Centennial

by James A. Michener

  He explained, “I seen it time and again. Them as got the gold were them as got there fust.” He had grown up on a farm in southern Ohio, to which he had no intention of returning. “They’s oney two places a man can live properly, St. Louis or San Francisco,” and of the two he preferred the former.

  “The day is gonna come—you will live to see the day, all of you—when I step off’n a Missouri River steamer and tell the cabman, ‘Planters’ House,’ and I’ll have money like you never seen—because it’s out there, just waitin’ to be picked up ... if you know the right place to dig.

  “Sure, I failed in California,” he often confessed. “Come home with fifty cents and a shovel. But I also come home with an idea. I know how to placer and I know how to dig. I carry this spade so when the next news breaks, I’m off. I got me a piece of paper that tells me where the next big strike is gonna be.” Here he would take from his pocket the oilskin pouch in which he carried his tobacco, and from it he would take a second pouch in which he carried a piece of cardboard onto which was pasted a well-worn clipping from the Missouri Republican of 1845:

  Miss Lucinda is not only unusually attractive, with her dark flashing eyes, but she is famed throughout the west as the granddaughter and only heir of Chief Lame Beaver, the Arapaho hero who discovered a gold mine in the Rockies.

  Spade was the least surprised man in St. Louis when in 1858 the extraordinary news flashed up and down the Mississippi valley: “Gold discovered in Nebraska Territory at Pikes Peak!” He left St. Louis that night, carrying only his Sacramento spade and a determination to be first at some new field.

  He took a steamer to St. Joseph, now a thriving city to which railroads from the east were delivering hundreds of gold-seekers daily. Some had funds to purchase wagons on whose sides they painted “Pikes Peak or Bust,” and others could even employ guides to lead their large trains of horses laden with enough equipment for a year.

  Larkin and seven men like him proposed to walk to the Rockies. They would ferry across the Missouri at St. Joe, ask directions to the Platte River and then walk the six hundred miles to the new gold fields. They formed a pitiful brigade, plodding along in the dust raised by the thousands who were riding west. They cadged food where they could, cut timber for other travelers who required it and helped wagons across the Big Blue, still a formidable barrier.

  When they reached the Platte they lounged like beggars at Fort Kearny for a couple of days, picking up things that other travelers had disposed of because of overweight, and gearing themselves for the long hike west. They had only one bit of good fortune: because they were headed for the Rockies, they did not have to ford the South Platte. By staying close to its southern bank, they were sure to reach the gold fields.

  In their passage they came naturally to Zendt’s Farm, where stones had been laid across the Platte so that travelers could cross over to buy their last stores for the final push to the mountains, and it was here that Spade Larkin, weighing less than a hundred and thirty pounds because of near-starvation on the route, struck his great fortune.

  He and five other foot travelers who had persisted to this point limped exhausted into the crowded stockade, and with one glance Spade saw that this store must be making a mint of money. Quietly he discussed with two of his companions the possibility of robbing it, but there were so many armed Indians camped nearby, and so many gold-seekers crowding in that they abandoned the idea. The other five bought a few necessities for the last stage of their journey and passed on, but for some reason Larkin stayed behind, fascinated by the stockade and the tremendous business it was doing.

  “You want to help with the travelers?” Levi Zendt asked the drifter.

  “Yeah, yeah!” he said. “It’s gold I’m after, but I need a grubstake, too.” So he got the job of carrying goods across the river to those travelers who could not make it to the northern side, and one day as he was packing goods to ferry across the river he happened to hear Zendt refer to his pretty wife as Lucinda, and in a flash he comprehended that this woman, stuck away in a trading store on the South Platte, was the girl in the newspaper story! He quit what he was doing and moved inconspicuously to the outhouse along the riverbank. Secreting himself within its dark and odorous confines, he brought out his tobacco pouch and carefully unfolded the clipping. There were the heady details: “Miss Lucinda ... granddaughter and only heir of Chief Lame Beaver ... gold mine in the Rockies.”

  He returned to work, churning over in his mind various possibilities as to how he might wrest from her the secret of the mine. In the meantime he would go on working as if nothing had changed.

  On a winter day in 1860 he returned to the stockade after having gunned down four buffalo cows, from which he had taken the tongues, and as he threw them on the kitchen table he asked Zendt, casually, “You ever know old man McKeag?”

  “My partner. We worked together here for seven years.”

  “Is it true you married his daughter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it true that she’s the granddaughter of an Arapaho chief?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’d she grow up?”

  “Ask her.”

  So Larkin sidled up to Lucinda as she was darning socks and asked, “Is it true that you’re the granddaughter of Chief Lame Beaver?”

  “No,” she said, and Larkin’s face fell. Then she laughed and added, “Because he was never a chief.”

  “Oh, but you were his granddaughter?”

  “He was a great man,” she said quietly.

  “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Many places. St. Louis, for one.”

  “I mean, when your grandfather was alive?”

  “He was long dead before I was born.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Just about everywhere between Canada and the Arkansas. He never went south of that because of the Comanche. Remember, I’m an Arapaho.”

  “I know.” He hesitated, then plunged ahead: “Did he ever live in the mountains?”

  “Everybody did. Not the real mountains, but the foothills. The first thing I can remember is living in the mountains. Blue Valley, we called it.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  Lucinda stopped her darning and looked at the prospector. “What’s all this questioning, Mr. Larkin?” she asked.

  “The newspaper said you were the granddaughter of Chief Lame Beaver.”

  “Oh, no! Levi! Levi!” When her husband appeared from the kitchen she laughed pleasantly and said, “Here’s another one who’s heard about grandfather’s gold mine. Tell him the story, because I have to get supper.”

  So Levi Zendt told Spade Larkin all he knew about the last days of Lame Beaver, the two gold bullets, the obsession of Pasquinel, and of McKeag’s finding him dead in Blue Valley. “Where is this valley?” Larkin asked, and Levi told him what he had told a dozen others: “You go up the Platte till you reach the fork. Keep right, then take the first fork left and climb fairly high, keeping the little stone beaver to your left. And there it is, blue spruce on one side, yellow aspen on the other and the creek comin’ down the middle.”

  “A creek?” Larkin asked.

  “Yes. A beautiful creek.”

  That night Larkin stole as much as he could carry from the stockade, grabbed his spade and started his solitary hike into the mountains. He was heard of from time to time, prowling the camps that others had pioneered, trying to find a place for himself along streams already over-crowded with men who had got there first. He went as far south as California Gulch, but repeatedly came back to the stream which many had explored without results: Clear Creek in Blue Valley. He pitched his camp there one whole winter, an act of folly, because it was known throughout the mountain area that the stream was barren.

  When spring came in 1861 Larkin did not even know that a war was starting which would divide the nation. He had been without human contact for more than six months, and his concern was exclusively wit
h the disintegrating clipping he kept in his tobacco pouch. Now he took it out again, sitting beneath the blue spruce outside his cabin door, and studied its reassuring phrases.

  “It’s got to be here!” Larkin said. “This is where Lame Beaver found those bullets.” And with a kind of sullen fury he plunged back into the cold water, slashing at the gravel and uncovering at last a scattering of nuggets.

  “Oh, God!” he cried, falling on his knees in the water. “I knew it was here!”

  For six weeks he practiced the most cruel discipline. He had found one of the richest placers in Colorado history, and he kept that, fact to himself, panning the gravel and secreting the nuggets, because in California he had learned that when a man found a placer, the trick was to locate the vein which threw off the nuggets, for the nuggets were valuable today, but the vein existed forever.

  Desperately he looked upstream of his find, but he discovered nothing. For a while he gave up placer mining and devoted his entire attention to the stream banks, praying that he might find the vein which had produced this splendid gold, but it eluded him. He became frenzied, more agitated than in the earlier days when he was searching merely for such gold as he could find in the stream bed. Now that was not enough. He wanted it all, the mother vein, the lode from which the real wealth sprang.

  One day in June he saw with despair that another prospector had climbed the stream and was entering Blue Valley. For a moment he considered shooting the man, to preserve the golden secret, but then he thought that probably the man had a partner, and before he could take decisive action the man, a knowing old fellow who could read signs, was upon him and knew that Larkin had found gold. Methodically the old man cut four saplings and staked out ten feet, the allowable portion of stream bank, and proceeded to set up his sieves.

  “Name’s Johnson,” he said. “See you found gold.”

  “Found nothin’,” Larkin growled.

  “Don’t see your stakes,” Johnson said.

  “They’re here,” Larkin said, hastily staking out the area just below his original find.

  For two days the men worked side by side, grudgingly, for Larkin wanted freedom to search for the vein, and on the third day Johnson struck a rich deposit of nuggets and went berserk. “It’s here!” he yelled, dancing up and down, and before Larkin could stop him or arrange some deal, he was dashing down the mountain to inform Denver of the great strike in Blue Valley.

  Within weeks the valley was lined with claims. Three times Spade Larkin had to fight off claim jumpers, and one newcomer said, “The prairies are black with people coming out here.” From all over America and parts of Europe disappointed men who had lost out on previous bonanzas streamed in to try their luck on this great concentration. Each pebble in Clear Creek was turned over at least a score of times, and some men like Johnson took out considerable fortunes.

  The valley was gutted. The aspen went early for building flumes, and the blue spruce vanished soon thereafter. The beaver were all killed off, and no deer dared venture from the hills. Huts of the most miserable sort sprang up on every side, and a loaf of bread sold for two dollars. Larkin, holding desperately to his original find, watched it decline week by week until it yielded nothing and he was forced into the indignity of descending from the . mountain and going to Levi Zendt, brazenly asking the merchant to stock him with goods which he might peddle in the camp.

  While he was gone, a man named Foster, from Illinois, a penniless veteran of the California fields, discovered the mother lode. It lay in a place that Larkin had not even considered, and it yielded $19,000,000, none of which accrued to Larkin, who continued to serve as peddler to the valley.

  Now huge structures were erected to monitor the mines, and a railroad climbed up for hauling in food and taking down the gold. For three years this garish valley, without a tree or a house worth living in, poured forth its amazing riches, and then the lode ran out. The men departed and the gaunt dwellings stood vacant. The tipple and the trestles rotted in the sun, and the trains ran no more. Blue Valley became a ghost town, one of the ugliest on earth, with not a single feature to redeem it, and Spade Larkin was forced to turn his back on the grandeur he had uncovered and drift along the streets of Denver, telling newcomers that he was the man, yessiree, he was the man that found Blue Valley, and for a beer he would explain how a newspaper clipping, a little clipping from a St. Louis newspaper, had told him the secret that nobody else had ever been able to find, the secret of Chief Lame Beaver’s lost gold mine. He became quite tedious.

  How did so unsavory a man destroy a document as noble in principle as the Treaty of Fort Laramie? When word flashed to Omaha, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Boston that Spade Larkin had struck one of the richest of all placers in Blue Valley, a prodigious horde of gold-seekers poured into the west, eager to accomplish there what they had been too late to accomplish in California, and most of them used the South Platte route, which took them past Zendt’s Farm, where they spent the last money they had on food and equipment. Each arrival was sure to require a box of physicking pills, a quart of castor oil, two quarts of rum and a large vial of peppermint essence, for only these could cure the ‘miner’s complaint.’ For Levi Zendt these were good years, and like his father-in-law before him, he banked his savings in St. Louis.

  For the Indians they were not so good. Some travelers, a trickle at first and then a surge, studied their maps and saw that if they ignored the Platte, which wandered north and south, and chose instead a course due west from Kansas City, they would head straight for the gold fields over flat land and save two hundred miles.

  This route was superior in all respects except one: it had no water. Animals perished from thirst and lack of grazing. Men starved to death because the deer and antelope stayed to the north, near the Platte, and the straight line became studded with graves. One party resorted to cannibalism, until only one man survived; Arapaho found him wandering in the waterless country and nursed him back to health.

  The new route produced two lasting consequences. First, it brought thousands of emigrants onto land which had previously been considered useless, so that not only did gold-seekers want mining lands in the hills, but truck farmers wanted flat lands from which they could feed the miners. And who owned the lands they sought? A handful of Indians who knew not the meaning of gold or the rules of farming. Bronze-faced men like Lost Eagle kept appearing at the new settlements, complaining of trespass and depredation, and such constant complaining could not be endured for long.

  Second, the new route doomed the buffalo. It cut the once-unlimited grazing lands between the Platte and the Arkansas into diminished segments; no longer could huge herds move freely north and south, as they seemed to require for propagation. If the discovery of gold had a devastating effect on the Indians, its effect on the buffalo was fatal. Within a space of time so brief that men would ever after marvel at the depopulation, the buffalo would vanish forever from this region.

  Clearly, decisions had to be made, or Indian and gold-seeker would soon be at war. Ironically, the demand for action could not have come at a worse time. In Washington and Fort Leavenworth attention had to be concentrated on the civil war, and few experienced officers could be spared for devising new arrangements with Indians. Men who knew nothing of the west were given the job of managing them, and no attention could be paid as to how it was done.

  Without even discussing the situation with the Indians, these men reached an incredible decision: tell the Indians a mistake was made at Fort Laramie, then offer them a new treaty which would give them a small parcel of largely worthless land containing no water, no trees and no buffalo, land whose only redeeming feature was that it could never possibly be desired by white men. And then conclude the new treaty with the solemn assurance that this time when the Great White Father used the phrase “for as long as the waters flow and the grass shall grow,” he meant it.

  The brutal task of persuading the Indians to accept such a one-sided revision was handed to Major Merc
y, now at the army’s Denver office, and to Indian Agent Albert G. Boone, grandson of old Daniel, who had had his own troubles with Indians.

  “I cannot go back to Chief Lost Eagle,” Mercy told his wife, “and announce that the other treaty is finished. Just because we say it’s finished.” He was distressed that his government, without discussion, would void a solemn treaty which he had helped to negotiate, and order him to make it palatable to the persons affected.

  “I can’t do it!” he said in their Denver home, and Lisette encouraged him in his defiance.

  “It’s disgraceful, Max, and I’d have none of it,” she told him.

  Together they drafted a letter to the authorities at Fort Leavenworth, warning of the consequences. The heart of their letter was contained in four propositions:

  If the terms agreed to at Fort Laramie are unilaterally abrogated, there will be war across the plains. It may be delayed in coming, but it will be inevitable, and it may strike us just when we are most preoccupied elsewhere.