Editor's note: This is the first in a four-part series.

For roots of today's biggest statewide issue - the diversion of flowing water - look locally.

California water was once a public resource. It was through the ungoverned California Gold Rush that water became divertable for private interests.

Eventually, a complex of government actions would guarantee water diversions for private interests. The latest such action is the "water package" of state legislation brokered recently by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Gold

Within California, the phenomenon of widespread water diversions first emerged in the Sierra Nevada foothills - with the 1848 discovery of gold, according to historian Norris Hundley and others.

Unlike in earlier gold-mining hotspots - Georgia, Alabama - in the territory that would become the Golden State, water to separate ore from soils was scarce.

Because they were on public land, both the gold and the streams of water belonged to the public. However, when a claims principle called "first in time, first in right" evolved in the foothills regarding gold, a federal military governor of the California territory, Brevet Brigadier-General Bennet Riley, did not act to preserve the public property.

"All of you here are trespassers," Gov. Riley reportedly said (he might as well have said "thieves"). "But as the government is benefited by your getting out the gold, I do not intend to interfere."

A parallel right evolved to appropriate public water, as well as gold, to private miners' hands. These intertwined rights - to gold and to water - were never granted. They simply became, in rough-and-ready fashion, unshakable facts - by enjoying the tacit support of Riley. Historians have noted that even if Riley had wanted to, he probably lacked the troops necessary to intervene effectively in the gold frenzy on behalf of public property.

Then, in 1851, the young State of California not only made private appropriations of gold and water officially legal, but also made the matter temporarily one of state jurisdiction, approving a "doctrine of prior appropriations" for the Mother Lode region. In respect of water, a public resource the future value of which few at the time could have foreseen, the miners - representing the private sector - had won.

Agriculture

The next development was pivotal. It set the stage for California's modern-day water wars. It brought back into the picture a federal government whose power was burgeoning with tax revenues from industrialization in the northern states and the securing for northern industry of the South's natural resources through force of arms in the country's Civil War.

Immediately following the war, the U.S. Congress in 1866 endorsed for all of the nation's public lands the doctrine of prior appropriations that California miners had forged in regard to gold and to water diversion. Then - most importantly for the present day - Congress expanded the appropriations doctrine to legalize water diversions for agriculture.

That sowed the seed.

In a scant 30 years, in 1896, an outfit was formed that would divert Colorado River water into California's arid Imperial Valley for large operations. That was the California Development Co. Although destined for a rocky beginning, that plan reinforced a notion that California was the place to go huge with cotton. In Texas, the average cotton plantation shrank from around 2,000 acres in 1900 to around 800 acres in 1920, according to the Texas State Historical Society. California plantations, correspondingly, by 1920, were about five times as large as those in the Deep South, according to University of California researchers.

The federal government soon stepped to the aid of big-agriculture interests trying to farm cheaply available desert land in the Imperial Valley. The naming of the All-American Canal reflected a new route that did not enter Mexico, but a federal role was trumpeted in the very name, as well.

It would be barely 40 more years until the entity arose - a massive water district dominated by two huge corporations - that underpins much of recent California water struggles. That was the Westlands Water District.

Next time: "Local control lost" begins a report on the origins of and political influences behind diversion to Southern California of Northern California water.