Centennial

by James A. Michener

  As she said this she pirouetted through the station, coming back to her father and grasping him by both hands. “I shall never leave here, Papa. I feel it. I shall fly with my black beetle, and I shall be gone.”

  It was nearly dusk when the amazing entourage finally packed itself aboard the special train and the new black engine pulled the seventeen cars westward. What a dinner was served that first night—from oysters to iced creams! The two dukes were graceful in acknowledging the applause of people lining the tracks and frequently they halted the train, dragging this or that Civil War hero to the back platform with them as torchlights began to flare in the countryside.

  Charlotte was flirting easily with Lieutenant Mercy, who seemed a most congenial young man, and brave too, with his stories of fighting Indians, when she became aware that a stranger was standing at her elbow, awaiting an opportunity to speak with her. It pleased her to make believe she did not see him; instead, she talked to Mercy with unusual animation, singing her sentences joyously, then halting abruptly, looking up at the stranger and saying, “I am most awfully sorry. Did you wish to speak to Lieutenant Mercy?”

  “I wished to speak with you, Miss Buckland,” the man said. “My name’s Oliver Seccombe and I am general manager of Venneford Ranch. I’ve come to take you to the Platte.”

  She did not know the word. “Is that the town where the ranch is?”

  “It’s a river,” he said.

  “What a flat, ugly name for a river. Platte. Sounds as if somebody dropped a plate in a dishpan.”

  Seccombe smiled. “The name’s appropriate, for it is a flat, ugly river, isn’t it, Lieutenant Mercy?”

  “Not at Fort Laramie,” Mercy said. “Up there it’s rather fine.”

  “The ranch doesn’t extend to the fort,” Seccombe explained.

  Charlotte, not entirely liking his manner, did not ask him to join them. “You’ll find my father over there, with the Russian duke,” she said.

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Buckland,” Seccombe said quietly. He was fifty-five years old that summer, a lean, capable Englishman who had bowed and bent and sprung back in all the storms America could throw at him, and he did not intend to allow this ill-mannered daughter of a Bristol silk merchant to confuse him now. “If you need me,” he said softly, “I shall be happy to assist you. For the present, you seem to be well cared for, and I shall go to bed. Busy day tomorrow.”

  The long ride across Nebraska required two days, what with stopping to inspect items of interest and a long wait while the horses were unloaded so that the two dukes could caper across the prairies, with Pawnee scouts shouting like Indian warriors as they rode. Seccombe thought the Pawnee looked silly, undignified, but the dukes apparently loved it, so on the second day a mock battle was staged between the Pawnee and Lieutenant Mercy’s young officers. The riding was superb, and as planned, after a sharp encounter the soldiers sent the Indians scampering across the prairie. When they rejoined the train the Pawnee were laughing, destroying any illusion that the fray could have been serious, but General Custer, as he insisted upon calling himself, quickly corrected that.

  A thin man with flowing mustaches, he told the dukes of his feat in 1868, only five years ago, at Washita River in Kansas. “It was touch and go,” he said, drawing the battle lines on paper, “but in the end my cavalry swept around this point and taught the red men a lesson.”

  “How many did you kill?” one of the dukes asked.

  “Two hundred, three hundred.”

  “A stirring victory!” the Russian duke cried, and he asked his aides if they did not agree that this was indeed a stirring victory. They did. Then Custer said modestly, “These plains will never be safe until the red devils are exterminated, and by that I mean exterminated.” The dukes nodded solemnly. A newspaperman overhearing the conversation winced. He knew that Custer had reported that he had slain 103 fierce warriors, whereas the official investigation, held later that year, had shown the Indian dead to number thirteen men, sixteen women and nine children.

  On the third day—after the train passed Julesburg and was well into Wyoming, skirting the Venneford Ranch, which touched the tracks on the south—the unbelievable happened. It could never have been planned, and it was no part of the arrangements or even the hopes of the seven generals, for their intention was to disembark at Cheyenne, ride north on horseback to Fort Laramie and hunt the buffalo from there.

  But as the train puffed westward, a remnant of the last herd to occupy the land between the two Plattes stumbled its way along the railroad tracks, and the engineer blowing his whistle loudly all the while slowed down almost to a standstill as the train cut a path through the middle of the herd. The buffalo, still confused by trains although they had seen them for six years now, started to mill around and in the end wound up within touching distance from the train windows.

  This was simply too good a chance to miss! The dukes unlimbered their rifles. The generals got down their Winchesters. Even Charlotte Buckland was offered a heavy Civil War gun, which she refused.

  It was almost impossible to miss a buffalo. Indeed, at some points it was necessary to wait for him to move off a few feet so that one could aim at a vital organ; otherwise the gun went off with the muzzle caught in the hair, which merely blew a hole in the beast’s stomach without really finishing him off.

  The firing continued for nearly half an hour, with animals dropping on either side of the train, depending upon which windows were crowded with sportsmen, and in this manner some sixty or seventy buffalo were slain.

  There was a brief interlude of excited chatter as they all compared notes on their kills. Suddenly someone noticed, moving parallel to the coach, a splendid bull with massive head held low, great shoulders and a sloping rear well adapted to fast charges. He could hardly have been important in the servicing of cows, for surely younger bulls must have driven him away by now, but he had a notable dignity which the German watercolorist tried to catch. “What an animal!” he cried as he rapidly started to sketch the sloping shoulders and drooping head.

  Charlotte could not remember later who uttered the cry, but someone shouted, “It’s for Miss Charlotte,” and a special gun, an Austrian one with a powerful sight, was handed to her, but again she refused.

  “Please!” the Austrian duke cried. “You may never have another chance ...”

  “She doesn’t want it,” a quiet voice said, and Charlotte saw with relief that it was Oliver Seccombe. He took the heavy gun and handed it to one of the Russians.

  “I’ll take him!” the Russian duke bellowed, but the pace of the bull matched exactly the speed of the train, and for more than a minute the grizzled old veteran moved beside the window, close enough to be touched but too close for a sporting shot.

  “Have the engineer speed up!” the Russian roared, and an equerry ran forward to deliver the message, but it was not required, for now the old bull started to veer away and the men standing behind the grand duke cheered and an American general shouted “Now!” But at that moment someone bumped the Russian, so that his bullet did not strike a vital organ; it may even have ricocheted off the horn, for the old bull snorted, kicked his hind legs and galloped off toward the open prairie.

  “Don’t let him escape!” one of the generals cried, and nineteen guns blazed from the slowly moving train. The old bull quivered, tried to maintain his balance but collapsed in the dirt. He had been running with such force that his body scraped along the ground for fifteen feet, raising a pillar of dust.

  “The best bull of all,” one of the Russians said, “and we saved it for last.” Seventy-three buffalo had been shot, a perfectly splendid accounting, all agreed. By this time the train, now unimpeded, started speeding up—leaving behind to rot some fifty tons of choice meat, along with hides that could have been fashioned into seventy-three of the finest robes.

  The portrait of the old bull was never finished. The German watercolorist, watching the noble beast go down under the blizzard of bullets, had no sto
mach for depicting his death. He crumpled the paper, and cleaning women at Cheyenne found it on the floor with the other rubbish.

  The second hunt occurred in response to national policy. It started in April of that year, in the town of Jacksboro, Texas, where in the handsome public square a man named Harker appeared leading three stout wagons and a group of four extremely tough skinners. When his convoy halted he let it be known that he would consider signing up one buffalo hunter, if the man was unusually good with the rifle. Everyone he spoke to said, “Amos Calendar’s your man,” and after he heard this four times he said, “I better see Calendar.” and he went in search of him.

  He found him on the north edge of town, living alone in a miserable shack. Calendar was then twenty-five years old, an extremely thin, clean-shaven recluse without even a dog to keep him company. His only possessions seemed to be the clothes he wore and two fine rifles invented by Christian Sharps and now manufactured in Hartford, Connecticut.

  “Name’s Harker,” the buffalo hunter said.

  “Mine’s Calendar.”

  “Hear you been up the trail to Colorado.”

  “Twicet.”

  “See any buffalo?”

  “Millions.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Five years.”

  “Aha!” Harker cried. “I’m the man who knows where they are now.”

  “Meanin’ what?”

  “They tell me you can shoot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Care to prove it?”

  Calendar showed no desire to demonstrate a known fact, so he remained inside his shack, but Harker was insistent, so he took down his oldest Sharps, the one he had carried on the Colorado trail. With studied insolence he took out a paper cartridge, hefted it for weight, pulled down the lever on his rifle and inserted the cartridge so that a tail of paper extended backward from the chamber. Then, with a sudden upward flick of the lever, he closed the breech in such a manner that a sharp knife sheared off the loose end of paper, exposing in the chamber a heavy charge of black powder, ready to be ignited whenever a spark was thrown upon it.

  “I see you’re usin’ the old-style cartridge,” Harker said with an edge of contempt.

  “Because I like ’em,” Calendar replied defiantly.

  He opened a minute chamber into which he placed a fulminate of mercury primer, which, when the hammer exploded it, would send a flash of fire down a tube to discharge the exposed powder. It was as complicated a system as had ever been devised for a rifle, and was beset with drawbacks. It had only one virtue: it worked.

  “What are you goin’ to hit?” Harker asked.

  “Anything you say.”

  Harker looked about for a bottle, found one and walked a considerable distance before placing it against a tree. “Try that,” he called.

  Calendar raised his Sharps, felt it nestle against his shoulder, and experienced not the slightest doubt that he would strike the bottle, for he had molded the bullet at the end of the paper cartridge; he had tied the banknote paper to the bullet with silk thread; he had weighed precisely the amount of powder; and he knew to a fraction how each part of the gun would act.

  “I’ll shoot off the top,” he said. Carefully, yet with familiar ease, he steadied the gun, pulled back the rear trigger to move the sear into hair-trigger position and moved his finger to the forward trigger. With ever so slight a touch he depressed the forward trigger, and several remarkable things happened.

  Because the powder lay exposed in the chamber, and because no breech could be made airtight, a dangerous body of flame shot upward through the loose fittings, temporarily blinding the shooter. Also, because the breech was loose-fitted in another direction, a fair supply of powder backfired into the face of the operator. But most important, the Sharps was so well made, and with such a heavy barrel, that the bullet had to leave the muzzle at great speed and with perfect direction. If Calendar aimed right, the bullet went right.

  Smack! There was no crash of broken glass, just the crisp sound of the top being blown off. “You can shoot,” Harker said as he returned to the shack. “You want to work for me on a buffalo hunt ... a real buffalo hunt?”

  “Well ...” Calendar said. He had no need of work. Doing odds and ends around Jacksboro, he made enough to keep alive, for his wants were few. He didn’t drink. He had no woman. He didn’t have to plow, so he needed only one horse. And he made enough money to care for his guns; he didn’t even need to buy cartridges, since he made his own.

  But Harker had a persuasion that Calendar could not resist. “See that thing sticking out of my saddlebag? That’s a new Sharps. Brass cartridge.”

  “It is?” Calendar asked, unable to mask his surprise. He had heard of this mighty gun, .50 caliber, 70 grains of powder, 475 grains of lead in the bullet. It was supposed to be a monster and only a few test samples had so far been made.

  “How’d you get aholt of one?” Calendar asked, studying the weapon as it rested in the saddlebag.

  “Friend bought it for me. You come out with me, Calendar, that rifle’s yours. Go ahead, take it out.”

  Once Calendar had the black-steel rifle in his hands, once he had inspected that enormous barrel—thirty-five inches long, twenty-three pounds in weight—he was lost. “You’d have to fire this’n from a tripod,” he told Harker. “Man couldn’t hold this.”

  “We’ve got a tripod,” Harker said. “And we’ve got the cartridges.” He handed Calendar three beautiful brass tubes. No more dangerous paper cartridges, no more flash from loose powder, no more backfire into the face.

  And then Harker, like Mephistopheles, whispered the magic words that made resistance impossible. Handing Calendar an intricate tool on which he had been working, he said softly, “At night, when the hunting’s done for that day, you’ll sit around filling your own brass cartridges ... molding the lead bullets ... fitting them in place.”

  Calendar studied the improvised tool: one hook removed the primer from the head of the spent cartridge, another plunger seated the new primer; a clever device straightened the cartridge; another crimped the edge to fasten the end of the bullet; at the far end there was a bullet mold into which hot lead would be poured; on the side was attached a powder measure. With such a gun, and such a tool, with three or four dozen cartridges to be reloaded, a bar of lead for casting bullets and a can of black powder, a man could shoot his way from here to hell.

  “How much is the gun?” Calendar asked, his eyes dancing.,

  “Nothing. You shoot for me all summer ... I got four of the best skinners you ever seen. You keep ’em busy, and at the end of the season that gun’s yours.”

  “I don’t go out with no man’s gun but my own,” Calendar said. “How much?”

  “Forty-nine dollars, and the double trigger, four dollars more.”

  “Wouldn’t be no good without a double trigger.” He looked at the gun, studied Harker, who seemed remarkably unpleasant. “I got fifty-three dollars, mister. I’m buyin’ the gun, and I’m leavin’ with you this afternoon.”

  So off they went to hunt buffalo—Bill Harker, as tough a plainsman as ever lived; Amos Calendar, veteran of the trail with R. J. Poteet; four ugly, dirty skinners; two wagon men to haul the skins; and a cook. They left Jacksboro about dusk and made camp well outside of town. Heading in a northwest direction, they crossed the Trinity River, the Wichita, the Peace and the Red, which put them into Oklahoma Indian territory, where they had no right to be.

  Harker warned them, “Keep a sharp eye for Comanche,” and a night guard was posted. God help the Indian who stumbled into this camp, because these men were killers. They hated Indians, sheriffs, missionaries, schoolteachers, buffalo, deer, antelope and other things yet to be identified.

  On their third day in Oklahoma they sprang into action, for Harker was right. With some innate sense he knew where the buffalo were, and he led his deadly team right to the edge of a herd. From a slight rise they looked down on at least six hundred animals.
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  “We work this way,” he told Calendar. “You’re probably the best shot, so you edge your way downwind while I move in from this side. You shoot first and knock down whatever animal seems to be leading the pack, but don’t kill him. If we can knock down the leader, the rest will mill around inspectin’ him and we can pick ’em off at our speed.”

  The big thing, as Harker explained, was to achieve a stand. That happened when the hunter succeeded in dropping but not killing the leader; then he could remain in one spot and shoot at leisure, bagging as many as seventy or eighty beasts while they milled about their fallen leader, uncertain what to do or which way to go. “There’s nothin’ in this world stupider than a buffalo,” Harker whispered as they prepared to attack the herd. “Wound one of them, the rest will gather round. I killed sixty-seven once, just like that.”

  Calendar crept into position downwind of the herd and watched as the animals continued to graze unmindful of danger. Take it slow, he told himself, creeping ever closer. He was now within sixty yards of the stragglers, but he did not want them. It was his responsibility to knock down the leader. You aimed not for the heart, because even with two bullets through the heart, a buffalo bull could run a hundred yards, throwing the herd into panic. What you did was aim for the lungs, because then the bull fell to the ground in lingering and unfrenzied dying. Then the other buffalo would gather to watch in quiet confusion.