute tribal chairman Leonard Cloud and his council created their own resource development company in 1992 using funds received from the federal government under the Colorado Ute Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement. They called the company Red Willow. In 1995 the Southern Utes assumed ownership of fifty-four natural gas wells, and they increased production fourfold in less than a year. Unlike private production companies, which were required to pay property and severance taxes to the state and county and income taxes to the federal government, the tribe was exempt from these taxes and thus would reap substantially larger profits on these and future projects.
    After more than a century of virtual isolation, within a decade or so the Southern Utes found themselves in the modern commercial world and able to command much of their own destiny. If not overnight, then figuratively close to it, they had emerging wealth, social status, and political importance. Now, when all-party discussions about the Animas–La Plata project were held, tribal representatives were near the head of the table. When plans for future economic development in La Plata County and southwestern Colorado were being drawn up, Leonard Cloud or his representatives were invited as full partners.
    And throughout the 1970s and beyond, Leonard Cloud and other tribal officials, largely at the urging of Sam Maynard, were periodic visitors to Washington. They arranged visits with their Colorado congressional delegation to seek support in their late dependency days and even more so during and after the water and energy revolutions that greatly elevated their status.
    Eventually the Utes acquired principled and dedicated professional financial advice, and Maynard could call on other top-flight legal experts as required. During the heady transition days, however, the vultures did circle, as Dan Sheridan’s experience proved. It was by no means certain in the late 1970s and 1980s that the Utes would not be picked over and picked apart by the emerging army of the unscrupulous.
    Sheridan’s concern throughout that time was for his friend Leonard Cloud and the tribe his grandfather had befriended in the late nineteenth century. He felt it was somehow symbolic that the Florida River that arose above the ancestral Sheridan ranch as a small rivulet and flowed through it as a somewhat larger stream