“It’s not a river!” he told his family with excitement dancing in his eyes. “It’s a canal, put there to bring water to land that needs it. We could go into the mountains and force the lakes to empty their water into little streams, and they’d bring the water to the Platte, and the river would carry it right to us. We could dig our own lakes, down here on the dry land, and imprison the flood water that comes during the spring and release it later as our replenishment.” He was only a peasant, but like all men with seminal ideas, he found the words he needed to express himself. He had heard a professor use the words imprison and replenishment and he understood immediately what the man had meant, for he, Brumbaugh, had discovered the concept before he heard the word, but when he did hear it, the word was automatically his, for he had already absorbed the idea which entitled him to the symbol.
The Platte is merely a canal to serve us,” he repeated, and with this basic concept guiding him, he directed his attention to the best way to use the beneficence the river provided. For three weeks he struggled with the problem, and then by a stroke of good luck he met some farmers in nearby Greeley who were grappling with the same problem, and together they saw what needed to be done.
Well to the west of Centennial rose a river which fed into the Platte, and it bore one of the most musical names in the west, Cache la Poudre. It had been named by some French trapper who had hidden his powder there during an exploration of the higher mountains, and its pronunciation had been debased to Cash lah Pooder. Usually it was known simply as the Pooder, and during the first years of the white man’s occupancy it had been ignored.
However, when farmers entered the area the Cache la Poudre assumed major significance, for it contributed to the flow of the Platte twenty-nine percent of the total. The Platte itself accounted for only twenty-two percent of its final flow, the rest coming from streams much smaller than the Poudre, and it did not take canny farmers like Potato Brumbaugh long to realize that in their Pooder they had a flowing gold mine.
Shortly after Brumbaugh tapped the Platte in 1859 for his small ditch, Greeley farmers took out from the south bank of the Poudre a small ditch, First Ditch, that irrigated the rich lands between the Poudre and the Platte, the ones lying close to the new town. This was a puny effort, not much larger than the private ditch dug by Brumbaugh, and it did nothing for the important accumulations of benchlands to the north.
It was Brumbaugh’s idea to cut into the north bank of the Poudre, far to the west, and to build a major canal, Second Ditch, many miles long, that would follow the contours of the first bench, bringing millions of gallons of water to dry lands, including his own. Some farmers in Greeley, called upon to share in the cost, predicted disaster and refused, but others recognized the potential value of such a project and subscribed their fortunes to its building.
Through the early years it was known as “Brumbaugh’s Folly,” for it cost four times what the Russian had predicted, and some estimates for siphons and conduits had to be multiplied seven and eight times, so that the cost of throwing water upon an acre of land rose appallingly, and many advocated that the wasteful project be abandoned. Banks would lend no more money and only the stubborn courage of men like Brumbaugh, his friend Levi Zendt and a few of the religious men of Greeley kept the ditch going.
“I can’t understand them,” Brumbaugh cried in frustration as one after another of his partners withdrew. “What if it cost ten times as much as I said? Does that matter? Suppose we get water on our dry land and each acre produces thousands of dollars? Who cares about original cost?”
It was the end product that mattered, always the end product. If fearful men had set out to build the Union Pacific, they would have quit, and if cowards had been called upon to pioneer an Oregon Trail across two thousand miles of unmarked land, they would have retired. But there were always men like Potato Brumbaugh who saw not the disappointing canal but the irrigated field, and if it cost an extra two thousand dollars to build the canal, that cost was nothing—it was absolutely nothing—if from it came water that ultimately would irrigate a thousand acres for a hundred years.
It was also Brumbaugh who visualized the great fishhook at the end of the Second Ditch. The canal had gone eastward as far as practical, but it still carried a good head of water, in spite of the smaller ditches draining from it, and Brumbaugh suggested, “Let’s lead it back west,” and he encouraged the surveyors to find new levels which would permit the water to return toward its point of origin.
“He’s takin’ the water back to use it over again,” cynics joked, and when Brumbaugh heard the jest and contemplated it, he realized how sensible the critic’s idea was, and out of his own pocket he employed a water engineer from Denver to study what actually happened to water diverted from a river, and the expert, after measuring the Platte and the Poudre at many sites, concluded that whereas Brumbaugh’s Second Ditch did unquestionably take out a good deal of water from the Poudre, seepage allowed more than thirty-seven percent to drain back into the Platte downstream. The water was used, but not used up, and the engineer calculated that with more thrifty procedures, as much as fifty percent of any irrigation water would find its way back to the mother river, available for use again and again.
“It’s what I said!” Brumbaugh cried with as much joy as if the returned water were coming back to his advantage. “The whole river is one system, and we can use it over and over.” He went from one community to another, expounding his views, showing farmers how the Platte could be plumbed as an inexhaustible resource, but one shrewd man in Sterling pointed out, “You say you send half the water back, and that’s true, but you also use up half, and if we keep using half of half of half, we dry up the river.”
“Right!” Brumbaugh shouted. “We use it up as it is now. But if we build tunnels up in the mountains and bring water that’s now wasted on the other side where it isn’t needed over to our side where it is ...”
“Now he wants to dig under mountains,” one of the Sterling men said, and again Brumbaugh shouted, “That’s right. That’s just what I want to do. When the Platte flows past my farm I want it to be as big as the Mississippi, and when it leaves Colorado to enter Nebraska, I want it to be bone-dry. This valley can be the new Eden.”
To accomplish what he had in mind, Brumbaugh had to devise a miracle which would have disheartened a lesser man. “What do you want to do?” a lawyer asked him one day. “Change the laws?”
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” Potato cried. And with the assistance of an impecunious but brainy lawyer from the Greeley colony, he set out to do it.
The law governing rivers, Riparian Rights, had accumulated through several thousand years of experience in countries of ample rainfall like England, Germany and France. The law was clear, and fair, and simple: “If a river has historically run first past the farm of A and later past the farm of B, A is allowed to do nothing which will diminish the flow of the river as it passes B.” This was a perfect law for the governance of the flour mill that A proposed building. He was free to lead the river down a millrace, and over his mill wheel and have the water do his work, just so long as he saw that the other end of the millrace returned to the river, so that the level when it passed B was in no way impeded. It was also an ideal law when B was a fisherman and used his portion of the river only for catching salmon; it was essential that the river keep to its proper level, and A was permitted nothing that might modify that level.
The average rainfall in the parts of England where Riparian Rights were codified was more than thirty-five inches a year, and a farmer’s big problem was getting excess water off his land. He had no reason for stealing any of it from the river, and if all lands throughout the world enjoyed thirty-five inches of rainfall a year, Riparian Rights would serve handsomely.
But what to do in a country like the drylands of Colorado, where the average rainfall was under fifteen inches a year? Here a river was exactly what Potato Brumbaugh said—an exposed artery determining life an
d death. To take a few inches of the Platte and lead it onto arid land, making that land blossom, was not stealing. It was something else not yet defined by law.
“We must have a new law,” Brumbaugh grumbled month after month, and in time he found in a small Greeley law office a man who saw even more clearly than he that a new land required a new law. Joe Beck was a Harvard graduate who had never been able to earn a nickel, because he was always heading off into strange directions. Brumbaugh, when he first saw Beck, knew that here was his man, and he offered him a solid fee.
“Change the law,” he told Beck. And the seedy lawyer proceeded to do so.
He devised a brilliant new concept of a river, taking most of his ideas from Brumbaugh’s apocalyptic visions: “The public owns the rivers and all the water in them. The use of that water resides in the man who first took it onto his land and put it to practical purposes. If A lives at the head of the river and has watched it flow past year after year without putting it to any constructive use, and if B lives far down the river and at an early date conceived a plan for using it constructively, then A cannot at some late date step in and divert the river so that B no longer has the water he used to have ... First-in-time, first-in-right.”
It was called the Colorado Doctrine of Priority of Appropriation, and it never caught on in states like Virginia and South Carolina, with their myriad rivers and plentiful rainfall like Europe’s, but the arid western states adopted it, because they knew there could be no alternative. Rivers existed to be used, every drop of them, and they were best used in orderly procedures.
Encouraged by this victory, Brumbaugh reached out to all portions of the Platte, visualizing new ways of using the water effectively. He followed the Poudre to its source, then climbed over the mountains and down into the valleys that fed the Laramie River, which flowed north into Wyoming.
“What a waste!” he muttered as he watched the clear, icy water leaving Colorado. He saw how easy it would be to dig a diversionary tunnel—“Fifty thousand dollars,” he told Joe Beck, falling short in his estimate by two hundred thousand—and through it divert millions of gallons of water now being wasted on Wyoming drylands.
“That goddamned Russian is a menace!” the farmers of Wyoming and Nebraska growled, and they hired their own lawyers to fight him. These men told the courts, “Leave these matters to Brumbaugh and he wouldn’t allow a drop of water to flow out of Colorado.”
The accusation was just. He wanted to divert every drop of water falling west of the mountains into the Platte, then use every gallon for irrigation in Colorado. In time even the judges of the United States Supreme Court would have to wrestle with his visions, and a lawyer from Wyoming would ask the Court, “What is this man trying to do? Restructure the whole west?”
If the question had been put to Brumbaugh, he would have replied, “Yes. The only task big enough for an honorable man is the restructuring of his world.” He would not have understood the word restructure when the lawyer first threw it at him, but he would have caught the meaning quickly, for long ago he had developed the concept.
One afternoon he took his son Kurt aside and said, “Report to Joe Beck in Greeley tomorrow and start to read law.” His son, then eighteen, demurred on the grounds that he wanted to work the farm, but Potato saw the future clearly: “The man who knows the farm controls the melons, but the man who knows the law controls the river.” And it was the river, always the river, that would in the long run determine life. So Kurt Brumbaugh mastered the nuances of law regarding rivers, especially the Platte, and in time he was arguing his father’s cases before the Supreme Court.
Potato himself kept to his farm, and when he saw that the water provided by the Second Ditch was fully utilized, he combined with some far-seeing Greeley men to build a Third Ditch, but this time his vision exceeded his capacity, and he ran out of money. He and Joe Beck tried to tap every bank in Chicago and New York. “All we need is four million dollars,” Brumbaugh said disparagingly, but it was not forthcoming, so he took passage on a Cunard liner and went to London with various introductions obtained through the good offices of Seccombe. After two days of hectic oratory, Potato got his money. When he first saw the sweet, clear water running onto his land from the English Ditch, he had another idea: “In Russia on land like this we grew sugar beets. Why can’t we grow sugar beets here?” And he put in motion a whole new set of headaches for the local farmers.
In 1881 a revolutionary change came over Centennial. For the past twenty years the citizens had been calling for a railroad to build its track into the town, but they had been ignored. The Union Pacific, in its thrust westward from Omaha to bind the nation together, had pulled a rather neat trick: along its entire route only two large centers of population existed, Denver and Salt Lake City, and it managed to miss both.
From the earliest days people knew that the Union Pacific ought to build a shortcut from Julesburg along the Platte to Denver, but this the railroad refused to do. “If a man wants to travel from Omaha to Denver,” said the managers of the road, “let him ride our line to Cheyenne and take the other road down to Denver. As for shipping cattle, to hell with cattle.”
But now the rival Burlington Railroad announced plans to build a new line directly to Denver, through the vacant land well south of the Platte, and suddenly the Union Pacific burst into all kinds of energy. Starting from the parent line at Julesburg, the rails were thrust westward at a galvanic rate: ten, eighteen, twenty-two miles a day. Skilled construction crews who had learned their jobs elsewhere, the Irish and the Chinese, moved in with practiced skill and fairly skimmed the tracks across the prairie. Like a great centipede the rails jumped westward.
When the railhead reached Centennial, citizens watched the laying of tracks with as much excitement as if it were a circus, and three local girls ran off with members of the construction gang. Hans Brumbaugh’s younger daughter, a flaxen-haired woman of twenty-three, was more prudent, and when the surveyor attempted to seek her favors, she insisted upon marriage.
The tracks ran along the north bank of the Platte, and formed a fine, solid edge to the town. The railway station became the focus of civic life, with several trains a day in each direction and a telegraph office from which messages of grave import could circulate throughout the town. Social life centered on the Railway Arms, the large hotel which the railroad built adjacent to its station.
On land donated by Levi Zendt, architects who had built other such establishments along the Union Pacific swept into town and in a few breath-taking months erected a major hotel, with many rooms, three different dining areas and a long bar. It cost the railroad $18,000 to build, and in 1883 alone it made a profit of $31,000.
Centennial was now linked to all the major cities in America, and the Venneford Ranch could ship its cattle direct to whatever market it deemed best. Boxcars of goods could be imported, and few men or women in town would forget the excitement that arose when word flashed that a cattleman named Messmore Garrett was bringing in four boxcars of steers which he proposed running on the open range.
“There is no open range,” men said. “Venneford has it all.”
“They don’t own it. It’s open if’n this guy Garrett can get to it.,
“How in hell’s he gonna get to it, answer me that.”
“He wouldn’t be comin’ if’n he didn’t have an idea on that score.”
The telegram said simply:
BAGBY CENTENNIAL
ARRIVING THURSDAY FOUR CATTLECARS OF STOCK
MESSMORE GARRETT
CARY MONTANA
So when the freight pulled in on Thursday afternoon, most of Centennial was at the station to see who would be handling the Garrett steers. The train whistled twice east of town, then chugged in and came to a halt. Mailbags were thrown down and messages exchanged, but the citizens focused their attention on four boxcars, from the first of which stepped a slim cattleman in his late thirties. He wore the customary large hat, but even so, women could see that his ha
ir was slightly graying. His eyes were deep-set and commanding, and he walked with a firm step as he strode forward, extending his right hand and introducing himself. “I’m Messmore Garrett. Who’s here to help unload my stock?”
Watchers looked at the various experienced cowboys and were astonished when none of them stepped forward. Instead, Amos Calendar shuffled to the front, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve and said, “I’m Calendar.”
“Bagby hire you?”
“He did.”
“Glad to see you, Let’s drop those chutes.”
Calendar went to one of the cars, which had now been detached from the rest of the train, and threw a chute into position. Someone inside the car slid the door open, and from a crowd of cowboys came the awed cry, “Jesus Christ! Sheep!”
Down the ramp ran hundreds of woolly sheep, dirty from their long ride, inquisitive and hungry. One ram ran to where the cowboys stood, and they recoiled from it as if it were a rattler. “Get away from me!” one of the cowboys yelled, almost as if he were a woman, but the ram pushed on, brushing against the cowboy’s leg. As it pressed onward the man gave it a mighty kick in the head, all the time cursing as only a cowboy could. “The damned thing touched me,” he told his mates with obvious revulsion.