“The irrigation fight broke out soon after we got our cows. July was hot, the creek was low, and there was only half a head of water coming through the ditch…each ranch, all the way down (Bear Creek) had rights to so many running square inches of water. Unless the creek was very low, there was enough for everyone to take his full measure.”
— “Little Britches”
by Ralph Moody
In 1906, Colorado was a tough but welcoming place for newcomers. The story of the Moody family, who had moved from the East Coast due to the father’s lung issues, is brilliantly detailed by the little boy who lived it.
Ralph Moody explains that each ranch had its own ditch box for water coming down Bear Creek. His parents, unknowingly, had landed on the last ranch on that descent.
The ditch boxes were wooden chutes through which the body of water passed. Each chute had a spillway with a gate to let out the full measure of that rancher’s water right. Gauge marks on the boxes informed each rancher how to set the gate so that he would take only his share when the ditch was running less than full.
I was not one bit surprised to read Moody’s account of “water hogs” at the head of the ditch. “There had been a feud between the ranchers at the head and tail of the ditch ever since it was built,” he writes.
One night in a period of drought, just after his father had planted oats, a kindly neighbor named Fred Aultland came calling. Fred was sporting a black eye and bloody nose. Ralph heard the adults discussing water being hogged by the ranchers at the head of the ditch, with absolutely none available to Aultland, just one farmer upstream from the Moody family.
“Father didn’t like me to be around when men were swearing, and Fred looked mad enough to begin any minute, but before he did, Father sent me to get our milk cows picketed out on the prairie near the railroad track,” Moody writes.
After supper, Ralph’s father milked the Holstein while Ralph milked the brindle. “I asked him if he was going to do anything about the water. He didn’t answer me for a while, and then he said, ‘Son, there are times a man has to do things he doesn’t like to, in order to protect his family.’”
Ralph awoke during the night to a faraway man’s voice shouting, then saw three lights moving in their newly planted oat field, so far away they looked like fireflies. His mother told Ralph to go back to bed, and he noticed his father was not in the house.
Ralph quietly slipped on his overalls and tiptoed out to watch three lantern lights come together and move up the railroad toward Aultland’s. The boy could hear water gurgling among the oats, just when his foot sank ankle-deep in soft mud.
He then heard the sound of half a dozen rifle shots from way off toward the west, so he hurried back to his bed, his fear jumping off the written page. He slipped off his overalls, climbed into bed and lie awake as his mind raced with worry for his beloved dad.
Father was so late coming home that Ralph milked both cows at daybreak without being told to do so. Over the next several days, Ralph witnessed his father and several neighbors with bruises, and one with his arm in a sling. The water war was in full swing.
Next week: Father becomes a hero
