## Facts

- A nonnavigable river formed the boundary between petitioner’s east-bank land and respondents’ west-bank land, with the thread of the stream as the dividing line.
- Petitioner’s land was patented from the United States in 1885 under the Homestead Act; petitioner acquired the land in 1921.
- Neither petitioner nor its predecessors ever diverted river water for beneficial use or made any actual appropriation of the water.
- Respondents possessed state-adjudicated water rights and state permits to appropriate water and planned a hydroelectric project.
- Respondents drilled and blasted in the riverbed on their own (west-bank) side to free the channel for use of their rights and to obtain rock for a dam.
- Petitioner sought an injunction to prevent any interference with the river’s flow, including barring drilling, blasting, or removal of materials from the streambed.
- The district court largely denied the injunction, allowing respondents’ activities subject to limited restrictions; the court of appeals affirmed.

## Issues

1. Whether a federal homestead patent issued after the Desert Land Act of 1877 for land bordering a nonnavigable stream in Oregon carries, by its own force, a common-law riparian right to undiminished natural flow against state-created appropriative rights.
2. Whether a patent-based riparian claim, without any beneficial appropriation, can bar an opposite landowner with valid state water rights from altering the stream channel on that landowner’s side of the thread of the stream.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the judgment.
- A post-1877 federal patent in Oregon bordering a nonnavigable stream does not, by itself, confer a common-law riparian right to have the water flow undiminished as against an opposite owner acting under state-recognized appropriative rights.
- The Desert Land Act of 1877 severed nonnavigable waters on the public domain from the land, leaving such waters available for appropriation and use under state law.
- Because petitioner had never appropriated or beneficially used the water, it could not use the patent alone to enjoin respondents’ channel work performed on respondents’ side, beyond the limited restrictions already imposed below.

## Legal Principles

- Congress may dispose of public-domain land and water together or separately; by statute it may reserve nonnavigable waters for public use under state allocation systems.
- The Desert Land Act of 1877 severed nonnavigable waters on the public domain from land title in the covered western states and territories, so later federal patents carry no inherent federal common-law riparian right.
- In those jurisdictions, water rights are determined by state law principles of prior appropriation and beneficial use, subject to existing rights.
- A landowner holding only a post-1877 federal patent, without an actual appropriation recognized under state law, cannot assert an automatic riparian right to defeat valid state-created appropriative rights.

## Conclusion

The Court held that, after the Desert Land Act of 1877, federal land patents in Oregon conveyed land title but no automatic riparian right to nonnavigable waters, leaving allocation and priority to state prior-appropriation law and preventing patent holders without appropriation from broadly enjoining state-authorized uses by others.


California Oregon Power Co. v. Beaver Portland Cement Co., 295 U.S. 142 (1935)