Brown v. Baker

This is a suit to enjoin interference with the flow of water in the channel of a nonnavigable stream to the head of plaintiffs’irrigating ditches. The facts are that Willow Creek rises in the Blue Mountains, flows in an easterly direction, in a well-defined channel, through the defendants’ and plaintiffs’ arid lands in Baker County, and empties into the East Fork of Powder River. In the spring the snow melts in these mountains, filling the banks of the creek, when it carries about four hundred inches of water, miners’ measurement, but in the summer only about thirty inches. In 1864 one Abel…