Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “We won’t see them till spring,” he told Perkin when he returned to headquarters.

  “But will we find them?” Perkin asked.

  “Maybe a thousand,” Jim said.

  “You mean nine thousand may die!” the little clerk asked.

  “They’re probably dead now,” Jim said dolefully.

  The Crown Vee animals who had stayed on the ranch survived, thanks to Jim’s heroic efforts and the hay he had prudently stored up, and when Perkin accompanied Seccombe to the Cheyenne Club in early January and heard the stories of total disaster that had overtaken some of the Englishmen ranching in Wyoming, he began to appreciate the good management at Venneford.

  “There’s never been a storm like it,” Claude Barker said. “For fifty miles you can’t see where Horse Creek is—frozen solid and covered over from bank to bank. If the thaw doesn’t come soon, we’ll be wiped out.”

  “No,” Perkin assured him. “Our man Jim Lloyd told me he had three or four thousand of your cattle down on our pastures.”

  “Thank God. They getting any food?”

  “Jim’s feeding them some hay.”

  “Thank God.”

  By mid-January it looked as if the freak storm had worn itself out. A series of warm days began to melt the snow, and on the trip back to the ranch Seccombe said, “Two more days of this and the snow will be off the grass. Then you’ll see the cattle recover.”

  “Oliver,” the little Scotsman said, “I am deeply impressed by the men you’ve hired. They know cattle. Better yet, they love them. Crown Vee came out better than any of the others, and I shall take this into consideration in my report.”

  The two men reached headquarters in a state of suspended animosity. Charlotte had a piping-hot dinner waiting, and Perkin told her, “Your husband turns out to be a prudent rancher,” and she replied stiffly, “We’re so pleased that you could see for yourself what running a ranch involves.” And disregarding her attitude, he said gallantly, “I’ll be leaving Friday, and taking with me the kindest memories.”

  Again he did not leave. That night a wind unprecedented in western history roared in from the arctic, dropping the thermometer from a benevolent fifty-three above to a gelid twenty-two below. The moisture which had accumulated from the melting snow froze into an impenetrable layer of ice.

  “This is most grave,” Seccombe said when he saw the glistening shield.

  “Why?” Perkin asked nervously, unable to comprehend what had hit the ranch.

  “The grass is sealed off. No cow can reach a blade of it. If this doesn’t melt within two days ...”

  Instead of melting, the ice became even thicker, for the thermometer dropped to minus twenty-seven.

  Then, on the night of January 15, the great blizzard of 1887 struck. It piled sixteen inches of snow atop the layers of ice, creating drifts which covered barns and obliterated roads and dropping the temperature to a historic forty-five degrees below zero. All pasturelands were buried beyond the capacity of any animal to penetrate. With no hay in storage, no feedcake available, most ranchers in western America sat impotent by their hearths and prayed for the storm to abate, while millions of cattle froze to death or starved.

  For five terrible days the intense cold continued, with more snow each night. The entire prairie was encased in ice, and anguished ranchers were forced to acknowledge that their dangerous gamble of running cattle on an open range, with no stores of feed to succor them in case of storm, had come to an end.

  The cow was the animal least fitted to fight a blizzard. The buffalo had learned to swing his massive head and push away the snow. The horse would paw down through the snow, finding grass beneath. Sheep would eat snow if water was lacking. Turkeys roosted in trees to escape the drifts, and chickens pecked till they reached ground and gulped snow to form water. The cow never learned any of these survival tricks; up to its belly in snow, it would die of thirst.

  Jim Lloyd had a cowhand from Texas called Red, who fancied himself as a roper. He walked with an exaggerated swagger and kept his thumbs locked in his belt, the way he had seen older men do. He was twenty-two and could be one of the best if he settled down. During one respite in the blizzard Red volunteered to ride the north boundary to report on what was happening. This was sheer bravado, and Jim allowed him every opportunity to change his mind. Not Red! He saddled up and headed east, taking pack rations and a flask. He was gone for nine days, and when he got back he was gaunt and red-eyed.

  Finlay Perkin suggested that he come into the kitchen at the castle and report on what he had seen, and he sat there just like the tough cowboy he wanted to be, gripping his coffee cup with both hands and talking in clipped sentences. But then as the phrases came out, his lower lip began to tremble and he had to put his cup down. For long moments he could not speak.

  “I seen ...” He looked helplessly at Seccombe. “I seen in that draw by the three piñons ...” He could not go on. After a period of silence he began again. “I seen dead cattle piled one on top of another till they seemed to fill the whole draw. I seen Pine Creek lined with what musta been a thousand carcasses. I seen over by the draw that runs into Line Camp Two a whole field of ice with horns and noses sticking out, musta been five hundred longhorns buried there in the first storm. I seen ...”

  He couldn’t continue. Dropping his red head onto the table, he remained silent, too tough to cry, too choked to speak. His listeners looked away, and after a while he mumbled, “Half our herd must be dead.”

  It was. But even so, Crown Vee came off better than most, solely because of the unflagging efforts of Jim Lloyd and his feeding teams. When the icy snow did not abate, he encouraged the carpenters to convert the ranch wagons into rude sleighs, and these he drove to all parts of the ranch, hauling hay. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day, and sometimes when he came unexpectedly upon a herd of longhorns who had perished in some draw, their bleak faces still turned hopefully away from the wind, he came close to tears.

  Across the west these were days of anguish, when tough cowboys like Texas Red could not contain the tragedy they saw, when gay and gallant ranchers like Claude Barker at Horse Creek surveyed the situation and said, “Well, that’s the end of the ranch. It was a good thing while it lasted.”

  The open-range cattle industry as the ranch barons had enjoyed it in the golden years of 1880 through October of 1886 was gone forever. No more could a man run his cattle wild through the clement winter, depending upon them to forage grass from the lightly frozen ground. No more could a man boast of owning five million acres of unfenced land and cattle so numerous he could not count them. The old days were dead; the Englishmen who had done so much to pioneer the west would be going home. New ideas would be needed: fences, new types of cattle, new systems of control.

  At no ranch were the consequences more bizarre than at Venneford, where during the dreadful days three mutually suspicious people were imprisoned within a castle—Oliver, Charlotte and Perkin, each in his separate corner tower. They met only for meals served in the drafty dining room—each keeping a watchful eye upon the other, each aware that the basis of his life was shifting, each pondering how best he could adjust to new requirements. The wind wailed and the ice formed, and each remained in his cell, like monks in a crumbling monastery a thousand years before.

  Oliver Seccombe was now sixty-nine years old, a man whose life was fairly well used up. It was ending in decay, with an ugly lawsuit threatening, and he saw no escape from almost certain catastrophe. He would have to surrender his position at the ranch, the lovely days at Line Camp Four among the piñons, his position as squire of the region. Leaving Charlotte’s castle would be no sorrow; it had been an expensive demon. But leaving the ranch would be, for this was his creation. Without his persistent enthusiasm it could never have come into being, and it was ironic that he should have been an agent of its destruction. The only consolation he had was that even after the collapse, Charlotte would possess enough money of her own to survive on, and someh
ow she would be able to find a good life. As for himself, Perkin had quite openly suggested that he resign. Well, ranchers in Argentina were always making inquiries among the Englishmen in Wyoming, and perhaps he could hook up with one of them. His deepest regret would be the loss of the Cheyenne Club, that amiable group of gentlemen, that Athens of the west, where the food was good, the wine better and the talk best of all. Damn, he would miss that club.

  Charlotte Seccombe had no such elegiac thoughts. Shrewd girl that she was, she realized something that neither her husband nor Perkin had yet thought about. With the tremendous losses suffered by all ranches during the blizzard—as high as ninety-three percent in some parts of Montana—the discrepancy between Finlay Perkin’s book count and the actual number of cattle on the range was wiped out! It simply did not exist! In October 1886 Finlay Perkin could point to his ledgers and say, “You paid for so-and-so many, cattle, but you have only so-and-so many. You must have stolen the difference.” But in March 1887 Seccombe could reply, “The missing cattle died in the storm.” As the bartender at the Cheyenne Club had cynically observed during the worst of the winter, “Forget the dead cattle, gentlemen. Doctor your account books.” She perceived that Perkin would have no case in court, even though he might make things unpleasant with the Bristol directors. So she began to treat him with studied contempt, inventing various ways to demean him. She laughed at the wrong time and took delight in contradicting him or even making him look foolish. Twice during the blizzard, when they were locked inside the castle with poor food and inadequate heat, she brought up the subject of the paint. “We lost a great deal of money and effort on that foolishness,” she said. “The paint cost little,” Perkin said defensively. “True, but the hours the cowboys wasted! They could have been cutting fall hay!” As for her husband, she had only the kindliest thoughts, but they were condescending. She saw that he had not the acumen of Perkin, nor the integrity of Skimmerhorn. He was a man gifted with words and initial action, but never one to see a difficult situation through to the end. As she had observed once to Jim Lloyd, whom she respected as a man of courage, “Oliver has never done a dishonest thing in his life.” When Jim looked up in surprise, she added, “He’s always hired someone else.” She hoped Oliver would come out of this impasse in one piece. Perhaps resigning would be the honorable solution. If not, there were other alternatives, both for him and for her.

  On Finlay Perkin the blizzard had a profound effect. Up to now, the cloistered little Scotsman had known a horizon delimited by Kincardineshire and Bristol. But in the storm he found himself at the center of a turbulent world where great fortunes could be dissipated overnight, where nature in one vast sweep of her hand could wipe out an area as large as Europe. But he knew it was more than the blizzard. Ranchers who had fallen into sloppy ways will complain that the storm ruined them, he mused as he shivered in his tower, but they were doomed long before the weather changed. Book count, overgrazing, careless management, stubborn refusal to look at new ways of operating—damn, damn, what a wasted world! He understood what should have been done because he was discovering that he liked cattle. He also had a keen appreciation of land; like Jim Lloyd, he had a feeling for what it could be made to do, what it would balk at. He saw Wyoming and Colorado as empires, scarcely touched so far as capacities were concerned. And most of all, he had evolved a very solid sense of what the cattle ranch of the future ought to be. He was aware that Oliver and Charlotte suspected him of compiling a dossier against them. Far from it. He held them in little consideration; Seccombe had no doubt abused his prerogatives and perhaps had misappropriated Venneford funds for the building of this ridiculous castle, but he was no longer of any central concern. The important thing was to encourage Seccombe to resign as soon as possible. He saw that with the interposition of the blizzard, and the wiping away of whole ranches, it would be petty and unfruitful to make a case at law over the disappearance of a few thousand Crown Vee cattle. He caught himself: What am I saying? A few thousand cattle? He must have diverted twenty thousand. More than six hundred thousand dollars snatched from under our noses. And because of the blizzard, we can’t do a thing about it. Our job is to build solidly for the future. Six years of honest operation and we’ll have a million back ...

  It was late March when the thaw finally came, and as Jim Lloyd moved about the ranch he saw that many of the emergency measures he had taken had worked. He felt that he had learned from this dreadful year many secrets for the successful handling of cattle, and he was therefore surprised and even a little irritated when Finlay Perkin, with his snooping ways, subjected him to intensive interrogation.

  “Did we pay a reasonable sum for our irrigation ditches?”

  “Of course. We dug most of them ourselves.”

  “Did this Russian, Potato Somebody, profit from the ditches?”

  “Mr. Seccombe got the idea from him!”

  “Did Mr. Seccombe ever sell any of the hay?”

  The little clerk hammered at one point after another, and in time Jim deduced that he was trying to force accusations against Mr. Seccombe, and after this line of questioning had continued for a while Jim got mad and snapped, “Listen, Mr. Perkin, I work for Mr. Seccombe, and he’s one of the best bosses a man ever had. I’ll not say a word against him.”

  “I would never want you to,” Perkin said evenly.

  “You sure sound as if that’s what you wanted.”

  In some dismay Jim took his problem to Mr. Skimmerhorn, who slapped his leg and said, “Damn! He followed the same line with me.”

  “What’s he up to?” Jim asked. “Why’s he testing Mr. Seccombe after what we’ve been through?”

  Skimmerhorn pondered this for some minutes, drumming with his fingers on the headquarters table. “The logical conclusion,” he said slowly, “is that he hasn’t been testing Mr. Seccombe at all. He’s been testing us.”

  “What have we done? Saved his cattle, that’s all.”

  “He was testing to see whether we were loyal to the man we’re working for.”

  “I was. How about you?”

  “I’m loyal to my boss till the moment he goes to jail.”

  “You think Mr. Seccombe may go to jail?”

  “Not after the blizzard. Could Mr. Perkin possibly go into court and say to the judge, ‘Some of our cattle are missing.’ If the judge owned any, he might reply, ‘Hell, all of mine are missing.’ Perkin has no case and he knows it.”

  “I don’t like that little son-of-a-bitch,” Jim said, and he was not on hand when the Scotsman said goodbye.

  Seccombe and his wife took the clerk to Cheyenne, where at the railroad station Perkin said his farewells. “You did a remarkable job, Oliver, bringing us through that blizzard. You have our thanks.”

  “But you’re determined to press the lawsuit?”

  “Not if you resign, Oliver. You’re almost seventy. Resign.”

  The train pulled into the station. The conductor cried, “All aboard for North Platte, Grand Island, Omaha!” and Charlotte bade the little clerk a restrained farewell. Oliver shook hands with him formally, then led Charlotte to the Cheyenne Club.

  He found there an autumnal mood, as if the end of an era were at hand. Instead of the vivacity that had always marked the card rooms and the bar during March, when winter was ending and polo about to begin, he found solemnity.

  “Claude Barker? Wiped out. Hasn’t a sou.”

  “Moreton Frewen! Dreadful shape, poor fellow. Said something about South Africa.”

  “The Chugwater people? No celebrations in Dundee this year. Someone said their losses were so heavy they may run sheep.”

  And so the mournful litany went: thousands of head of cattle starved; on some ranches ninety percent; no more money from Boston; seventeen club members, mind you, seventeen of our most secure men, eliminated—gone bust.

  The club itself was in sad shape. More than half the members had lost heavily and were relinquishing membership. The dining rooms, which had once been so ga
y in spring, were desolate areas where bleak white tablecloths served only to remind the few diners of their fields covered with snow. Even the room in which the Seccombes stayed seemed shabby.

  How sad, how infinitely sad it was. Oliver bore it for two days, then told Charlotte with gray despair, “It’s all ending so poorly, so very poorly.”

  “Forget that little worm,” she snapped. “He’s powerless to hurt us.”

  “It’s not Perkin, it’s me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong we can’t put right. What’s book count? If we’d had the damned cattle, they’d have frozen.”

  He was dismayed to realize that she had no comprehension of the anguish he was feeling or its cause, and he tried to explain: “When I watched Jim Lloyd in the blizzard ... and Texas Red ... and saw them taking command, doing the things a cattleman ought to do.”

  “They’re paid to do it. It’s their job.”

  “Even Claude Barker rode through the storm thirty miles to summon help ... lost two fingers ...”

  “Claude Barker is a silly, ineffectual man, and if he’d stayed home, he wouldn’t have frozen his fingers.”