"Following a tradition of collective action on the mining frontiers of other continents, the miner formed districts, embracing from one to several of the existing 'camps" or 'diggings' and promulgated regulations of marking and recording claims. The miners universally adopted the priority principle, which simply recognized the superior claims of the first arrival. But the...miner's codes defined the maximum size of claims, set limits on the number of claims a single individual might work, and established regulations designating certain actions - long absence, lack of diligence, and the like - as equivalent to the forfeiture of rights. A similar body of district rules regulates the use of water flowing on the public domain."

"This development and the resulting mining industry had a profound influence upon the political and economic growth of California and on the development of water law throughout the West. As water was required in much of the gold mining process, rights to the use of the water were of fundamental importance. This mineral area was Mexican territory when gold was discovered but was ceded to the United States less than 6 months later by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. There was no organized government there in the early years, nor much law except that made by the miners who helped themselves to the land, gold, and water under rules and regulations of their own making as they went along. In the words of the United States Supreme Court (Jennison v. Kirk, 98 U.S. 453, 457, 1879), speaking through Justice Field who had been Chief Justice of California, the miners 'were emphatically the law-makers, as respects mining, upon the public lands in the state.'

"The rules and regulations of the miners were made by and for the individual camps and hence varied from one locality to another, but essentially the principles that they embodied were of masked uniformity. These principles related to the acquisition, holding and forfeiture of individual mining claims, based on the priority of discovery and diligence in working them. And to the acquisition and exercise of rights to the needed water were applied comparable principles-posting and recording notice of intention to divert a specific quantity of water, actual diversion and application of water to beneficial use with reasonable diligence, continued exercise of the right, priority of time of initiating the appropriation, and doctrine of prior appropriation of water for beneficial use. These property rights in land and water were thus had, held, and enjoyed under local rules that were enforced by community action."

"One of the essential elements of a valid appropriation is that of priority over others. Under this doctrine he who is first in time is first in right, and so long as he continues to apply water to a beneficial use, subsequent appropriators may not deprive him of the rights his appropriation gives him by diminishing the quantity or deteriorating the quality of the water.

[In Joerger, the court also stated that: "An enlargement of a water right may be made in the same manner as a new appropriation." An increase over the scope of the original appropriation as distinguished from progressive development originally contemplated and consummated with due diligence is subject to rights intervening between the making of the original appropriation and that of the enlargement.]