Centennial

by James A. Michener

  He would be far from destitute. Take that farm he had picked up from the Grebe boy after the tragedy. He had paid three thousand for it and a banker from Chicago was offering twenty. Not all of his deals had worked so well, but he would quit Centennial with more than a million dollars, which wasn’t bad for a boy who had reached town with a traveling theatrical group.

  He spent July and August working out the details of the transactions which would move his property into the hands of others. No specific deals were concluded, because the men he was negotiating with were on vacation, but come September the arrangements would be terminated quickly.

  “We’re out from under,” he told his wife with real relief during the last week of August. “I feel years younger, and we should have a great time in Florida. Morgan’s going to love the beach, and I’m told the University of Florida is almost as good as Colorado.” His son was eleven at the time and excited at the prospect of living in a tropical climate.

  And then, on Thursday night, the last day of August 1939, rain began to fall, and when Philip Wendell went to bed he told his wife, “Just our damned luck! I’m selling the farms tomorrow, and tonight it rains.” From their bedroom window he looked at the rain, a real downpour that would fill the fields prior to the fall planting. “Well,” he said, “our bad luck is somebody else’s good luck. In my bones I know this is the beginning of a wet cycle. Somebody’s going to make the millions, and I wish it were us.”

  “Philip, go to sleep.”

  He couldn’t. All night he tossed uneasily, brooding about the fortune he was throwing away, the retreat he was making just when the drylands were about to come into their own. It wasn’t fair. His parents had committed murder to gain a foothold in this town and with a sure nose his father had sought out the good lands. Old Mervin Wendell had sensed the destiny of this region and now his son was throwing away the advantage.

  For some reason he could not later explain, Philip Wendell rose from his bed while the rain was still falling and dawn was not yet at hand. He went downstairs to review the sales papers he would be signing tomorrow, to assure himself that he had gotten top dollar for each of the parcels, and when he turned on the radio he heard the electrifying news from Europe:

  At dawn this morning, Friday, September 1, Adolf Hitler marched into Poland. Protected on the flanks by the treaty signed recently with Soviet Russia, the Germans are on their way to Warsaw. Polish forces are reported to be fighting gallantly, but ...

  The first thing Wendell thought, recalling the many Russians he had done business with, was, Sooner or later, he’ll have to fight Russia.

  From this intuition he never wavered, and on it he began to construct the probable course of events: the stalemate, the American involvement, Japan up to something in the Pacific, the confusion which must entangle all nations.

  “This could go on for years!” he muttered, pacing up and down, listening to the reassuring rain. “America’s got to stumble in. And everybody will want wheat. The rain and the war! It’s what I knew would happen.”

  Without consulting his wife, he began calling real estate men in the region, rousing them from bed and offering to buy whatever dry-land farms they had on their lists. “I’ll bring the check before nine o’clock,” he told them. “I know that’s early, but I want to close the deal.” When one of the agents said, “I have some fine irrigated farms, Philip,” he snapped, “They’re for men afraid to gamble. Real men fight the drylands.”

  His wife, hearing his raised voice, came down in her nightgown to find her husband telephoning, one after another, the men who had been planning to buy his farms: “Deal’s off, Garrett. I’ve decided to hold on to the land.” Pause. “Yes. I know we shook hands, but we signed no papers. The deal’s off. Going to farm it myself.”

  “What are you doing?” his wife asked in dismay. Morgan, having been awakened by the noise, came sleepy-eyed into the room and asked, “What’s happening, Daddy?”

  “The world’s changed,” Philip said. “Overnight, everything’s changed.” He flicked on the radio, and they heard the solemn announcements from London, and Morgan said in awed tones, “Golly, it’s a real war!”

  His mother, now able to view this day’s events from her husband’s perspective, took his hand and whispered, “If the war lasts long enough, we could become ...”

  She was not allowed to finish her sentence, because Philip was speaking to his son. “The earth gives you nothing, Morgan. It simply sits there and waits. It neither loves you nor hates you, but it does cooperate with men who are not afraid. Your grandfather bought nineteen farms and made eighteen of them pay because he understood land, and so do I, and so must you. Dust, drought, war ... they’re nothing. It’s the land that counts, and starting today, you’re to learn everything there is to know about it. Because this time the land is going to make us rich ... very rich.”

  CAUTION TO US EDITORS: This table, compiled for me by Walter Bellamy, shows what happened to agriculture at Line Camp in selected years. It is unique in that his crucial figures for rainfall refer not to the calendar year, like other tables, but to the actual growing season. Thus ‘1923 ... 6” ’ means that the winter wheat which was harvested in the spring of 1923 had enjoyed during its entire year from May 1922 through April 1923 only six inches of moisture from rain and snow combined. These figures apply only to Line Camp. In a town like Centennial near the South Platte, moisture and yield per acre could have been much different.

  Denver. You might want to do a nostalgic take-out on Denver as the mecca of the Mexican beet worker during the depression years. A good deal of animosity developed

  in this period, with Denverites claiming that the rural areas used the beet workers all summer, then threw them onto the Denver taxpayer during the winter. The problem was aggravated by the fact that many Mexicans preferred the congenial society that was possible in Denver, with specialized restaurants, cantinas, dances. But even if he did get to Denver, the lot of the Mexican was not idyllic, for he was penned into a narrow district between Jews on the one side, Italians on the other. The causeway near the railroad station was known as “the longest bridge in the world, runs from Mexico to Israel.” Fights between the groups were constant. Even so, many older Mexicans now living in rural Colorado think back upon those winters in Denver as the happiest in their lives.

  Depression. I have been reluctant to use this word in my report, because in Colorado the phenomenon had a contradictory application. On the plains where duststorms struck, this period was one of the bleakest in American history and not even dramatic exaggeration could convey the anguish of some of the stories from that period. On the other hand, in the high country back of the Rockies there remain to this day people who ask, “What depression? We had no dust, no drought. We could always butcher a beef or go out and kill an elk or a deer. We saw no hobos, no unemployed. We didn’t buy new cars, but no one starved. We never saw anyone selling apples, and with us there were no sheriff sales.” On large spreads like the Venneford Ranch, cowboys often had to go without wages, but they kept their bunks, their horses, their jobs and some very good food. It was places like Line Camp that had the heart kicked out of them. I have photographs of nine communities like it that are now ghost towns, of more than a hundred isolated farms whose once-proud houses are falling into ruin. My photographs of the deserted churches, white and stark against the sky, are almost too painful to look at. On the plains there was a depression, and the visible consequences terrify the beholder even today.

  Scandal. You may feel obligated to cover the one occasion in which Centennial achieved nationwide publicity, all of it bad. In the spring of 1948 the Patriotic Order of the Women of the West, Centennial chapter, announced an All-American Citizenship award for high school seniors. By every criterion the prize had to be awarded to an outstanding athlete-scholar-leader, Jesus Melendez, but when his name appeared in the Clarion as the nominee, a Mrs. Wentworth Carver, president of the statewide P.O.W.W., stated flatly, “The true Ame
rican ideals of this great nation were generated by those gallant forebears of English stock who settled our eastern seaboard, and it was not the intention of our society to bestow its medal upon some Mexican immigrant who is probably in our state illegally to begin with.” Well, as you may remember, the whole nation got into the act, heaping ridicule on Mrs. Carver, but national scorn was not needed to reverse the damage she had done. Philip Wendell, an extreme conservative, excoriated her statement and Walter Bellamy pointed out to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “The Melendez family has lived in Colorado much longer than Mrs. Carver’s family has lived in the United States. Besides, his older brother Fidel gave his life for this nation at Anzio.” The most telling blow, however, came from the schoolchildren of Centennial. Acting on their own, they passed a resolution drafted by one of the Takemoto girls: “If Jesus is denied the prize, it must not be awarded at all, because no one else in this school is half as worthy of it as him.”

  Chapter 14

  NOVEMBER ELEGY

  I spent the month of October 1973 searching Centennial for some man or woman whose life epitomized the history of the west. I wanted to send the US editors in New York a kind of capstone to our project, a detailed and intimate portrait of what westerners were doing and thinking about in those critical years prior to our national birthday celebration.

  At first I focused on Centennial’s black barber, Nate Person, grandson of the only black cowboy ever to have ridden point on the Skimmerhorn Trail. The story of how this family achieved its position of love and leadership in my small western town was an American epic.

  Then I shifted to Manolo Marquez, descendant of those redoubtable Mexicans, Tranquilino and Triunfador. He had a fascinating story to tell of breaking through prejudice and winning a solid place for himself. But these were special cases, and their association with Centennial began rather late in its history. I needed someone more deeply rooted in the community, and more typical. And then, on the last day of the month, I found my perfect prototype.

  Early in the morning on November 1 I was breakfasting in a corner of the large room at Venneford Castle. Three moose heads, long undusted, stared down at me as I chatted with Paul Garrett, forty-six years old, tall and graying at the temples. He was one of the most perceptive men in Colorado, and a leader in many fields.

  What attracted me to him especially was his combination of seriousness and self-deprecating good humor. For example, as I finished my tar-flavored cup of tea he told me, “My family has always favored that strange-smelling stuff. My grandmother, Pale Star ... She was an Arapaho Indian you know ... she said it tasted to her like charred jockstrap.”

  “Who were your grandparents?” I asked, and he produced from his cluttered desk a standard breed book in which he kept track of his prize Herefords.

  “I’ve already studied the history of the Venneford bulls,” I told him, but he said, “Not this one,” and he opened the book to a page which he had filled out about himself, as if he were a Hereford. It showed his ancestors back to the fifth generation, and after I had studied it for a few minutes, I was confirmed in my earlier opinion that here was the man I needed to complete my report. (See Map 14 – Paul Garrett Geneology)

  The Garretts had started in sheep, it is true, but they’d had the good sense to shift over to cattle. Paul had army people like the Mercys in his ancestry, and frontiersmen like Pasquinel. One branch of his family had been English, so he would know that interesting aspect of western development, and another branch was Indian.

  “Garrett, Messmore and Buckland were of English stock,” he told me as I put the book down. “The Lloyds were a Welsh family that emigrated to Tennessee and Texas. Patrick Beeley was a hard-drinking Irishman. Pasquinel and Mercy were French, and writers usually ignore the French influence in western history. Zendt, Skimmerhorn, Staller and Bockweiss were Germans. Deal was Dutch, but originally he spelled his name a different way. Red Wolf and Pale Star were full-blooded Indians. Lucinda McKeag, whom everyone seemed to love, was the daughter of a squaw named Clay Basket, about whom the mountain men wrote in their diaries.”

  “Pretty mixed up,” I said.

  “Damned near incestuous,” he confessed. Then he slapped the breed book and said, “if you follow the history of the really great bulls, you’ll find many instances of very close in-breeding. My case, the same way. A son of Lucinda McKeag married the daughter of her brother. Messmore Garrett married his first cousin. And Henry Buckland, father of the formidable Charlotte you’ve spoken about so often, married his niece, if you please.”

  Before I could respond to this last bit of information, the telephone rang and an elderly Mexican serving woman shuffled in to report, “It’s very important.” And she handed him the phone from his desk.

  It was the new governor of Colorado, eager to share some exciting news: “At my ten o’clock press conference this morning I’m announcing your appointment as head of our executive committee responsible for the state centennial celebration.” This was a greater honor than a stranger might have appreciated, because Colorado alone of the fifty states would be celebrating in 1976 not only the two-hundredth birthday of our nation but also the hundredth anniversary of the state.

  “This fits in perfectly,” I said when I heard the news. “What I’d like to do, Mr. Garrett, is to follow you around a bit. For a couple of weeks. Listen in as you conduct your business ... give my editors a feeling for what a westerner is doing these days. If you wouldn’t mind, I wish you’d carry this tape recorder with you when I’m not there. Just in case there’s something you’d like to get off your chest.”

  “A month ago I’d have said no,” he replied. “It isn’t easy, Vernor, when your wife dies. Not even when you haven’t been really married, which was my case, as you may have heard.”

  “I’ve heard a good deal about you,” I said. “I’d like to know more.”

  “If the tape recorder works, you may know a helluva lot more.” He insisted on my staying for lunch, and as we ate beneath the moose heads, word of his appointment penetrated to various corners of the state, and his phone began jangling, with citizens from the western slope of the Rockies- demanding to know if they were to form part of the twin celebrations, or if they were as usual to play second fiddle to the greater concentrations of population along the front range. “Of course you’re counted in,” he assured them. “First thing I do tomorrow is drive across the mountains to consult with you. Get your crowd together. Decide what you want, and I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow night ... in Cortez.”

  On November 2 he got me out of bed early, filled his gray Buick at the ranch gasoline pump and headed for the mountains. There had been rumors that gas rationing might be imposed, and perhaps a speed limit of fifty miles an hour. “Impossible speed for the west,” he muttered as he settled the car into its normal cruising speed of eighty. By the route we had planned, the day’s drive would cover some six hundred miles, but with the excellent roads that crisscrossed Colorado, this was a short trip for a western driver. Cutting onto the interstate west of Venneford, we roared south toward Denver, skirted that city and headed into the high passes at ninety miles an hour.

  We had gone only a short distance when Garrett saw something which had always pleased him. It demonstrated the imaginative manner in which Colorado had confronted some of its problems, for in the building of the interstate the engineers had to cut through a tilted, geologic formation, and instead of simply bulldozing a path through the little mountain, they had made an extremely neat cut which exposed some twenty geological strata. A park had been built around the multicolored edges, so that schoolchildren could wander across the steep slopes of the cuts and actually touch rocks which had formed two hundred million years ago. They could inspect the purple Morrison formation in which the dinosaurs had been found, and could see how layers of sea deposit had been thrust upward when the Rocky Mountains erupted. “This is one of the best things accomplished in Colorado in the past twenty years,” Garrett told v
isitors, “and it cost practically nothing. Just some imagination.”

  He loved driving, for he responded to the motion of the car as it leaned gracefully into the well-banked curves. There was a kinesthetic beauty about pushing a quietly running automobile through the mountains, and it helped him sense the quality of the land he was traversing. Looking above him, as he sped along, he saw once more the noble peaks of Colorado. Often he had astonished eastern visitors by asking, “You’ve surely heard of Pikes Peak. How many mountains in Colorado are higher? Give a guess.”

  Many easterners had never heard of Colorado’s other mountains, and they were always surprised when he told them, “We have fifty-three mountains higher than fourteen thousand feet—many, many more than any other state. Pikes Peak is a mere hill. It’s number thirty-seven on the list—only 14,111 feet high.” Even Longs Peak, which his family had always called Beaver Mountain, was no more than fifteenth on the list. This was truly a majestic state.

  He kept his foot well down on the throttle as we roared toward Eisenhower Tunnel, highest major tunnel in the world; it would take us deep beneath the Continental Divide and at its western end bring us into some of the loveliest valleys on earth. Here new ski centers were being developed, and he stopped briefly at several to alert the proprietors that he expected them to contribute some topnotch sports events for the celebration.