“ The irrigation company is a corporate agency of a community of farmers, and holds, controls, and administers for their mutual advantage the water rights which enable them to irrigate and cultivate their lands, all of which are naturally arid. Long prior to the driving of the tunnel, and while the lands through which it extends were public lands of the United States, the irrigation company or its stockholders appropriated all the waters of the stream for irrigation and other beneficial uses ”

“ This is a suit to determine conflicting claims to underground waters collected and brought to the surface by a mining tunnel in Utah. The plaintiff (petitioner here) is a mining company incorporated in Delaware and the defendant an irrigation company incorporated in Utah. Each seeks to have the right to use the waters quieted in itself as against the other. The District Court, with some hesitation, gave a decree for the mining company, which the Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, with a direction that one for the irrigation company be given. ”

“ All the natural flow of the stream as it was before the tunnel was driven is required to satisfy the prior appropriation of the irrigation company or its stockholders, and to irrigate the lands of the latter, to which it long has been applied, and, unless the waters so intercepted and collected by the tunnel be permitted to flow from its portal into the stream in such way that they can be used under the prior appropriation, a material part of the lands heretofore reclaimed and irrigated thereunder will be without water, and their cultivation must be discontinued. ”

“ This may be said to have been the universal rule in the United States, prior to the settlement of California. Local decisions, arising from the necessities of the people, soon altered it there, and in 1866 Congress passed an act,' etc. ”