Centennial

  This trip’s been worthwhile, Vernor. I may not know what I think about Nixon or Agnew or Watergate, but at last I know what I think about the American Indian. Every reservation in this nation should be closed down. The land should be distributed among the Indians, and if some of them wish to continue living communally, they should be encouraged, like the Pueblos in New Mexico. The rest should enter the dominant culture, to sink or swim as their talents determine. The way my family had to. The way Flor’s did in Old Mexico. Many good things will be lost, but the best will persist—in legend, in remembered ways of doing things, in our attitude toward the land. I can no longer support a system which keeps the Indians apart, like freaks of nature. They aren’t whooping cranes, to be preserved till the last one dies out. They’re part of the mainstream, and that’s where they belong.

  At dusk on November 28 we took motel rooms in Douglas, home of the fabled jackalope, half-jackrabbit, half-antelope. Local taxidermists were so skilled at grafting small deer horns onto the heads of stuffed jackrabbits that many visitors, including Flor Garrett, believed the mutant existed. A huge statue in the town square confirmed her belief, and when she asked where a live jackalope could be seen, Paul broke into laughter.

  “You’re precious,” he told her. “A typical tourist. What the United States ought to do right now is take the money we’re spending in Southeast Asia and on space shots and build a barbed-wire fence around the whole state of Wyoming. Declare it a national treasure and allow only five hundred thousand visitors a year. When you come through the gate, the officer ties a little broadcasting radio around your neck, the way Floyd Calendar did with his bears, and they’d keep track of you, and after seven days a message would go out, ‘Paul Garrett, driving a gray Buick with a beautiful Chicano girl. He’s been inside a week. Kick him to hell out.’ ”

  Flor pointed out that whereas he had wanted to dissolve a small Indian reservation, he now wanted to initiate a huge Wyoming reservation, and she thought this contradictory, but he said, “Not at all. Human beings cannot be kept in a state of preservation, but irreplaceable natural resources can. I say, ‘Declare Wyoming a national park and treat it as such.’ ” After dinner he bought her a small jackalope, and as he presented it to her formally, he announced to the diners in the restaurant that she was now protector of this rare creature.

  On Thursday, November 29, we drove to the spot which Garrett loved most in America, the one he visited at least twice each year. It was of little consequence, really, and even though it had at one point played a specific role in American history, it had not been a major one; few Americans could ever have heard of it. But the site had been preserved with such intelligence that it stood as an example of almost flawless restoration.

  It was Fort Laramie, still standing in silence at the spot where the swift dark Laramie River emptied into the North Platte. Wild turkeys still roamed the fields where the Indians had camped during the Treaty of 1851, and elk could sometimes be seen on the range where the Oglala Sioux had hunted. In the soft limestone west of the fort the deep ruts of wagon wheels could still be seen, where straining forty-niners had dragged their covered wagons.

  The old buildings had been preserved if their walls were sound, or reconstructed if only their foundations remained, and not a false note had been struck. There were no mighty cannon or ramparts filled with dummy soldiers firing at nonexistent Indians. Only the materials available in the 1860s and 1870s had been used, and the sutler’s store where the emigrants had bought their last food before heading west for Oregon still offered Arbuckle’s coffee and those handsome white blankets of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  Not many visitors came to Fort Laramie, for it was in no way spectacular, but scores of men and women who loved the west made pilgrimages to its clean, well-ordered acres to recapture the reality of American settlement:

  Down there is where Pasquinel and McKeag had their winter headquarters. Lame Beaver and his Arapaho spent one winter over there. Levi Zendt and that remarkable girl, Elly Zendt ... she’s the one whose diaries you read. The wagons came down that hill and camped on the other side of the Laramie. The great convocation you read about ... 1851 when all the Indians came here. The Crow came in from the northwest over there. It must have been a tremendous sight, the whole Crow nation on horseback. And this building over here is where McKeag and Clay Basket had their store. That’s where my great-great-grandfather Maxwell Mercy, first met them. This other fine building ... Old Bedlam it’s still called. That’s where my ancestor Pasquinel Mercy served before he went to Little Big Horn with General Custer.

  Our visit ended on a bitter note, because as Garrett was about to leave the fort, be saw on the bulletin board an announcement that any letters mailed there would be posted with the handsome three-cent stamp honoring Francis Parkman, and if there was one man in American letters Garrett despised, it was Parkman:

  Honoring a man like that! He debased the Oregon Trail with one of the feeblest historical books ever written. He had no comprehension of what the trail signified, no compassion for the Indians who roamed it and no generosity for the emigrants using it. He could turn a phrase rather well, but in human understanding he was pitifully deficient. He made fun of Mexicans, ridiculed Indians, heaped abuse on hardworking farmers from the midwest, lacked any comprehension of Catholic culture and, worst of all, failed to understand the prairie. He judged all life by the meanest Boston yardstick, and almost every generalization he made about the west was wrong.

  Some of his phrases fester in my mind. He called Chief Pontiac, one of America’s best-balanced Indians, a “thorough savage to whom treachery seemed fair and honorable, the Satan of his forest paradise.” I remember one passage in which he excoriated the farmers passing through as little more than animals, concluding, “Most of them were from Missouri.” But the one that best sums up his miserable view of life stated that he divided the human race as he saw it, into three divisions “arranged in the order of their merit: white men, Indians and Mexicans,” and he doubts that to the Mexican can be conceded the honorable title “white.”

  I’ll tell you one thing, Vernor. If you ever send me a letter bearing Parkman stamps I’ll burn the damn thing unopened. I don’t want him in my house. What I resent most is that by getting his book published first, he scared away other writers infinitely better qualified. He never looked at the plains, nor the Platte, nor the Arapaho, nor the beaver, nor the coureur de bois, nor the bison. Of course, I’m speaking as an Arapaho, but I’ll promise you this. If I run into him on the Happy Hunting Grounds, I’ll scalp the son-of-a-bitch.

  As we crossed the state line to enter Colorado, Garrett breathed deeply, saying, “It’s so good to be home.” Over dirt roads we drove to the ruined town of Line Camp, where only the grain elevator and the two stone buildings erected by Jim Lloyd more than a century before remained. Where was the sign that boasted WATCH US GROW? Where were the library and the bank and Replogle’s Grocery Store? Where was the tractor agency that used to sell sixty tractors a year? And worst of all, where were the homes that had been so painstakingly built, so painfully sustained during the years of drought?

  They were gone, vanished down to the building blocks of the cellars. A town which had had a newspaper and a dozen flourishing stores had completely disappeared. Only the mournful ruins of hope remained, and over those ruins flew the hawks of autumn.

  Our car pulled up before one of the low stone buildings and Garrett got out to knock on the door. For a moment it seemed that no one was there. Then a very old man with fading reddish hair and deep-set eyes came to the door. He was eighty-six, but he moved and spoke with youthful enthusiasm, almost as if the excitements of life were just beginning.

  “Paul Garrett, come in! Tim Grebe told me you’d married a beautiful Chicano, and I see she’s as pretty as he said. Come in! Come in!”

  He led us into the office from which he had once helped give away a hundred and ninety thousand acres of drylands, and he had watched as the defeated ha
d abandoned the land. Now only he survived. With firm voice he spoke of those distant years, of the good rainfall at the start of the pestilential years. His memory was acute, and he could recall most of the families.

  “What was the worst thing that happened in those years?” Garrett asked. In whatever celebration Colorado organized for its birthday, he would insist that the tragic times be remembered too, for they were a part of history that should not be denied.

  Bellamy pondered this question for such a long interval, staring out the low window of the stone house, that I supposed he had not heard. “Was it the Grebe tragedy?” Garrett asked.

  “No,” Bellamy said brusquely, as if he had already dismissed that possibility. “That was an accident, without cause or consequence. But there was one terrible moment. The farmers were starving. The dust was finger-high inside the houses. Everyone was losing hope. Then Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey visited us. What a god-like man! He visited with every farmer he had persuaded to come here. He walked over the land and assured us that the good years were bound to return. He confessed his mistakes and was especially helpful with the wives, for he gave them courage.”

  “What was so terrible about that?” Garrett asked.

  “When the meetings ended, he came in here, alone. He fell into that chair you’re sitting in and asked for a drink of water. When I placed it on the table before him, he shuddered. Then, without touching the glass, he uttered a piercing shriek and covered his face with his hands. After a moment he looked up at me and whispered, ‘May Christ forgive me for what I did to these men and women.’ Then he pulled himself together and Miss Charlotte drove him back to Centennial, but he refused to touch the water.”

  On the short drive home to Venneford, Garrett studied the great rolling fields sown in winter wheat. He could see that every prediction made by Dr. Creevey half a century ago had been fulfilled. Wheat prospered on the Great American Desert, and vast farms like that of the Volkema brothers earned huge profits, for the owners had learned not to plow deep and never to harrow.

  A new law helped, too: if any farmer saw that because of poor management his neighbor’s fields were beginning to blow away, with the inevitable consequence that other fields in line would blow away too, the observant farmer was allowed by law to plow his neighbor’s field correctly. The cost of doing this would be added to the taxes of the remiss farmer. If any farmer persisted in his sloppy husbandry, his land would be taken away from him, for it imperiled the entire district. Never again would fields be allowed to blow away.

  The old two-part system that had prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century—rancher and irrigator—was now a tripartite cooperation: the rancher used the rougher upland prairie; the irrigation farmer kept to the bottom lands; and the drylands gambler plowed the sweeping fields in between, losing his seed money one year, reaping a fortune the next, depending on the rain. It was an imaginative system, requiring three different types of man, three different attitudes toward life, and Garrett was honored to have found a niche within it.

  How powerful the land was! Continuously men did strange and destructive things to it. yet always the land endured. It was the factor which limited what men could accomplish; it determined what the irrigated fields would produce and how many cows could be grazed on a section. Even when men walked upon the moon, they remained attached to their native land by electrical impulses, and to the land they must return.

  To be engaged in the protection of this land, as Potato Brumbaugh had been in his long wrestling with the river, or Jim Lloyd in his guardianship of the grasslands, was an honorable occupation, Garrett felt, because each generation was obligated to leave the land in a position to defend itself against the next generation.

  As the car approached the castle, Garrett reflected on the grand circularity of history. On that hill to the west the good men of Centennial had once beat up the Chicano Penitentes for their weird practices, and the other day a crowd of young fellows from the town had thumped the Jesus Freaks for behaving differently from decent Methodists or Baptists. Last week a judge in Denver had announced from the bench that if Colorado still had any red-blooded men, they’d go out in the streets and thrash the Hare Krishna, who offended law-abiding citizens with their yellow robes and crazy cymbals.

  At the castle we found Arthur Skimmerhorn pacing beneath the moose heads: “Forgive me for letting myself in, but I had to see you, Paul.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment, he blurted, “Have you sold those Hereford bulls?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to buy them.”

  “I told the foreman to get rid of them.”

  “Has he sold them?”

  “We can find out soon enough.”

  Skimmerhorn listened apprehensively as Garrett rang the foreman: “How about those thirty bulls I told you to sell? ... A man in Kansas is trying to make up his mind ... Did you make a promise of any kind to him? ... It doesn’t have to be writing ... You gave him an option? ... Till when? ... He was supposed to make up his mind yesterday and he didn’t bother to call? ... Ring him right now and tell him we sold them to Skimmerhorn in Colorado.” He replaced the phone and told Skimmerhorn, “They’re yours. And I’m delighted they’ll be staying close to home where I can watch them.”

  “Thanks, Paul.”

  “I thought you’d switched to Charolais.”

  “I did. Got the results they said I’d get, too. Bigger calves. More money. With your Simmentals you’ll do the same. Those fancy boys don’t lie.”

  “Then why the eagerness to buy my Herefords?”

  “Well,” the young rancher said with a touch of sarcasm, “they tell the truth but they’re not obligated to tell the whole truth. Look at my figures.” And from his pocket he produced a folded sheet which summarized the fuller story: Hereford cow—Charolais bull. Calves so big they could only be born by Caesarean section, fifteen percent. Calves so big they had to be born with the help of calf-puller, nineteen percent. Calves dead at birth or shortly thereafter, fourteen percent.

  “What it means,” Skimmerhorn said, “is that you do get extra money when you sell your steers, but you waste it all on veterinary fees. So I figure, if I’m working extra hard just to pay the vet, why not run cattle I really like?” He accepted the drink Garrett proffered and slumped into one of the chairs beneath the moose heads. Twirling his glass, he confessed, “I’ve done very well with the Charolais. No complaints, and I’m going to keep some of those big bulls ... to tighten up my herd, you might say. But when I haul your thirty Hereford bulls over to my ranch, and then pick up some good white-face cows at the Nebraska sales, well ... I’ll feel I’m an honest man again.”

  “I can drink to that,” Garrett said.

  On the last day of November, Paul Garrett was wakened early by a cowboy shouting. “The Simmentals are here!”

  There, waiting by the barn. were cattle trucks which had hauled the thirty red-and-white bulls nonstop from Montana. At first Garrett wanted no part of introducing them to their new home. for this was Hereford country and they were trespassers, but then he felt ashamed of himself. “If we’re experimenting with Simmentals, we’ll do it right,” he said to me, and he went down to assist with the unloading.

  The new bulls were big, full-bodied, and they looked as if they could care for themselves, but they were flabby, more like dairy cows than range Herefords. One of the hands cried softly, “Moo cow, moo!” But then he saw the boss and scurried off.

  “Pete!” Garrett called. “Come back here. They may look moo-cow, but they’ll be paying your wages. Show them respect.”

  So the Simmentals were unloaded, and Garrett could see that Tim Grebe had sent him thirty strong bulls. They’d do well on Crown Vee land, and maybe the balance sheet would look better in a year or two. But when the animals moved out to take possession of land which for a century had reverberated to the hoof-beats of Herefords, Garrett felt sick to his stomach, and that afternoon he went in to Centennial alone, to drink at the bar of the Railw
ay Arms. Next year it, too, would be gone.

  And as he drank he grew increasingly mournful over the fate of Centennial. It had known a hundred good years and now was perishing. The sugar-beet factory, the feed lots, the Hereford ranches—all the old patterns of life were dissolving.

  He banged his glass on the table and grabbed at a stranger. “This was a good town, a great one,” Garrett shouted at him. “Do you know that Edwin Booth played in our theater, and Sarah Bernhardt? William Jennings Bryan stopped here, and so did James Russell Conwell and Aristide Briand.” The man was obviously unfamiliar with these names, and pulled away.

  A freight train, one of the few that still came through town, sounded its querulous whistle, evoking a new set of memories. Garrett left his table and went over to the stranger, saying compulsively, “Listen to that, pardner. That’s the Union Pacific. I remember the day, thirty-four years ago this month, when Morgan Wendell ... he’ll take office in January ...”

  His phrases dribbled off, but not his memories. He left the bar and went out onto the veranda, and cold air reminded him of that distant time. Morgan Wendell had come to the ranch and said, “Let’s go down and see it today!” and they had hitchhiked their way to a point along the Platte some miles east of Centennial. There they waited along the shore, two boys twelve years old skipping stones across the water, watching the hawks.