Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  Brooks’ verdict on the father of Utah was this: “While he did not order the massacre and would have prevented it if he could, Brigham Young was an accessory after the fact, in that he knew what had happened, and how and why it happened. Evidence of this is abundant and unmistakable, and from the most impeccable Mormon sources.”

  In 1961, the Council of Twelve Apostles met in Salt Lake City and decided, based in large part on the findings of Juanita Brooks, to reinstate John D. Lee to full membership and blessing of the church. More than seventy years after his execution and excommunication, he was re-sealed. His descendants, more than a thousand people living throughout the West, including Stewart Udall, the former Secretary of the Interior, were ecstatic. The Apostles said nothing about the complicity of the church, only that John Lee was back in eternal good graces.

  A WOMAN answering the phone at a number I had been given to call has disappointing news for me: Juanita Brooks is dead. I was glad to hear that Brooks had died in good standing with the church, her funeral held in the St. George tabernacle. Others remain less fortunate. Of late, the church has purged from It’s ranks writers and scholars deemed subversive, including D. Michael Quinn, a historian who documented Joseph Smiths dabbling in the occult. The gerontocracy that runs the $30-billion church empire cannot accept the idea that It’s founders were carnal, curious, occasionally prone to violence, but that story is imprinted onto the Great Basin, whether they see it or not.

  Late in life, Brooks continued to campaign for a decent monument at Mountain Meadows. The church owed it to the dead, she said, and to themselves. A little marker had gone up near the creek bank in 1932. The Mormon Church later purchased the property and adopted a policy of discouraging visitors. The marker was torn down. On public land adjoining the church site, the Forest Service put up a plaque years later, but it was nearly impossible to reach; the access road was washed out and not repaired. The slab of Vermont granite on which I read the names of the dead is the most prominent marker to date. It must do, even with It’s cryptic account of what happened in the meadow in 1857. At the bottom of the granite slab, it says that the monument was erected by the state of Utah and by “the families and friends of those involved and those who died.” It is the best evidence yet that some who carry the burden of this piece of the past are not afraid of it. No one understood this more than Juanita Brooks, for her grandfather had been with the killers in the meadow.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ostrich Boy

  Highlands Ranch, Colorado

  For a time again everybody wanted to live along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. A thousand people a week, a million newcomers in twenty years, they filled the high prairie from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs and marched up the mountains to timberline. They came first as visitors, gasping at the elevation, marveling at the sunset trim along fourteen-thousand-foot summits to the west, catching a Rockies game at Coors Field and arguing over whether home runs are cheap in the thin air. They imagined a life: skiing six months of the year, public school in a new building, a half-acre lot of their own. Mass migration to the blunt edge of the Rocky Mountains had happened so often that it became a predictable cycle of American history, dating to 1859. People were drawn by silver booms, coal bonanzas, cattle riches, oil gushers, military bases, a synfuels rush, real estate speculation. Arriving from the East, the Front Range was the first place to drop your past, leaving it in the Great Plains dust. All the booms were followed by busts: a sea of foreclosure signs, the wind blowing through half-finished skyscrapers, Denver in the rearview mirror. But this did not matter. There is no institutional memory in the West, only dawn.

  This time around, they built not just ranch houses, subdivisions, or cul-de-sac communities named for the tribes that had long ago been driven from the area, but entire cities from scratch. Denver was a place to watch sporting events, eat authentic Mexican food, or conduct some state business in one of the capitol buildings. It renewed itself periodically, with people discovering the old stone homes and bike paths along the South Platte. But the serious sodbusting was going on elsewhere in the hundred-mile-long megalopolis stretching north to south or further west, two miles above sea level, in alpine enclaves where water was rationed and mountain lions would occasionally prowl the edge of a softball field. The new airport floated on the brown plains to the east, a self-contained world under full white sails, just outside the urban edge where the ground was being tilled for triplexes.

  By the late 1990s, the fastest-growing county in America was just south of Denver—Douglas County. The wind blew at regular huffs from the Plains, making it hard for trees to take root. But homes had no problem finding a hold. The land wrinkled and folded up a bit in Douglas County, enough to give most every home a peek out the picture window to the spires of the Rockies. And it was here that Highlands Ranch, the biggest of the overnight communities in Colorado, came together. Staking out twenty-two thousand acres, the founders of Highlands Ranch envisioned perhaps ten thousand people in ten years. In five years they had applications for forty thousand and were on their way to ninety thousand—full construction. The homes were dropped, as if they fell from the air, on wide, curving streets. A garage was sometimes bigger than the entire house people had left behind. The architectural style tended to be a Rocky Mountain hybrid— usually three levels clad in beige or off-white, with bay windows, cedar decks, fireplaces, and huge central rooms stuffed with electronic appliances, called entertainment centers. Highlands Ranch is owned by a subsidiary of Philip Morris, the tobacco company; the few public spaces within the twenty-two thousand acres are no smoking zones.

  Highlands Ranch had no reason to exist in a traditional city sense, it was not a port, a river confluence, a center of banking or commerce. It was ranchland, seasonal grass for livestock, empty in the way of the West where the tableland meets the mountains. But even as cattle country, it had no reason to exist either. So homes were perhaps a better use for the land. It took barely an acre to raise a single steer in the watered Mississippi River valley, but up to sixty acres near the Front Range. Still, Denver was long known as a cowtown. Buffalo Bill Cody is buried in the mountains just above the city. The image he created—a West of hoofed beasts at full gallop, buckskin-clad riders, and problem-solving by pistol—certainly did not go to his grave with him. To this day, Denver alternately promotes and rejects the image, as in the memorable 1985 headline from the leading newspaper: “War Declared on City Image as Cowtown.”

  Philip Morris housing contractors had yet to shoo away the last of the cattle from Highlands Ranch when a tall Canadian with an unusual plan arrived in 1992. Ken Turnbull had an idea that had been incubating in his mind for two years. A geologist, he had lived overseas for a time, then worked in Denver during the energy boom of the early 1980s, setting up his own business. He sold his company before the late 1980s bust. And by the 1990s, he came to Highlands Ranch, like many people, because he wanted to start a new life and do it in a place where there was no encumbrance of the past. Besides, he said, “My hands had become soft.”

  He had searched the length of the Front Range, looking for ranchland. He wanted it for a somewhat radical purpose. Cattle made no sense on open lands of the West in the modern age, when people were eating less beef, and fish from two oceans away could be in the neighborhood market twenty-four hours after being snagged in a net. Turnbull did not quite share Edward Abbeys description of cattle as “ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes.” But he thought it had been a mistake to populate the West with European stock and then construct an entire system of subsidies and political support around them. He is a staunch free-market man: things should live or die, flourish or fail, on their own merits. Cattle, at the time Turnbull arrived in Highlands Ranch, seemed to be on the way out of the open West. By the market logic that he had studied, they were deficits on four legs. Throughout much of the 1990s, it cost on average $800 to raise a steer that brought only $660 at the mark
et. But cattle stayed on the land in large part because of government welfare to stockmen and their beef, a taxpayer gift propelled by the image in many a mind that the West and cows were historic mates. Policy followed the old story.

  Turnbull favored a different sort of exotic, a creature that he said he could prove had lived in Jurassic-era America. So he bought fifteen acres at the upper edge of Highlands Ranch and set up an ostrich ranch. Flightless birds, with eyes the size of tennis balls, eight feet tall, up to 350 pounds each, with just two grams of fat per three pounds of red meat, were the future, he proclaimed without a wink. Of course, many of his neighbors thought he was a crackpot. And some of the old cattlemen who had sold out to the tobacco company said he was doomed. Nobody would raise meat in the Denver metro area again, they said. It was time to move on and out, making room for the sea of beige homes. But Turnbull had done his homework. The land he bought was simply the wrong place for the wrong animals. “I showed these figures to my accountant: A single breeding pair of ostriches could ultimately produce 1.2 million pounds of low-fat, low-cholesterol meat,” said Turnbull. “And he laughed. I mean he just started laughing out loud. Ostriches? Here? He said go back to the drawing board. There had to be a catch. So I spent another year asking questions. I could not find a catch.”

  Turnbull’s gut instinct, and all the consumer and market trends, told him to stay with his plan. “Within a few years, there will be ostrich burgers in every McDonalds,” he said. “Ostriches were made for the West.”

  Just as the new residents of Colorado were redefining what it meant to live in the West—lifestyle refugees, the demographic experts called them— Turnbull was in his way trying to redefine the archetypal Westerner, the one disappearing entirely from the range even as the image was soldered onto a high perch of history. If Kit Laney of New Mexico was ending the millennium determined to make a living like a Western man of the last century, Ken Turnbull was taking the same calendar pivot and going in the opposite direction, without any custom-and-culture protection or a dime in subsidies. He had logic on his side, but no mythic story to inhabit. What else were sacred cows good for, Turnbull reasoned, but for skewering?

  He looked and sounded traditional enough for a high plains drifter: tall, angular, with lean features, sandy hair, a deadpan sense of humor. Had Turnbull come along 150 years ago, It’s possible the dominant mythology of the West would be different. Bookshelves of paperbacks, vaults of film, dude ranches, those ordinances in Catron County—all might revolve around the bug-eyed, sharp-beaked visage of an ostrich moving over a dusty expanse instead of a cow. Imagine the Bierstadt painting Emigrants Crossing the Plains—the overlanders making their way through the mountain chasm toward the setting sun, wagon trains and walkers trying to match stride with their herds of ostriches. How might the West look at itself, or the world look at America, had one accident of history replaced another? Might we be singing around the campfire: Get along, you hose-necked feather dusters, get along?

  A FEW YEARS into his project, Turnbull’s ranch was crowded with birds—speedy, hyperkinetic, somewhat neurotic, exceedingly horny— and Highlands Ranch was crowded with people, who were doing their share for the Colorado population boom as well. The area could not build schools fast enough: children attended in shifts, going through the summer, with classes set up in vinyl modular units dumped on the bare ground. When Turnbull purchased his land, the main thicket of homes was off on the horizon, where the Philip Morris property faced Denver. But nobody expected that the bald land south of a city that had just suffered another devastating bust would take off as fast as it did. This surge of prosperity seemed different. The other Front Range booms were based in one way or the other on tearing up the Rockies. The coal and silver miners, the oil drillers, the water-snatchers, the shale-oil and synthetic fuels explorers—they all came armed with tools to rip up the land, and they left behind slag heaps of poison, half-built mountain roads, and communities saddled with debt and heartbreak. This time around, the boom was based on telecommunications, computer software, recreation—the new American West, they liked to say. Time and again, companies announced that the main reason for locating near the Front Range was because they wanted to be in the midst of all that Rocky Mountain country. The workers were skiers, hikers, rafters, fishermen, hunters, Sierra Club members first, and software engineers and biotechnicians second. The irony, of course, was that they came to an area where planning was anathema, and suburbs sprouted without logic or consideration to traffic problems or water supplies. The Brown Cloud, especially on stale winter days, kept the Rockies out of view.

  Near Turnbull’s property, the streets filled quickly with three-thousand-square-foot starter homes and spindly six-foot starter trees. The Philip Morris contractors, aware of the desire of their home buyers to be close to nature, named the streets and neighborhoods for endangered species. There was Spotted Owl Lane, Wildcat Reserve, Bobcat Ridge, Cougar Ridge. Turnbull’s home was on the elevated edge of Highlands Ranch, about six thousand feet above sea level. He could look out on days when the wind blew the Brown Cloud away and see some of the big sentinels of the Rockies, from 14,255-foot Longs Peak in the north to 14,110-foot Pikes Peak in the south. And he could look up to where Buffalo Bill is buried and see a wave of homes rippling all the way down the slope of the mountains, through Denver and then south and east up to the border of his ostrich ranch.

  The eccentricities of ostriches took some getting used to. Feeding them was not difficult. He gave them pellets of protein and fiber, a diet that would produce a mature bird in under two years. But they swallowed anything—car keys, kids’ tennis shoes, cellular phones. They particularly liked shiny things. They ate sand and flecks of rock to aid digestion, so a silver watchband looked even better. When visitors entered the ostrich pens, they were asked to remove earrings, mufflers, hats—all potential ostrich appetizers. Turnbull shared stories with the other ostrich ranchers about what to do after a bird swallowed a glove or a sock (don’t ever take your gloves off!). He constantly went over the ranch with a metal detector, searching for scraps that might find their way down an ostrich gullet. He built sheds that shielded the birds during spells of extreme weather. Any temperature between ten degrees and ninety they could tolerate, he found. The birds used their bundle of feathers for insulation in the winter, and fluffed it out into an umbrella for shade in the summer. Turnbull built a heated incubation shed for eggs, a nursery, and a barn. The chicks liked company; otherwise they sometimes panicked and refused to eat.

  “So I went to Wal-Mart and bought one of these,” he pointed to a simple mounted mirror. “An instant ostrich family.” He had discovered one other ostrich trait: they are extremely stupid. When he noticed a pair that kept pecking at each other, he bought a rubber chicken and put it in a shed; it soon became the object of all vicious pecking. He did not want to experiment too much, though. What Ken Turnbull was interested in was proliferation, and for that, he let nature take It’s course.

  “You have to appreciate the fact that they’ve been getting along for fifty-five million years without our help,” he said. Their mating ritual was something to behold: a bit of strutting, some sniffing and circling, a big ruffling and swelling of feathers, then a mount. All the puffing and passionate unfolding of feather layers made a sound like a vacuum cleaner. They did this quite often. A single hen can lay up to forty eggs a year. Turnbull started out with four eggs and eight chicks. In no time, he had more than a hundred ostriches roaming the far edges of Highlands Ranch, their necks poking above the horizon of exurbia. Their appearance, alone, made Turnbull’s piece of Front Range real estate a gawker’s destination; the ostriches, of course, gawked back. The birds have enormous legs, with thick, muscled thighs and two heavy toes on each foot. They may not be able to fly, but they move faster than most traffic around the Denver metro area. With a top speed of more than forty miles an hour and a stride of fifteen feet, an ostrich in full sprint is impossible to catch, and much faster than a horse. Ost
riches have very little hair on top, but a lot bunched up around their big eyes. Some have double chins. Squinting, a mature ostrich can look not unlike Alan Simpson, the former Senator from Wyoming.

  It is impossible for another animal, such as a dog, to herd them. “They kill dogs,” said Turnbull. “Stomp ’em to death.” They also bite ranchers, as Turnbull’s hands attest. Even so, he had taken to some of them. One bird, Claudia, was nine feet tall and a favorite; Turnbull, at age forty-eight, said he might grow old with Claudia, who could live to be fifty if well fed and healthy. At the same time, Turnbull recognized that he could not afford to get too attached to his protein. These birds were being fed, sheltered, and kept healthy so that they would end up on the grill.

  “They eat half as much as cattle, and live four times as long,” said Turn-bull. “Plus… they’re very light on the land. Smell that?” He sniffed. There was nothing but the whiff of fresh-cut lawns blowing in from the new homes of Highlands Ranch. “No smell. That’s precisely the point. I can Jive here near all these people because I’m not driving away anyone with the smell of cow shit.”

  TURNBULL WENT down to the National Western Stock Show and Rodeo in Denver to spread the gospel of ostrich ranching and see how his competitors in the red-meat racket were doing. Not very well, as it turned out- the beef peddlers, that is. The annual event is often called the Super Bowl of stock shows, a strong-smelling, heavily leathered extravaganza of big folks and their hoofed investments. Cattle prices had dropped 35 percent in three years, and some cattlemen were not at all happy to see Ken Turnbull and a seven-foot ostrich at his booth. Nor, for that matter, did the cattle ranchers care for all the buzz over bison and elk at the show. The grandstands were packed for the elk auction, the first ever in Denver. Raising domestic elk for their antlers, which they shed every year, had started to take off, with pharmaceutical companies paying up to eighty dollars a pound for the ground-up dust of a discarded rack. In the global economy, it was a high-value Western export, ending up in drugstores in Asia, where men believe it keeps them virile and reduces blood pressure. As for bison— hadn’t they been eliminated from the West more than a century ago? They looked good in Charley Russell sketches and on old nickels, but here, among the cattle, it was somewhat disconcerting to the cowboys. Buffalo were back, bigger than ever. The bison sale was the largest in the history of the event. One big yearling bull, the show’s grand champion breeder, was purchased for $61,000.