The one exception to the rule it had just established, said the Court, was when someone had water rights that predated the Colorado River Compact. Those rights had to be satisfied first, no matter what. There was an exquisite irony in this. Most of the Indians of the Southwest were hunter-gathers when whites arrived; a purely agricultural culture such as the Hohokam no longer existed. When the whites came and killed off the buffalo and antelope and ran the Indians onto reservations, their old way of life perished, and they had no choice but to become farmers or wards of the state. The
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