Bristor's neighbor, Armon Cheatam had been vigorously pumping water from eleven wells, several around 130 meters deep, to irrigate 2,000 acres of nearby desert. The price for short-staple cotton increased by 500% in the dozen years prior to 1950. By 1952 nearly half the cultivated land in Arizona was growing cotton, a notoriously thirsty crop that required extensive irrigation. Like many others, Cheatham sought to make some easy money using the apparently boundless groundwater resource under his feet. Cheatam's wells had created such an extensive cone of depression that they had left Bristor's well stranded above the depleted water table.

Cheatam and Bristor found themselves on either side of a legal divide in the complex world or western water law. On the one hand, was the view (Cheatam) that the landowner also possessed everything under the ground surface all the way to the Earth's core. In this view Cheatam could pump as much groundwater as his crops needed as long as the well was on his property. The opposing view (Bristor) followed the doctrine that rocks stay, water moves; essentially that a landowner can't own mobile groundwater any more than he owns the air above his land. Bristor and his neighbors took Cheatam to court accusing him of unreasonable use of groundwater. The court eventually ruled in favor of Cheatam.

Source: Slide Mountain, T. Steinberg, 1995, University of California Press