As Colorado farmers worked through drought and water issues in the early 1900s, an 8-year-old boy named Ralph Moody was living it alongside his father.
In his autobiographical “Little Britches” book, Moody writes, “Saturday night there was a meeting at our house. Men came from all the ranches west of us — halfway to the mountains. They must have started getting there just after I went to sleep, but I woke up when the first buggy came into our yard.”
The nightly battles over the flow of water from the mountains had brewed past the point of what ranchers were willing to tolerate after several men ended up with black eyes and broken bones, rifle shots fired. Someone was going to be seriously injured, and the voice of reason begged for a better resolution.
As the men gathered, everyone talked at once. Some demanded men with rifles up on the hills, “Shooting any so-and-so that went tampering with a ditch box,” allocating water to farms, while others said, “That would end with all of them thrown in the hoosegow.” The discussion got louder and wilder, on and on it went.
Finally, young Fred Aultland asked Ralph’s father, Charlie, for his thoughts. It suddenly became quiet, and Charlie calmly said, “Well, it seems to me that courts are usually the best place to settle disputes if men can’t get together peaceably, but in this instance, both sides are afraid of what the court’s ruling might be.”
He acknowledged they were able to fight at night to save crops for the moment, “but that won’t do in the long run, because sooner or later somebody’s going to be killed.” Saying those at the top of the ditch hold all the cards, “we ought to sit down with them and work out our differences.” That caused more shouting and swearing “even with Mother in the room,” Moody writes.
Charlie suggested the only way he could see things resolving is by compromising in drought seasons. “I believe if we approached them right with an agreement that we’d settle for 80% of our proportion, based on ditch-head level, we might come to terms with them.”
Some men wanted to keep fighting at night, while others agreed Charlie’s was an idea worth pursuing. “Then, mother shut the window,” so Moody and his sister Grace hurried back to bed.
In the end, Charlie’s idea of peacefully meeting with all to reach compromise prevailed, successfully. Lives were spared, and crops survived downstream all the way to the Moodys on the tail end. “Father was a hero!”
Next week: Present-day water woes through the eyes of a Utah man, once an Ohio-raised farm boy
