Parker Dam

Water has always been a point of contention in the arid U.S. Southwest. In 1922, an agreement on water allotment between the seven states in the Colorado River Basin was nearly reached. Every state agreed on how to divvy up the water in the river except Arizona , which held out and refused to sign the Colorado River Compact.

Tensions came to a head around a decade later, in 1934, when construction began on the Parker Dam across the Colorado River. The western bank of the river was in California and the eastern bank in Arizona, and the purpose of the dam was to provide water to the growing population of Los Angeles . But Arizona was still unhappy with how negotiations ended on the water allotment of the Colorado River, and Governor Benjamin Baker Moeur decided that a dam partially constructed in Arizona to divert water to California was a bridge too far.

Governor Moeur dispatched six soldiers of the Arizona National Guard to the site, who confirmed that construction was indeed taking place on the Arizona side of the river. Arizona's Attorney General advised the governor that the dam could not be constructed on Arizona's soil without their consent, and at that, Moeur declared martial law and called for a much larger contingent of National Guard troops to be sent to the dam site to stop the construction.

One hundred National Guard soldiers, armed with rifles and machine guns, were loaded into wooden ferry boats and sent up the Colorado River to Parker Dam. Newspapers mockingly called the dispatched soldiers the "Arizona Navy," but this name was embraced by Governor Moeur and the owner of the ferry boats, Nellie T. Bush, was officially decreed to be the fleet's admiral.

Upon reaching the construction site, the ferry boats got entangled in cables around the dam and had to be freed by Californian workers. Despite this ignominious start, the deployment of the Arizona Navy was successful. The troops occupied the construction site on Arizona's side of the river while Californian and federal officials scrambled to figure out what to do.

At this point, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was furious with Governor Moeur, but declared a stop to the construction nonetheless. The Department of the Interior sued Arizona and the case quickly went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. To the astonishment of the federal government and the state of California, the Supreme Court sided with Arizona, stating that the dam had not been specifically authorized by Congress and that California could not build the dam on Arizonan soil without their permission.