The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 256

-delegation Introduced a bill that (hey hpped, IM Vn i f) would settle the i rucnee niver aispuie uiice and for all. The bill included provisions to end the tribe's lawsuits, to guarantee Reno and Sparks enough water to support the anticipated growth of those cities to the year 2005, to establish a minimum level for the lake and to compensate the tribe if the level went lower. It would also create a fish propagation program, set up a (10 million Paiute trust fund for the tribal government and ratify the California Nevada Interstate Water Compact. The members of the tribal council were persuaded to endorse the settlement because it supposedly would keep the lake from disappearing entirely or turning into a dead sump. And the money involved sounded attractive.

But when some of the members of the tribe heard about the bill and read its provisions, they rebelled. The "guaranteed" minimum lake level, they said, was not high enough to permit the fish to spawn. And they were suspicious of promises to pay them if the lake sank even lower. They were well aware of the long record of broken promises. Tribal member Dewey Sampson told the Reno Gazette-Journal: "My great grandfather, lived on this land, and if he knew what was happening he would fight, and so will I.

We'll never give up any of our water rights." Alvin James, a Paiute who holds a University of Nevada master's degree in natural resources, protested: "The effect of the bill is simply to sell the water reserved for Pyramid Lake They're taking everything away from us." James and his wife, LaNada, a UC-Berkeley graduate, led a petition drive requiring a tribal election, and in the resulting balloting the bill was voted down by 192 to 14. Laxalt was deeply disappointed at the tribe's reversal: "My patience is wearing thin," he said. "It is frustrating to see such a delicate compromise on the verge of unraveling." This year he introduced a new version, S. 2457, which omits the complicated tradeoffs and simply provides for congressional ratification of the California-Nevada Interstate Water Compact. It, Drums Along the Truckee UAneiDcauaa ways for many years.

When timber became important to railroad builders, it no longer belonged to the Paiutes. When pifion pines were needed for firewood, they no longer belonged to the Paiutes. "When grassland was needed by the cattlemen, it no longer belonged to the Paiutes, When water from the Truckee River was needed by white farmers and ranchers, it no longer belonged to the Paiutes Swimming in the turquoise waters are Pyramid's well-nigh legendary fish, the La-hontan cutthroat trout. In most lakes and Conservation should be an integral part of any water plan for this or any basin in the West, but it seems to be the forgotten factor. aspen-bordered meadows where Reno was built, then flows east and north to its final destination in Pyramid Lake.

In 1906 the Bureau of Reclamation built Derby Dam, east of Reno, ultimately diverting about half of the Truckee south to the Lahontan Reservoir for the creation of the Newlands Project, an effort to make the desert blossom with farms in a region around Fallon. Evidently no one thought to ask the Paiutes to yield their rights to the water, which they believed had been guaranteed to them when the Pyramid Lake Reservation was created by presidential order. With the growth of agriculture and the boomtown expansion of Reno, the Derby Dam diversion lowered the level of the lake some 70 feet to the point where a sand-and-gra 'el delta rose as a barrier to the spawning trout by the 1940s, and they died out. The cui-ui, with an amazing life span of 25 to 40 years, managed to survive. The lake was restocked with cutthroat trout in the 1950s, and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service now maintains a hatchery there.

The 1200 Paiutes on the reservation raise cattle or hold jobs off the reservation they have been ill-equipped to participate in the Machiavellian politics of water in the West and were baffled by the thickets of legal gobbledygook that deprived them of what they thought were their ancestral rights. Trying to recover their rights by lawsuits, they have won some and lost some, but the lake has continued to fall intermittently. Current wet years have raised it a few feet higher than it was in the preceding dry years. Last year Nevada's Republican Senator Paul Laxalt and the Nevada congressional ITTJhe water wars of the West and the I Indian wars of the West are far from ended. They are no longer fought with dynamite and rifles; they take place In the courts, in the legislatures, in the halls of Congress and the court of public opinion.

They are fought with bitterness though not with bloodshed, and they arouse the kind of visceral emotions that swirl around the historic treatment of native Americans and around relations between Westerners and the land and water they call their own. Sometimes Indian wars and water wars intersect, as they do at Pyramid Lake, that Tahoe-sized body of turquoise water northeast of Reno, where the Pyramid Lake Pai-utes (one of many Paiute tribes east of the Sierra) are being deprived of water their ancestors owned for 3000 years. The lake is steadily shrinking as its source, the Truckee River, is diverted for alfalfa growers, for denizens of the gaming houses of Reno and Sparks and Tahoe, for developers who spread subdivisions in the high deserts and assume the water supply of the West is infinite. Along the banks of the river and around the nearly pristine shores of the big blue lake, you can figuratively hear the tribal drums beating again as they beat in 1860, when the Paiutes decisively repulsed an army of gun-happy Comstock miners. Berkeley author Ferol Egan, who wrote an account of that war, "Sand in a Whirlwind," describes what happened after the Paiutes were forced to come to terms: "The treaty between the Paiutes and the government has been violated In many Derby Dam Vf Reno CW yCJ Reservoir HeAi streams anglers are happy to snag trout, weighing a pound or two.

At Pyramid impounders are common, and 10-pounders are not unusual. In 1977 a fisherman landed a 28-pounder, and the world's record sport trout was a giant hauled in at Pyramid in 1925, weighing in at an incredible 41 pounds. Also swimming in Pyramid is a fish found nowhere else in the world the cui-ui (pronounced trout. With the lake shrinking, the cui-ui is classified as a threatened species and has been placed on the endangered list. The Truckee flows out of Lake Tahoe at Tahoe City, roars through its steep canyon down the east side of the range to the broad, he interstate compact is an important battle in the overall war.

In the 1960s governors Ronald Reagan of California and Paul Laxalt of Nevada sponsored it as an agreed allocation of the unappropriated waters of the Truckee and other streams flowing from California into Nevada. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall opposed the compact because he felt it did not protect the tribal water rights, and Congress.