The news hounds never noticed Andy Colter. Yet, in the most important way, this is his story. It is Andy whose efforts combined with being in the right place at the right time to enable him to get something worthwhile out of so much sound and fury in other people's lives.

To the media, the event which occurred was the big drama on the Turpentine, and it is true that in that drama Andy was a quite minor, in fact a peripheral player. The names in the news were Fred Penderson, Rev. Johnny Moultin, and Elissa Maas, not Andy Colter. That was just fine with Andy. It was not the news media whose attention he wished to catch.

As for Henry Pindon, whose machinations did so much to cause the dramatic events of so much import to other people's lives, neither the people caught up in those dramatic events nor Andy Colter ever realized what Henry perpetrated on them. The peddlers of newsworthy excitement certainly would have found Henry's part in events of interest had they known of it, but Henry covered his tracks too well to get caught.

Here's the tale of what happened, including the parts that never made the news, but don't be fooled by the drama. It is Andy Colter's quiet part in the event which led to anything more than suffering and noise.

Of course, the drama the news hounds blared as if it had materialized out of nowhere, Henry Pindon's opportunistic scheming, and Andy Colter's honest opportunity alike only became possible as a result of the settlement of the Yertok Tribe's longstanding water rights lawsuit.

1

Thanks to changing American attitudes toward Indians and to their own increased legal sophistication, Yertok tribal lawyers achieved, quite incidentally, what neither Apache warriors nor environmental activists ever could: To drive the last of the ranchers out of the lush high country watershed known to all in the area as the Turpentine. The more ironic as the Yertok never had lived within two hundred miles of the Turpentine; but the water from the Turpentine River flowed down from the high slopes of the Bodenkohe Mountains of Ocotillo County on Arizona's eastern edge, past spruce and aspen, cottonwood, oak, prickly pear and mesquite, to meet the Gila River in its valley in the Central Arizona desert below.

The Yertok still could point to the dusty remains of the long-barren ditches that once irrigated their traditional squash and cotton fields with water of the Hassayampa River, which was, in its turn, another tributary of the Gila. As important to their lawsuit, Yertok tribal lawyers had been able to trace a continuous paper trail all the way back to a Spanish land grant of 1642, acknowledging their farming, and the right to the water to continue…as feudal vassals to provision the land grant’s holder. Mexican jurisdiction ignored the Yertok, or at any rate said nothing specific about them, but confirmed the land grant, unchanged.

The United States, on acquiring what had been Northern Mexico, and before that a Spanish colony, took the opposite tack. The United States repudiated the already-two-centuries-old Spanish land grant. But the United States’ original treaty with the Yertok, of 1851, confirmed their water rights, in language translated directly from that land grant.

Another irony that. The United States army hoped to buy provisions from the Yertok. A plan long forgotten by the time the final version of that treaty, was ratified, in 1873. No one in the mud-sodden swamp of nineteenth century Washington knew what Southwestern water rights meant. But the legal language was retained. Not that it did the Yertok much good at the time. White people soon diverted all of the water upstream of the Yertok's scorched reservation, to support their own towns and farms.

By the time the Yertok Tribe's lawsuit made its way through a United States court system at last willing to take Indian tribes' treaty claims seriously, the Yertok had no interest in growing anything with water that was not available anyhow. Times had changed though. As Forest Service regulations had reversed from pro-ranching to pro-Environmentalist, so Federal courts had reversed priorities from ignoring Indians to compensating them for treaty rights previously stolen from them. In the American Southwest, the right to use limited water was allocated by seniority of documented prior use. Water rights thus were property, with monetary value. Location of actual water was only one factor, among many, in the arcane legal formula.

PANVERSE ONE

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