Home › C › Colorado River Compact

Colorado River Compact

an interstate treaty signed No November 24, 1922, by the seven states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, for the purpose of providing an equitable apportionment of the use of the waters of the Colorado river and securing the development of the Colorado river basin by the proper storage of the river waters, with protection of life and property from destructive floods. The treaty makes possible extensive projects for the reclamation of hundreds of thousands of acres of arid lands in the seven states named, as well as for the development of vast hydroelectric power, all such projects having been prevented in the past by interstate controversies and unwillingness to yield any local right of control. CONSTANTINOPLE CONSTANTINOPLE. By the treaty of Sèvres, 1920, the city was left nominally in the hands of the Sultan, but the entire zone of the Straits was neutralized and placed under the control of an international commission, which exercised all real authority up to the end of 1922.

Following the victories of the Turkish Nationalists over the Greeks in Asia Minor, Constantinople was demanded by the Turks, who threatened to attack the British forces in the neutral zone, but who were finally prevailed upon to withdraw. In November, 1922, however, a Turkish Nationalist governor informed the Allies that the former Turkish government no longer existed and that he had assumed the governorship of the city. The Allied commissioners accepted the new regime, which was followed by the flight of the former Sultan. At Lausanne it was agreed that Constantinople should be returned to Turkey on the signing of a general treaty of peace.

The first Turkish demand that all Greeks should be expelled was later modified, largely through the protests of the Allied representatives and those of the United States; but it was determined that the Greek Ecumencial Patriarch should remain in the city only if shorn of all civil and administrative functions.