Like for many other rivers of the American Southwest, runoff in the Rio Grande basin is limited and varies widely from year to year and alternates between devastating droughts and destructive floods. In the 1880s, farmers in the region began to complain that they were not receiving a fair appropriation of river water. By the 1890s, water use in the upper basin was so great that the river's flow near El Paso, Texas, had been reduced to "a trickle in dry summers."