questioned how or why we were doing all this in the beginning. That field checking must have been … in the spring of 1968 or thereabouts. We tried to pay attention to the important stuff on water, but sometimes, well, people just go off, and they got on these tangents how they were special, they ignored the state engineer or the thinking that this wasn’t state water, that kind of thing … We got it right, mostly, in the end, but a lot of the time we [OSE] were pretty generous about the water duties we assigned or dimensions of fields and how much water people actually needed. I think people were irrigating like crazy with us present [chuckles] … I mean they weren’t growing rice in places like Taos or Talpa, so that … [laughs] was pretty entertaining.6
Locals were not always fully trusting of the process. Bob’s recounting also makes it clear that Taoseños were intent on being visible to OSE staff in their irrigation practices. They wanted to be seen making full use of their water at the time of mapping, often to the point of overwatering. The hydrographic surveys were the starting point for enjoining the various kinds of expertise necessary to make the 1907 water code work in New Mexico.7 However, mapping property lines in the valleys was complicated.
Miguel A., a leather shop owner now in his sixties who used to run some cattle in El Prado, recalled local reactions to the new presence:
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