Centennial

by James A. Michener

  By nightfall word had sped across northern Colorado and well into Wyoming, carrying the dismal news that sheep had entered the cattle country. John Skimmerhorn, appalled at the event, cabled Bristol:

  PERKIN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED SHEEP INVADED

  OUR RANGE STOP ADVISE IMMEDIATELY

  SKIMMERHORN

  The answer was brief, GET THEM OFF. In fact, it was the only sensible answer that could be given, for it was an established fact that cattle and sheep could not use the same pasture.

  “The sheep is a filthy beast,” cowboys averred that night as they tried to get the smell of the new arrivals from their nostrils. “A steer won’t touch grass that sheep have walked over. The woollies leave a smell. Christ, I can smell it now.”

  “What’s worse,” another said. “The sheep crops the grass so close, a cow can’t get nothin’ for two years after.”

  “It ain’t only that,” the first cowboy said. “The sheep has a sharp hoof, and he cuts the grass below the stem, right down into the root.”

  “Mostly, though, it’s the smell,” a third man said. “My uncle could walk into a restaurant and if they’d cooked mutton within three months, he could smell it. Cattle ain’t dumb. They know that smell kills.”

  So the war began. (See Map 10 – The Shepherds 1880-1899) In self-protection against the woollies the cattlemen felt they had to drive the sheepmen off the range, and they were ruthless in their determination. At the Cheyenne Club the big ranchers compared notes and some thought the way to protect the range was to shoot the sheep from ambush, but others reported success from clubbing them to death after dark. One rancher along the Laramie River got his cowboys to herd the woollies over a precipice. “We killed more’n a thousand that way,” he said.

  But others preferred poisoning. “Usin’ saltpeter or blue vitriol on the grass,” a Chugwater man said, “takes care of a hell of a lot of sheep and you don’t lose any cattle.”

  Claude Barker, a notably serene man, said little about the problem, but when sheepmen invaded his range, two of them were shot, leaving one survivor to drive the remnants of the herd back north.

  On the Venneford Ranch the problem became acute. Oliver Seccombe was on his way to England when Messmore Garrett arrived with his first four loads of sheep, and decisions had to be left to Skimmerhorn, who used every device he could think of short of murder to dislodge the sheep. He had no success. Calendar moved the first flock onto the range east of Rattlesnake Buttes, and Buford Coker, the South Carolina Confederate, led a large bunch to Fox Canyon northwest of Line Camp Five.

  Skimmerhorn was restrained in dealing with the two intruders because he knew them both, had served with them on the Texas cattle drive. He liked Coker and had a grudging respect for Calendar’s ability to protect himself. “One thing I’ve got to warn you about,” he told his cowboys at a meeting convened to deal with the trespassers. “Those two men know how to shoot. Calendar especially isn’t going to be scared by threats of gunplay. You behave yourselves.”

  The well at Fox Canyon was poisoned and quite a few of Coker’s sheep died before he could rescue the others. Calendar’s flock was attacked by a running pack of savage dogs who had been maneuvered into the area by men on horseback. Calendar coolly shot most of the dogs, but only after they had done much damage. Grass in the draw which was used as a corral was set afire from all directions, and some two hundred sheep burned to death, but Calendar and Coker stuck to their job, and Messmore Garrett shipped in more sheep.

  He was a resolute man. At the local bank, where the tellers found it repugnant to serve him, he deposited ten thousand dollars and let it be known that he wished to buy land for a sheep ranch, his own headquarters, that is, while he ran his sheep on the public domain.

  “It’s a goddamned disgrace,” the banker said at a dinner held by cattlemen in the Railway Arms. “That range has been out there for a thousand years, and the only person who has cared for it in all that time is the cattleman. Legally I suppose it belongs to the government. But it’s our range. That damned Messmore Garrett better not try to buy land from me.”

  The cattlemen were especially outraged when employees of Garrett rode in to the land office and signified their intention of taking up homesteads. “You know it ain’t for them!”

  Three members of Garrett’s family applied for homesteads, but their papers were lost. They applied again, but a lawyer intervened on behalf of the local citizenry to fault one of the applications, and the two others had to be sent to Kansas City for verification. They, too, were lost.

  Garrett made no public complaint. He hired a Denver lawyer who had fought such cases for years, and with glacier-like pressure that expert tied up some parcels of land from which Garrett could, although with difficulty, organize and run his sheep ranch.

  The big breakthrough came when the lawyer filed papers at the courthouse for the purchase of two thousand acres of land at Chalk Cliff from Levi Zendt.

  The whole pressure of the cattle industry fell on poor Levi, and his store was set on fire, the second time he had suffered this incendiary form of debate. The fire was extinguished, not by the fire company, whose members refused to fight any fire on property belonging to a sheepman, but by Garrett and his friends. Next day the Clarion reported:

  The store of Levi Zendt, who seems to prefer the company of sheepmen to that of honest men, caught fire. Unfortunately, it was put out. We remind our readers who have the welfare of this region at heart that this is the same Levi Zendt who protected the Pasquinel brothers when they were burning and murdering along the Platte. People from Pennsylvania seem to require a lot of learning.

  Zendt ignored both the fire and the news report, but when a group of cowboys wanted to know how he could sell decent land to a sheepman, he told them, “Indians sold me that land, to help me get started. I allowed Venneford to use it, to help them get started. I sold Brumbaugh other land, to help him get started. And you’re damned fools to ask such a question.”

  They reported this at the ranch, and Skimmerhorn rode down from headquarters to reason with Levi. “It’s criminal to bring sheep onto a cattle range,” the foreman argued. “They destroy. They use up. They’re no better’n a bunch of hoofed locusts.”

  Levi countered that in his life—he was now sixty-two—he had seen many new ideas evolve and always men said they destroyed the world as it had been. “Maybe the endless range that you know, John, is a thing of the past. Maybe you ought to buy some of that barbed wire I have and fence your land and know what you’re doin’.”

  “But, Levi, you own shares in Venneford. You’re cutting your own throat.”

  “I don’t think too much of your cattle shares, John.” And onto the table he tossed the contract he had made with Messmore Garrett, giving him land for his sheep. “Fact is, John, I’d like to sell my Venneford shares. If you know anyone who wants to buy them.”

  Skimmerhorn did. Next day Jim Lloyd appeared at the store and said, “Mr. Zendt, I hear you got some Venneford shares for sale.”

  “I sure do.”

  “I’d like to buy ’em.”

  “You’d be a lot smarter buyin’ sheep shares. I could get you some.”

  Jim drew back, aghast. “I’m a cattleman. I run cattle.”

  “If you know what you like, stick to it,” Levi said. “You can pick up my Venneford shares at the bank.” Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Lucinda and I have been wondering—do you ever hear anything about Clemma?”

  “Never,” Jim said.

  “No more do we,” Levi said. Then, briskly: “Jim, you’d be doin’ this part of the country a service if you warned your cowboys to leave Coker and Calendar alone. Those men have only so much patience.”

  “They’re not my cowboys,” Jim protested. “The troublemakers are comin’ down from Wyoming.”

  “Better warn ’em to stay home, Jim. There’s gonna be trouble else.”

  The warning was to no avail, and three nights later someone got among the Calendar shee
p and clubbed more than a hundred to death, breaking their heads open with violent, shattering blows.

  In the golden summer of 1883 Chief Lost Eagle, then a frail old man of seventy-three, had his third and last portrait made standing beside a President of the United States. In 1851 he had stood with Millard Fillmore following the great treaty of Fort Laramie, and ten years later he had been photographed with Abraham Lincoln. Now Chester Arthur was vacationing in Yellowstone Park, in an effort to bring the needs of that noble area to the attention of the nation at large. Such a trip into wilderness was a daring venture, requiring the services of seventy-five cavalrymen, many teamsters and scouts, and one hundred and seventy-five pack animals. In passage the President proposed to stop over at the Indian reservation in northwestern Wyoming.

  There he met the famous Shoshone chieftain Washakie, who had a grievous complaint, lodged with vigor and ancient contempt: “Why did the Great White Father allow the Arapaho to trespass onto my reservation?”

  President Arthur looked to one of his aides for explanation, but none was forthcoming, and Washakie, now a man in his eighties, continued: “You know the Arapaho eat their dogs. You know we have fought them for a hundred years.”

  Here an aide informed the President that the Ute, of which the Shoshone were a segment, had indeed fought the Arapaho for a century, and it was true that the Arapaho did eat dogs. “Disgusting,” the President said.

  The protest continued for some time, after which a scout was found who could explain: “The Arapaho have no right to be here ... none at all. They were expelled from their reservation in Colorado and taken to the Dakotas, but they didn’t like it there.”

  “Who required that they like it?” the President asked.

  “So when food ran out, they were allowed to come down here.”

  “They should be sent back,” the President snapped. “But they’ve been moved around too much, sir.”

  The President agreed to listen to the Arapaho side of the story, and Chief Lost Eagle was brought to see him. He presented a pathetic figure, a withered little old man in a tattered army uniform, with a big bronze medal about his neck and on his head a silly high-crowned hat, a turkey feather sticking up from the band. He was bowlegged from years in the saddle and spoke in a high voice.

  “We have traveled far,” he said, “and at last we have a home. We wish to stay.”

  “What’s the medal?” Arthur asked, and General Phil Sheridan, a man who hated Indians and who had coined the classic phrase “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” moved forward to inspect the bronze.

  “President Buchanan,” Sheridan reported, repressing a snigger.

  The entourage moved in, each man wanting to be photographed with the funny little Indian, and he posed for some time, realizing that his appeal to the Great Father had not been taken seriously. “If I could speak with the President again,” he pleaded, but the cavalrymen kept pressing in to have their pictures taken, and by the time Lost Eagle was able to break away, the President had gone.

  “Over here! Over here!” the scouts were calling in Shoshone, and Lost Eagle, who did not understand that language, was left alone until a soldier started pushing him “Over here, Grandpa,” and he was maneuvered into a group containing Washakie and the other Shoshone.

  “Arapaho,” one of them muttered, but now the photographer was shouting at them to remain very still, and he had barely taken the picture when a wild shout arose from a distance and a group of young Indian braves galloped onto a large open field, where President Arthur sat under a canopy. It looked as if the young men were going to attack the President, but at the last moment, from another corner of the field, a company of cavalrymen, led by a boy blowing a bugle, rushed forward to engage the Indians in mock battle. There was a furious discharge of blank ammunition, with horses whinnying and eleven Indians, trained for the purpose, falling off their horses and sliding in the dust as if they had been killed. After ten minutes of shouting and fine horsemanship and an infinity of firing, the brave cavalrymen drove the Indian savages from the scene and saved the President.

  The young Indians who participated were congratulated by both President Arthur and General Sheridan for their fine riding, after which they were allowed to get mildly drunk. Senator George Vest, of Missouri, and Robert Lincoln, son of the late President, agreed that it had been a memorable display, and then the last of the joking cavalrymen insisted upon being photographed with Chief Lost Eagle, and again he patiently posed while the group made fun of him.

  Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.

  But the group laughed at him, would not listen to his petition, and failed even to realize that he was presenting them with a grave moral problem, not of much magnitude, but perhaps of greater intensity for that reason. By the time the presidential party left Wyoming, Chief Lost Eagle was dead.

  The coming of the railroad affected the white man as profoundly as the horse had changed the Indian. For example, in the early summer of 1884 Levi Zendt was confounded by a telegram which the stationmaster handed him:

  ARRIVING UNION PACIFIC FRIDAY AFTERNOON TO STUDY INDIAN TRIBAL LAW

  CHRISTIAN ZENDT

  In confusion he showed the message to Lucinda, who asked, naturally, “Who’s he?”

  “I don’t know. I had a brother Christian. He bought cattle and was so stupid he never heard of an Indian, let alone law.”

  “Could it be his son?”

  “Nobody ever told me who has sons.”

  Lucinda decided it must be one of Levi’s nephews, most likely a son of Christian. He was probably studying law somewhere and had caught onto some fancy idea about Indians. Having suggested this, she became grave: “Should I leave while he’s here?”

  “No!” Levi exploded. “Why should you?”

  “I am Indian.”

  “That’s what he’s comin’ out to study. Cutthroat Indians. Let him see a real one.”

  “What about my brothers.”

  “Look!” He pulled his wife by the arm. “When they kicked me out of Lancaster my family thought me worse than your brothers. I was lower than a murderer. They’ve got no right to be put off their feed by Pasquinels.”

  “Does your family know that I’m your wife?”

  “I haven’t told ’em.”

  “I think I’d better go to Denver.”

  “You stay here. It’s time they knew.”

  So when the afternoon train chugged in from Julesburg, with many of the townfolk at the station, for its arrival was still a novelty, Levi and Lucinda were there to greet Christian Zendt, whoever he was. Down the steps, carrying a small carpet suitcase, came a tall, blond, square-faced boy about twenty-three years old.

  “You must be Uncle Levi,” he said brightly, with an unpretentious grin. “And this is Mrs. Zendt.” Then he looked at her closely and asked, “Are you a real Indian?” And when she nodded graciously, he cried, “This is better than I’d hoped for. It’s truly wonderful!”

  All the way to the farm he talked like a magpie. Graduated from Franklin and Marshall. Yes, son of Christian Zendt, but he was dead now. Three years ago. Enrolled in the law school at Dickinson. Yes, the other three brothers were still living, all with kids. His mother had been one of the Mummerts of Paradise ...

  “The old wagon makers!”

  “The same.”

  “Did Mahlon marry?”

  “Yes, but very late. He courted the Stoltzfus girl for about fifteen years. He was afraid to marry, right out like that, and she was afraid t
o lose him, because he was the only man her age left, and she lost her looks and every Tuesday and Friday they stared at each other across the market, she in her stall selling baked goods and he in his selling meat and both families getting richer, and finally the three brothers got together and said he had to marry her, it was unfair otherwise, and he took to his bed with fear, so Christian and the other two brothers went to the Stoltzfus girl and proposed for Mahlon, and they were married, “And when I last saw them they stood side by side in the meat stall and one of the Stoltzfus boys had taken over the bakery.”

  “Any children?”

  “One every year for five years.”

  The more Levi and his wife saw of this ebullient young man, the more they liked him. He sat enraptured as she told how her uncles had tied buffalo skulls to their backs and had danced in swirling dust until the thongs broke through their back muscles. She told also of her brothers and how they had escaped the massacre, and Levi shared the pain when Christian broke in: “Dear God, Aunt Lucinda! You don’t mean Skimmerhorn set up the guns on purpose and mowed them down?” She said that was exactly what she meant.