Once Upon A Time In the California Water Wars

By David Wigg

At the turn of the 20th century a man sweeps through California's Owens Valley and captures its one valuable resource...water...and claims it for Southern California. In the process, Jack Granger's way of life is ended. His Comanche progeny vow revenge. Four generations later The President of The United States achieves revenge and justice and California is changed forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Wigg
• Release date: Jan 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215502563

David Wigg

David Wigg lives in rural Missouri and spends his time writing fiction, growing vegetables and flowers, fishing and travelling abroad with Linda...his muse, his inspiration and the love of his life.

Book preview

Part One

The Comanche and The Irishman

Chapter One

They had ridden hard for two days, reaching the western edge of the Llano Estacado.  They were driving three hundred head of prime Mustangs...the best of Iron Jacket’s remuda.  As Iron Jacket’s son, he had the pick of the herd and he chose prime breeding stock.  With the warmth of the setting sun against his back, he sat atop his horse on a high point on the Caprock Escarpment, looking east.  His mind sorted through the many raids and battles he and his father had survived, side by side, always returning to the Llano Estacado with its thirty-seven thousand square miles of emptiness to shed pursuing enemy tribes, Spanish or American soldiers or Texas Rangers.  It would be the last time Quanah Nacona would cast his eyes on the dry, treeless expanse that was the Comanches’ centuries-old sanctuary.

He was born in 1835, the product of a brutal raid led by his father the year before.  Iron Jacket, born in the late 1780’s, was a Quahadi-Comanche Hereditary Chief, a War Chief and a medicine man...three titles connoting considerable influence among his Quahadi band.  He was a brutal and effective warrior.  He was called Iron Jacket because he wore a Spanish coat of mail...a garment of chain mail or rings that protected him from light weapons fire from resisting white settlers and Spanish soldiers during his many terrifying raids through Texas and Mexico from 1820 to 1858.  Because enemy bullets didn’t affect him, Iron Jacket’s Comanche brethren believed he could blow bullets aside with his breath, giving him high status as a medicine man among the Quahadis.

The Comanches began as a stone-age Indian splinter group that, in the 16th century, broke away from the Shoshone Tribe of the Wind River country of Wyoming and headed to the Southern Plains to the herds of millions of buffalo.  They called themselves Nermernuh, which in Shoshone means ‘people’.  They were not handsome people...short, dark-skinned...but strong, fierce and fearless.  Their culture was primitive, even by the standards of the tribes around them.  Though they had been marginalized and bottled up in Eastern Wyoming by other larger tribes in the 16th and early 17th century, a revolutionary series of events that changed their fortunes occurred in the late 17th century.  It transformed the fortunes of the Comanches and all who came in contact with them for the next two centuries.

Beginning with their arrival in the Americas in the late 15th century, the Spanish laid claim to much of Latin America and began moving north.  But they brought with them a unique resource that would, ironically, doom their plans to gain control of the center of the North American continent...the horse.  The ancestors of horses originated on the North American continent about fifty million years ago and crossed over the land bridge that then, stretched across the North Pacific to Eurasia.  Tens of millions of years later the modern Mustang that roamed North Africa returned to the American continent with the Spanish explorers.  But its utility to the Indians went unrealized until the Spanish military overplayed its hand in New Mexico.

As they moved north into New Mexico, the Spanish conquered and subjugated the Pueblo tribes along the San Juan River Valley.  But they could not control the Apaches, who raided Spanish territory and the Pueblo’s, repeatedly.  By the 1670’s, after years of Spanish cultural repression and repeated bloody raids by Apaches against the Pueblo Indian settlements along the upper Rio Grande, the Pueblos rebelled and, in 1680, drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for a decade.  With the Spanish gone, the thousands of horses they left behind ran wild into the open plains of the greater Southwest, creating the first wave of massive wild mustang herds available to anyone who could catch and break them.

By 1750 all of the major buffalo-hunting tribes...the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Blackfoot, Sioux, Crow and Comanche...incorporated horses into their pursuit of the Buffalo.  From horseback at full speed, Indians could shoot arrows and throw 14-foot lances capable of passing completely through an adult buffalo. The Comanches mastered the horse in every way possible.  They caught, broke, rode, bred and traded horses better than anyone in North America.

Comanche born and bred horses were the finest available anywhere in the west and were in great demand from Eastern Colorado to the Kansas-Missouri border and down to well-south of the Texas-Mexico border.  To be sure, they stole thousands of horses during raids into Texas, Mexico, and New Mexico, but their horse breeding was unparalleled anywhere west of Missouri and Louisiana.  Apart from tribal herds, Comanche warriors might have as many as one-hundred-fifty horses of their own, while Chiefs might possess as many as three-thousand head.

For Comanches, war was a full-time job.  Comanche children learned to ride horses beginning in early childhood, spending much of their young lives on horseback. Young boys did no work around camp...they trained to be warriors.  Boys were taught to shoot arrows from under a horse’s mane with remarkable accuracy and to lean over the side of the horse at full gallop and pick things up off the ground.  By their teen years boys could lift a full-grown man off the ground at top speed...a vital lesson to save fellow warriors wounded in combat. 

Aside from serving as an aid in hunting buffalo, all of the plains tribes used the horse to conduct war against three threats to their domain:  Other tribes, the Spanish coming up from Mexico and the Whites moving west from the eastern third of the American continent.  In combat, most Indians didn’t use the horse to its full advantage...in an attack, all of the tribes would ride to the site of a battle, dismount and engage in the fight on foot...that is, all but two...the Comanches and Kiowa who would fight from horseback.  The Spanish, The Texas Rangers and US Army Cavalry all dismounted to fight as well, giving Comanche warriors a massive mobility advantage on the field of battle.

A Comanche warrior on horseback was as lethal as any cavalryman in the history of war fighting.  When circling the enemy, a Comanche warrior would ride with one foot over a horse’s back and fire as many as twenty arrows from under its neck with deadly accuracy in the time it took a Spanish soldier to reload his musket once.

All of the major tribes could inflict death and mayhem on their enemies, but once the Comanches were mounted they had no equal in war fighting, in the ferocity of their attacks and in the sheer brutality of the torture and killing of their captives.  They brought Stone Age savagery with them to the 18th and 19th century Great Plains...brutality that Spanish, French and American populations hadn’t experienced for centuries, if ever.  So, for most of two centuries they terrified the Spanish and French explorers and the American communities that stretched along the edge of the great western wilderness.

Historians consider the Comanches the most fierce and dominant of all the Indian tribes in early North