Excerpted from Boulder: Its Friends and Neighbors, written by Boulder’s only female mayor, Olive Hagadone, and originally published serially in The Monitor in 1985-86.
There are only two times a year that much attention is paid to the Boulder River: in August when there is barely a trickle to supply the ranchers down river with irrigation water, and in the spring when the same trickle can swell into a raging torrent that takes out bridges and anything else in its way and in years past kept the railroads constantly repairing torn out trestles and roadbeds.
To just what extent the ranchers of the Valley were willing to go to protect their water rights on the Boulder and Little Boulder rivers was shown as early as 1891, when it was learned that the Anaconda Company was planning a reservoir on the Nez Perce watershed to supply the mines and the city of Butte with water.
