“What happened to him?” Lucinda asked quietly. “Living with a French girl in Boston, I think.”
“And Clemma?”
“You mean ... you haven’t heard from her?”
“No.”
“I am sorry. You haven’t heard then that the baby died?”
“No.” All her Indian stoicism revealed itself in this brief word. Lucinda had no sense of shame, no reticence. Her daughter had vanished and she would be grateful for any information.
“I have no idea where she is,” the officer said, and Lucinda nodded.
When Jim heard this news he was distraught and announced his intention of trying once more to find her, but Levi forestalled him: “James, I shall never forget how you put everything aside to search for her, but that was enough. You’ve done all that could be expected and now you must put her out of your mind.”
“Can you put her out of yours?”
“No, but I’m her father.”
“I’m to be her husband,” Jim said. And instead of forgetting her, as he should have done, he became more obsessed with the belief that he was meant to find her, to care for her. Whenever he came to town he asked the Zendts if they had heard anything, and he convinced himself that one day she would write him, and would wait somewhere for him to rescue her.
Jim let it be known that he had no interest in meeting girls, and not much in other kinds of social life, either. He directed his energy toward the ranch, and became so proficient that he received attractive offers from several English corporations running large herds to the north, but he preferred to stick with Seccombe and Skimmerhorn, two men he trusted.
He intensified his study of nature, analyzing the habits of birds and small animals, but found his greatest delight in supervising the Crown Vee Herefords. He became known throughout the industry as “Jim Lloyd, the Hereford man,” a name in which he took restrained pride.
In 1876 everything connected with Zendt’s Farm reached a climax. To begin with, Congress at last agreed to accept Colorado into the Union as the thirty-eighth state, and it was decided that entry should be made on August 1, just after the hundredth anniversary of the nation.
Statehood should have come much earlier, in 1866, as a matter of fact, and it would have, except that southern sympathizers in the territory, combining with those who still revered Colonel Skimmerhorn for his gallant victory at Rattlesnake Buttes, proposed that the constitution of the new state contain a proviso ensuring that in Colorado, so long as the state endured, only white men should be allowed to vote. Since there were practically no Negroes or Chinese in the territory, and certainly no Indians, the only reason these patriots could cite for such exclusion was that it sounded fashionable.
“Sort of makes us modern,” they said, and their fellow citizens enthusiastically adopted the proposal. The national Senate and House accepted it, too, on grounds that the people of a state ought to be able to choose whom they wished to share their responsibilities with.
President Andrew Johnson, however, made short shrift of the bill when it reached his desk. He vetoed it with a sharp rebuke, basing his decision not on the moral problem of discrimination but on the practical fact of population decline plus the results of a recent plebescite which contradicted earlier mandates:
Colorado, instead of increasing, has declined in population. At an election in 1861, 10,580 votes were cast. At the elect tign in 1864, the number of votes cast was 6192; while at the election held in 1865, the aggregate of votes was 5905 ... It is not satisfactorily established that a majority of citizens desire state government. In an election held for the purpose of ascertaining the views of the people, 6192 votes were cast, and of this number a majority of 3152 was given against statehood.
Perhaps a divine counselor sat at Johnson’s elbow when he penned these words, for had he admitted Colorado at that time, her two senators would surely have voted against him in the forthcoming impeachment—they said so—and he would have become the only President to be removed from office. At any rate, in 1866 Colorado remained a territory.
Now, in pleasanter times, and with the offending proviso eliminated, Colorado was to become a state, and there were celebrations from border to border.
There were also elections! The new state would be entitled to two senators, who would be chosen by the legislature, since it was felt that the general public was not qualified to vote directly for such an august position, and one congressman; seeing that he was of a lower order, the public would be permitted to vote for him directly.
As the time for statehood approached, a sensible movement started in the little town of Zendt’s Farm. It was the schoolteacher, Miss Keller, who launched it, and no sooner had she uttered her suggestion, than it caught the imagination of everyone: “Zendt’s Farm is no name for a town that’s destined to be a city. Let’s celebrate the double birthday and rename ourselves Centennial!”
The idea was so popular that it was two days before anyone thought to ask, “What will Levi say? After all, he founded the place.”
He thought it a great idea. “Never did like Zendt’s Farm,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t like the name Zendt. Everyone I knew with that name either was stingy or ornery, except my mother. And she was born a Spreichert.”
Lucinda said she thought the name Centennial was perfect, and that afternoon dated a letter to Cyprian: “Centennial, Colorado, June 9, 1876,” the first appearance of the name in any document.
So the decision was made, and the town of Centennial was born. A flamboyant celebration was arranged at the river to usher in the second hundred years of American independence and the birth of the new town. Steers donated by the Venneford Ranch were roasted, and patriotic speeches were made, predicting a notable future for both the nation and the town, but festivities were dampened when word arrived on the train from Cheyenne that on an undistinguished battleground in Montana, Colonel George Armstrong Custer with all his men had been massacred by the Sioux and vengeful Cheyenne.
Pasquinel Mercy was among them, chosen specifically by Custer to be his aide after the buffalo hunt on the Union Pacific. When a young cowboy ran into the midst of the celebration, shouting the awful news, Mercy’s pregnant young wife, Laura Skimmerhorn, fainted, and some celebrants began to stare accusingly at Lucinda Zendt.
The nation was now a hundred years old, the town thirty-two, dating from that August day in 1844 when Levi Zendt and the McKeags arrived to establish their trading post. In the case of both nation and town, all major strands of future development had been identified; history would consist of their slow maturing. For the nation: what to do about race? how to control expanding business? how to distribute the growing wealth? For Centennial, history would be what it always had been: how could man adjust to his harsh surroundings? how could he use his land creatively?
CAUTION TO US EDITORS: As a southerner I have always shared the westerner’s suspicion of railroads. Had I been either a rancher or a farmer in the west, I would have been quite bitter about the insolent way in which the railroads treated me. Discriminatory rates, arbitrary rulings on cattle and feed grains, refusal to provide service and arrogant indifference to my problems—all of which we endured in the south—would have been infuriating, and I would have enrolled myself among the agitators. The abuses stemmed from the fact that the owners of the railroads never saw themselves as servants to an expanding nation; they were men trying to squeeze the last penny of profit from a good thing, and to accomplish this, they subverted legislatures, perverted economic law and persecuted anyone who tried to hold them to a more honest discharge of their duties. As a result, even today westerners buy airplane tickets with actual relish, and out here the current call for public support for the railroads falls on deaf ears. If Commodore Vanderbilt did indeed say, “The public be damned,” what the descendants of that public now say to the railroads is unprintable.
Diplodocus. The dinosaur excavated at Chalk Cliff in 1875 became known as diplodocus, and some years later alon
g the border of Colorado and Utah an expedition financed by Andrew Carnegie dug up two beautiful specimens. One now rests in a handsome setting in the Denver Museum of Natural History and is the gem of that collection. Carnegie was so delighted with his find that at his own expense he had molds made for each separate bone in the skeleton, hundreds of them, and circulated plaster casts to various museums throughout the world, so that people everywhere could enjoy “his dinosaur.” A later cast from the molds, this time in cement, now stands at the entrance to the museum at Vernal, Utah, not far from where the original diplodocus roamed 136,000,000 years ago, and it is enormous.
Triceratops. The lands around Rattlesnake Buttes proved rewarding to many teams of excavators. Starting in 1873 and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century, scientists dug a startling variety of bones. In the twentieth century, teams from Europe and eastern universities have continued the work. This year, in Pleistocene clay beds I myself found the jaw of an eohippus; it shone in my hand like a little jewel, and just north of Chalk Cliff, in a classic Morrison deposit, I had the thrill of finding an entire armored collar that triceratops carried about his neck, erecting it into a formidable defense whenever some predator attacked. It is very exciting, I can assure you, to hold in your hand the remnant of a giant lizard who stood 70,000,000 years ago where you now stand.
Warning. You understand, and your caption writer must too, that no human being has ever seen a dinosaur bone. What I uncovered that day from triceratops was not a bone, but rather the petrification of a bone that had once existed. All so-called dinosaur bones are in fact stones formed within the matrix of the original bone. What happened was this: When the original bone was buried, water containing silica seeped into it, and ever so slowly the silica was deposited within the bone. In time the bony structure dissolved and was completely replaced by stone, in such minute detail that from the appearance of the stone we can today deduce with total accuracy even the cell structure of the original bone, and can indeed diagnose what diseases the bone may have suffered. No one has ever seen a bone of diplodocus, but the stony recollection of that great beast is even more exciting and beautiful than I have been able to describe.
Records. The 89 buffalo that Amos Calendar killed in his stand did not by any means constitute a record. Authenticated reports of that period cite the following one-day kills: Charles Rath 107, Doc Zahl 120, Orlando A. Bond 293. Witnesses saw Tom Nixon kill 120 in forty minutes, but in doing so he ruined the barrel of his Sharps. Jim Cato, famous buffalo hunter working out of the Texas Panhandle, is credited with having shot 16,000 buffalo during the great extermination.
Guns. It would be impossible to overestimate the emotional significance of guns to the westerner. If you want your head blown off, elbow your way into a crowded bar and mention gun control. One popular legislator wins perennial reelection with a simple slogan which he plasters over the car bumpers in his district: “The west wasn’t won with a registered gun.” The weapons mentioned in this report are especially favored by collectors. Pasquinel’s fine Hawkens sold for $17.68 in 1826; today it would bring around $1,200. Levi Zendt’s beautiful Melchior Fordney cost him $12 in 1844 but would now be worth $600. Buford Coker’s 1863, LeMat originally sold for $50; today it would fetch $1,000. And Amos Calendar’s buffalo Sharps cost him $53 in 1873; today it would be worth $1,250.
Book count. It may seem improbable that operations as carefully financed and supervised as the great English and Scottish ranches could have allowed themselves to be bilked by fraudulent or misleading accounting, but the records are replete with instances. In 1882 the Holly and Sullivan Ranch was sold to Arkansas Valley Land and Cattle Company with 440,000 acres and a book count of 17,000 head of cattle. Fortunately, the buyer insisted on a downward escalating clause which depended on the actual count of the cattle, should one be made. The true count proved to be 8683. The Niobrara Land and Cattle Company carried 39,000 cattle on their books; in liquidation they could find only 9000. These errors came about principally because managers made rough estimates of their calf crops: “We have 1000 cows and it stands to reason 85 percent will drop calves, so next year we’ll have 1850 critters.” On the open range the true calf drop figured no more than 70 percent, so each year the gap between actual count and book count widened.
Intemperate press. As editors required by libel laws to watch your words, you may find the quotations from the Clarion somewhat inflammatory. Where Indians were concerned, the Colorado press felt few restraints, and one finds in the files numerous invocations to genocide. Editorial policy called for the extermination of the Indian, and that did not mean removal; it meant killing every Indian within the state borders.
Colorado. Warn your cartographer to be wary when mapping this region. The state was put together late by joining three vertical strips of unassociated territory—western, central, eastern—each with its separate dramatic history. 1492 Spain lays vague claim to entire area (Columbus) ; confirmed 1541 (Coronado). Western and central strips remain Spanish till 1821, then Mexican Empire; 1823 Republic of Mexico. Western: 1848 Mexico cedes to U.S. as consequence of war; 1850 Utah Territory. Central: Mexico till 1836, then Republic of Texas; 1845 Texas joins U.S. and retains northern lands; 1850 Texas sells lands to U.S., which immediately divides them between Territories of Utah (north) and New Mexico (south). Eastern: Spanish till 1682, then France (La Salle); 1763 back to Spain by treaty; 1800 back to France (Napoleon); 1803 sold to U.S. (Louisiana Purchase); 1805 Louisiana Territory; 1812 Missouri Territory; 1819 vague claim by Indiana but legally Unorganized Territory. In 1854 central and eastern strips combined, but immediately divided horizontally among Territories of Nebraska (north, including Zendt’s Farm), Kansas (central) and New Mexico (south); 1859 illegal and abortive Jefferson Territory proclaimed; 1861 Colorado Territory with boundaries of present state; 1876 statehood. Name Colorado derives from Spanish and can mean either red, colored or a dirty joke.
Chapter 10
A SMELL OF SHEEP
If any section of the United States ever enjoyed a true golden age, it must have been the cattle regions of the west in the early 1880s. There had been previous fine periods. The New England shipping industry in the 1840s had been magnificent, with whalers sailing distant seas and merchant vessels opening the Orient. The prosperity of cotton plantations in the early 1850s, when British markets were begging to buy, and slaves were docile and great ships from all parts of the world put in to rivers like the James and the Rappahannock to load bales, certainly deluded their owners into believing that cotton was king. And the hectic 1870s, when eastern manufacturers controlled the nation, sending their finished products out on the new railroads at huge profits, buying their raw materials cheaply from the south and west, working their labor fourteen hours a day and controlling the money market to suit their purposes, were a heyday long remembered.
But none of these earlier periods of exuberance surpassed the euphoria that settled over the west in the dazzling eighties. In those years winters were mild and cattle proliferated; investments in land produced enormous dividends; and citizens of all types saw before them a constantly expanding horizon. Like the men in earlier decades who had basked in the sun of fishing, or cotton, or manufacturing, the ranchers of the west truly believed that their golden age must continue forever, for if gold dazzles, it also blinds.
No group prospered more than those canny British who had long before spotted this part of the world as one ripe for development and hungry for investment. In later years it would be popular to lampoon these foreigners as “remittance men,” as if incompetent third and fourth sons were exiled to the west on small monthly payments to keep them out of trouble and, more important, out of sight. Many American dramatic companies, flitting from town to town on night trains, kept in their repertoire plays which made fun of these remittance men, relying on strange accents and unfamiliar customs to draw derisive laughter, but the truth was otherwise.
The sturdy merchants of Bristol sent out only firs
t-class men to check on their considerable investments at the Venneford Ranch. The tight-fisted marmalade millionaires of Dundee did their best to run their great Chugwater Ranch effectively, and they did not dispatch nincompoops to do the job. In Texas the Matador Ranch, largest of all, was run primarily by shrewd investors from London, while over at Horse Creek the merchants of Liverpool were putting together a fine ranch under the leadership of Claude Barker. The most beautiful ranch of all, Beau Brae on the west bank of the Laramie River, was owned and managed by ultra-cautious Scottish businessmen from Edinburgh, and they intended to make money.
The Englishmen who supervised the railroads, protecting British investments there, were excellent people, and those who operated the mines were even better, for a more courageous type of man was required. The irrigation men were prudent, while those dealing primarily in land were bold. They brought their women with them, or sent for them after a short stay in America, and during these years along the Colorado-Wyoming border, English and Scottish patterns of life predominated. The land between the two Plattes could not properly be called an English colony, for the local political leaders were apt to be Dutchmen or tough-minded Kentuckians, but socially the area was an outreach of London-Edinburgh-Dundee-Bristol-Liverpool, and the hard-working Britishers were determined to enjoy themselves.
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