Centennial

by James A. Michener

  What happened was that when you brought your cattle onto the grazing lands, a Venneford cowboy would ride up and warn you not to trespass on his watering rights, and if you persisted in claiming your rights to the open land, one day you became shot. That was the phrase they used: “Poor Waddington. Running his cattle north toward Skunk Hollow. He became shot.” In eleven such incidents no one ever saw who did the shooting, nor were there even suspicions. But eleven would-be intruders became shot.

  Take the case of the two ranches along the Platte east of Zendt’s Farm. Close in was the farm belonging to Potato Brumbaugh, his wife, their daughter and two sons. Farther east, and therefore less protected, lay the ranch of Otto Kraenzel. Each commanded an influential stretch of riverbank, and if either fell into the hands of uncongenial cattlemen, the whole open range might become vulnerable. It was therefore essential that the Venneford people obtain these two ranches.

  Realizing that Hans Brumbaugh, with his successful irrigation project, would be the more difficult to persuade, Oliver Seccombe first approached the Kraenzels. They didn’t want to sell. They liked the Platte valley and foresaw a bright future. Seccombe pointed out that if they sold to him at a good price, they could take the money and homestead elsewhere in Colorado; he would help them locate a favorable site.

  They refused to discuss the matter, told Seccombe it was no use arguing any further, regardless of price. So he bade them an amiable farewell and caught the train at Cheyenne for business in Chicago.

  In his absence a Mr. Farwell arrived in Cheyenne. First he rode down to visit the Kraenzels, offering them a very good deal indeed, and then he rode up to the Brumbaugh ranch, where Hans and his wife assured him that under no conditions would they be interested in selling.

  Mr. Farwell came back with two assistants, whom he called Gus and Harry, and the trio did their best to convince both Kraenzel and Brumbaugh to sell, but neither was interested. During the last discussion Mr. Farwell, a dark man in his forties who spoke with a gentle voice, said, “I’m sorry that negotiations have broken down.”

  “There never were any,” Brumbaugh said.

  Mr. Farwell ignored this and said, “I’ll wait for two days at Zendt’s place. If you change your mind, come in and we’ll settle this easily.”

  “There’s nothing to settle,” Brumbaugh said, and Kraenzel said the same.

  “Then I suppose that’s all there is to it,” Mr. Farwell said quietly. He indicated that Gus and Harry were to depart and he shook hands with the stubborn ranchers. For two days he waited at Zendt’s, and when nothing happened he rode off toward Cheyenne, with Gus and Harry trailing behind.

  Two nights later Otto Kraenzel was gunned down and his ranch house set on fire. Mrs. Kraenzel and the two children escaped. They were so terrified, so eager to be rid of this dreadful place, that when they got to Denver they authorized a lawyer to sell the establishment, cattle and all, if a buyer could be found, and they were seen no more in the west. Oliver Seccombe, not being in the area, sent a telegram to Denver commissioning a lawyer he knew to acquire the vacated Kraenzel ranch, which solidified the Venneford holdings along the river.

  When news of Kraenzel’s murder sped through the community, the killers must have expected Potato Brumbaugh to hightail it off the Platte; if so, they underestimated the stoop-shouldered Russian, for having once fought off the Volga Cossacks, he now had no intention of surrendering either to fear or to Mr. Farwell, wherever he was. Instead, he sent his daughter to town with a message for Levi Zendt: “If they kill me, you’ll be next,” and Levi suspected that this might be correct, but the request placed him in an awkward position. Brumbaugh was accusing the Venneford people of trying to assassinate him and his family, and Levi was a partner in the Venneford operation. It was he, Levi, who was being accused of murder.

  He sent the Brumbaugh girl back to the farm and sought out Skimmerhorn. “John, did you hire outsiders to come in here and kill Kraenzel and Brumbaugh?”

  “God! No!”

  He spoke with such conviction that Levi had to believe him. “Did Oliver Seccombe hire anybody?”

  “No, Levi! He wants to round out his holdings, but not with bullets.”

  “Then our duty is clear. Somebody in the operation is trying to run Brumbaugh off his land. I’m getting my guns to help him defend it.”

  Without awaiting an answer, he turned and left, a stubborn, smallish man fifty-three years old, but at the gate he did hesitate, as if he expected a response, and John Skimmerhorn called, “Wait. I’ll go with you.”

  The enemy, whoever they were, struck that night, but they were met by such a hail of bullets from the Brumbaugh house—seven guns firing from all sides—that they failed to set any buildings on fire and killed no one, even though numerous bullets ripped through the house.

  The next night this ugly, unidentified war resumed, but toward dawn Potato Brumbaugh had had enough. Stooped like an ape, he gathered his family together and said, “They’re over behind that hayrick. There’s five of us to go out and get ’em, and these two friends to guard the house.”

  “I’m goin’ with you,” Levi said, but Brumbaugh would not allow it. Light was just beginning to break when they ventured forth—a husband, his sharpshooter wife, his daughter, aged thirteen, and his boys, twelve and ten, all wielding big guns, all determined to drive the enemy off or die.

  It was a brutal six minutes, with gunfire coming from many directions, but after the Brumbaughs worked their way safely across the open space leading to the barn, Potato surprised everyone. Running forward under protecting gunfire from his sons, he set fire to the hayrick, and as flames rose he bellowed, “Over there, goddamnit, over there!” And his wife and daughter ran speedily to a vantage point and killed a man as he tried to escape the flames. The others rode off and were seen no more.

  Levi went to the dead body, expecting to find Farwell or Gus or Harry, but the corpse was not of anyone previously seen in the area.

  When Oliver Seccombe returned from Chicago he was met by Zendt and Skimmerhorn, who told him, “Outlaws killed Otto Kraenzel and drove his family off the land,” and Seccombe said sanctimoniously, “Yes, I heard of that sad affair.”

  “Next night they started on Potato Brumbaugh’s place,” Skimmerhorn said, “but Levi and I helped the family. They killed one of the outlaws and drove the others away.”

  Levi was staring directly into Seccombe’s face as these words were said, and the man never flinched.

  Seccombe placed his arm about Skimmerhorn’s shoulder and said, “You did exactly right, John. Ranches around here must be protected from nightriders.” He then rode down to offer the Brumbaugh family the assistance of three ranch carpenters to help repair the damage, and Brumbaugh said, “I’d be glad to have them,” and within a short period the farm was restored.

  After that Seccombe visited the Brumbaughs frequently, bringing the children presents from Cheyenne, and after a while it occurred to Brumbaugh that he was spying on his irrigation, so he switched his canvas dams and outlets to other places so as to confuse the Englishman. One day when he caught Seccombe surveying the hayricks he said, “That’s to feed cattle when the winters get cold,” and Seccombe said, “Last winter I hardly wore a coat,” and Brumbaugh said blandly, “With all your cattle, you better hope it stays that way.”

  Later he saw Seccombe instructing his cowboys how to dig irrigation ditches, and by one device or another he let Seccombe know that he was no longer welcome to visit the Brumbaugh farm. “I’ll keep my ideas to myself,” he told his wife, “and let Oliver Seccombe do the same.”

  In this way the traditional antagonism of the prairies was launched: the rancher who wanted the range kept open against the farmer who required fenced land which he could control. It was a warfare as old as the first human family: “And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground ... and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”

  Lev
i Zendt, watching the growing friction, told his wife, “Like always, the Bible was right. In a fight for land, the farmer will always kill off the rancher, because the farmer’s tied to the land and he’ll fight to protect it.”

  During the early summer of 1873 three hunts were organized, and when they ended, the face of the west was permanently altered and any hope of retaining old patterns of life vanished.

  The first started in Omaha, Nebraska, and came at a dramatic time, for the Panic of 1873 had already cast its shadow across the money markets of New York and Chicago; prudent men were beginning to draw in their investments, but the men and women involved in this outlandish affair were so wealthy and so protected that the panic could not touch them.

  Leader of the hunt was one of the lesser dukes from Austria. He was accompanied by a grand duke from Russia. They were joined by French and English military attach6s and by seven generals who had served with more or less distinction in the Union armies during the Civil War, among them a charismatic firebrand named George Armstrong Custer, a temporary general during the Civil War but now returned to the rank of captain. Seconded to serve Glister was young Pasquinel Mercy, a lieutenant from Fort Laramie, who knew where to find buffalo.

  In the second echelon of the party, below the dukes and the generals but providing most of the money to pay for the special train, the servants, the boxcars of liquor and the twelve cooks to prepare the banquets, came a group of French and British financiers interested in the west, and among them was a member of the Venneford enterprises sent out to inspect the holdings of the noble earl in the American west. He was Henry Buckland, fifty-one years old, an importer of silks from India with offices in Bristol, and traveling with him was his daughter Charlotte, aged twenty-one.

  Buckland was a handsome, florid man of substance, both bodily and financially. He had left home as a young man to work aboard an India-bound ship and had loved the subcontinent, finding himself more at home in Bombay than in Bristol. He had built for himself an impeccable business reputation. He had married the daughter of a cousin of Earl Venneford of Wye, and this happy union, somewhat above his station, had projected him into the front ranks of Bristol society.

  It was natural, when Venneford launched his adventures in America, that Henry Buckland be invited to participate, and it was equally natural that he should be the first British member of the combine to visit the American establishment.

  His being along on the formal hunt was an accident. The organizers, hoping to snag a titled Englishman to augment the Austrian and Russian luminaries, had invited Lord Venneford, on the not preposterous theory that an English earl was at least the equal of a grand duke, but Venneford could not break away from duties at home; instead, he recommended his trusted associate, Henry Buckland of Bristol.

  Charlotte Buckland’s presence was not an accident. A headstrong, unpredictable girl of more than average beauty, she had during the past few years become increasingly troublesome to her parents. When she was nineteen—an age when her mother was already married—they had tried to arrange a most acceptable engagement to one of Bristol’s more promising young men, a member of the Pollard family notable for the excellent teas it imported from Ceylon and India. The match was totally appropriate, for it would have linked two families which had distinguished themselves in the India trade, and it had the warm approval of Lord Venneford.

  But Charlotte simply did not like young Pollard and abused him shamefully, letting it be known throughout Bristol that under no circumstances would she consent to marry him. And after casting him aside, she began flirting with a variety of men, including a naval officer and a married barrister, and her behavior was creating something of a scandal. It was high time that she was removed from Bristol, and the unexpected invitation to her father to join the Omaha hunt could not have come at a more opportune time.

  “I’d love to go, Papa,” she cried, emphasizing the word love which she pronounced lovv, with that musical force that well-trained English girls often used. Indeed, she sang her sentences, and in so charming a way that she sometimes seemed a delicate bird infected with spring. She was tall and blond, and laughed easily. She had proved to her own satisfaction that she could entice men, and she liked their company.

  She left England in the spring of 1873 with a sense of keen excitement, as if in the new world she would find a fulfillment which she had missed in the old. She had no desire whatever to visit India, “that dreadful place filled with cobras and fat rajahs.” She believed that India should be reserved for the capable young men of her family who understood trading in silk.

  Longhorn cattle? Now, that was something else! She had seen an early photograph of some two dozen steers on her father’s ranch—well, he owned a goodly share of it, even if it was in old Venneford’s name—and from the first had been fascinated by those incredible horns, jutting out at right angles to the animal’s face and reaching for seven feet, with a double twist on the way. “I should love those animals,” she assured her father. Also, the distances involved on the ranch intrigued her. She figured that if one end of the ranch were placed on Bristol, the other would reach right across England to Dover and ten miles into the English Channel, and to have so much land under one management seemed quite preposterous.

  New York delighted her, with its plebeian vigor, and Chicago was a joy. She visited the burgeoning stockyards and for the first time saw her family’s beef on the hoof, but the horns of those steers were decidedly disappointing. “They’re so dreadfully short,” she complained. “Hardly longhorns at all. Look more like docile Herefords.” She had often been to Herefordshire, the county that bordered Wales to the north, and knew the handsome red-and-white cattle that formed the specialty of that area.

  It was the trip west from Chicago that gave Charlotte her introduction to what she called “the real America,” and by the time she reached Omaha and the beginning of the Union Pacific she was in love with the sprawling land that seemed to encompass so many of her attitudes. It was bold, and innovative, and unafraid and often given to excess. She liked the men—those ruddy, well-fed merchants talking in hushed whispers about the panic. They were disturbed by it, but not afraid. She liked the hearty voices, the lack of affectation and the open manner in which the men ogled her. By the time the train reached Nebraska she and her father had been invited as house guests to four different establishments, and she wanted to visit each.

  At Omaha the Bucklands were submerged in a sea of undirected activity, for the entourages of the two dukes descended upon the city, and junior members were making outrageous demands: “The grand duke simply must have a bath twice a day, and the water must be hot, do you hear, hot!” There was also the matter of special foods and cooks to prepare them. The seven American generals had their problems, too, but each had a bevy of subalterns to solve them, while French and English businessmen encountered much difficulty in acquiring even basic necessities. The confusion was compounded by the four ubiquitous American journalists who wanted to talk with everyone, two photographers who were laboriously taking pictures which would be treasured a hundred years hence, and a German watercolorist who made lifelike pictures of the mélange. He dashed them off with bewildering facility, seven and eight a day; in time they would be worth five thousand dollars each, but now he banded the less appealing ones around as souvenirs, keeping only the best for the book that a German publisher had commissioned.

  This was the American west, the land of Indians and buffalo, the dream world of millions of Europeans who saw it as an escape from the routine of their city-pent lives. No detail was lacking in interest, and when Charlotte Buckland saw on the streets of Omaha a cowboy, a Chinese railway worker and a Pawnee Indian, she brought all three into line and had her photograph taken with them.

  (There she is, standing between the Chinese and the Indian, a slim, beautiful English girl with a mischievous look that can be seen even now as she flirts with the cowboy. She wears a long dress, a summer blouse with ruffled sleeves, a large h
at, and about her trim waist a heavy leather belt. Off to one side in the picture, photographed by accident, stands Lieutenant Pasquinel Mercy, whom she has not yet met.)

  “I am Lieutenant Mercy,” a young man said, stepping forward. “I have been commissioned to watch after you.”

  She left the Indian and the Chinese and went over to Mercy, extending her hand. “I’m Charlotte Buckland, and over there’s my father, having apoplexy trying to buy an extra trunk from that horrid little man.”

  They went to where Buckland was arguing, and within a few moments Lieutenant Mercy had the purchase arranged. He then took them on a brief tour of the station and showed them the train on which they would soon be embarking. As he did so, a well-worn little engine with a beehive stack puffed into the station, and Charlotte cried, “Look at that darling little thing! Is it going to pull us all the way to Wyoming?” And Mercy, with obvious pride, pointed to a black monster coming down another track and said, “That’s ours.”

  “Papa!” Charlotte cried. “Look at that giant beetle coming to consume us.” The way she pronounced the word consume captivated Mercy, and he said, “If it is a beetle, it must have wings,” but his metaphor was awkward, and Buckland stared at him, but Charlotte, appreciating what the young officer had been attempting, cried, “It does have wings! It does! And we shall fly to Wyoming.”