Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Before he risked breaking into the secret of the rock, he purified himself, for he knew that no man could succeed in a venture of great moment without the aid of gods. Leaving his work space—a flat area at the foot of the chalk cliff—he went to an opening between the trees and there turned his face upward and his body to each of the four compass points, ending with the east, from which the sun came. He engaged in no complicated ritual and uttered no incantation; he merely wished to inform the gods that he was about to engage in a project of importance to his clan, and he solicited their attention. He did not grovel for assistance, because in that large area there was no better knapper than he, but he did want the gods to be aware of his undertaking and to refrain from interfering.

  He then went to the running stream that came out of the mountains to the west of the cliff and washed his hands, applying some of the water to his face. He was now ready.

  As he walked back to his work area he was indistinguishable, except for his dress, from other men who would occupy this land ten thousand years later. He walked erect, with no apelike bending at the waist. His arms did not dangle and his head was not massive in proportion to the rest of his body. There was no conspicuous ledge of bone above his eyes and his hands were, as we shall see, beautifully articulated.

  His eyes had a slight slant, an evidence of his Asian ancestry. His face was somewhat heavier than those of later men, his cheekbones more pronounced, his skin several shades lighter than that which was to come later; it inclined, perhaps, more toward red than yellow, and in this respect was quite similar to the men who would follow.

  He had a working vocabulary of twelve or thirteen hundred words, few of which would be intelligible even a short time after his death, for in language swift change was in process. He had considerable powers of thought, could plan ahead, could devise tactics for hunting which required cooperative movements carried out at spaced intervals, and he knew a good deal about animals, the nature of differences between women and men, how to rear children, how to lay by enough food in good periods so that he would have something to eat in time of famine. He worked hard and understood that if he got ahead in his production he would have time for his own enjoyment.

  He did not take himself too seriously; he was not lugubrious even when talking to his gods. Often he burst into laughter when his children did something ridiculous. From time to time, in making the projectile points on which his clan depended for their existence, he felt pride in being an artisan, a man trained to accomplish, and such a feeling came over him now.

  “If I get a good start,” he told his apprentice, who must soon be making the points himself, “I can strike ...” and here he held his ten fingers aloft twice.

  What a tremendous statement to have come from the mouth of a primitive man! How totally compelling in its complex range of thought! A man at the dawn of history who could utter such a complicated concept could produce children for whom anything would be possible.

  If is a word of infinite intellectual significance, for it indicates actions not yet completed but with the possibility of alternate outcomes. To get a good start implies memory of bad starts and how they differed from the good; it implies also that there will be consequences stemming from the good start and that they will be consistent with such consequences in the past. The incompleted I can strike ... is the sum of man’s experience on earth, the promise of completed action in accordance with known desires. And the ten fingers held aloft twice is an advance in mathematics so profound—an abstract number without a name—that all subsequent analytical thought will be based upon it. To visualize twenty points as being obtainable from a roundish chunk of rock, and to have a number for them and to recognize that that number goes beyond the digits of the hand, is an accomplishment of such magnitude that it must have required man most of the two million years he had so far lived on earth to assemble the experience that would justify such a conclusion.

  The knapper who prepared to strike the rock that day had all the innate opacities that future men would have; the only additional component required to produce a complicated society would be a sufficient passage of time and the patient accumulation of memory. But this man had something else which would always be precious in whatever epochs followed: he had an innate sense of proportion, design and beauty, and the degree to which he had these qualities would never be surpassed by any men who followed him on this spot.

  Coughing twice, rubbing his fingertips on his chest, he lifted the heavy rock and studied it for the last time. It met his specifications, for it was vitreous, totally homogeneous, without any tendency to fracture along a predetermined plane, and of the same construction along all axes, which would permit it to fracture equally well in all directions.

  Making a finished point required four quite different steps, each performed with a different tool. First he must transform the amorphous rock into a truncated cone. Now, obviously the knapper could not possibly have known the mathematical properties of a cone, nor the physical principles governing it, but he had learned from experience that if his rock did not assume a conical shape, it would not yield the flakes he sought, but if it did approximate a cone segment, the flakes would fly off in dazzling sequence.

  His first tool was a smallish, rounded rock with curious characteristics. It was ovoid and of a grainy texture, with a certain amount of yield. It was the possession he prized most in his life, for a responsive hammerstone was almost irreplaceable. One morning he had advised his assistant, who was seeking such a stone for himself, “You must find one that talks back.”

  With his hammerstone he knocked away unwanted portions of the flint and coaxed it into conical form. When it was prepared, he worked carefully with his hammer, building the right kind of edge around the top surface. Then, after careful study, he struck one particular spot, and the force of his hammer radiated downward but with a slight lateral effect, and a beautiful flake as long as his hand leaped from the surface of the core. Dropping his hammer, he held this flake to the light and satisfied himself that it contained no telltale lines of fracture. It was fearfully sharp along the edges and as it then stood could have been used for a knife, but he intended working on it later to form a projectile point.

  What happened next astonished even his helper. Working rapidly, and revolving the core so that always a new face was exposed, he struck with his hammerstone almost as fast as a woodpecker pecks a dead limb, knocking off one perfect flake after another. Then he paused and worked slowly, building up the edge so that it would catch the hammer blows properly, and when this was done he resumed his woodpecker taps. Nineteen long flakes flew from the core, each sharp enough to butcher a mammoth. In his left hand lay the remnant, too small to be struck for further flakes, and this he tossed aside.

  He dropped his hammerstone, threw back his head and winked at his helper: “Good, eh?” They gathered the flakes and the knapper inspected each one. Three he discarded as offering doubtful promise for future work. They would never make projectile points, but the remaining sixteen had obvious possibilities. Properly finished, they could become masterpieces. Arranging them in a line, he summoned the clan to witness the good luck he had had that day.

  The hunters surveyed the potential points and assessed them approvingly. One man, a notable tracker whose spears had started the deaths of several mammoths, grabbed one blade and cried, “This one for me!” The knapper took it, studied it from various angles and said, “I’ll try.”

  When the celebration of the flints was over, the artisan and his helper proceeded to the second step, the critical job of converting these sharp-edged flakes into workable projectiles. Taking a hand-sized piece of mammoth hide, he placed it in his left palm; this precaution was necessary, for otherwise the sharp flint slivers would slice his hand.

  He laid aside his hammerstone and reached for his second tool, a clever device made from an antler. It was shaped like a small boomerang, except that at the angle where the two arms met, a knob protruded, about the size and
shape of an egg. This was the hammer with which he would shape the flake.

  Now, this knob must have contained about one thousand minute faces, indistinguishable one from the other to the untrained eye, but the task at hand was so intricate that the knapper had to swing his hammer with some force, over a fair distance, yet see to it that the precise point on the hammer struck the precise point on the edge of the flint. When it did, a curved piece of flint, reaching all the way around one face of the stone, would fly off. It was an act of incredible skill, of incredible engineering beauty.

  He was now ready for the third process. The former flake was fairly close to the shape he wanted, but before it could be called a finished projectile, more precision work was required. Putting aside the hammer, he took an awl made from a single tine of elk horn, rounded on the end, like the tip of a little finger.

  Holding the nearly finished point against the hide in his left palm, he applied the tine to minute projections along its edge, and by pressing with great but controlled force, he caused fragments of flint to crack free, and in this way, moving always from one calculated spot to the next, he put a scimitar-sharp edge around the entire point.

  When he had worked for about fifteen minutes, pressing but never striking, he stopped and broke into a wide grin of satisfaction and handed the point to the waiting hunter, who showed it to his accomplices. It was superb, perfectly shaped, like a long, slim leaf, balanced, precisely flaked in all areas and with a keen cutting edge. Any huntsman tracking game in Africa or Asia during the preceding two million years would have cherished it.

  But the knapper was not satisfied. Grabbing it roughly from the hunter, he prepared for the final process.

  Cradling the point in the hide, he used his awl to form a tiny platform at the base, where it would ultimately be lashed by thongs to the haft. When this was leveled to his satisfaction, he took his fourth tool, a chest-punch, formed from the spreading antlers of the elk, with a curve that corresponded to his chest, but with one projecting tine in the middle. Holding the tool against his breast, he brought it to bear on the tiny platform, and with great pressure caused the flint to flake halfway down its length.

  Without speaking, for this was a delicate and crucial operation, he used his awl to build another tiny platform on the opposite face, and once more, with the aid of his chest-punch, he forced off a flake running half the length of the point.

  When he saw that this intricate move had succeeded, he leaped in the air, holding the finished point aloft in his hand. Shouting words of triumph, he passed it to the hunter, who better than most of the watchers, appreciated the tension the knapper had been under during the last moments.

  The entire operation had required less than twenty minutes, and only one refinement remained. Recovering the point, the knapper lifted his hammer and with a fine insolence which would have terrified anyone who had begun to value it as a work of art—which it was—knocked a large indentation in the base, so that it could more easily be fastened into its haft by means of mammoth sinews and adhesives. Then with a rough stone he carefully ground away the sharp edges around the base so that the thongs would not be cut when it was lashed to the spear.

  At three separate intervals the knapper could have considered his point completely finished, for it was a serviceable projectile that could kill, but each time he had gone beyond to knock away portions of his most meticulous work in order to improve upon some small detail which to another might have seemed trivial. In the midst of any process he could have leapfrogged to the next, but he refused, because he enjoyed his work and knew it to be good. Now that it was finished, he gave it to the hunter almost carelessly, as if to say “I can do as well next time.” Then he laughed raucously, scratched his armpits, and sorted through the flakes to find another likely prospect.

  That projectile, later to be named a Clovis point, with its functional design, its exquisite workmanship and its pronounced fluting, would be the finest work of art ever produced in the Centennial region. Men of a later day would have lathes at their disposal and electric drills and computers to assist them in determining slope, but they would produce nothing which in beauty, utility and perfect workmanship would match this Clovis point. Viewed flat, it was a subtle lanceolate, improving upon one of the most satisfying designs of nature. Viewed head-on, it was streamlined with uncanny anticipation of later discoveries. Held sideways, the base seemed like a wafer, so thin did the fluting make it, but when lashed to a haft, the point could penetrate like a bullet.

  The rest of its story is quickly told. Next day the hunter took his spear and, with the aid of seven helpers, sought the towering mammoth. A boy trained in agility ran and dodged before the great tusked beast, and when the animal lowered its head to impale the tantalizing boy, the hunter ran with great speed, leaped in the air, landed on the back of the mammoth, vaulted high, and with both hands grasping his spear, brought it down with terrible force into the neck of the animal.

  When the mammoth had lowered its massive head to catch the boy, the vertebrae above his shoulders had become extended, so that the point was able to enter and sever the spinal cord. The result was dramatic. The mammoth took one faltering step and dropped dead. Not once in a hundred times could a hunter reach a vital point with his spear; usually death was a long-drawn process of jabs in the side and chasing and bleeding, requiring two or three days. But this was the lucky blow, and the men howled with delight.

  Nearly twelve thousand years later the articulated skeleton of this mammoth would be unearthed not far from Centennial, and wedged between two of the neck vertebrae would be found this projectile point, indisputable proof that man had lived in America not the mere three thousand years that some had assumed prior to this discovery, but for a very long time indeed. Thus the Clovis point produced that day by the conscientious knapper was not only a supreme work of art; it would also become a prime fact in our intellectual history.

  It was from such men that the American Indian descended. Through the centuries the original stock from Asia, already varied because of the widely separated intervals at which their immigration occurred, underwent many mutations, depending upon where they settled and what luck they had with the natural resources they found. For example, one large tribe lived for some centuries in the Rocky Mountains just west of Rattlesnake Buttes, and there they divided into two, the more adventurous portion proceeding to Mexico, where they developed the dazzling Aztec culture; the less adventurous half remained behind to become one of the poorest Indian families on record, living on roots and barely able to sustain a civilization. We can be sure that the two groups at one time had an equal chance, because they spoke the same language and must have been part of the same tribe, the brilliant Aztecs of Mexico and the somber Utes of Colorado.

  Or again, in California two branches of a tribe were offered a fateful choice. One tamed a few miles to the east and found an easy highway of riches and good living all the way to Peru, where they built the mighty Inca civilization; the other turned a few miles to the west and found itself. trapped on the arid peninsula of Baja California, where its members eked out the most miserable existence known to the world’s humans, not even developing anything which could reasonably be called a civilization.

  One attractive group of Indians, using a language that no one else could understand and referring to themselves only as Our People, branched off from the prehistoric men who had made the Clovis points and found a good life for themselves east of the Mississippi River. About A.D. 500 they moved westward and took up residence in the forests of northern Minnesota. From there, sometime around A.D. 1100, they moved farther westward onto the northern plains and the Dakotas, and at some point in the latter part of the eighteenth century they wandered tentatively southward to the land along the Platte, taking up a seasonal and foraging residence in the vicinity of Rattlesnake Buttes.

  Our People were a tall, slim tribe of Indians with traditions so old they seemed engraved in time. The men tattooed themselves with as
hes driven into their skin by cactus needles, three designs across the chest, and when they designated themselves in councils with other tribes they were apt to say “Our People” and then tap their breasts with their fingertips.

  They placed their faith in Man-Above and their reliance in battle on Flat-Pipe, the sacred totem of the tribe. It was a Battened pipe, guarded at all times by its keeper and cherished in the way the ancient Israelites had cherished their Ark. Flat-Pipe was of crucial importance because Our People were surrounded by enemies, and without its consolation, would have long since been overwhelmed.

  In the year 1756 a sliver group of Our People, holding tentatively to the land between the two Plattes, faced the latest in the long line of crises which had beset them since the tribe started storing memories. The Indians surrounding them had horses (See Map 04 – Dissemination of the Horse among American Indians) and would soon have guns, and they had neither.

  On his ninth birthday Lame Beaver was taken aside by his father Gray Wolf—that is, his real father’s oldest brother—and prepared for doleful news: “You must always remember that Our People are surrounded by enemies. To the north”—and he faced the boy in that direction—“the Dakota, fearful warriors. To the west, the unspeakable Ute, those black evil ones who try to steal our women and our children so that they can become light like us. Never trust a Ute, no matter what presents they bring or how they speak. To the south, the Comanche—they have horses. And to the east ...” Here he turned the boy toward Rattlesnake Buttes and the prairies beyond. “Out there, always lurking, always clever, the tribe it is almost impossible to defeat in battle.” He spat. Biting his lower lip, he felt an anger so great that for a moment he could not speak. Then, brandishing his feathered spear toward the east, he snarled, “The Pawnee.”