Klamath River basin drought leaves families, farms dry, reignites longstanding conflicts -

A historic dry spell has parched a region once dubbed the “Everglades of the West,” leaving thousands without water and worsening tensions between Native Americans, farmers, ranchers and the federal government.  For more than a century, the federal government has overseen an intricate and imperfect system of water distribution intended to sustain an ecosystem and an economy. The whole precarious balance was based on the assumption that enough snow would always fall, and melt, and fill the vast watershed of the Klamath River Basin, which straddles the border of California and Oregon and is home to about 124,000 people.But this year, the region buckled under one of the worst droughts ever recorded.