ONLY ANOTHER WRITER, SOMEONE WHO HAD WORKED HIS heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door.
“New York’s trying to get you,” he said with some excitement. “If I got the name right, it’s one of the editors of US.”
“The magazine?”
“I could be wrong. They’re holding in my office.”
As we hurried along the corridor he said, with obvious good will, “This could prove quite rewarding, Lewis.”
“More likely they want to verify some fact in American history.”
“You mean, they’d telephone from New York?”
“They pride themselves on being accurate.” I took perverse pleasure in posing as one familiar with publishing. After all, the editors of Time had called me once. Checking on the early settlements in Virginia.
Any sophistication I might have felt deserted me when I reached the telephone. Indeed, my hands were starting to sweat. The years had been long and fruitless, and a telephone call from editors in New York was agitating.
“This Dr. Lewis Vernor?” a no-nonsense voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Author of Virginia Genesis?”
“Yes.”
“Had to be sure. Didn’t want to embarrass either of us.” The voice dropped slightly, as if that part of the discussion were ended. Then with crisp authority it said, “Dr. Vernor, I’m James Ringold, managing editor here at US. Problem is simple. Can you catch a plane from Atlanta this afternoon and report at my office tomorrow morning at nine?” Before I could even gasp, he added, “We cover expenses, of course.” Then, when I hesitated because of my surprise, he said, “I think we may have something that would interest you … considerably.” I grew more confused, which gave him time to add, “And before you leave for the airport, will you discuss schedules with your wife and your college? We shall very probably want to preempt your time from the end of semester right through Christmas.”
I placed my hand over the mouthpiece and made some meaningless gesture toward Dean Rivers. “Can I fly to New York on the late plane?”
“Of course! Of course!” he whispered with an enthusiasm as great as mine. “Something big?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. Then into the phone I said, “What was your name again?” When he replied, I told him, “I’ll be there.”
In the next hour I called my wife, arranged for Professor Hisken to take my classes and then reported to the president’s office, where Dean Rivers had prepared the way with President Rexford by telling him that it sounded like the chance of a century for me and that he, Rivers, recommended that I be given the necessary leave.
Rexford, a tall southern gentleman who had accomplished wonders collecting funds for a college that badly needed them, was always pleased when one of his faculty received outside attention, because in subsequent meetings with businessmen he could allude to the fact that “we’re becoming better known all the time, something of a national force.” He greeted me warmly and asked, “What’s this I hear about US wanting to borrow our finest history man for the autumn term?”
“I really know nothing about it, sir,” I replied honestly. “They want to interview me tomorrow morning, and if I pass muster, they want to offer me a job from term-end to Christmas.”
“When’s your next sabbatical?”
“I was planning to spend next spring quarter in the Oregon libraries.”
“I remember. Settlement of the northwest. Mmmmm?”
“I thought that having started in Virginia and then done my study on the Great Lakes, it might be natural for me to—”
“Complete the cycle? Yes. Yes. You do that and you’ll be a very valuable man to us, Vernor. A lot of foundations are going to be looking for projects dealing with the American past, and if we could offer you as a man who has done his homework, Virginia to Oregon … well, I don’t have to tell you that I could generate a lot of interest in a man like that.”
“So you think I should stay here and work on my Oregon project?”
“I haven’t said what I think, Vernor. But I know for a fact …” Here he rose and moved restlessly about his office, thrusting his arms out in bursts of energy. “I know that a lot of these foundations would just love to place a project in Georgia. Get them off the hook of appearing too provincial.”
“Then I’ll tell the editors—”
“You won’t tell them anything. Go. Listen. See what they have to sell. And if by chance it should fit into your grand design … How much do we pay you a quarter?”
“Four thousand dollars.”
“Let’s do it this way. If what they have to offer is completely wide of the mark—bears no relation to American settlement—turn ’em down. Stay here the fall and winter quarters, then go out to Oregon in the spring.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But if it does fit in with your intellectual plans, say, something on the Dakotas. And”—he accented the word heavily—“if they’ll pay you four thousand or more, I’ll grant you fall quarter without pay, and you can take your sabbatical with pay spring quarter and head for Oregon.”
“That’s generous,” I said.
“I’m thinking only of myself. Point is, it wouldn’t hurt with the foundations if I could say that our man Vernor had done that big writing job for US. Gives you a touch of professionalism. That and your two books. And believe me, it’s that professionalism that makes you eligible for the big grants.” He stalked about the room, hungrily, then turned and said, “So you go ahead. Listen. And if it sounds good, call me from New York.”
At eight-thirty next morning I was walking down Avenue of the Americas, among those towering buildings of glass, marveling at how New York had changed since I knew it in 1957 when Alfred Knopf was publishing my first book on Virginia. I felt as if I had been away from America for a generation.
US had offices north of the new CBS building; its glass tower was the most impressive on the avenue. I rode up to the forty-seventh floor and entered a walnut-paneled waiting room. “I’m early,” I told the girl.
“So am I,” she said. “Coffee?” She was as bright as the magazine for which she worked, and she put me at my ease. “If Ringold-san told you nine, nine it will be.”
At one minute after nine she ushered me into his office, where she introduced me to four attractive young editors. James Ringold was under forty and wore his hair combed straight forward, like Julius Caesar. Harry Leeds, his executive assistant, was something past thirty and wore an expensive double-knit in clashing colors. Bill Wright was obviously just a beginner. And Carol Endermann … well, I couldn’t begin to guess how old she was. She could have been one of my good-looking, leggy graduate students from a tobacco farm in the Carolinas, or just as easily, a self-directed thirty-three-year-old assistant professor at the University of Georgia. I felt I was in the hands of four dedicated people who knew what they were doing, and was sure I would enjoy watching them operate.
“Let me get one thing straight, Vernor,” Ringold said. “You published Virginia Genesis in 1957 with Knopf. How did it sell?”
“Miserably.”
“But they brought it out in paperback two years ago.”
“Yes. It’s widely used in universities.”
“Good. I hope you got back your investment on it.”
“With paperbacks, yes.”
“That book I know. Very favorably. Now tell me about your next one.”
“Great Lakes Ordeal. Mostly iron and steel development. A lot on immigration, of course.”
“Knopf do it, too?”
“Miserably?”
“Yes, but it’s paying its way … in paperback.”
“Delighted to hear it,” Ringold said. “Harry, tell him how we got onto his name.”
“With pleasure,” young Leeds said. “Sometime ago we needed expertise of the highest caliber. On a project of some moment. We sent out calls to about thirty certified intellectuals for recommendations—and guess what?” He pointed at me. “Abou Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”
“In the profession,” Bill Wright said, “you have one hell of a reputation.”
“Hence the phone call,” Leeds said.
“Your books may not sell, Vernor,” Wright continued, “but the brains of this nation know a good man when they read his research.”
Ringold was slightly irritated by young Wright’s interruption and now resumed charge. “What we have in mind, Professor Vernor, is for you to make a research report for us in great depth, but also at great speed. If you devote your entire time from the end of May till Christmas, we feel sure that with your background you can do it. But our schedule is so tight, if you submit it one day late, it won’t be worth a damn to us—not one damn.”
“Does that kind of schedule frighten you?” Leeds asked.
“I work on the quarter system,” I said. Either they understood what this meant in way of planning and precise execution, or they didn’t. They did.
“Good,” Ringold said. He rose, walked about his desk and said, standing, “So now we’re down to the nitty-gritty. Carol?”
“What we have in mind, Professor Vernor”—I noticed that she used the exact phraseology of her boss—“is to publish in late 1974 a double issue of US devoted entirely to an in-depth analysis of one American community. We want you to go to that community, study it from the inside, give us intimate research on whatever aspects of it interest you deeply.”
“The ones that awaken a gut response,” young Wright volunteered.
“We’re already prepared to do a quick once-over job,” Miss Endermann said, “but what we’re after is much deeper … nothing less than the soul of America … as seen in microcosm.”
I gripped the arms of my chair and breathed slowly. This seemed the kind of commission a man like me dreams of. It was what I had tried to do in Virginia after graduating from the university at Charlottesville and what I had followed up with at the Great Lakes when teaching at the University of Minnesota. I at least knew what the problem was.
“Have you identified the community?” I asked. Much would depend upon whether I had competence in the selected area.
“We have,” Ringold said. “Tell him, Harry.”
“Because the arteries of America have always been so crucial,” Leeds said, “we determined from the start to focus on a river … the ebb and flow of traffic … the journeymen up and down … the influence of time sweeping past …” As he spoke he closed his eyes, and it was apparent that he had chosen the river, and no doubt the specific settlement on it. He opened his eyes and said, “So, Professor Vernor, I’m afraid we’ve stuck you with a river.”
“I worked with rivers in Virginia,” I said.
“I know. That’s what attracted me to you.”
I was eager to land this job, because it was the kind of work I ought to do before going to Oregon, but I did not want to appear too eager. I sat staring at the floor, trying to collect my thoughts. DeVoto had already done a masterful job on the Missouri River, but he had left some topics undeveloped. I might be able to write a strong report on St. Joseph, or one of the Mandan villages, or even something farther west, say Great Falls. “I’d not want to compete with DeVoto,” I said tentatively, “but there’s a chance I could do something original on the Missouri.”
“It wasn’t the Missouri we had in mind,” Leeds said.
Well, I thought, that’s that. Of course, there was still the Arkansas. I could select some settlement like La Junta … include Bent’s Fort and the massacre at Sand Island. But I insisted upon being honest with these editors, so I told them, “If your river is the Arkansas, you’d do better choosing someone more fluent in Spanish. To deal with the Mexican land grants, and subjects like that.”
“We weren’t interested in the Arkansas,” Leeds said.
“What did you have in mind?”
“The Platte.”
“The Platte!” I gasped.
“None other,” Leeds said.
“That’s the sorriest river in America. You’ve heard all the jokes about the Platte. ‘Too thick to drink, too thin to plow.’ That’s a nothing river.”
“That’s why we chose it,” Leeds said.
Miss Endermann broke in. “We specifically wanted to avoid notorious places like St. Joseph, one of my favorite cities on earth, because it would be too easy to do. A great deal of American history was drab, just as you said now—a nothing river, ‘a mile wide and an inch deep.’ ”
“We reasoned, and properly so I’m convinced,” Ringold said, “that if we can make the Platte comprehensible to Americans, we can inspire them with the meaning of this continent. And goddamnit, that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll leave the drums and bugles and flying eagles to others. We are going to dive into the heart of that lousy river …” He stopped in embarrassment. Obviously, the editors of US had made a major commitment to the Platte, and I respected their enthusiasm.
“I understand your approach,” I said. “Now you have to understand that I can’t be expected to be a world authority on the Platte. I know about its settlement, its Indians, its irrigation—the general things. But I must not pose as an expert.”
“We know that,” Miss Endermann said eagerly. “We want you for what you have been, not for what you are. You can immerse yourself in this subject within a week.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I’ve already reconnoitered the North Platte twice in connection with the Oregon Trail. I know most of the sites along the North Platte, know them well.”
Harry Leeds broke in: “What we had in mind was the South Platte.”
“Good God!” I couldn’t help myself. The South Platte was the most miserable river in the west, a trickle in summer when its water was needed, a raging torrent in spring. It was muddy, often more island than river, and prior to the introduction of irrigation, it had never served a single useful purpose in its halting career. I couldn’t think of even one town situated on the South Platte. Yes, there was Julesburg—most evil town along the railroad—burnt by Indians in 1866 or thereabouts.
Then I remembered. “There is Denver,” I said lamely, “but if you didn’t want a major river, I’m sure you don’t want a major city. It isn’t Denver, is it?”
Miss Endermann answered my rhetorical question: “Have you ever heard of Centennial, Colorado?”
For some moments I racked my brain, and from somewhere a tag-end piece of information such as scholars earmark for possible future use surfaced. “Centennial. Am I wrong in thinking that it had another name? Didn’t they change it in 1876 … to honor Colorado’s entrance into the Union? What was the old name? Rather well known in early chronicles, seems to me. Was it Zendt’s Farm?”
“It was,” Miss Endermann said.
“You know, I can’t recall a single fact about Zendt’s Farm. Gentlemen, I am not well versed in your chosen subject. Sorry.”
I assumed that this was the end of the interview, but I assumed wrong. “It’s for that reason we want you,” Ringold said. “Listening to your non-faked reactions to a town you never heard of and a river you despise convinces me that you’re precisely the man we want. The job’s yours if you want it, and we’re damned lucky to find you.”
With that he ushered us from his office, instructing Harry Leeds to go over details with me and bring the crowd to Toots Shor’s for lunch at twelve sharp. “We’ll discuss money then,” he said, “but so far as I’m concerned, you’re hired, unless your fee is unspeakable.”
Four of us went to Harry Leeds’ office, where gigantic photographic blowups of George Catlin’s paintings of Indians adorned the walls. “My tipi,” he said.
We discussed how I would work. I would drive to Centennial as soon as my classes ended, establish contacts with the Denver Public Library, which was some fifty miles away, introduce myself to the faculties at Greeley, Fort Collins and Boulder, and prepare research reports on what had actually happened at Centennial during its history, which had started only in 1844 with the arrival of Zendt and one of the mountain men.
“I might want to go further back,” I suggested.
“The Spanish never settled that far north,” Wright said, “and the French never settled that far south. Lewis and Clark ignored the Platte altogether. We can start safely with Zendt in 1844.”
I was not to bother about literary style. I was writing neither a doctoral thesis nor a novel. I was simply submitting arbitrarily selected insights as to the character and background of Centennial and its settlers, and I could depend upon the home office to polish whatever segments they might want to publish.
“And regardless of what fee you and Ringold agree upon,” Wright assured me, “we want you to purchase whatever maps, agricultural studies, reports you need—you name it.”
“We would want you to send them back at the end of the study,” Leeds said.
“How much do you expect me to write?” I asked, still not clear as to the creative relationships.
“By Christmas, a fairly complete reaction to the site.”
“Usually I spend that much time on a chapter,” I said. “There’s a hell of a lot of first-class work been done on the west by some very good men, and I’m not going to presume …”
“Vernor,” young Wright explained patiently, “we are not hiring you to do a research study on the sugar-beet industry of the South Platte. We are hiring you as a sensitive, intelligent man, and all we want from you are some letters which share with us your understanding of what transpired at Centennial, Colorado, between the years 1844 and 1974. Just write us some letters, as if we were your friends … your interested friends.”
The other two agreed that that was exactly what they wanted, and we went off to lunch fairly satisfied that the project would work, but at Toots Shor’s, a restaurant I had not visited before, I was to receive a series of shocks which altered the whole prospect.
As we entered the restaurant the proprietor, a large man, ambled over to Harry Leeds and shouted, “Hello, you miserable son-of-a-bitch, haven’t they fired you yet?”
Leeds took this in stride, and Shor turned to me, grabbing me by the collar. “Don’t let this crumbum talk you into doing his dirty work. He’s known as the literary pimp of Sixth Avenue.” With that he showed us to our table, where James Ringold was waiting.
“He’s dead drunk already,” Shor warned me. “How this stumblebum keeps that magazine goin’, I’ll never know.”
With that he departed, and Ringold asked Leeds, “All settled?”
“All settled,” Leeds said. “We couldn’t be happier, right?” He addressed this question to Wright and Endermann, and they nodded.
“Then it’s simply a matter of money. Use your car and we’ll pay twelve cents a mile. We’ll pay your hotel bills, but we do not expect you to take a suite at the Brown Palace. Don’t be alarmed if board and keep run a hundred and seventy dollars a week. You can travel as required but you cannot rent airplanes, road graders or dog sleds. Under no circumstances are you ever to be out a penny of your own money, except for whorehouses. We do, however, expect itemized expense sheets, and we pay out money only when they are verified.” I was accustomed to asking Dean Rivers if I might have thirty dollars for a new atlas. This hit me so fast that I simply could not digest the details, but I noticed that young Wright was taking note of everything. “He’ll send you a copy,” Ringold assured me.
“Now as to fee,” he said, “you’re a top professor in Georgia. You’re worth a lot of money, and I’m sure they don’t pay you according to your worth. I’m not going to haggle. We’re asking two quarters of your time, half a year’s salary. We’ll give you eighteen thousand dollars.”
I could have fainted. After I had sipped a little consommé I said something which led to my next shock. I said, “Mr. Ringold, that’s generous pay and you know it. But if you’re gambling so much on this special issue, what if I get sick? Can’t provide the manuscript?”
He looked at me in amazement. “Haven’t you told him?” he asked Leeds.
“Never occurred to me,” Leeds said, and the other two shrugged their shoulders as if it had slipped their minds too.
“Vernor,” Ringold said expansively, “we have the article already written—every word of it. Illustrations and maps are well started. We could go to press next week. All we want from you is assurance that we’re on the right track.”
This information staggered me. I was being hired to write not a polished article which would appear under my name, but merely a house report to back up something already completed, a report which might never be published and might not even be used. When the article appeared, a sleazy job at best, there would be this byline: “Prepared with the assistance of Professor Lewis Vernor, Department of History, Georgia Baptist.” I was being bought, for a good price … but I was being bought.
The food went sour and my disappointment must have shown, for Ringold said, reassuringly, “We always work this way, Vernor. We work like demons month after month on a project … best writers in America … but at the end we always want someone with real brains to vet the damned thing. That’s why we stay in business—facts are important to us, but understandings are vital. We inject a very high percentage of understandings in our rag and we’re asking you to help us on our next big project.”
My vanity was destroyed and my intellectual integrity humiliated. “I think this lunch is over, gentlemen,” I said. I tried to rephrase the sentence so as to include Miss Endermann, and loused things up.
It was young Wright who faced up to the debacle. “I’m going to make a suggestion. Professor Vernor, as you must know, Mr. Ringold’s offer was most generous. I handle these things all the time and I can assure you we would not hesitate to offer Arthur Schlesinger such a deal. We made such a generous offer because we respect you. You thought you were writing an article for us. I understand your confusion. Let me suggest this. Go out to Centennial. Carol’s already cased the joint. She’ll go with you to see if you respond the way she did. We’ll pay someone to take your classes. You can leave tomorrow. Better still, leave tonight. And if you decide to join us, when your report is finished, you’ll be free to publish it under your own name—maybe as a book. Six months after our publication the property becomes yours.”
“That’s a damned good idea, Wright,” Ringold said. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. Vernor, can you fly out to Centennial this afternoon? There’s a United plane at three.”
“I’d have to ask President Rexford.”
“Get him on the phone. Toots! You got a phone there?”
For the first time in my life a waiter brought a phone to my table, curling the long black wire across my chair. In a moment I was speaking with President Rexford, but I had barely introduced myself when Ringold took the phone. “Rexford? Sure I remember you. The Baptist Committee, that’s right. We want to borrow your bright boy for one week. We’ll pay three hundred dollars for some graduate student to cover for him. Is that a deal?” There was some conversation, after which Ringold handed me the phone. “He wants to talk with you.”
“Hello, Vernor? Is the project germane to Oregon?”
“Totally. But it’s not what we thought at all. I’d just be doing legwork for background stuff.”
“Could it lead to anything substantial?”
“Yes. It’s work I would have to do later.”
“Do they pay well?”
“Very.”
“Take it. Fly out to Colorado tonight. Professor Hisken could use the three hundred dollars and we’ll forget the graduate student.”
So that afternoon at three Miss Endermann and I boarded the jet for Denver, and because of the time difference we arrived there at four. She hired a car, and while it was still light we drove north. To the west rose the noble Rockies, to the east stretched the prairies, mile upon mile of treeless land. At the end of an hour I saw the sight which had been familiar to all travelers westward, a line of scrawny, limb-broken cottonwoods.
“There’s the Platte,” I said, and we entered upon a small north-south road which took us down to the river, one of the strangest in the world. It was quite wide, several hundred yards perhaps, but most of the width was taken up with islands, sand bars, rocks and stumps of trees. Where was the water? There was a little here, some over there, but the spring floods had not yet broken loose, and it was all a stagnant muddy brown. Its principal product seemed to be gravel, endless supplies of gravel waiting to be hauled away by trucks which lined the bank.
Across the Platte lay the little town of Centennial. The sign told the whole story:
CENTENNIAL
COLORADO
Elev. 4618
Pop. 2618
When we turned right into the one-way circle that took us across the Union Pacific tracks and into town, I heard someone shouting, “Hey! It’s Carol!” and I looked over to see a black man standing before a barbershop.
“Nate!” Carol called. “How about Mexican food tonight?”
“Like always,” he called back. “Eight?”
We pulled in behind the barbershop and parked where a sign said that if we did not intend to register at the Railway House, our car would be towed away at a cost of twenty-five dollars. The bellman who came out to greet us recognized Carol, and they too had a reunion.
“I wanted you to stay here, right by the railroad, in order to catch the old flavor,” she explained as we registered, and this was prudent judgment, because everything about the place was old: the smell, the carpets, the uniform of the bellman and my room. But it was likable. Men traveling from one Colorado town to another in times past had climbed down from the Union Pacific and lodged here, and for a historian they had left memories.
At quarter to eight I met Miss Endermann in the lobby and she took me out onto Prairie—not Prairie Street or Avenue or Boulevard. Just Prairie.
“If you’re like me,” she said, “you orient yourself properly at the start. Well, Prairie runs due north and south. The center of town is where Prairie and Mountain cross, because Mountain runs due east and west. We’ll walk there.”
We went to the intersection, and she said, “It all starts from here. West to the Rockies. East to Omaha. South to Denver. North to Cheyenne. Streets begin at the east and run by number up to Tenth Street. Avenues begin at the railroad and run north to Ninth Avenue. It’s well laid out.”
We turned east on Mountain and walked four blocks to a noisy restaurant called Flor de Méjico, and there again we were warmly greeted, this time by a robust Mexican introduced to me as Manolo Marquez. “We knew you’d be back,” he told Miss Endermann. “Tonight the best in the house, on me.”
He showed us to a table covered by a red-checkered cloth and a well-greased menu which Miss Endermann told me had been invariable for the past five years. “I hope you like Mexican food,” she said.
“It’s not common in Georgia.”
“We’ll introduce him to it, Manolo,” she cried. “Three plates, with a sample of everything. And some Coors beer.” She asked if I knew this Colorado beer, and I said no. “With Mexican food it’s sort of heaven,” she assured me.
The door opened and the black man I had seen on the street entered and came to our table. Miss Endermann kissed him, then said, “This is my friend and counselor, Nate Person. Not only a good barber but a sagacious one. He knows where the bodies are buried.”
Person, a gray-templed man in his fifties, asked where I was from, and when I said Georgia he laughed. “That’s a state not high on my list.”
“It’s getting better,” I assured him.
“High time,” he said evenly.
“You must tell him everything you told me,” Miss Endermann said, and Nate nodded.
I suppose it was a good dinner, but the items that faced me were so unlike what I was accustomed to in Georgia that it all tasted like a hot jumble. “The toasted thing is a taco,” Miss Endermann explained. To me it was more like French-fried cardboard, and the enchilada and tamale seemed so nearly identical that I never did discover which was which. The stuffed pepper, called a chili relleno, was mostly fried cheese, but the salad was great. So was the small glass of pomegranate juice. And the Coors beer was, as she had predicted, “as light as a cupful of mountain water.”
After we had finished the dinner, which Miss Endermann and Person gulped as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks, I began to experience the most pleasing sensation. It was as if my stomach were in harmony with the world. “That must have been pretty good food,” I said. “Tastes better now than it did going down.”
“Join the club,” Miss Endermann said. “Nate, remember that first time you made me try it? Thought I’d die.”
There was a commotion at the door and Marquez hurried over to greet a tall, gangling westerner who had slouched in. He wore a cowboy hat, a bandanna and crooked-heel boots with fancy spurs. He was what western writers call a “lean, mean hombre,” but he moved with an easy grace and made himself at home wherever he was.
He came directly to our table, where he grabbed Miss Endermann, pulled her to her feet and kissed her.
“Cisco!” she cried. “This is too much. I thought you were in Chicago.”
“I was. Got back Monday. Heard you were in town. Knew I’d find you here.”
She introduced him to me as Cisco Calendar, and he let me know at once that he didn’t think much of me. He turned a chair around and straddled it, resting his chin on the back. “Good to see you,” he said to Carol. He spoke elliptically and kept his half-savage face close to hers.
It was obvious that he intended getting Miss Endermann off by himself, and it was just as obvious that she wished it that way, so after a few uneasy moments he said, “Got the car out here. Wanta take a spin?” She did, and that was the last I saw of this angular, aggressive cowboy.
In the morning Miss Endermann said, “If you’re up to it after the Mexican food, let’s reconnoiter.” She drove me up and down the two main streets until my bearings were set. She then took me to the plush northwest segment: “The Skimmerhorns, the Wendells, the Garretts. Those are the names that count.” In the northeast sector, where the homes were noticeably poorer, she said, “Zendt’s Farm, which started it all, and down here, the original Wendell place. There was a great scandal about it, and you’ll want to look into that.”
As we passed the Flor de Méjico in the southeast, she said, “That’s where we ate last night. Down here by the tracks is where Manolo Marquez lives, and along here is Nate Person’s barbershop, where we came into town yesterday.” In the remaining sector, the southwest, there was not much: along the tracks the ramshackle home of Cisco Calendar. “He could afford much better, of course, but that’s where his family has always lived.”
That was Centennial, at least the part I would be concerned with. “Not quite,” Miss Endermann said. “Two more localities, and they loom large.” And she drove me north on Prairie and well up toward the Wyoming line, where I saw something which astonished me: a massive castle complete with spires and donjon.
“It’s Venneford,” she said. “All the land we’ll be on today, and millions of acres more, once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Greatest cattle ranch in the west.”
“Does the noble earl figure in my story?”
“Not unless you want him to,” she said. “But what we see next is the heart of your story.”
And she drove me east onto dry land such as I had never before seen, bleak and desolate, and at the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, “This is how they found it. A vast emptiness. Nothing has changed in a million years.”
In no direction could I see any sign that man had ever tried to occupy this enormous land—no house, no trail, not even a fence post. It was empty and majestic, the great prairie of the west.
Miss Endermann interrupted my reflections with a promise: “When we reach the top of that next hill you’ll see something memorable.”
She was right. As we climbed upward through the desolate waste, we reached an elevation from which I looked down upon a compelling sight, one that would preoccupy me for the next half year. It was a village, Line Camp, she said, and once it had flourished, for a tall grain silo remained, but now it was deserted, its shutters banging, its windows knocked in.
We drove slowly, as if in a funeral procession, through the once busy streets marked only by gaping foundation holes where stores and a church had stood. We found only devastation, gray boards falling loose, school desks ripped from their moorings. Somehow I must make the boards divulge their story, but now only hawks visited Line Camp and the stories were forgotten.
Two buildings survived, a substantial stone barn and across from it a low stone edifice to whose door came a very old man to stare at us.
“The only survivor,” Miss Endermann said, and as we watched, even he disappeared.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We want you to tell us,” she said.
It must have been obvious that I was captivated by Centennial and its environs, because at lunch we began to pinpoint my commission, and I said, “By the way, nobody has told me who wrote the story I’m supposed to fortify.”
“Don’t you know?”
“Obviously not.”
“I did.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I researched this story on the scene for five months.”
“I knew …” I was confused. “Of course, I realized that the people here knew you. But I thought you’d been …”
“Helping someone else? Helping someone important?”
She asked these questions with such a cutting edge that I thought we’d better get down to cases. “Miss Endermann,” I said, “you’ll forgive me, but your magazine is asking me to spend a lot of time on this project. May I ask what your credentials are? Do you mind a few questions?”
“Not at all,” she said frankly. “I’d expect them. I know this is important to you.”
“What do you think of Frank Gilbert Roe?”
Without batting an eye, she said, “On horses, terrific. On bison, I prefer McHugh.”
This was a sophisticated response, so I proceeded: “What’s your reaction to the Lamanite theory?”
“A despicable aberration of Mormonism.” She stopped and asked apologetically, “You’re not Mormon, are you?” And before I could answer, she said, “Even if you are, I’m sure you agree with me.”
“I respect the Mormons,” I said, “but I think their Lamanite theory asinine.”
“I’m so glad,” she said. “I don’t think I could work with someone who took that sort of bull seriously.”
“What was your reaction to the Treaty of 1851?”
“Ah,” she said reflectively. “Its heart was in the right place. But the government in Washington had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of Missouri that there was no chance—none ever—that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given. If it hadn’t been gold, it would have been something else. Stupidity. Stupidity.”
This young woman knew something. I asked her, “What is your judgment on the Skimmerhorn massacre?”
“Oh, no!” she protested. “It’s your job to tell us what you think about that. But I will confess this. I’ve studied the Skimmerhorn papers at Boulder and the court-martial records in Washington, and I’ve interviewed the Skimmerhorns in Minnesota and Illinois. I know what I think. Six months from now I want to know what you think.”
I had one final question, and this would prove the depth of her investigation. “Have you done any work on the reports of Maxwell Mercy?”
She burst into laughter and astonished me by rising and kissing me on the cheek. “You’re a real dear,” she said. “I did my master’s thesis under Allan Nevins at Columbia on some unpublished letters I’d found of Captain Mercy. On my bedroom wall at home I have an old photograph of him taken by Jackson at Fort Laramie, and for your personal information I got damned near straight A’s at Illinois and honors at the University of Chicago, where I took my doctorate.”
“Then what in hell are you doing knocking around with Cisco Calendar till four o’clock this morning?”
“Because he sends me, you old prude. He sends me.”
Next morning I drove her to Denver, where she caught the plane back to New York. At the ramp she told me, “Stay the rest of the week. You’ll fall in love with this place. I did.” When I wished her luck at the office, she said, “I’ll be working on maps.” Then, impulsively, she grabbed my hands. “We really need you … to make the thing hum. Call us Friday night, saying you’re signing on.”
I drove back by way of the university at Boulder because I wanted to consult my old friend, Gerald Lambrook of their history department, and he said, “I can’t see any pitfalls in the arrangement, Lewis. Granted, you’re not writing the article and you lose some control, but they’re a good outfit and if they say they’re going to give it first-class presentation, they will. What it amounts to, they’re paying you to do your own basic research.”
Lambrook was an old-style professor, with a book-lined study, sheaves of term papers, which he still insisted on, and even a tweed jacket and a pipe. I worked in a turtleneck and it was sort of nice to know that the old Columbia-Minnesota-Stanford types were around. I had known him at Minnesota and it was easy to renew our old friendship.
“But I’m interested, historically speaking,” he said, “in the fact that you haven’t mentioned the thing for which Centennial is most famous. The area, I mean.”
I asked him what that was, and he said, “The old Zendt place.”
“I know about it. Saw it yesterday. The fellow from Pennsylvania who wouldn’t build a fort but did build a farm.”
“I don’t mean the farm. I mean Chalk Cliff, on his first place.”
“Never heard of it.”
“That’s where the first American dinosaur was found.”
“The hell it was!”
“That great big one. Went to Berlin, and how we wish we had it back. And then, not far from there, but still on the original farm, the Clovis-point dig. Say, if you’re free, I think I could get one of the young fellows from geology to run us up there.” He started making phone calls, between which he told me, “The university’s doing some work up there, I think.” Finally he located an instructor who was taking his students on a field trip to the Zendt dig during the coming week, and he said he’d enjoy refreshing his memory, so off we went, Lambrook and I in my car and young Dr. Elmo Kennedy in his.
We drove north along the foothills of the Rockies, past Estes Park on the west and Fort Collins on the east, till we came to what might have been called badlands. Dr. Kennedy pulled up to inform me, “We’re now entering the historic Venneford spread, and Chalk Cliff lies just ahead. I’ll open the gates, you close them.”
We proceeded through three barbed-wire fences behind which white-faced Herefords grazed, and came at last to an imposing cliff, running north and south, forty feet high and chalky white. “Part of an old fault,” Kennedy explained. “Pennsylvanian period, if you’re interested. At the foot of the cliff, in 1875, down here in the Morrisonian Formation, Professor Wright of Harvard dug out the great dinosaur that can be seen in Berlin.”
“I never knew that,” I confessed. “I knew the dinosaur but not its provenance.”
“And two miles up, at the other end of the cliff, is where they found—1935, I think it was—that excellent site with the Clovis points.”
“I have heard about that,” I said, “but not that it was located near Chalk Cliff.”
We spent the rest of the morning there, inspecting this historic site, after which Lambrook and Kennedy drove back to Boulder. “Be sure to close the gates,” they warned. That left me some time to inspect the brooding cliff, and as I kicked at the chalky limestone I came upon a fossilized sea shell, a frail, delicate thing now transformed into stone, indubitable proof that this cliff and the land around it had once lain at the bottom of some sea and now stood over five thousand feet above sea level. I tried to visualize the titanic force that must have been involved in such a rearrangement of the earth’s surface, and I think it was then I began to see my little object-town Centennial in a rather larger dimension than the editors back in New York saw it.
By back roads I drove east to Line Camp, seeing that desolate spot from a new angle, and was even more fascinated by the compression of history one observed there: Indian campground, cattle station, sheep ranch, dry-land farming, dust bowl, and then abandonment as a site no longer fit for human concern. The place attracted me like a magnet and I wished that I were writing of it and not Centennial, which at this point seemed pretty ordinary to me, but as I drove south, it occurred to me that I must be following the old Skimmerhorn Trail, and when I came to the low bluffs that marked the delineation between the river bottom and the prairie and I was able to look down into Centennial and its paltry railroad, with cottonwoods outlining the south side of the Platte, I had a suspicion that perhaps it too had had its moments of historic significance. What they were, I could not anticipate, but if I took the job I would soon find out.
I was eating lunch at Flor de Méjico—sandwiches, not enchiladas—when I heard a man’s voice inquiring, “Manolo, you have a man from Georgia eating here?” Marquez replied, “Right over here, Paul,” and he brought a tall, well-dressed rancher-type to my table.
“I’m Paul Garrett,” he said, extending his hand. “Mind if I sit down?”
I asked him to do so, and he said, “Heard you were in town. When Miss Endermann was here before we did a lot of work together. And I wondered if you’d like to take a little orientation spin in my plane.”
“Very much!” I said. “I understand things better when I see the geographical layout. But I’m leaving Friday.”
“I meant right now.”
“I’m free.”
He drove me out to an airstrip east of Beaver Creek, where his pilot waited with a six-seater Beechcraft, and we piled in. Within minutes we were high over the Platte, and for the first time I saw the meanders of this incredible river from aloft. “The braided river,” one expert had called it with justification, for the strands of the river were so numerous and the islands so interspersed, it did seem as if giant hands had braided the river so that it now hung like a lovely pigtail from the head of the mountains.
Several times we flew up and down the Platte, and I appreciated better how it dominated the area, where it overflowed its banks, where it deposited huge thicknesses of gravel, and how men had siphoned off much of its water into irrigation ditches. It became an intricate system rather than an isolated stretch.
Garrett then directed the pilot to fly north to the Wyoming line, and as we left the river and crossed the arid plains, coming at last to the bluffs which marked the end of Colorado in that direction, he told me, “This is the old Venneford spread. I want you to see it, because you won’t believe it.” He asked the pilot to fly west toward the mountains, and below I saw the shining white expanse of Chalk Cliff.
“I was down there this morning,” I said.
“Good spot. The boundary’s a little farther west.” He pointed to an old wire fence, and we dropped low to inspect it. “That’s where the Venneford lands began,” he said. “Now until I tell you different, everything you see down there once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Everything.”
We sped east for half an hour, over an immense tract of land, and I became fascinated by a phenomenon I had not seen before: at periodic intervals great circles were indented into the surface of the plains, as if gigantic fairies had built magic rings or Indians their tipis of enormous size. I could not imagine what these circles were, and was about to ask Garrett when he said, “It’s still Venneford land.”
We flew for an hour and fifteen minutes, deviating north and south for short excursions to explore arroyos, and at the end of that time he pointed ahead: “The Nebraska line. That’s where the earl’s land ended.”
“How much?”
“One hundred and eighty miles east-west, fifty miles north-south.”
“That’s nine thousand square miles!” I hesitated. “Are my figures right?”
“Well over five million acres,” he said.
I stared at the magnitude of the land, the empty, lonely expanse, and guessed that it hadn’t been good for much in those days and wasn’t good for much now.
“A hundred and eighty miles in one direction,” he said as we turned homeward. “The foreman would inspect about ten miles a day in his buggy. Eighteen days merely to cover the middle and forget the north and south borders. It’s that kind of land, Professor Vernor. It requires more than sixty acres to support one cow-and-calf unit.”
“Miss Endermann told me you’d bought some of it,” I said.
“I’ve only a hundred and thirty-three thousand acres. Maybe the best part, though.” He asked the pilot to fly north of the Venneford castle, where he outlined a rugged terrain of barren plains, foothills and some attractive low mountains. “A real challenge,” Garrett said. “If you come back, come up and look it over.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Back east, how many acres to the unit?” he asked as we headed toward Centennial.
“My uncle in Virginia needs only one acre for what you call a unit—bottom land, along the river.”
“There you have the difference between Virginia and Colorado. One to an acre your way. One to sixty our way. That makes your land sixty times better than ours. But we work seventy times harder, so we come out a little bit ahead.”
He drove me back to the hotel and I asked if he’d join me in a drink. “Never during the day,” he said, and before I could ask further questions, he was gone.
I now had Centennial keyed in, as far as prairie, mountain and river were concerned, so I directed my remaining stay to the town itself. The Garrett plot, at Ninth and Ninth, was a brooding place with a nineteenth-century wooden house dominating scrubby trees. The Morgan Wendell place, one block south, was a handsome ranch-style home covering a large and beautifully landscaped area. But it was the land east of town that preoccupied me, for to a Georgian, what went on there was new. Beaver Creek protected the town from the encroaching prairie. West of the creek lay bottom lands, largely swampy and a place for birds; east of the creek stood Centennial’s two commercial enterprises.
North of the highway stood the dominating sugar factory of Central Beet. Its pungent aroma, even in the spring of the year, permeated Centennial with a clean, earthlike smell. To a man like me, reared in the cane country, it seemed profane that men would try to extract sugar from beets, but they did.
South of the highway was something I had never seen before: vast corrals delimited by wooden fences, containing not a shred of grass nor any growing things except hundreds upon hundreds of white-faced cattle, all the same size, all being fattened for the slaughterhouses in Omaha and Kansas City. Never before had I seen so many cattle at one time, and I tried to estimate how many there were. When I reached two hundred in one corral and realized that there were two dozen corrals all equally crammed, I concluded that my original estimate of hundreds had to be multiplied by ten.
The place was like a factory—Brumbaugh Feed Lots, the sign said—with overhead conveyors bringing the grain to each corral, and traps for hauling away the manure, and waterpipes everywhere—and all convenient both to the sugar-beet factory, from which came beet pulp for feeding the animals, and to the railroad, which brought in calves and hauled away fattened cattle. What really astonished me was to discover that every animal I saw was either a heifer or a steer—no bulls, no cows, just yearlings bred specially for butchering.
On Thursday afternoon I drove out to Line Camp, and again I was affected by the strange allure of sweeping prairie and lonely vista. I was east of the deserted village when I saw before me a sight of compelling interest: twin pillars rising a sheer five hundred feet from the surrounding land. For miles in every direction there was nothing but empty land, then these twin pillars of red and gray rock shooting skyward.
They were so conspicuous that I was sure they must be named, and I looked about for someone to question, but there was no one. For mile upon mile there was no one, only the silent pillars and a hawk inspecting them from aloft.
The late sun made the red rocks flame and I watched for a long time, trying to guess how such spires could have been left standing, but finding no answer. In Georgia such a phenomenon would have been a natural wonder. “The Devil’s Darning Needles,” or something like that. In the west they were not even marked on the map, so prodigal had nature been with her displays.
Every night I ate dinner at the hotel, and my waiter was a man whose ancestors had come to Centennial with the building of the railroad in the 1880s and had lingered. When Nate Person gave me a haircut he told me that an ancestor of his had come north from Texas with the cattle drives and had lingered. Manolo Marquez had a father who had come north from Chihuahua to work sugar beets and he too had lingered, and it occurred to me that unlike Garvey, Georgia, where my ancestors had lived for three hundred years, everyone in Centennial had arrived within the last hundred and twenty years—just drifting through—and all had lingered.
I was much taken with the town. I had a good time with Marquez and Nate Person. I liked Paul Garrett immensely and wanted to know more about him. And the setting, with that incredible Platte River dominating everything, was much to my taste. What deterred me, then, from telephoning James Ringold and saying, “I’ll take the job”?
Vanity. As simple as that. I hated to play second fiddle, anonymously, to someone else, especially a beginning scholar much younger than myself. I suppose the fact that she was a girl added to my resentment, but in an age of Women’s Lib, I was not about to admit that. I feared the whole project was undignified and a potential threat to my professional reputation. I was therefore prepared to inform New York that I could not accept, when I took one last walk Friday afternoon. I was reflecting on the fact that during my visit to Centennial, I had met a black, a Mexican and many Caucasians, but not one Indian. I considered that symbolic of today’s west.
I walked idly through North Bottoms in order to catch a better understanding of how Central Beet and Brumbaugh Feed Lots interrelated, when I saw ahead of me a lone workman operating a back-hoe in the extreme elbow of Beaver Creek, and I went over to ask him what he was doing.
“Gonna build a bridge over the creek. So’s the beet trucks from the west can enter the plant easier.”
As I watched him gouging the back-hoe into the soft earth, I became aware of a third man who had joined us. He introduced himself as Morgan Wendell, director of Wendell Real Estate, “Slap Your Brand on a Hunk of Land.” He had left his offices, walked across Mountain and come through the North Bottoms to stand not far from me. I could not imagine why the digging of foundations for a bridge abutment should have concerned him, but he was obviously perturbed, and for good reason, apparently, for just as he took his place by me, the swinging arm of the back-hoe slammed down into the soft earth with extra force, hit rock and fell into a hole. It required considerable dexterity for the operator to manipulate his machine out of this difficulty, but he succeeded. I watched the maneuvering with interest; Morgan Wendell watched with horror.
When the back-hoe was again free, the driver climbed down to inspect what had trapped him. I too moved forward to peer into the hole. But Morgan Wendell elbowed us both aside and took command.
“You’d better quit work at this spot,” he told the operator. “Sink hole or something. Work on the other side.”
“They told me to work here,” the man said.
“I’m telling you to work over there.”
“Who are you?”
“Morgan Wendell. I own the land on this side.”
“Oh!” He shrugged his shoulders, cranked up his machine and drove it ponderously along the creek to Mountain, crossing over to the eastern side.
As soon as he was gone, Morgan Wendell looked at me and said, “Well, that’s that,” and he began edging me away from the hole. I showed no inclination to go, whereupon a very firm hand gripped my arm and led me back toward town. I decided that prudence required my acquiescence, for Morgan Wendell was a tall, heavy-set man who weighed a good deal more than I and had a much longer reach.
When we got to First Street, just opposite Wendell Place, the old headquarters of the family, I said, as casually as I could, “Well, I’ll have some chili at Flor de Méjico.”
“It’s good there,” he said.
When I left him, keeping my glance carefully ahead but watching as much as I could out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rush back to the exposed hole and climb in. He was there for some time, perhaps fifteen minutes, after which he climbed out carrying something wrapped in his coat. He walked south along the bank of Beaver Creek, crossed the highway and went into his office building.
As soon as he was out of sight I ran to the opening, climbed down and found myself inside a cave, not large but very secure … until the back-hoe punctured the roof. It had been formed, I judged, by the action of water on soft limestone and must have been very old. Along the western side there was a small bench, not formed by man yet appearing almost to have been made as a piece of built-in furniture. At the far end of this bench lay an item which Morgan Wendell had apparently overlooked: a small bone, which I suspected was human.
I placed it in my pocket and climbed out of the little cave. I was none too soon, for the back-hoe operator, who was then on the other side of the creek, was now directed by Morgan Wendell to bring his lumbering machine back to the western side, come up the creek bank and begin filling in the cave and tamping it down with his machine. When he had finished, Wendell inspected the job and satisfied himself that no one would be likely to detect that a long-lost cave had been accidentally laid bare that afternoon.
I returned to my room at the Railway Arms and put in a person-to-person call to James Ringold at US: “This is Vernor. I’ll take the job.” I heard him call out to Leeds and Wright: “Get Carol. Good news.”
I said, “But I’ll have to do the work my way.”
“Wouldn’t want you to do it any other way.”
“My first reports may go a little deeper than you intended,” I warned.
“It’s your ideas we want.”
“But I’ll get it done by Christmas.”
“Jingle bells, jingle bells” sounded over the telephone—three male voices, joined later by a soprano. It would be an interesting time till Christmas.