KUNC: Two thick, orange, bound books sit on a library table at Colorado State University.

“This is the original compilation,” said Patty Rettig, a water resources archivist at the university. She’s the keeper of the detailed records of another time when states were fighting over how to share the Colorado River.

“You can see here, this is the first 18 sessions, and then we have another volume,” she said, pointing to the second book.

These hundreds of pages hold the transcripts of the 27 meetings that led to the Colorado River Compact in 1922. They provide an important window into the rooms where Western water was divided up

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