Interviews with Dennis Frydendall
September 10, 17
and 29, and October 7, 2008, at his son David’s home in
Interview and transcription by Linda Bell
Index:
-
History of Water Development in Northern Colorado and Wyoming
-
History of Red Feather Storage and Irrigation Company, the DOW Lakes and Fox Acres Lakes
Association
with Red Feather Storage and Irrigation
Water Development
in Surrounding Subdivisions
Water
Development in the West
At
this point we should get back to the very beginning….
Most of the water in the Poudre drainage, and lesser in the other
drainages such as the Thompson, the
During
the early days of settlement fights became common over water and there was no
law that governed who got the water. It
was a matter of just location and opportunity, so during the constitutional
convention that made
This
system was basically a new system in the
Today
George Varra, the River Commissioner, will go up – well, I don’t think he
has to go up, I think it’s all automatic today – and get a reading on the
Poudre just above Ted’s Place. Then
he mathematically constructs a virgin river, if there is such a possibility, but
that would be the amount of water that would be in the river if nobody was doing
anything – adding water out of Chambers or subtracting water out anyplace.
This then determines the rights of those people that are affected.
The whole idea of storage is to get the water in the spring runoff, hold
it, and dump it later in the season for the purpose of irrigating longer in the
season. As a result, they have
farmers basically – and there were some…
I don’t know how to say this without leaving a bad taste in
somebody’s mouth, but there have always been hucksters trying to make a buck
off of land in the west and certainly greedy.
The early days were no exception and the deal was that break between 50
cents and 5 dollars an acre, which was pretty attractive if they could just get
the water.
That’s
the same kind of mentality that drives anybody that wants to convert land.
That new (960 land) project that they’ve talked about in Red Feather is
the same basic deal. If you do these
things, the price of land will go up and sell and make bucks.
That’s what they want. The
part I’m interested in is the water and how they’re going to solve that.
I don’t know if they already have water rights on that land.
At one time there were some old hay meadows on that property and ever
since Ray Stenzel bought it they’ve been recording how much each ditch runs.
Ultimately they’re going to claim this water is in their name and their
right is number “what” for so many acre feet, and they’ll go to Water
Court and everybody from
When
we went to court in the 1970s, the Red Feather Storage & Irrigation Company
had two or three objectors. And if
you can change things around to the satisfaction of those objectors, why, then
you could get the deal approved. You
had to satisfy not only the objectors but also the law.
Usually it costs in order to get somebody to buy off, and you lose part
of your water. What you have to
factor in is the expense of the law which goes on forever and then once you know
what your water is, then what can you do with it?
Will the project then fit the water?
I don’t know whether their water will fit or not for 50 houses, and
whatever else. Conceivably after all
the horse tradin’ is done you have water for 49 horses and 4 houses.
Our
water rights (for the Red Feather Storage & Irrigation) are out of the North
Pine and the South Pine coming off the Baldies. Very few people recognize it,
but we have a tributary of the South Pine that crosses our ditch system so we
can take water from it. We divert
most of our water from the North Pine.
History
of Water Development in Northern Colorado and
Wyoming
The
source of the water for the Division of Wildlife lakes is – you have to kind
of back up and look at it as a system. All
the lakes in Red Feather, with the exception of Parvin, were part of a system.
They were owned initially by the Laramie Poudre Irrigation Company, and
the Laramie Poudre Company had dreams of irrigating all that land out there (to
the east) – “Watch Nunn grow.” As
part of that scheme, clear to Briggsdale, you can drive out in those pastures
and there’re places where a pickup can drive in a lateral ditch.
That’s how much water they expected to get there.
It was all to come out of the
This
(plan) caused
Historically
under the Prior Appropriation water laws, the first shovel of dirt is the
starting point in your water right. They
had started the tunnel, run out of money, gathered up some more money, started
again and finally got it through. The
Supreme Court ruled that they didn’t get credit for any of this time, except
when they punched a hole through it, as a result they were cheated out of their
water. And
The
Laramie Poudre Irrigation Company decided to kick that horse again to see if
they couldn’t get more water out of it, so they went back to the Supreme Court
with the argument that the water used in Colorado was to irrigate hay meadows,
whereby the water just runs through the meadow and back into the stream (toward
Wyoming) and therefore shouldn’t have a charge against the limit set by the
court. Once again the court ruled
against the Laramie Poudre. The
Supreme Court said it was a problem they were going to have to settle in
People
don’t realize it, but there are several places where this water is diverted.
For instance, the water out of Deadman ditch that we see when we go on
the (Meadow) tour, that is water that would go out into the
After
the Supreme Court cases, that bankrupted Larimer Poudre Irrigation Company.
They had a sheriff’s sale in 1936 on the courthouse steps in
About
Water Rights
Now,
another concept that – this will do nothing but confuse you, but you ought to
have it anyway – there are basically two kinds of water rights in the
If
you can imagine moving west and developing as you go, you get to the
Kansas-Nebraska border and you have heavy rainfall and the population is heavy
there too. You go to the state
legislature and adopt a water right system for the state, they tended to make a
“riparian system” because that’s where most of the people lived at the
time and they had plenty of water so it was kind of a natural fit.
So they would do that. A
“riparian system” is such that the water doesn’t belong to anybody in the
sense that when needed the water is assigned to the most beneficial use.
Let’s
say you live on
In
a Riparian (Water Right System), only the farm on the river has any right to
that water. If it touches the river,
it’s got a right to that water. The
right is limited by the concept of “most beneficial use” which can change
from year to year or time to time. For
instance, if your beneficial use is to raise corn for ethanol and the river goes
down, you couldn’t get water any more because the water itself would be ruled
to be more beneficial to run this mill down stream and they need a full head of
water to do it. If at someplace in
the system there was a hospital that needed the water, it would be seen as more
beneficial than the mill. It’s
always a decision of what’s most beneficial to the community, time by time.
Barges, for instance, floating barges down the river is very critical to
the economic health of the whole area, so they get a different priority.
You
get to
It’s
like the pipeline coming from Bellvue that the City of
Our
problem has always been, and will continue to be, that we originate all the
water up here in
Right
now today
But
Kansas has a “riparian system” and that is – now we are used to measuring
in acre feet, we owe so-many acre feet this year, next year we owe so-many acre
feet and if you make those things happen, then you’re in – but the compact
between Colorado and Kansas is an off-shoot of this riparian idea and it has
been described as both the worse and best of the compact system.
It determines who gets the water and the purposes for which it’s used.
History
of Red Feather Storage and Irrigation Company, the
DOW
Lakes
and
Fox
Acres
Lakes
In
1947 the Horsetooth-Big Thompson project was ready to come on line and start
furnishing water, so there was a widely spread feeling that we would have all
kinds of water. The Red Feather
System was in need of repair and replacement on many of its facilities and of
course the Tunnel Water Company was not ready to put that kind of capital into
doing this, so therefore it became their choice to simply sell it and get it off
their hands. That’s when the Red
Feather Storage and Irrigation was formed to buy it.
When
this opportunity came along in 1947, it was too good to pass up.
The leadership in Red Feather was very anxious to get this ownership.
So people like, oh, Ted Dunning I’m sure was a prime mover, I’m sure
Ralph Swanson was and I can almost bet Ray Higley was a prime mover, and those
are probably the only ones still there in the 1960s.
What they did was to form a company which paid four percent interest and
went out and sold stock just up and down the street until they got the money
they needed – anywhere they could sell a share, not only in Red Feather.
Of
course, in 1947 Game and Fish desperately wanted the lakes.
The Tunnel Water Company for some reason or another, hated, would not do
business with, Game and Fish. That’s
hearsay and there’s no way of proving that, it’s just what I understand.
What happened was, the Red Feather Storage and Irrigation Company decided
it would sell Dowdy, West and Bellaire to the DOW (Colorado Division of
Wildlife) for half of the $35,000 investment.
Then (Red Feather Storage and Irrigation) would keep the remainder of the
lakes and eventually two or three years later they sold
We
had 200 shares in stock, at $100 a share, we got $3000 (for the sale of
So
when I bought my share of stock up in Red Feather I would get a check every year
for $4 which was the interest on my $100 investment.
And then, shortly after – dates would be helpful here, I could probably
chase them if they’re important – we got something from the county assessor
who wanted to assess our assets to pay real estate taxes.
Of course that would be the worst or all possible scenarios for our
operation, and we fought this for two or three years.
Finally we decided the way out of this was to go through the
First, he would furnish or build
That’s how Columbine was built and became ready to use as a
rearing pond. It holds about 3 acre
feet of water. We can always fill
it, then dump it later into Shagwa, which is our next lake.
And then … Shagwa is about 9 acres I think.
I think that’s right, but if you’re going to publish these numbers,
make sure you get them right. That
gets you down to Hiawatha which is about 35 acres, Ramona, 19, Snake, 12,
Letitia about 19. Going down the
other channel from … instead of going to Shagwa, you’ve got to go to
Papoose, which is a rearing pond. I
don’t know how much water it holds, it’s about the same size as Columbine.
We have Apache and that’s a little over 19 acres and Nokomis, which is
I guess 12 acres maybe, a little more. Then
the ugly step sister is
Among
the DOW lakes, Parvin is a separate issue. The
water that feeds Parvin is (straight) out of the South Pine (and not part of the
system), but the interesting part, is that when they built Parvin they simply
put a dam in the drainage and never filed for a water right.
And they had no water right until in the 1970s we filed on the
Dowdy
and
We
actually own some shares of water in the Mountains and Plains Irrigation
Company. The Mountains and Plains
Irrigation Company is owned primarily by the City of
Way
back when we got into the early water wars (the Board of the Red Feather Storage
and Irrigation Company) sensed that we needed some additional water to use to
fill our lakes. One alternative was
to get some Mountains and Plains water. The
cement company owned 69 shares. A
share doesn’t mean anything, but 69 shares will produce in a good year about
110 acre feet of water. In order for
us to use that water, we filed for a transfer right, which is another of the
many water rights which are available, and the water right simply says if you
own water at Point A and want to replace it at Point Z, if nobody is hurt in
between, you may do that. So we
examined the
Maybe
we should explain the operation of the Red Feather Lakes as irrigation
reservoirs and then throw in the idea that that’s not really compatible with
what recreational use requires – for fishing, everything.
An irrigation and storage lake is to pick up the water in the spring when
the snow is melting and then hold it until there’s a call for it when you
release the water. If it was a wet
year you’d probably go ahead and release all of it anyway because these old
earthen dams are pretty much designed to dry out.
They are not designed to store water permanently. As a result, people
live on a lake, they don’t like to see that mud hole out there.
It isn’t a matter of whether they can fish or can’t fish, it’s just
an ugly thing. Fox Acres has the
same trouble. They want all these
lakes, but they want them filled with water all the time.
You can’t use them for irrigating grass if they’re full of water.
So that’s a problem.
Then
it does affect the fishing negatively, as we previously discussed.
The fish go down stream, little fish, and all kinds of stuff happens.
Who
can fish in the lakes is a separate package entirely.
Frankly that’s changed and we’re not through changing it.
I don’t know if you keep up with the sporting world but fishing and
hunting has really dropped. DOW for
instance will have a free license day for kids and for fathers where you don’t
have to buy a license. It’s just
an attempt to market fishing. We
suffer from the same problem. People
come to Red Feather and they want to bring these ATVs, motorbikes, and all those
kinds of things, and they don’t care about fishing.
The young people are more interested in these sports that are more
adrenalin sappers. Different strokes
for different folks. But it’s been
hard to maintain our membership. We
have expanded who we will take. It
used to be you had to own property in Red Feather.
Now we have different prices for different situations.
But if you wanted to come to Red Feather and fish and had family, you
could pay about $400 to $500 a year and get all the fishing privileges you want.
And that will change as the market changes.
Our
position is that the lakes in Red Feather are important to everybody there.
They are the heart of Red Feather. Over
the years the fishermen had been essentially paying the bill for everybody’s
use of this beautiful lake atmosphere. We’re
trying to attach it to the property so there is a stream of revenue that we can
depend on.
Right
now we have to replace a dam at Hiawatha, which is one of the bigger, more
expensive dams that we have, and it’s going to cost a quarter of a million
dollars and we need money to do that. It’s
a management sort of thing, not easily done and it’s hard to convince
people….
For
instance, diesel has shot up out of sight. Our
fish guy, almost everything he does has a diesel connection.
Delivery (of stock) alone from Hotchkiss to Red Feather is a major
expense. The good trout are in
Hotchkiss. We can’t use the ones
raised in the hatchery on the Poudre. That’s
a state operation and they can’t sell them privately.
Hotchkiss is over on the Western Slope.
The ditch system was such that if you got a really heavy runoff you couldn’t deliver it because the system was in poor shape. When I finally got the company to agree on a resurrection program, we were going to do the delivery system first. There were places where you couldn’t walk on the ditch bank, it was so insignificant. We’d have all these breakouts and lose the water and it was going some place else.
We
started up at the top – I’ve got some pictures, we may get into them; they
are not here, they are in Greeley – and we get a program going to redo the
delivery system and when you turn the water on, if there’s a lot of water, a
lot of water comes down and causes some other problems because we can’t deal
with it, but we can always bypass it. We
got that pretty well straightened out. You
couldn’t run enough water around Shagwa to count.
You could step across (the ditch) anyplace when it was running wide open.
It was a worn out system. At
any rate, we went to the expense and trouble of fixing that so when we did get a
wet year, we could bring water to Red Feather.
Then
we started working on our dams. We’ve
essentially rebuilt Letitia, in agreement with Fox Acres, we’ve rebuilt Snake
ourselves, we’ve rebuilt part of Ramona – we still need to do a section of
it. We’ve done some work on
Hiawatha but it still needs a major repair.
We built
And
that’s a story worth telling… .
Erie
Lake
History and Water System
When
I came to Red Feather,
There
was this boys club or camp, that’s what it was.
As you trace back the deeds, there were two properties.
One of them was with the Kiwanis Club and the other one was with another
club, like Rotary or Lions, but at any rate, the clubs functioned as the
supporters of this camp. I have no
idea where (the sponsoring clubs) were located physically.
This was along, I would guess, in the 20s when camping out was kind of
big for kids, and poor kids.
The
lake itself was not very deep and had practically no natural drainage into it.
It really sets up there on top, if you walk around it.
If the Big Thompson (flood) would come, why, it wouldn’t gain much
water because most of it would fall right in the lake.
We owned
I
don’t think
At
any rate, the Larimer-Poudre Irrigation Company brought water into this lake and
built the dam there, and the dam today is very much like the first time I saw
it. We have rebuilt it and put a new
outlet structure in because that was all rusted out.
So, this was the situation when I came.
There was this little puddle of water out there, and you could see the
old
There
was a fence all along on the south side of the road and Curry ran cattle on his
part. On the north side of the road
you got into Quaintance land pretty quick, so there wasn’t any fence there to
worry about. We organized a crew of
men to go over there and dig that ditch out so we could run water the next
spring. Well, we did.
We dug – no water. It
wouldn’t run through the ditch. If
you go upstream from the road closest to
See,
all the lakes in Red Feather are fed by a series of man-made ditches and a
series of natural topography. You
put the water in a valley up here, take it out down here and put it in a ditch
and run it two or three hundred yards, and dump it into another valley, it will
eventually get where you want it to go if you’ve got enough water.
The system to fill
We
told the people at
Gene
Barker had an old D-7 cat with a blade that would tilt.
So we decided we’d go over there Labor Day because there wouldn’t be
any judge they could get or anything to stop the process, and we’d be in there
and out of it in a day’s time. David,
my son, 1969 probably, ran the rod, I ran the transit to look through to make
sure the water would run downhill, and Gene ran the cat.
I’ll tell you, we ripped the worse looking ditch you’ve ever seen in
your life. It was deep, ugly, and
the next spring, we turned the water in and it worked.
We filled
We
heard a lot in the interim, for instance one of the things that was a big deal
… there was a pine tree growing up in the middle of this dam and it was
probably about six inches around, and they hired someone from the CSU forestry
department to core drill it to prove how long it’d been there.
They were trying to prove abandonment.
But
One
of the examples of maintaining it, as soon as we put the ditch in and they
developed that land, a guy by the name of
We
cut down the tree when we rebuilt the dam. But
it was a non-issue because it might have been there a hundred years and it
wouldn’t have proved abandonment, which is what they wanted.
The Mitchell Ditch would be better described as the Mitchell Ditch System, rather than as a single ditch. From my understanding, the top part, which was the most important part where it intersects the North Pine, was blasted out in 1888. About half, three-quarters of a mile downstream from the amethyst mine is the head gate at the North Pine and the Mitchell Ditch.
If
you look at a water system, you have to understand that easy is first.
It’s just the way it is…. And
they could get into the South Pine part of that easily; you could get it with
horses and scrapers and just make it work. When
you get up to the North Pine you had to probably use … was dynamite available
then? The rock face up there shows
no signs of drill holes. Most
dynamiting you can see the drill holes, but I kind of think that might have been
black powder where they blasted. I
don’t know when dynamite was common….
The
delivery system in Red Feather is a combination of man-made and use of the
natural terrain. I don’t know that
there is a single lake that doesn’t have some kind of natural basin.
The land is all decomposed granite, and if you’ve ever flown over the
area, it’s just filled with little potholes that are natural.
In wet years they were full of water.
There’s
Early
Growth of
Red
Feather
Lakes
Community
The
next part of this, there’s a community growing up around this water situation.
Very small, very – not much drive in it certainly.
It would be pure speculation, but there was some attempt to homestead
some places around here in the 1800s, 1900s.
There might have been some timbering during the early part.
Red Feather was kind of isolated, yet sort of strategic.
You could not get into the upper Poudre, so in order to get to the upper
Poudre, you came up to Log Cabin and across.
But they also had stage service over to – eventually to Walden – but
it went down Deadman Creek, there at the old Glendevey and then up over ... it
opened up northern
Red
Feather kind of has two histories. While
early on it was ranching, timber, starve-to-death kinds of settlement, that was
prior to the concept of a recreational environment that it became in 1925. There
are some traces of the pre-Red Feather, but I don’t know when or by what name
Red Feather existed prior to that. There
was
Many
of these ditch companies (on the plains) were put together because the farmer or
somebody had land and some of it was already sold and the farmer wanted to
participate in this deal, so he’d dig ditches in the winter as his
contribution without spending any real money. In the farm country the labor was
almost all put in by the farmers. Most
of the mountain stuff was done professionally.
The
hand dug ditches you see around here on land were built for different purposes.
The same thing is true of this 960 land (development proposal).
If you tried to ranch up here you had to have hay.
So they always homesteaded the meadows so they could irrigate.
(While) they were irrigating the meadows they’d turn the cows loose in
the forest.
Along
when Red Feather sporting came to be, that sort of changed that, because then
you had a place where you could sell worms in the summer, offer fishing.
No one was going that far hunting deer, that would be crazy….
The area was subdivided and promoted as a place to build summer cabins.
At any rate, the economy kind of began to include this patch of people
who were only here in the summer … people who were interested in buying ice,
for instance. They cut ice on
Ramona, stacked it in sawdust, took it out, weighed it – always with the tongs
on – took it off, put it in somebody’s trunk and took the tongs off.
You bought a pair of tongs every time you got a block of ice.
Summer people really drove that economy.
I doubt seriously if the winter people even bothered (with ice).
The
fact is this established some economic activity that didn’t have anything to
do with timber or agriculture. It
kind of began to change Red Feather and that change has gone through the years
and still is very evident that you have people come up here ….
It solved several problems. In
the 1920s there was a big problem with tuberculosis.
There was a common belief that if you slept with the mountain air, you
could prevent or cure tuberculosis. It
was pretty common for health reasons to come to the mountains and breathe the
mountain air and this was an activity that was open to all classes of people.
The camping out era started then, cars were a little bit better and
people were beginning to experience vacations and better work schedules.
I think it was a period of time when if you had a couple of days off, you
could do things like this. So Red
Feather became popular as a – it was often referred to as a “poor man’s
country club.” It was pretty much
a blue collar clientele. It’s
reasonably close to the populations to Denver and along the Front Range, but it
also attracted a lot of people who were in the farming business out of Kansas
and Nebraska, that once the wheat was harvested it was easy to get away for a
period of time. So this kind of
drove a new kind of economy in Red Feather that was pretty near impossible
beforehand. And, as a result, we had
some growth period there, where people were building houses or cabins, most of
them were pretty rustic. They had no
intention of living in them during the hard part of the year; they just wanted
something to keep the mosquitoes out at night.
You can go through Red Feather and most of the old cabins have a lean-to
porch on them, which is a rather large part of the cabin, and now it’s all
incorporated with windows and all that, but when it was originally built there
was nothing but screen separating you from the mountain air.
That was the typical building.
If
you want to see one of those, go over – just as you go out of Red Feather
before the cattle guard on Hiawatha Highway, on the north side, about two or
three houses in, there’s this cabin with yellow and some dark color and a huge
big porch. The screen is kind of
waving in the breeze – it’s not going to last much longer.
But it is typical of that sort of solution to those problems.
Of
course the fishing was an alternative, something to do, so that got that going.
We first stocked the lakes in agreement with the owners of the lakes.
They had no objection to us using them, I don’t know what they paid, I don’t
think it was free, but I don’t think money was a big item in the agreements.
The problem with it was that the very nature of storage water is that you
unstore it. In the fall, they’d open the head gate and drain it all out and
that would leave you with shallow water during the winter and it likely killed
the fish through the winter, so it was one of those things that everyone
realized was not the best way to do it, but it was as good as you could do.
That horse drove the whole business of buying the lakes when they became
available. Once the company was
formed and the price was paid, we no longer emptied the lakes because there was
no water released. You didn’t need
to open that head gate every year; you just threw a little dirt in if it started
leaking.
Red
Feather will always be both blessed and cursed by the 1920 vision of mountain
recreation. The subdivisions all
have small lots crowded together in patches around the lakes.
Walking distances within the village were important after the ride up to