IF ANY SECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EVER ENJOYED A TRUE golden age, it must have been the cattle regions of the west in the early 1880s. There had been previous fine periods. The New England shipping industry in the 1840s had been magnificent, with whalers sailing distant seas and merchant vessels opening the Orient. The prosperity of cotton plantations in the early 1850s, when British markets were begging to buy, and slaves were docile and great ships from all parts of the world put in to rivers like the James and the Rappahannock to load bales, certainly deluded their owners into believing that cotton was king. And the hectic 1870s, when eastern manufacturers controlled the nation, sending their finished products out on the new railroads at huge profits, buying their raw materials cheaply from the south and west, working their labor fourteen hours a day and controlling the money market to suit their purposes, were a heyday long remembered.
But none of these earlier periods of exuberance surpassed the euphoria that settled over the west in the dazzling eighties. In those years winters were mild and cattle proliferated; investments in land produced enormous dividends; and citizens of all types saw before them a constantly expanding horizon. Like the men in earlier decades who had basked in the sun of fishing, or cotton, or manufacturing, the ranchers of the west truly believed that their golden age must continue forever, for if gold dazzles, it also blinds.
No group prospered more than those canny British who had long before spotted this part of the world as one ripe for development and hungry for investment. In later years it would be popular to lampoon these foreigners as “remittance men,” as if incompetent third and fourth sons were exiled to the west on small monthly payments to keep them out of trouble and, more important, out of sight. Many American dramatic companies, flitting from town to town on night trains, kept in their repertoire plays which made fun of these remittance men, relying on strange accents and unfamiliar customs to draw derisive laughter, but the truth was otherwise.
The sturdy merchants of Bristol sent out only first-class men to check on their considerable investments at the Venneford Ranch. The tight-fisted marmalade millionaires of Dundee did their best to run their great Chugwater Ranch effectively, and they did not dispatch nincompoops to do the job. In Texas the Matador Ranch, largest of all, was run primarily by shrewd investors from London, while over at Horse Creek the merchants of Liverpool were putting together a fine ranch under the leadership of Claude Barker. The most beautiful ranch of all, Beau Brae on the west bank of the Laramie River, was owned and managed by ultra-cautious Scottish businessmen from Edinburgh, and they intended to make money.
The Englishmen who supervised the railroads, protecting British investments there, were excellent people, and those who operated the mines were even better, for a more courageous type of man was required. The irrigation men were prudent, while those dealing primarily in land were bold. They brought their women with them, or sent for them after a short stay in America, and during these years along the Colorado-Wyoming border, English and Scottish patterns of life predominated. The land between the two Plattes could not properly be called an English colony, for the local political leaders were apt to be Dutchmen or tough-minded Kentuckians, but socially the area was an outreach of London-Edinburgh-Dundee-Bristol-Liverpool, and the hard-working Britishers were determined to enjoy themselves.
In September of 1880 a group of young American ranchers, educated at Harvard and Yale, accompanied Claude Barker of Wolf Pass on a ride down from Cheyenne to visit with Oliver Seccombe on a matter of some importance. Venneford was now almost a village, with sturdy buildings erected by the ranch carpenters and stonemasons. There were barns and corrals, of course, and a long, low range of sheds in which boss hands like Skimmerhorn and Lloyd worked, but the center of activity was the three-story red-stone Gothic mansion erected by the Seccombes. It was an imposing residence, resembling a castle on the upper reaches of the Rhine, and it became famous throughout the west.
Three rounded towers soared above the corners of the large house, with a four-sided battlement rising at the fourth corner. The roof contained eleven chimneys and was broken repeatedly by dormers. The ground floor was surrounded by a pillared veranda, while all doors leading into the house were made of heavy oak studded with brass fittings. It was possible to sleep eighteen guests in comfort, with four Negro servants to attend their needs.
“What we have in mind,” Claude Barker told the Seccombes, “is a club … a gentlemen’s club. We’ve selected a suitable corner in Cheyenne, and we’ll keep the membership exclusive. All of us here, plus a few others with the right kind of background.”
“What are you calling it?” Charlotte Seccombe asked.
“The Cactus Club,” Barker said.
“Oh, that’s delicious!” Charlotte cried, but her husband was more interested in the list of proposed members. They were all substantial cattlemen, except for the manager of the Union Pacific Railroad; of the initial twenty members, fourteen would be Americans, six British. Socially they were impeccable; in ranching, the most powerful.
“Will only twenty families be able to support such a club?” Seccombe asked warily. He and Charlotte were sorely overextended by the building of their mansion; true, she had put up most of the money, but he had had to sell off more Crown Vee stock to scrape up his share, and he did not relish the idea of added expense right now.
“We have a subsidiary list,” Bill Warsaw, one of the Americans, said, and he showed Seccombe forty additional names, some less glittering socially than the original but all capable of putting up large sums of money.
“These are great years for cattle,” Barker added enthusiastically. “Ranchers have money.”
“If you enlarge the list to include this second category,” Seccombe said, “we’ll come in.”
Papers of incorporation were filed on September 22, 1880, and the famous Cactus Club of Cheyenne was founded. It retained that name only briefly, for at an early meeting Seccombe proposed, “Cactus seems rather repelling. Let’s call it simply the Cheyenne Club,” and the change was made.
Its rules were rigid. They were patterned after the fine clubs in London, to which most of the British members belonged, and their purpose was to create an ambience in which a conservative cattleman could feel at ease, protected from grubby merchants, importuning businessmen and small-time farmers. Fireplaces in the various rooms were decorated with blue-and-white tiles depicting scenes and quotations from Shakespeare, and the members who occupied these rooms were expected to conform to the highest standards of decorum. Offenses which called for immediate expulsion included:
DRUNKENNESS IN THE PRECINCTS OF THE CLUB TO A DEGREE OFFENSIVE TO MEMBERS.
CHEATING AT CARDS.
THE COMMISSION OF AN ACT SO DISHONORABLE AS TO UNFIT THE GUILTY PERSON FOR THE SOCIETY OF GENTLEMEN.
In addition to these major abhorrences, the rules decreed, perhaps optimistically, that no wager of any description be made in the public rooms of the club, nor any loud or boisterous noise on the premises. In view of the ebullient nature of the younger members, and the burgeoning and heady state of the cattle industry, both a blind eye and a deaf ear became the distinguishing marks of the Rules Committee. But upon any palpable breach of social etiquette, particularly one that might reflect upon a member’s behavior toward the fair sex, the board showed no hesitancy in cutting the hair that held the Damoclean sword.
The cost of belonging to the Cheyenne Club was high, but membership ensured amenities. There were billiard rooms, games for cards, three tennis courts, access to a polo ground, a library stocked with books from Paris and London and an incomparable dining room supervised by chefs with international experience. The menus were extraordinary, and included the choicest viands and game from the region, fresh oysters from the Atlantic and fish from the Pacific, the finest cheeses and delectable fruits, a side table piled high with a Viennese pastry cook’s most mouth-watering confections, and a wine cellar that was to become the object of envy in many London clubs.
But what gave the Cheyenne Club its real significance was that from its rooms the government of the territory was dictated. Here all decisions were made relating to land ownership, the rights of irrigation, the laws for branding cattle, the regulations for banks. Wyoming Territory was a democracy; its constitution said so and it had a legislature to prove it, but the members of the legislature who mattered were all members of the Cheyenne Club, and what they decided at private caucus within the club mattered much more than what they said in open meetings of the legislature. Wyoming was a splendid, unpopulated state admirably suited for the running of cattle, and the membership of the Cheyenne Club proposed keeping it that way.
In protecting their interests they could be ruthless. Take the roundup law, for example. With nineteen-twentieths of the state an open range, cattle from one ranch could wander for a hundred miles without being detected, so when the cows had calves it was essential that some kind of general collection of animals be held, to enable each ranch to identify and brand its stock. Without this safeguard, a small-time rancher with a few cows and a flexible sense of property could round up cattle fifty or a hundred miles from any ranch headquarters and slap his iron on thirty or forty unbranded calves in no time, and after a few years of this he would wind up with a sizable herd, all reared by someone else.
“What kind of cattle do you figure is best for Wyoming?” a rancher asked one day at the Cheyenne Club.
“Without question, the Cravath breed.”
“Don’t believe I know it.”
“It was developed by Dan Cravath on his little place on the Laramie.”
“What are its characteristics?”
“Extreme fertility of the cow. Dan had only twelve cows bearing his brand, but every year they each had five calves. And this can be proved, because each year he branded sixty, sure as hell.” The members had to laugh over their wine and cigars, for all had been victimized by rustlers like Cravath.
To halt the depredations of such men, the big ranchers bullied the Wyoming legislature into passing a law without parallel. Henceforth it would be illegal for anyone except owners of the big ranches to conduct a roundup. At their roundups any calves not specifically belonging to one of the big ranches would be thrown into a common lot and sold, the proceeds to go for the hiring of officers to enforce the law. Thus big cattlemen like Oliver Seccombe and Claude Barker were legally deputized to police the range, to their own enrichment.
Now the little man like Dan Cravath, who had been running a few head on public property, would be squeezed out of business. Of course, Cravath was entitled to look on at the big roundups, but if his calves were not properly branded, they would be taken and sold. He would thus be paying the salaries of the officers whose job it was to drive him out of business, and the majesty of the state could be called upon by the big ranchers to toss him in jail if he protested.
The members of the Cheyenne Club did not abuse their privilege. A few difficult mavericks like Dan Cravath and Simon Juggers north of Chugwater were shot, but everyone knew that they had been stealing calves and it was conceded that the range was better off without them.
The members had a strong sense of stewardship where the range was concerned. They had opened it to cattle, cleared it of predators and supervised it, and whereas a distant government in Washington claimed to own it, effective ownership resided in these tough-minded men. At one hearing before the United States Senate, R. J. Poteet, the prominent rancher from Jacksboro, testified as follows:
LAMBERT: Tell us in your own words what a rancher means by the doctrine of contiguity.
POTEET: We’ve always held in Texas, and throughout the west generally, that a rancher has the right to run his cattle on any part of the open range that lays contiguous to his holding.
LAMBERT: Do you define contiguous as a matter of a mile or a hundred miles?
POTEET: Well, east and west, I’ve seen my cattle wander a hundred and fifty miles. North and south, they’ve gone halfway to Kansas, that’s better’n a hundred and sixty miles. And they did so because the open range was contiguous to mine.
LAMBERT: Aren’t you claiming, Mr. Poteet, that the range contiguous to your barn reaches from Canada to Mexico? (Prolonged laughter.)
POTEET: You know, young man, I’d never thought of it that way, but you may be right. I remember in 18 and 69 when I trailed a bunch of cattle from Reynosa in Old Mexico, across the Rio Grande and up to Miles City, Montana. Using the western trail, we traveled getting on for two thousand miles, and in all that time we crossed only two roads, the Santa Fe Trail along the Arkansas and the Oregon Trail along the Platte. We saw no fences, no gates, no bridges. We swam our cattle across so many rivers that my left point, fellow named Lasater, said, “Them critters has swum so much water, they’s growin’ webbed feet.” I guess our contiguous range did reach from Canada to Mexico, and it would be a good thing for this nation if it did so again.
Members of the Cheyenne Club quoted this testimony with approbation, for it represented their thinking.
The glory of the club was the social life that centered upon it. Charlotte Seccombe exclaimed one night, “At dinner this evening we had four peers of the realm sharing oyster stew with us. You couldn’t better that in London!”
And it wasn’t only Englishmen who graced the dining hall. The lovely Jerome sisters, daughters of a New York banker, came out from the east. Clara, the older, would marry Moreton Frewen, the Englishman who maintained his castle in northern Wyoming. Jennie, the younger, would marry Randolph Churchill and become the mother of the great Winston.
Bankers from all parts of the United States flocked into Cheyenne to look into the cattle business, and as they dined at the club and heard what the enterprising Englishmen were accomplishing, they felt an irresistible urge to invest their own funds, so that Boston financiers began to appear on British boards, and millionaires from Baltimore and fiduciary agents from Philadelphia, and in due time each of the new investors had to be initiated, to his sorrow, into the meaning of that subtle phrase book count.
Whenever John Skimmerhorn watched Oliver and Charlotte Seccombe hitch up their four bay mares for the drive to Cheyenne, he felt a pang of fear. “What’ll they buy this time?” he would mumble to himself. He did not begrudge the couple their mansion, although as an austere man he felt it pretentious, nor did he mind the extra work when delightful people like the Jerome sisters and their suitors stayed at the ranch. Indeed he told his wife, “It’s sort of fun to have dukes and earls on the place. Makes our cowboys spruce up a bit.”
What did worry him was the fact that each year Seccombe sold off more of the ranch’s basic stock. Each year the discrepancy between actual count and book count widened.
“Jim,” he asked Lloyd one autumn when the Seccombes were frolicking in Cheyenne, “how many breed cows do you estimate we have?”
“No one can say. They’re scattered …”
“How many? You’re a damned shrewd man, Jim, and I know you have your guess.”
“I’d say …” Jim stopped. He was thirty years old and most satisfied with his job. It was precisely how he wanted to spend his life, and he could look forward to many more years of employment. As he had neither wife nor children, the Venneford Ranch occupied his whole attention, and he would do nothing to endanger his position.
“You’re not puttin’ this down in a book somewheres, are you?” he asked suspiciously.
“Nope.”
“You’re not aimin’ to use it against Seccombe? Him spendin’ so much of the ranch’s money?”
“I’m asking your opinion!” Skimmerhorn snapped. “You run the cattle. I have the right to know.”
“Okay then,” Jim flashed. The two men were on tricky ground, and each knew it. As boss hand among the cowboys, Jim had to have a horseback opinion on everything, and he had one, but he did not want his information used to Seccombe’s disadvantage.
“If I was in court, properly sworn, I’d say we have about twenty-nine thousand, countin’ everything.”
“Book count says close to fifty-three thousand.”
“The book is wrong.” He was angry, both with the questioning and with the facts. For some time he had known that the books were badly inflated, and he also knew that sooner or later someone from Bristol would discover that fact, and there would be hell to pay.
“Jim, I’m on your side,” Skimmerhorn said placatingly.
“You don’t sound it.”
“What I think we should do is this. Every six months you and I will submit to Seccombe, in writing, our best guess as to the actual condition of the herd. Everything. New bulls, cows, calves, steers.”
Jim nodded.
“We’ll give them to Seccombe. What he does with them is his business. But I think we’re obligated—”
“I’ve been doin’ it,” Jim broke in, and he went to his desk and produced a ledger with honest estimates. When Skimmerhorn studied it he had nothing to say. He thought some of the figures too pessimistic and with pen and ink altered them upward, initialing his estimates.
When he was through he looked up at Jim and said, “Sometimes I think you were lucky, Jim, not to get married. She’s killing him, that one.”
Jim flushed and looked away. It was clear to him that Oliver Seccombe was in way over his head, with the headquarters mansion a monstrous weight around his neck, but never once did Jim think that Seccombe would have been better off unmarried. When he watched Charlotte greet the boss with a kiss and when he saw how proud Seccombe was to introduce his wife to their guests, he knew that whatever cost the Englishman paid was worth it. He saw Charlotte as a high-spirited woman, never afraid of skittish horses, and God knows she spent a lot of money. But she was laughter and a bright breeze and the dip of a bird’s wing. And to Jim Lloyd, without a woman of his own, these things were more important than book count.
The reassuring success Potato Brumbaugh was having with his irrigated fields should have satisfied him, for his produce was bringing premium prices in Denver, but instead it exasperated him, for during every planting season and every harvest he compared the trivial portion of his irrigated land against the massive proportion of arid land, which produced nothing, and the imbalance infuriated him.
He made two experiments. First, he tried planting his arid land, but with a rainfall of less than fifteen inches a year, all he got was a luxuriant stand of foliage in May, when the last rains fell, and withered vegetables in September, when the land lay gasping in the sun. For three successive years he spent considerable money and effort, producing nothing except the hard-won conclusion that without irrigation his benchlands were useless, except to grow native grass for the grazing of cattle.
His second experiment proved what irrigation could accomplish. Purchasing six galvanized buckets from Levi, he plowed up a small corner of his dry benchland, planted it with varied crops, then directed his wife and children to haul water all summer to keep the plants alive. It was hard work, but in September the family had melons and corn and half a dozen other things that had been waiting only for water.
“The soil is even richer than down along the riverbed,” Brumbaugh said, and the idea that hundreds of acres of productive land were going idle grieved him, and he began to brood.
He stalked along the Platte, a stoop-shouldered man in his forties, powerful and with enormous energies. Catherine the Great had been wise to import such men to her wasteland along the Volga and the later Czars had been fools to let them go, for these were the kind of men who loved the soil, who lived close to earth, listening to its secrets and guessing at its next wants. It was inconceivable to Potato Brumbaugh that nature intended those superfertile lands to lie unused, and he tried to fathom ways to bring them under cultivation.
“There’s lots of water,” he grumbled as he watched the Platte flow past. “I could pump it up.” But he had neither the pump nor the power. “We could carry it up,” but even that year’s small experiment had exhausted the resources of five strong people.
He strode along the river for so long, and with such intensity, that he became the river. He moved with it, felt it in his bones. He sensed each nuance of the flow throughout the year and slowly he began to visualize this noble river as a unit, an exposed artery with channels flowing out and back in from all directions. It held the land together and made it viable.
One day he developed an image of himself standing on dry land and pulling the river and all its tributaries up by the roots, and what was left was an empty canal, and from that conceit he began to formulate his concept of the Platte.
“It’s not a river!” he told his family with excitement dancing in his eyes. “It’s a canal, put there to bring water to land that needs it. We could go into the mountains and force the lakes to empty their water into little streams, and they’d bring the water to the Platte, and the river would carry it right to us. We could dig our own lakes, down here on the dry land, and imprison the flood water that comes during the spring and release it later as our replenishment.” He was only a peasant, but like all men with seminal ideas, he found the words he needed to express himself. He had heard a professor use the words imprison and replenishment and he understood immediately what the man had meant, for he, Brumbaugh, had discovered the concept before he heard the word, but when he did hear it, the word was automatically his, for he had already absorbed the idea which entitled him to the symbol.
“The Platte is merely a canal to serve us,” he repeated, and with this basic concept guiding him, he directed his attention to the best way to use the beneficence the river provided. For three weeks he struggled with the problem, and then by a stroke of good luck he met some farmers in nearby Greeley who were grappling with the same problem, and together they saw what needed to be done.
Well to the west of Centennial rose a river which fed into the Platte, and it bore one of the most musical names in the west, Cache la Poudre. It had been named by some French trapper who had hidden his powder there during an exploration of the higher mountains, and its pronunciation had been debased to Cash lah Pooder. Usually it was known simply as the Pooder, and during the first years of the white man’s occupancy it had been ignored.
However, when farmers entered the area the Cache la Poudre assumed major significance, for it contributed to the flow of the Platte twenty-nine percent of the total. The Platte itself accounted for only twenty-two percent of its final flow, the rest coming from streams much smaller than the Poudre, and it did not take canny farmers like Potato Brumbaugh long to realize that in their Pooder they had a flowing gold mine.
Shortly after Brumbaugh tapped the Platte in 1859 for his small ditch, Greeley farmers took out from the south bank of the Poudre a small ditch, First Ditch, that irrigated the rich lands between the Poudre and the Platte, the ones lying close to the new town. This was a puny effort, not much larger than the private ditch dug by Brumbaugh, and it did nothing for the important accumulations of benchlands to the north.
It was Brumbaugh’s idea to cut into the north bank of the Poudre, far to the west, and to build a major canal, Second Ditch, many miles long, that would follow the contours of the first bench, bringing millions of gallons of water to dry lands, including his own. Some farmers in Greeley, called upon to share in the cost, predicted disaster and refused, but others recognized the potential value of such a project and subscribed their fortunes to its building.
Through the early years it was known as “Brumbaugh’s Folly,” for it cost four times what the Russian had predicted, and some estimates for siphons and conduits had to be multiplied seven and eight times, so that the cost of throwing water upon an acre of land rose appallingly, and many advocated that the wasteful project be abandoned. Banks would lend no more money and only the stubborn courage of men like Brumbaugh, his friend Levi Zendt and a few of the religious men of Greeley kept the ditch going.
“I can’t understand them,” Brumbaugh cried in frustration as one after another of his partners withdrew. “What if it cost ten times as much as I said? Does that matter? Suppose we get water on our dry land and each acre produces thousands of dollars? Who cares about original cost?”
It was the end product that mattered, always the end product. If fearful men had set out to build the Union Pacific, they would have quit, and if cowards had been called upon to pioneer an Oregon Trail across two thousand miles of unmarked land, they would have retired. But there were always men like Potato Brumbaugh who saw not the disappointing canal but the irrigated field, and if it cost an extra two thousand dollars to build the canal, that cost was nothing—it was absolutely nothing—if from it came water that ultimately would irrigate a thousand acres for a hundred years.
It was also Brumbaugh who visualized the great fishhook at the end of the Second Ditch. The canal had gone eastward as far as practical, but it still carried a good head of water, in spite of the smaller ditches draining from it, and Brumbaugh suggested, “Let’s lead it back west,” and he encouraged the surveyors to find new levels which would permit the water to return toward its point of origin.
“He’s takin’ the water back to use it over again,” cynics joked, and when Brumbaugh heard the jest and contemplated it, he realized how sensible the critics’ idea was, and out of his own pocket he employed a water engineer from Denver to study what actually happened to water diverted from a river, and the expert, after measuring the Platte and the Poudre at many sites, concluded that whereas Brumbaugh’s Second Ditch did unquestionably take out a good deal of water from the Poudre, seepage allowed more than thirty-seven percent to drain back into the Platte downstream. The water was used, but not used up, and the engineer calculated that with more thrifty procedures, as much as fifty percent of any irrigation water would find its way back to the mother river, available for use again and again.
“It’s what I said!” Brumbaugh cried with as much joy as if the returned water were coming back to his advantage. “The whole river is one system, and we can use it over and over.” He went from one community to another, expounding his views, showing farmers how the Platte could be plumbed as an inexhaustible resource, but one shrewd man in Sterling pointed out, “You say you send half the water back, and that’s true, but you also use up half, and if we keep using half of half of half, we dry up the river.”
“Right!” Brumbaugh shouted. “We use it up as it is now. But if we build tunnels up in the mountains and bring water that’s now wasted on the other side where it isn’t needed over to our side where it is …”
“Now he wants to dig under mountains,” one of the Sterling men said, and again Brumbaugh shouted, “That’s right. That’s just what I want to do. When the Platte flows past my farm I want it to be as big as the Mississippi, and when it leaves Colorado to enter Nebraska, I want it to be bone-dry. This valley can be the new Eden.”
To accomplish what he had in mind, Brumbaugh had to devise a miracle which would have disheartened a lesser man. “What do you want to do?” a lawyer asked him one day. “Change the laws?”
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” Potato cried. And with the assistance of an impecunious but brainy lawyer from the Greeley colony, he set out to do it.
The law governing rivers, Riparian Rights, had accumulated through several thousand years of experience in countries of ample rainfall like England, Germany and France. The law was clear, and fair, and simple: “If a river has historically run first past the farm of A and later past the farm of B, A is allowed to do nothing which will diminish the flow of the river as it passes B.” This was a perfect law for the governance of the flour mill that A proposed building. He was free to lead the river down a millrace, and over his mill wheel and have the water do his work, just so long as he saw that the other end of the millrace returned to the river, so that the level when it passed B was in no way impeded. It was also an ideal law when B was a fisherman and used his portion of the river only for catching salmon; it was essential that the river keep to its proper level, and A was permitted nothing that might modify that level.
The average rainfall in the parts of England where Riparian Rights were codified was more than thirty-five inches a year, and a farmer’s big problem was getting excess water off his land. He had no reason for stealing any of it from the river, and if all lands throughout the world enjoyed thirty-five inches of rainfall a year, Riparian Rights would serve handsomely.
But what to do in a country like the drylands of Colorado, where the average rainfall was under fifteen inches a year? Here a river was exactly what Potato Brumbaugh said—an exposed artery determining life and death. To take a few inches of the Platte and lead it onto arid land, making that land blossom, was not stealing. It was something else not yet defined by law.
“We must have a new law,” Brumbaugh grumbled month after month, and in time he found in a small Greeley law office a man who saw even more clearly than he that a new land required a new law. Joe Beck was a Harvard graduate who had never been able to earn a nickel, because he was always heading off into strange directions. Brumbaugh, when he first saw Beck, knew that here was his man, and he offered him a solid fee.
“Change the law,” he told Beck. And the seedy lawyer proceeded to do so.
He devised a brilliant new concept of a river, taking most of his ideas from Brumbaugh’s apocalyptic visions: “The public owns the rivers and all the water in them. The use of that water resides in the man who first took it onto his land and put it to practical purposes. If A lives at the head of the river and has watched it flow past year after year without putting it to any constructive use, and if B lives far down the river and at an early date conceived a plan for using it constructively, then A cannot at some late date step in and divert the river so that B no longer has the water he used to have … First-in-time, first-in-right.”
It was called the Colorado Doctrine of Priority of Appropriation, and it never caught on in states like Virginia and South Carolina, with their myriad rivers and plentiful rainfall like Europe’s, but the arid western states adopted it, because they knew there could be no alternative. Rivers existed to be used, every drop of them, and they were best used in orderly procedures.
Encouraged by this victory, Brumbaugh reached out to all portions of the Platte, visualizing new ways of using the water effectively. He followed the Poudre to its source, then climbed over the mountains and down into the valleys that fed the Laramie River, which flowed north into Wyoming.
“What a waste!” he muttered as he watched the clear, icy water leaving Colorado. He saw how easy it would be to dig a diversionary tunnel—“Fifty thousand dollars,” he told Joe Beck, falling short in his estimate by two hundred thousand—and through it divert millions of gallons of water now being wasted on Wyoming drylands.
“That goddamned Russian is a menace!” the farmers of Wyoming and Nebraska growled, and they hired their own lawyers to fight him. These men told the courts, “Leave these matters to Brumbaugh and he wouldn’t allow a drop of water to flow out of Colorado.”
The accusation was just. He wanted to divert every drop of water falling west of the mountains into the Platte, then use every gallon for irrigation in Colorado. In time even the judges of the United States Supreme Court would have to wrestle with his visions, and a lawyer from Wyoming would ask the Court, “What is this man trying to do? Restructure the whole west?”
If the question had been put to Brumbaugh, he would have replied, “Yes. The only task big enough for an honorable man is the restructuring of his world.” He would not have understood the word restructure when the lawyer first threw it at him, but he would have caught the meaning quickly, for long ago he had developed the concept.
One afternoon he took his son Kurt aside and said, “Report to Joe Beck in Greeley tomorrow and start to read law.” His son, then eighteen, demurred on the grounds that he wanted to work the farm, but Potato saw the future clearly: “The man who knows the farm controls the melons, but the man who knows the law controls the river.” And it was the river, always the river, that would in the long run determine life. So Kurt Brumbaugh mastered the nuances of law regarding rivers, especially the Platte, and in time he was arguing his father’s cases before the Supreme Court.
Potato himself kept to his farm, and when he saw that the water provided by the Second Ditch was fully utilized, he combined with some far-seeing Greeley men to build a Third Ditch, but this time his vision exceeded his capacity, and he ran out of money. He and Joe Beck tried to tap every bank in Chicago and New York. “All we need is four million dollars,” Brumbaugh said disparagingly, but it was not forthcoming, so he took passage on a Cunard liner and went to London with various introductions obtained through the good offices of Seccombe. After two days of hectic oratory, Potato got his money. When he first saw the sweet, clear water running onto his land from the English Ditch, he had another idea: “In Russia on land like this we grew sugar beets. Why can’t we grow sugar beets here?” And he put in motion a whole new set of headaches for the local farmers.
In 1881 a revolutionary change came over Centennial. For the past twenty years the citizens had been calling for a railroad to build its track into the town, but they had been ignored. The Union Pacific, in its thrust westward from Omaha to bind the nation together, had pulled a rather neat trick: along its entire route only two large centers of population existed, Denver and Salt Lake City, and it managed to miss both.
From the earliest days people knew that the Union Pacific ought to build a shortcut from Julesburg along the Platte to Denver, but this the railroad refused to do. “If a man wants to travel from Omaha to Denver,” said the managers of the road, “let him ride our line to Cheyenne and take the other road down to Denver. As for shipping cattle, to hell with cattle.”
But now the rival Burlington Railroad announced plans to build a new line directly to Denver, through the vacant land well south of the Platte, and suddenly the Union Pacific burst into all kinds of energy. Starting from the parent line at Julesburg, the rails were thrust westward at a galvanic rate: ten, eighteen, twenty-two miles a day. Skilled construction crews who had learned their jobs elsewhere, the Irish and the Chinese, moved in with practiced skill and fairly skimmed the tracks across the prairie. Like a great centipede the rails jumped westward.
When the railhead reached Centennial, citizens watched the laying of tracks with as much excitement as if it were a circus, and three local girls ran off with members of the construction gang. Hans Brumbaugh’s younger daughter, a flaxen-haired woman of twenty-three, was more prudent, and when the surveyor attempted to seek her favors, she insisted upon marriage.
The tracks ran along the north bank of the Platte, and formed a fine, solid edge to the town. The railway station became the focus of civic life, with several trains a day in each direction and a telegraph office from which messages of grave import could circulate throughout the town. Social life centered on the Railway Arms, the large hotel which the railroad built adjacent to its station.
On land donated by Levi Zendt, architects who had built other such establishments along the Union Pacific swept into town and in a few breath-taking months erected a major hotel, with many rooms, three different dining areas and a long bar. It cost the railroad $18,000 to build, and in 1883 alone it made a profit of $31,000.
Centennial was now linked to all the major cities in America, and the Venneford Ranch could ship its cattle direct to whatever market it deemed best. Boxcars of goods could be imported, and few men or women in town would forget the excitement that arose when word flashed that a cattleman named Messmore Garrett was bringing in four boxcars of steers which he proposed running on the open range.
“There is no open range,” men said. “Venneford has it all.”
“They don’t own it. It’s open if’n this guy Garrett can get to it.”
“How in hell’s he gonna get to it, answer me that.”
“He wouldn’t be comin’ if’n he didn’t have an idea on that score.”
The telegram said simply:
BAGBY CENTENNIAL
ARRIVING THURSDAY FOUR CATTLECARS OF STOCK
MESSMORE GARRETT
CARY MONTANA
So when the freight pulled in on Thursday afternoon, most of Centennial was at the station to see who would be handling the Garrett steers. The train whistled twice east of town, then chugged in and came to a halt. Mailbags were thrown down and messages exchanged, but the citizens focused their attention on four boxcars, from the first of which stepped a slim cattleman in his late thirties. He wore the customary large hat, but even so, women could see that his hair was slightly graying. His eyes were deep-set and commanding, and he walked with a firm step as he strode forward, extending his right hand and introducing himself. “I’m Messmore Garrett. Who’s here to help unload my stock?”
Watchers looked at the various experienced cowboys and were astonished when none of them stepped forward. Instead, Amos Calendar shuffled to the front, wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve and said, “I’m Calendar.”
“Bagby hire you?”
“He did.”
“Glad to see you. Let’s drop those chutes.”
Calendar went to one of the cars, which had now been detached from the rest of the train, and threw a chute into position. Someone inside the car slid the door open, and from a crowd of cowboys came the awed cry, “Jesus Christ! Sheep!”
Down the ramp ran hundreds of woolly sheep, dirty from their long ride, inquisitive and hungry. One ram ran to where the cowboys stood, and they recoiled from it as if it were a rattler. “Get away from me!” one of the cowboys yelled, almost as if he were a woman, but the ram pushed on, brushing against the cowboy’s leg. As it pressed onward, the man gave it a mighty kick in the head, all the time cursing as only a cowboy could. “The damned thing touched me,” he told his mates with obvious revulsion.
By nightfall word had sped across northern Colorado and well into Wyoming, carrying the dismal news that sheep had entered the cattle country. John Skimmerhorn, appalled at the event, cabled Bristol:
PERKIN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED SHEEP INVADED OUR RANGE STOP ADVISE IMMEDIATELY
SKIMMERHORN
The answer was brief: GET THEM OFF. In fact, it was the only sensible answer that could be given, for it was an established fact that cattle and sheep could not use the same pasture.
“The sheep is a filthy beast,” cowboys averred that night as they tried to get the smell of the new arrivals from their nostrils. “A steer won’t touch grass that sheep have walked over. The woollies leave a smell. Christ, I can smell it now.”
“What’s worse,” another said. “The sheep crops the grass so close, a cow can’t get nothin’ for two years after.”
“It ain’t only that,” the first cowboy said. “The sheep has a sharp hoof, and he cuts the grass below the stem, right down into the root.”
“Mostly, though, it’s the smell,” a third man said. “My uncle could walk into a restaurant and if they’d cooked mutton within three months, he could smell it. Cattle ain’t dumb. They know that smell kills.”
So the war began. In self-protection against the woollies the cattlemen felt they had to drive the sheepmen off the range, and they were ruthless in their determination. At the Cheyenne Club the big ranchers compared notes, and some thought the way to protect the range was to shoot the sheep from ambush, but others reported success from clubbing them to death after dark. One rancher along the Laramie River got his cowboys to herd the woollies over a precipice. “We killed more’n a thousand that way,” he said.
But others preferred poisoning. “Usin’ saltpeter or blue vitriol on the grass,” a Chugwater man said, “takes care of a hell of a lot of sheep and you don’t lose any cattle.”
Claude Barker, a notably serene man, said little about the problem, but when sheepmen invaded his range, two of them were shot, leaving one survivor to drive the remnants of the herd back north.
On the Venneford Ranch the problem became acute. Oliver Seccombe was on his way to England when Messmore Garrett arrived with his first four loads of sheep, and decisions had to be left to Skimmerhorn, who used every device he could think of short of murder to dislodge the sheep. He had no success. Calendar moved the first flock onto the range east of Rattlesnake Buttes, and Buford Coker, the South Carolina Confederate, led a large bunch to Fox Canyon northwest of Line Camp Five.
Skimmerhorn was restrained in dealing with the two intruders because he knew them both, had served with them on the Texas cattle drive. He liked Coker and had a grudging respect for Calendar’s ability to protect himself. “One thing I’ve got to warn you about,” he told his cowboys at a meeting convened to deal with the trespassers. “Those two men know how to shoot. Calendar especially isn’t going to be scared by threats of gunplay. You behave yourselves.”
The well at Fox Canyon was poisoned and quite a few of Coker’s sheep died before he could rescue the others. Calendar’s flock was attacked by a running pack of savage dogs who had been maneuvered into the area by men on horseback. Calendar coolly shot most of the dogs, but only after they had done much damage. Grass in the draw which was used as a corral was set afire from all directions, and some two hundred sheep burned to death, but Calendar and Coker stuck to their job, and Messmore Garrett shipped in more sheep.
He was a resolute man. At the local bank, where the tellers found it repugnant to serve him, he deposited ten thousand dollars and let it be known that he wished to buy land for a sheep ranch, his own headquarters, that is, while he ran his sheep on the public domain.
“It’s a goddamned disgrace,” the banker said at a dinner held by cattlemen in the Railway Arms. “That range has been out there for a thousand years, and the only person who has cared for it in all that time is the cattleman. Legally I suppose it belongs to the government. But it’s our range. That damned Messmore Garrett better not try to buy land from me.”
The cattlemen were especially outraged when employees of Garrett rode in to the land office and signified their intention of taking up homesteads. “You know it ain’t for them!” they exploded. “It’s just Garrett tryin’ to get aholt of some land. Sure as hell, the day they prove it up, they’ll turn and sell to him. The law oughta stop them.”
Three members of Garrett’s family applied for homesteads, but their papers were lost. They applied again, but a lawyer intervened on behalf of the local citizenry to fault one of the applications, and the two others had to be sent to Kansas City for verification. They, too, were lost.
Garrett made no public complaint. He hired a Denver lawyer who had fought such cases for years, and with glacierlike pressure that expert tied up some parcels of land from which Garrett could, although with difficulty, organize and run his sheep ranch.
The big breakthrough came when the lawyer filed papers at the courthouse for the purchase of two thousand acres of land at Chalk Cliff from Levi Zendt.
The whole pressure of the cattle industry fell on poor Levi, and his store was set on fire, the second time he had suffered this incendiary form of debate. The fire was extinguished, not by the fire company, whose members refused to fight any fire on property belonging to a sheepman, but by Garrett and his friends. Next day the Clarion reported:
The store of Levi Zendt, who seems to prefer the company of sheepmen to that of honest men, caught fire. Unfortunately, it was put out. We remind our readers who have the welfare of this region at heart that this is the same Levi Zendt who protected the Pasquinel brothers when they were burning and murdering along the Platte. People from Pennsylvania seem to require a lot of learning.
Zendt ignored both the fire and the news report, but when a group of cowboys wanted to know how he could sell decent land to a sheepman, he told them, “Indians sold me that land, to help me get started. I allowed Venneford to use it, to help them get started. I sold Brumbaugh other land, to help him get started. And you’re damned fools to ask such a question.”
They reported this at the ranch, and Skimmerhorn rode down from headquarters to reason with Levi. “It’s criminal to bring sheep onto a cattle range,” the foreman argued. “They destroy. They use up. They’re no better’n a bunch of hoofed locusts.”
Levi countered that in his life—he was now sixty-two—he had seen many new ideas evolve and always men said they destroyed the world as it had been. “Maybe the endless range that you know, John, is a thing of the past. Maybe you ought to buy some of that barbed wire I have and fence your land and know what you’re doin’.”
“But, Levi, you own shares in Venneford. You’re cutting your own throat.”
“I don’t think too much of your cattle shares, John.” And onto the table he tossed the contract he had made with Messmore Garrett, giving him land for his sheep. “Fact is, John, I’d like to sell my Venneford shares. If you know anyone who wants to buy them.”
Skimmerhorn did. Next day Jim Lloyd appeared at the store and said, “Mr. Zendt, I hear you got some Venneford shares for sale.”
“I sure do.”
“I’d like to buy ’em.”
“You’d be a lot smarter buyin’ sheep shares. I could get you some.”
Jim drew back, aghast. “I’m a cattleman. I run cattle.”
“If you know what you like, stick to it,” Levi said. “You can pick up my Venneford shares at the bank.” Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Lucinda and I have been wondering—do you ever hear anything about Clemma?”
“Never,” Jim said.
“No more do we,” Levi said. Then, briskly: “Jim, you’d be doin’ this part of the country a service if you warned your cowboys to leave Coker and Calendar alone. Those men have only so much patience.”
“They’re not my cowboys,” Jim protested. “The troublemakers are comin’ down from Wyoming.”
“Better warn ’em to stay home, Jim. There’s gonna be trouble else.”
The warning was to no avail, and three nights later someone got among the Calendar sheep and clubbed more than a hundred to death, breaking their heads open with violent, shattering blows.
In the golden summer of 1883 Chief Lost Eagle, then a frail old man of seventy-three, had his third and last portrait made standing beside a President of the United States. In 1851 he had stood with Millard Fillmore following the great treaty of Fort Laramie, and ten years later he had been photographed with Abraham Lincoln. Now Chester Arthur was vacationing in Yellowstone Park, in an effort to bring the needs of that noble area to the attention of the nation at large. Such a trip into wilderness was a daring venture, requiring the services of seventy-five cavalrymen, many teamsters and scouts, and one hundred and seventy-five pack animals. In passage the President proposed to stop over at the Indian reservation in northwestern Wyoming.
There he met the famous Shoshone chieftain Washakie, who had a grievous complaint, lodged with vigor and ancient contempt: “Why did the Great White Father allow the Arapaho to trespass onto my reservation?”
President Arthur looked to one of his aides for explanation, but none was forthcoming, and Washakie, now a man in his eighties, continued: “You know the Arapaho eat their dogs. You know we have fought them for a hundred years.”
Here an aide informed the President that the Ute, of which the Shoshone were a segment, had indeed fought the Arapaho for a century, and it was true that the Arapaho did eat dogs. “Disgusting,” the President said.
The protest continued for some time, after which a scout was found who could explain: “The Arapaho have no right to be here … none at all. They were expelled from their reservation in Colorado and taken to the Dakotas, but they didn’t like it there.”
“Who required that they like it?” the President asked.
“So when food ran out, they were allowed to come down here.”
“They should be sent back,” the President snapped.
“But they’ve been moved around too much, sir.”
The President agreed to listen to the Arapaho side of the story, and Chief Lost Eagle was brought to see him. He presented a pathetic figure, a withered little old man in a tattered army uniform, with a big bronze medal about his neck and on his head a silly high-crowned hat, a turkey feather sticking up from the band. He was bowlegged from years in the saddle and he spoke in a high voice.
“We have traveled far,” he said, “and at last we have a home. We wish to stay.”
“What’s the medal?” Arthur asked, and General Phil Sheridan, a man who hated Indians and who had coined the classic phrase “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” moved forward to inspect the bronze.
“President Buchanan,” Sheridan reported, repressing a snigger.
The entourage moved in, each man wanting to be photographed with the funny little Indian, and he posed for some time, realizing that his appeal to the Great Father had not been taken seriously. “If I could speak with the President again,” he pleaded, but the cavalrymen kept pressing in to have their pictures taken, and by the time Lost Eagle was able to break away, the President had gone.
“Over here! Over here!” the scouts were calling in Shoshone, and Lost Eagle, who did not understand that language, was left alone until a soldier started pushing him. “Over here, Grandpa,” and he was maneuvered into a group containing Washakie and the other Shoshone.
“Arapaho,” one of them muttered, but now the photographer was shouting at them to remain very still, and he had barely taken the picture when a wild shout arose from a distance and a group of young Indian braves galloped onto a large open field, where President Arthur sat under a canopy. It looked as if the young men were going to attack the President, but at the last moment, from another corner of the field, a company of cavalrymen, led by a boy blowing a bugle, rushed forward to engage the Indians in mock battle. There was a furious discharge of blank ammunition, with horses whinnying and eleven Indians, trained for the purpose, falling off their horses and sliding in the dust as if they had been killed. After ten minutes of shouting and fine horsemanship and an infinity of firing, the brave cavalrymen drove the Indian savages from the scene and saved the President.
The young Indians who participated were congratulated by both President Arthur and General Sheridan for their fine riding, after which they were allowed to get mildly drunk. Senator George Vest, of Missouri, and Robert Lincoln, son of the late President, agreed that it had been a memorable display, and then the last of the joking cavalrymen insisted upon being photographed with Chief Lost Eagle, and again he patiently posed while the group made fun of him.
Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.
But the group laughed at him, would not listen to his petition, and failed even to realize that he was presenting them with a grave moral problem, not of much magnitude, but perhaps of greater intensity for that reason. By the time the presidential party left Wyoming, Chief Lost Eagle was dead.
The coming of the railroad affected the white man as profoundly as the horse had changed the Indian. For example, in the early summer of 1884 Levi Zendt was confounded by a telegram which the stationmaster handed him:
ARRIVING UNION PACIFIC FRIDAY AFTERNOON TO STUDY INDIAN TRIBAL LAW
CHRISTIAN ZENDT
In confusion he showed the message to Lucinda, who asked, naturally, “Who’s he?”
“I don’t know. I had a brother Christian. He bought cattle and was so stupid he never heard of an Indian, let alone law.”
“Could it be his son?”
“Nobody ever told me who has sons.”
Lucinda decided it must be one of Levi’s nephews, most likely a son of Christian. He was probably studying law somewhere and had caught on to some fancy idea about Indians. Having suggested this, she became grave: “Should I leave while he’s here?”
“No!” Levi exploded. “Why should you?”
“I am Indian.”
“That’s what he’s comin’ out to study. Cutthroat Indians. Let him see a real one.”
“What about my brothers.”
“Look!” He pulled his wife by the arm. “When they kicked me out of Lancaster my family thought me worse than your brothers. I was lower than a murderer. They’ve got no right to be put off their feed by Pasquinels.”
“Does your family know that I’m your wife?”
“I haven’t told ’em.”
“I think I’d better go to Denver.”
“You stay here. It’s time they knew.”
So when the afternoon train chugged in from Julesburg, with many of the townfolk at the station, for its arrival was still a novelty, Levi and Lucinda were there to greet Christian Zendt, whoever he was. Down the steps, carrying a small carpet suitcase, came a tall, blond, square-faced boy about twenty-three years old.
“You must be Uncle Levi,” he said brightly, with an unpretentious grin. “And this is Mrs. Zendt.” Then he looked at her closely and asked, “Are you a real Indian?” And when she nodded graciously, he cried, “This is better than I’d hoped for. It’s truly wonderful!”
All the way to the farm he talked like a magpie. Graduated from Franklin and Marshall. Yes, son of Christian Zendt, but he was dead now. Three years ago. Enrolled in the law school at Dickinson. Yes, the other three brothers were still living, all with kids. His mother had been one of the Mummerts of Paradise …
“The old wagon makers!”
“The same.”
“Did Mahlon marry?”
Yes, but very late. He courted the Stoltzfus girl for about fifteen years. He was afraid to marry, right out like that, and she was afraid to lose him, because he was the only man her age left, and she lost her looks and every Tuesday and Friday they stared at each other across the market, she in her stall selling baked goods and he in his selling meat and both families getting richer, and finally the three brothers got together and said he had to marry her, it was unfair otherwise, and he took to his bed with fear, so Christian and the other two brothers went to the Stoltzfus girl and proposed for Mahlon, and they were married, “And when I last saw them, they stood side by side in the meat stall and one of the Stoltzfus boys had taken over the bakery.”
“Any children?”
“One every year for five years.”
The more Levi and his wife saw of this ebullient young man, the more they liked him. He sat enraptured as she told how her uncles had tied buffalo skulls to their backs and had danced in swirling dust until the thongs broke through their back muscles. She told also of her brothers and how they had escaped the massacre, and Levi shared the pain when Christian broke in: “Dear God, Aunt Lucinda! You don’t mean Skimmerhorn set up the guns on purpose and mowed them down?” She said that was exactly what she meant.
He had a wonderful freedom from false nicety. “Tell me about the deaths of your two brothers. We hear a lot about them back east. I never dreamed they were my uncles!”
She laughed bitterly, then told how one had been hanged, how the other had been shot in the back by Frank Skimmerhorn, and how Levi, defying local hatreds, had buried them both. They talked a good deal about tribal law, and Levi was astounded at how much his wife knew. Her knowledge was not codified—that would be the task of trained men like Christian—but it hung together, and for the first time Levi understood that Indians were governed by customs as rigid as those which bound the Mennonites of Lancaster County.
One night Lucinda told Levi, “It’s not proper, a young man like this talking with us all night. He ought to be meeting some of the girls.” When Levi saw how easily this youngster of twenty-three handled the young ladies and with what grace he bandied their flirtations, he recalled his own barbarity at that age.
When the time came for Christian to return to Dickinson, four Centennial families with daughters sought to give him farewell parties, and he accepted, kissing the girls and their mothers goodbye. At the station he told Levi, “You should visit the family. I’m sure they’d welcome you.”
“I’m not so sure. I’m still the outcast.” He was standing with his arm about Lucinda as he added, “Don’t tell them I married an Indian. They wouldn’t understand.”
“I never see them.”
“You don’t?”
“No, when I wanted to go to college they raised Cain, Mahlon worst of all. Even my father ridiculed me. To hell with them all.”
When the train chugged in from Denver, Lucinda kissed her nephew goodbye and said, “Come back. Come often. Lots of people in this town would be pleased to see you, Levi and me most of all.”
He swung onto the train, blew kisses at the girls—and returned to his studies. Three times that winter Lucinda brought up the question of Levi’s going back home for a short visit. Each time he said, “Not unless you come too,” and she replied, “Lancaster’s not ready for an Arapaho Indian.”
So he dropped the matter, but she raised it a fourth time: “A man ought to see his kin. Levi, you can’t imagine how you perked up when Christian was here. You have a right to know how the trees are doing.”
Often through the years he had wondered how those stately trees had grown, and whether the barn still sat with its hex signs among the meadows, but before he could respond, she made another comment even more compelling: “I cannot forget that when they left Jake Pasquinel’s body on the gallows, you stepped forward to claim it, because he was my brother. From that day I would have walked through hell for you, Levi. A man ought to stick with his kin.”
She bought him a large suitcase and some new clothes. She purchased the ticket, Centennial to Omaha to Chicago on the Union Pacific. Change stations at Chicago for Lancaster on the Pennsylvania. She took him down to the station an hour early and introduced him to others who were going as far as Chicago. But she would not accompany him.
The trip was so uneventful. He could not believe that he had once struggled for a half year to cover the same distance, and on Wednesday morning when the train pulled into the cavernous station at Lancaster, he was awed by the change, but then he saw his three bearded brothers waiting for him, and time seemed not to have touched them. Mahlon, still tall and dark, had acquired neither weight nor congeniality. He looked as if he were there to collect the remaining eighty-eight dollars Levi owed him for the stolen horses. Jacob looked pretty much the same, and Caspar, who did the butchering, was the powerful man he had been forty years ago. To the farmers of Lancaster the passage of years meant little; they tended their business and allowed others to worry over intrusions like the Civil War and financial panics.
The brothers remarked on Levi’s lack of beard and congratulated him on having been able to manage a train trip all the way from Colorado. They piled him into a wagon pulled by two handsome bays and off they went to Lampeter, where Levi discovered that Hell Street was quieter now, but as they approached the ancient lane and the tall trees, he saw that the farm was unchanged. There stood the towering barn with its colorful hex signs and the reassuring pronouncement:
JACOB ZENDT
1713
BUTCHER
The lovely trees were more stately and the little buildings were just as he had left them. He wondered how many miles of sausage and acres of scrapple had come from that red shack since he left.
“We have a stall in Philadelphia now,” Caspar explained. “We take the train to Reading Terminal. Very large business.” Levi was pleased to hear the Pennsylvania German accent again: werry larch busy-niss.
At the house, so small when compared to the barn, Levi met the Zendt wives, and there was Rebecca Stoltzfus, totally changed. She was plump and white-haired and very stolid. Only the cupid’s-bow mouth was the same, and in her expanded face it looked rather ridiculous. He held out his hand and she shook it formally.
“Things are good at the market,” she said.
“Who’s runnin’ the bakery?” he asked.
“My brother,” she said.
The Zendt women had a traditional family dinner waiting, a display of food that staggered Levi, who recalled the many years he had lived on pemmican and beans. The table and the groaning sideboards contained a full seven sweets and seven sours, eight kinds of meat, three kinds of fowl, and six kinds of cookies, including the ones whose memory had tormented him when he was starving: crunchy black-walnut made with black molasses.
He wondered if any people were entitled to so much food, so much of the world’s goodness. And as he surveyed the farm and saw the ample supply of water and the infinity of trees and the lush grass where one acre would support a cow, he was struck with how easy life was in Pennsylvania and how brutally difficult in Colorado, where you had to dig a ditch twenty miles before you could tease a little water onto your land.
It was the trees that moved him most deeply. He loved to walk in the woods or sit at the picnic area in the grove: Yes, that’s a hickory. How many of them I chopped down to fuel the smokehouse. And the oaks, they haven’t grown an inch in forty years. And the good maples and the ash and the elm. We had a treasure here and never knew it.
On Friday evening the children found him sitting beneath the trees, tears in his eyes. “You feeling tired, Uncle Levi?”
“I was thinkin’ of the time I needed a tree to save my wagon,” he told them. “And I had to walk many miles to find one.” They knew he had to be lying.
At family prayers Levi was astonished, there could be no other word for it, by the minute detail with which Mahlon told God what to do. At each grace the tall, acidulous man would direct God’s attention to evildoers, to men who had stolen money from the bank, to girls who were misbehaving, and Levi began to understand why so much violence had been permitted in Colorado. With God kept so busy in Lancaster prying into petty problems, how could He find time to watch over real crimes like those of the Pasquinel brothers and Colonel Skimmerhorn?
From time to time the family dropped discreet questions about his experiences in the west. They knew that the girl he had abducted from the orphanage at gunpoint had died.
“Killed by a rattlesnake,” Levi said without inflection.
“Any children?”
“She was about to have one when she died.”
“Did you remarry?”
“Yep.” He let it go at that.
By Saturday it was obvious that Levi Zendt was not happy at the family farm and that his brothers were ill-at-ease with him. He did not belong to the family, and no one was grieved when he announced that on Monday he would head back for Colorado. “Chicago, then St. Joseph, Missouri. There’s a stage that runs out of there along the old road that Elly and I took in the Conestoga …”
“That would be interesting,” Caspar said frigidly.
At Sunday dinner the Zendt women put on a lavish display, not only to send Levi west on a full stomach but also to welcome Reverend Fenstermacher—son of the older preacher—on his regular eating visit. Levi dreaded the prospect, but the minister proved much different from his self-righteous father.
“Forty years ago, when I bought my rifle from Melchior Fordney, he boasted that you could fire one of his percussion guns three times in two minutes,” Levi said.
“That was my brother. He died at Antietam.”
“Was the war hard on Lancaster?”
“On boys like my brother … very hard.”
Fenstermacher offered a grace marked by a deep sense of God’s benign presence and the fellowship that sprang from it. At the end he pointed to the table and said to Levi, “Your family intends that you shall not forget the bounty of Lancaster.”
Levi put his fork down and said, “It’s strange, but when we were starving on the plains I never once thought of a dinner like this. I thought only of special things. The bite of sour souse, the rich stink of cup cheese, and black-walnut cookies. Does the souse still sell well?”
“Better than ever,” Mahlon said, “especially in Philadelphia. Caspar’s wife makes it now, same way you did.”
Then, for some perverse reason, Levi decided to show his family their sister-in-law. Coughing, he produced a photograph of Lucinda, one in which she looked very dark. He said, “You haven’t seen my wife,” and passed it to his left. He could tell who was holding the picture by the look of shock that came over each face. Finally the Stoltzfus girl said, hesitantly, “She’s very … western.”
“She’s an Arapaho.”
“What’s that?” Caspar asked.
“Indian. She’s half-Indian.”
This was greeted with gasps, which Levi ignored, directing his attention to the meats. From somewhere came the question, “What’s her name?”
“Lucinda McKeag.”
“Doesn’t sound Indian. Sounds Scotch.”
“That wasn’t her real name. McKeag picked up her mother when her father died, and she went along.”
There was enough in that sentence to preoccupy the Zendts for some moments, after which Levi volunteered, “Her real name was Pasquinel.”
This information was greeted by silence, during which Reverend Fenstermacher knitted his brow. At last he asked quietly, “Was she related to … Wasn’t there a Pasquinel family we read about?”
“There was. The old fellow was a mountain man. His sons were known as the Pasquinel brothers.”
“Those?” several voices asked almost tremulously.
“Yep. Lucinda’s brothers were a mean pair. They hanged one. Shot the other in the back.”
“The half-breed murderers?”
“The Indians suffered more murders than they committed, but the Pasquinels were killers.” Levi helped himself to apple butter and preserved cherries. “I had the unpleasant job of cutting the older boy down from the gallows. At the time I thought it was merciful he was dead, but reflectin’ on what we did to his tribe, I’m not so sure we hung the right people.”
Reverend Fenstermacher coughed, but Levi was started and nothing, not even food, could stop him. He told of the Indian fights, of the years of drought, of locust swarms, of the gold-mining camps. Every incident he referred to was alien to the Zendts, and in a way ugly, but as he unfolded the epic of life in the west it began to acquire a certain grandeur, and the very magnitude of it made them at least listen with respect.
One comment on the sun dance reminded him of young Christian Zendt, and prompted him to say, “You ought to get that boy back here. He may prove to be the best Zendt of all.”
As the meal ended, Mahlon said unctuously, “Reverend Fenstermacher, since it may be a long time before we see our brother again, would you please give our family a special blessing!” The reverend, having anticipated such an invitation, had certain things he wanted to say.
“Dear God, Who watches over us, You have heard me say a hundred times in church, ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.’ Nothing in my experience has been more mysterious than the manner in which You took Brother Levi west and placed him among the Indians and gave him an Indian wife and Indian brothers. You chose him from among the five Zendt brothers to do Your work on the frontier, and he has done it well. He has been our emissary, and we have all been remiss in not sending him money to aid him when he needed it. We have kept our love from him. We have not even bothered to acquaint ourselves with what he was doing. God, forgive us for our indifference.
“But Levi was in error, too. He did not share with us his adventure in settling the wilderness. He did not report to us either his struggles or his victories. Especially was he afraid to bring his wife Lucinda here to visit with his family, afraid lest we embarrass her because she was Indian. Does he think we are so poor in spirit? When he returns home let him tell his wife that we send her our love, that we know her as our sister and that our home is her home, now and forever. Does he think that we do not know tragedy also? The Civil War that struck so many families here was just as deep a sorrow to us as the Indian wars were to him. We are all Your children, God. Truly, we are brothers in Your family and as we share our tragedies so we share our triumphs, and it is love that binds us together. Amen.”
There wasn’t much the Zendts could say after that. It was obvious that any preacher who would insult the richest Mennonite family in Lampeter, and at their own table, had no bright future in the Lancaster area, and the goodbyes after dinner were restrained. Levi went down to the grove, to sit among the trees, and it occurred to him that just as the Arapaho had dragged buffalo skulls through the dust, punishing themselves, so white men dragged behind them enormous skulls of another kind. The Indians were smart enough to allow their burdens to rip free; the white man seldom did.
The return to Lancaster had been unbearably painful. He had not said a dozen words to Rebecca Stoltzfus, the girl who had changed the direction of his life; he knew no more about her now than when he stepped off the train. He had discussed nothing of gravity with Mahlon, who seemed as distasteful now as he had forty years ago. He had not even been gracious enough to ride in to Philadelphia to see the family stall in Reading Station, because he had been so wrapped up in his own memories that he didn’t really care what was happening to the family.
It had been a terrible mistake to come here, and he left without being able to improve relations with his family in the way Reverend Fenstermacher had hoped. He was not sorry to go, and the Zendts were even less sorry to see him board the train.
At St. Joseph, Levi changed to the stagecoach, which would take him slowly west; and as the ferry carried them across the Missouri, he relived the journey of forty years ago. He felt he had been correct in leaving Lancaster, for now he knew that nothing had changed in the intervening years: he had found no significance other than tables piled ridiculously high with food. And as they chugged along, everything he saw added to his excitement—the muddy river, the black boys along the waterfront, the creaking ferry, the brooding threat of Kansas, the highway west. How he wished that Elly and proper Captain Mercy and bright Oliver Seccombe were with him now, just starting out with their teams. Even crafty Sam Purchas—he would want Sam too.
But after the coach was well into Kansas and had climbed past the Presbyterian mission, it came to the Big Blue, and Levi called to the driver to stop, and he climbed down to inspect this puny creek, this mere trickle of water in August, and he was aghast to think that this miserable pencil line across the landscape had once been a forbidding torrent where he had nearly lost his wagon and his wife.
It was incredible. Memory was playing him false. Then the image of the buffalo skulls returned, and he visualized himself dragging across the prairies his painful burdens of remembrance. But his robust sense of reality reasserted itself, and he began to laugh at himself. “I missed the whole point!” he cried. “My brothers were uneasy because they feared I was comin’ back to claim my share of the farm. It’s part mine, but let ’em keep it.” He continued laughing. “Never once did they ask about the dinosaur. Biggest thing ever discovered in the west. Must have been in the Lancaster papers.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They’d have asked about the dinosaur if it was something good to eat.”
When he climbed back into the coach a man from Nebraska, staring at the river, said, “Hell, you could spit across that,” and Levi laughed and told him, “Not in the spring of ’44, my friend.” And heavy skulls tore from the sinews of his mind, and he told the man, “Right now, though, you’re right. A good man could spit across it.”
When Levi reached Centennial, neighbors persisted in questioning him about the east, and at first he rebuffed them, but finally he spoke for all westerners when he said, “Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can’t tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything … not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important … not a lot of trees and buildings.”
Other people were also returning from their travels. When Oliver Seccombe came home with his wife after their six months in England, he found Venneford Ranch in trouble. On the extreme outer edges, over toward Nebraska, squatters were building sod huts on the open range which had long been preempted by Crown Vee cattle. Along the Platte, immigrants from states like Ohio and Tennessee were taking out formal homesteads, as if by doing so they could gain access to the range. Committees were actually visiting the ranch headquarters to see about buying ranch land for the building of small towns.
“We need towns in this state,” they argued, and Seccombe told them, “Not on our land you don’t.”
Worst of all, the sheepmen led by that damned Messmore Garrett were more and more digging in and running their sheep on what had always been considered cattle territory. The situation was becoming intolerable, and on his first day home Seccombe ordered Skimmerhorn and Lloyd to ride out with him to warn Garrett’s men: “Vacate or suffer the consequences.”
They rode east to where Amos Calendar had parked his lonely wagon—bed, commissary, refuge from storms for months on end—and it was some time before they could find the lean Texan. He rode toward them with his rifle across his saddle and grunted a meager hello to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd.
“I’m Oliver Seccombe,” the Englishman said. “You’re trespassing with your sheep. This is cattle country.”
“It’s open range,” Calendar said.
“I’m warning you to get your sheep out of here.”
“I’m stayin’ till Mr. Garrett tells me to move.”
A dog now ran up, a collie-type with white and black hair. “Good-looking dog,” Seccombe said. “You ought to get him out of here, where he’ll be safe.”
“Rajah’s safe anywhere,” Calendar said slowly. “Long as I got my Sharps.”
The ranchers were getting nowhere with this difficult man, but Seccombe was determined to deliver the warning: “If you don’t move the sheep, Calendar, we’ll move them for you.”
“You tried that before and failed.”
Seccombe flushed. “What do you mean by that?”
“Them gunmen who tried to kill me didn’t come from Brazil.”
“Are you suggesting that I …”
“I ain’t suggestin’ nothin’. I’m simply tellin’ you that if any of you sonsabitches fire at me, I’m gonna fire back.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Seccombe said, spurring his horse and starting west.
They headed for Line Camp Four, among the piñons, and as they rode Skimmerhorn said, “I better explain Buford Coker, Mr. Seccombe. He’s a hot-tempered Confederate from South Carolina. He’s not like Calendar at all. As you’ve seen, Calendar likes being alone. Coker don’t. He’s gone in to Cheyenne and spent a lot of time at Ida Hamilton’s House of Mirrors, and last time I saw him he’d persuaded one of the girls, Fat Laura …”
“I’ve heard of Fat Laura,” Seccombe said.
“Well, you’ll find Fat Laura in the sheep wagon with him. Or maybe in a shack. Coker’s building himself a shack at Fox Canyon.”
“Building!” Seccombe exploded. “That’s cattle country. We let him build, we’ll have half the sheepmen in the west …”
Coker was building. He and Fat Laura had hired two men to come down from Cheyenne and build them a substantial shack at the mouth of Fox Canyon. It was not elegant, but it was sturdy, and when Seccombe saw it he wanted to shout, “Skimmerhorn! Have that thing torn down!” for it was a visible warning of what would happen across the range if corrective steps were not taken, and quickly.
At the door of the new house stood Fat Laura, a Virginia woman in her late twenties and obviously a graduate of Ida Hamilton’s academy. In her teens she must have been pretty in the buxom, bucolic way that cowboys appreciated, but ten years of hard life and constant movement from one brothel to the next could not be disguised, and the accumulation of forty pounds gained through the only activity she really enjoyed had made her a slattern. She was six inches taller than Coker and thirty pounds heavier, and why he had associated himself with her remained a mystery.
But here she was, a Cheyenne castoff, living on the edge of nowhere with a sheepman. A woman could hardly sink any lower, Seccombe thought, and he had no desire to enter into conversation with her. He let Skimmerhorn do the talking.
“Where’s Coker?”
“Out.”
“Which direction?”
“Make a noise, his dog might bark.”
“You living here permanent?”
“Looks like.”
She was a repulsive woman with fat lips and heavy eyes and faded hair. She had no intention of informing these men as to Coker’s whereabouts, and now she stood gross and ugly in the doorway as if daring them to enter.
“I have a gun,” she said, “so don’t start nothin’.”
“We don’t shoot ladies.” Skimmerhorn laughed. “But tell Coker to get his sheep off this land. And get that shack off it, too.”
“I homesteaded this shack.”
“You what?” Seccombe shouted. “A Cheyenne whore homesteading cattle country?”
Fat Laura stared at him with her basilisk eyes and said nothing, but from behind the doorjamb she produced a heavy shotgun. Bringing it forward, she plopped the butt end in the dust, then leaned her fat bosom on the barrel.
“You tell Coker to get off this land,” Seccombe warned, and Fat Laura’s huge face broke into a contemptuous smile.
“Up your fancy ass, Englishman.”
The three ranchmen rode back to headquarters, bewildered as to what they must do next. If Venneford sat by supinely while sheepmen invaded the range, and if they made no protest when immigrants squatted on the outer edges of the ranch and homesteaders took up government land, pretty soon the whole intricate structure would begin to fall apart, the trend would accelerate and a noble way of life would be lost.
“Thing I cannot understand,” Seccombe said as they approached headquarters, “is how a decent man like Levi Zendt could sell his land to sheepmen.”
“There’s a theory going around,” Skimmerhorn said, “that the open range is ended. Zendt told me he thought sheep were a better investment, especially with a man like Garrett supervising.”
“Garrett!” Seccombe exclaimed. “Isn’t there any way to run that scoundrel off the range?”
Skimmerhorn ignored the question and continued with Zendt’s reactions: “He says maybe we ought to consolidate around the land we own. Fence it in and concentrate on about half the cattle we now run.”
“But this is cattle country!” Seccombe said. “It belongs to us.”
Skimmerhorn was reluctant to point out that for the past seven hours the riders had not once been on Venneford land. They were on open range, land that belonged to anyone; it was cattle country only because the cattleman had always said so.
Confusing days followed. This was the finest time of year, late August before the first frost, with calves grown sturdy on rich grasses. A man should be enjoying these days, and Charlotte entertained numerous visitors at the castle, with her usual flair and merriment, but Oliver Seccombe enjoyed none of it.
He could not comprehend how the citizens of Centennial could permit sheepmen to invade their land. “The animals are filthy,” he said to the banker. “Look at the pitiful men who work them. This fellow Calendar, a miserable hermit talking to his dog. And that wreck of a man, Bufe Coker, living with his Cheyenne harlot. Hell, he’s slept with sheep so long he probably can’t tell the difference.”
All cattlemen believed the accusation that the lonely sheepherder engaged in sexual intercourse with his charges, and many funny stories circulated regarding this supposed custom: “You hear about the Englishman countin’ sheep in Wyomin’? ‘One, two, three, four. Good mornin’, Pamela. Don’t forget. Tea at five.’ ”
“Look at a sheepman when he comes to town,” Seccombe said bitterly to the editor of the Clarion. “He walks alone. His eyes are downcast. He’s ashamed to speak up to people he meets. In a bar he stays at the far end, drinking with no one. He’s an outcast and he knows it. His smell alone, sleeping with those woollies, would make him a lonely man.” He shook his head mournfully, then brightened.
“On the other hand, you take a cowboy. Frank, honest, clean-cut. He sleeps with girls, not sheep, and his joy shows. He’s never alone. Likes a crowd. In a bar he heads right for the middle, where the people are, and when he speaks to you he looks you in the eye. The cowboy is a clean, fine man. I’ve seen thousands of them. But the sheepman is craven. They ought to be run out of here.”
The Old Testament bothered Seccombe. It was full of sheep and shepherds, and he began to wonder if perhaps the Jews were not also contaminated people. “They spent all this time worrying about pork,” he told Charlotte’s guests at dinner one night, “when their real problem was mutton, and they didn’t recognize it.”
“Abraham was a shepherd. David was a shepherd. Joseph was a shepherd,” one of the guests pointed out.
“Yes!” Seccombe cried. “But when Our Lord was born you didn’t find Him looking for a sheep pen. He was born with the cattle, where He belonged. I could have little respect for Him if it had been otherwise.” His tirade was proof of his total adaptation to American customs, for certainly in his native England, where there was no inbred resentment of sheep, fine spring lamb was as welcome on the discriminating table as beef.
“Don’t forget, Oliver,” an argumentative guest said, “that the first man born on earth tended sheep, Abel, and when he handed God one of his sheep, God accepted it and blessed it.”
“God was careless that time,” Seccombe growled. “It’s a sad day when I hear sheep being defended in my own house,” and he stiffly excused himself and headed for the Cheyenne Club, where he could associate with men dedicated to cattle and the proper use of the range.
He found little levity. Claude Barker was bitter against the invasions made by sheepmen on the north end of his Horse Creek ranch, and the Chugwater people felt the same. “This country is goin’ to hell,” Barker protested, and various plans were proposed for counteracting the drift.
“All we’re asking,” Seccombe said, “is to have things go on as they were. We don’t need cities out here, and sheep, and homesteaders trying to grub out a meager living. This land should be kept open. It was made for cattle the way Chicago was made for people. There’s an honesty about raising cattle … a dignity …”
The younger ranchers allowed him to finish his speech, knowing that it meant nothing. When the difficult decision of what specifically to do had to be faced, Seccombe would board a train and head for business out of town. He was not much for difficult decisions, and sure enough, two days after this first planning session he found reasons for visiting bankers in Kansas City.
He was at work in that city on the afternoon that the five-thirteen Union Pacific pulled into Centennial from Denver. The usual inquisitive locals and wide-eyed children were at the station to watch the train arrive, and they remarked on the various local people who disembarked, making shrewd guesses as to what they had been up to in the capital. But as the last of the customary passengers had left the train, a man whispered, “Hey, look!” and everyone turned toward the rear car, where two slim men in black suits and broad-brimmed hats were alighting. The older stepped onto the platform, looked cautiously about him, beckoned to the other to follow. When they were free of the train, a porter handed down two valises and pointed to the Railway Arms, saying in a voice loud enough for the watchers to hear, “Over there, Mr. Pettis.”
“The Pettis boys!” someone cried in a hoarse whisper, and all other arrivals were ignored as men drew back while the two visitors walked solemnly through the station and across the road to the hotel. There they registered boldly as Frank and Orvid Pettis.
For the next two days Centennial buzzed with speculation as to what had brought these two aging gunmen to town. The Pettis boys! What a travesty of language! They had never been boys. At fourteen they were vicious killers, and now at fifty-seven Frank was a black-toothed, scrawny man with sharp, battle-worn eyes. Orvid, in his fifty-second year, was a hardened assassin living out his years with the small funds he received for one or another routine murder.
Yet they were known as the Pettis boys, and their arrival in any frontier town signified that someone with a grievance to settle had grown impatient with the law. They had never been apprehended in cold-blooded murder; they were too clever for that. Even when they were arrested, with every item of evidence pointing to their guilt, as in the Pueblo murders, where they were seen at the crime and where their footprints matched exactly those found at the site of the triple assassination, clever lawyers were brought in from Kansas and the jury exonerated them.
The pitiful aspect of their lives was that whereas they had done much work for men with money, they got little for themselves. They killed and threatened and evicted, but they never lived well. When they came to a town like Centennial they had funds for the purchase of horses and their hotel bills were taken care of, but when the job was done, whatever it was, they would move on to a similar town, buy a couple of horses, eat free at the hotel. But they did not prosper. From the cattle they stampeded on the Skimmerhorn Trail in the years from 1868 through 1880, they made barely enough dollars to subsist on, and thirteen of their equally underpaid men were shot. They now lived in a small town in western Kansas, always ready for a telegraphed invitation.
A few days later they rode out of town, two dark and silent men heading east. “They’re after Calendar,” boys whispered, and one gallant fellow only fifteen years old, who had grown to respect that somber sheepman, jumped on his horse and rode out to warn him. “Calendar! Calendar!” he was shouting long before he reined in his sweating horse, “Pettis boys are after you.”
But they were not headed in his direction. After a long detour to the east, they cut north, left Colorado and went deep into Wyoming to a draw leading into Horse Creek, where a sheepman was herding some two thousand woollies. They shot him from ambush, then stampeded the sheep into the quicksand river, where they floundered, bleating piteously, and perished.
They then rode far west, beyond the Laramie River, to a remote spot where a Mexican was tending twelve hundred sheep. Seeing that he was alone and unarmed, Frank Pettis said, “Let’s gunnysack him,” and they threw a bag over the shepherd’s head, tying it about his waist. They lashed him to a rock and he had to listen as they methodically clubbed his sheep to death. The sad cries of sheep beaten but not yet dead so affected the poor man that he began to whimper in sympathy, and Orvid said, “Let’s put him out of his misery,” and each of the brothers emptied his revolver into the sack.
The boys then swung south in a long loop which brought them finally to Fox Canyon, where they spent a day secretly observing Buford Coker’s new shack.
“There’s the whore,” Frank whispered to Orvid as Fat Laura appeared at the doorway.
“I don’t want to kill no woman,” Orvid replied.
“She ain’t no woman,” Frank said, and as they watched they saw, coming from the north, Wyoming way, a man riding full blast toward the cabin, shouting, “Coker! The Pettis boys is on the loose! They’re killin’ sheepmen!”
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Frank mumbled. “Just when things was goin’ good.”
They continued to watch as the man galloped up to the cabin, dismounted and began talking agitatedly with Fat Laura.
“We better knock them off,” Frank said with professional judgment. “We don’t want three guns against us.”
“Three?” Orvid asked.
“I bet that whore can fight like a cornered badger,” Frank said, indicating with his right shoulder the fact that she was already going for her rifle.
“Here goes,” Frank said. “I’ll get the man. You get the whore.”
With no more talk, the two killers edged themselves closer to the cabin, and at a signal from Frank, they fired. The man dropped with a bullet through his head, but Orvid had less luck with Fat Laura. He merely shot her through the left shoulder. He saw blood spurt out, so he knew he had winged her well, but she was not dead, for she succeeded in crawling back into the shack.
“You missed!” Frank said with disgust. “And look!”
There, edging his way down the draw behind the cabin, was Bufe Coker, shouting encouragement to his woman: “Hold on, Laura. I’m comin’.”
Dodging bullets, he made his way to the back door of the cabin and in to where Laura leaned against the wall, blood dripping from her shoulder. Ignoring the bullets that zinged through the shack, he tended the fat woman, binding her wound and giving her assurance that it could not be fatal.
“We’ll hold ’em off till help comes,” he said. “Who are they?”
“Kellerman said they was the Pettis boys.”
“Where’s Kellerman now?”
“Out there, dead.”
“Hell. We could’ve used him.”
“Will they kill us?”
“They got to come in here to do it.” He gathered his guns, giving one to his woman, and began shoring up the front door with furniture. He was preoccupied with this task when he heard Fat Laura scream, “No! No!” and he looked out in time to see his dog Bravo run toward the house.
“Back! Back!” he shouted, and if the dog had been working sheep he would have obeyed, but he sensed that Laura was in danger and continued running toward her.
With one shot Orvid Pettis killed the dog. Fat Laura looked at Coker with a dumb, animal-like emptiness in her eyes, and tears rolled down her ravaged face. “They mean to kill us all,” she said.
Coker consoled her, “We’ve lots of ammunition. And lots of guns. If Kellerman knew about this, so do others, and they’ll be along to help.”
So they dug in, returning fire only when one of the Pettis boys moved his position, and for that whole day gunfire blasted spasmodically, with no apparent effect.
Then, in late afternoon, sheep began wandering into the area, and as each one appeared, inquisitive and shy, Orvid Pettis shot it. The noise would cause other sheep to investigate, and whenever one came into range, Orvid shot it through the head. His marksmanship was uncanny and caused Fat Laura to whisper, “He can kill anything he puts his mind to.”
“Not you or me,” Coker said grimly, and with well-aimed shots he kept the killers at bay.
But shortly before sunset Frank Pettis worked his way around to a rock from which he commanded the front of the shack, and while Orvid blasted away at the back, he drew a perfect bead on the window, then waited with extraordinary patience for thirty minutes until someone inside the house moved accidentally into view.
It was Fat Laura. Pettis pulled his trigger and a bullet ripped through the window and into her head, killing her instantly.
“Oh, my God!” Coker groaned. “Laura! Laura!” He crawled along the floor to where she lay in blood and cradled her head in his arms. At the House of Mirrors she had been the girl who tended the other girls when they were sick. She had taken care of cowboys down on their luck and had given Coker three hundred dollars to help build this cabin. She had loved the place and had planted a few hopeless trees to shield it from the wind, and if she was not a good cook, she was enthusiastic, and now she was dead.
“Better come out, Coker, or we’ll burn you out,” Frank Pettis cried.
“Come get me, you bastards,” the South Carolina man shouted back.
“We’re gonna burn you out,” Frank warned.
“I ain’t no woman. You can’t kill me.”
“Is the whore dead?”
It was an ill-matched fight. Never once did Bufe Coker get a clean shot at either of the Pettis boys. With practiced skill they hid behind rocks, shooting only when they had a good chance of hitting him, and he was powerless to punish them in return.
Night fell, a dark and moonless night, and he could not check on what they were up to. He had to stay awake to protect the cabin, and he spent the hours moving from front to back, firing at unexpected moments to assure them that he was on guard. They could take turns sleeping, but not he.
About three in the morning he decided that Orvid was asleep, for he recognized the different sounds made by their guns, and he made a desperate move. Firing twice from the front window, he ran quickly to the back and out into the night, blazing away at the spot where he thought Orvid might be resting. No luck. Orvid was not there, and Coker barely made it back to the cabin. He fired madly at the shapes closing in on him but apparently hit nothing.
“Coker,” came the warning voice. “You got till dawn to come out. Then we burn the place.”
The next two hours were quiet. And as dawn brightened, Coker could see the prostrate body of Fat Laura sprawled in her own blood. It made him sick to see her hair matting in the gore that surrounded her, but she was too heavy for him to lug onto their bed. “Jesus, Laura,” he whispered.
With the first ray of sun Frank Pettis sent a fusillade at the front of the house, moving constantly closer, and while Coker was occupied shooting back, Orvid succeeded in sneaking to the rear and setting the shack ablaze.
For thirty minutes Coker fought the fire, stopping at intervals to shoot at shadows, but he was powerless to halt the flames. And all the time Frank Pettis was shouting, “Come on out, Coker, or you’ll cook.”
So in the end the South Calinky man grabbed his LeMat, checked the chambers of the sawed-off shotgun and waited till the flames crept about his legs. Then, instead of coming out the front door, he burst through the window, firing at the spot where he supposed them to be, but they were not there.
In the moment before Coker leaped, Frank had cautioned his younger brother, “He’ll try to jump us from the window,” so when Coker came out, he sprang right into the fire of two deadly rifles. He took seven shots in the face and chest and collapsed before the chambers of the LeMat were exhausted.
“Better throw them damned sheepmen in the fire,” Frank said, and they picked up the stiff body of the man who had brought the warning, swung him back and forth a couple of times and lofted him easily into the flames. Then they lifted Coker high in the morning air and with a powerful toss sent him arching into the embers of his cabin.
“That’ll learn ’em,” Frank said.
When the various murders were discovered, sheep owners appealed to the governors of both Wyoming and Colorado for protection, but were told that no evidence was at hand that these crimes had been directed against sheepmen as such. As for the Pettis boys’ having been employed by cattlemen to settle range differences, that suggestion was abhorrent to any right-thinking man. As a matter of fact, there was not a shred of proof connecting the Pettis boys with the killings, and it seemed more probable that the crimes had been committed by itinerant Mexican sheepmen. The Clarion summarized local opinion when it editorialized:
It is offensive to the decent citizens of this city when malicious and ill-founded rumors are circulated to the effect that two law-abiding visitors from Kansas are accused of the most heinous crimes. No substantial charge of any kind has been leveled against them, and none can be proved. We would remind our readers who the five victims were. A Mexican, a Confederate who took arms against the Union, a woman of bad character and worse performance, a troublemaker who ran about the countryside spreading rumors, and a miserable outcast charged with having committed abominations with sheep he was supposed to guard. While we do not condone murder, we cannot but feel that the area is the better off for the departure of these unfortunates, and the sooner others like them leave, the happier decent citizens will be.
Messmore Garrett, having a clearer understanding of what had happened and what might happen, armed himself and rode out to Amos Calendar’s sheep station, where he said, “They’ll get you next … or me. You any idea where they might be holing up?”
“I do.”
“Tell me and I’ll get them.”
“That’s my job. You watch the sheep.”
So Calendar rode in to Centennial and sent a boy up to the headquarters to fetch Jim Lloyd. When the subforeman came down, Calendar said, “Jim, they killed Coker.”
“I know.”
“He was your friend.”
“He certainly was.”
“They’re holed out in the saloon at Blue Valley.”
“What are you goin’ to do about it?”
“With your help, I’m gonna kill ’em.”
“My help?”
“He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
Jim licked his lips. He wanted to avoid gunfire, but Bufe Coker had been his friend. In the fight with the Comanche, Bufe had saved his life. In the worse fight with the Pettis boys, Bufe had saved him again. They were more than friends, they were brothers, and Jim could recall what Bufe had said on that last night they had ridden the two-to-four: “If two fellas eat dust in drag positions for four months, that makes ’em brothers, don’t it?”
“I’ll go.”
And as they were riding west toward the mountains, they were joined by a most unexpected volunteer. They heard their names called: “Jim, Calendar!” It was Potato Brumbaugh on his favorite horse.
“You after the Pettis boys?”
“We are.”
“I’ll join you.”
“Why?” Calendar asked.
“When they tried to burn me out, Zendt and Skimmerhorn helped me.”
“Was they the Pettis boys?”
“Sure. Didn’t you know that? The cattlemen in Wyoming hired them.”
No stranger posse ever rode the trail: an aging Russian farmer not directly involved, a young rancher-businessman who hated guns, a deadly marksman lugging a buffalo Sharps, who knew that he must strike first or not at all. The three rode west till they reached the trail leading up Clear Creek to Blue Valley, and there they cut far to the north over rough country.
“The Pettis boys never sleep,” Calendar warned. “The slightest change attracts their attention. No one must see us.” This was a long speech for Calendar, but each phrase was packed with meaning; a casual traveler stopping by might say, “Saw three fellows on the trail,” and that would be enough to alert the killers, so that when the strangers reached town they would be gunned down, just on chance.
So the three avengers dismounted and led their horses to the upper rim of the valley, where they could look down into the former mining camp. Tethering their horses, they started the descent, going slowly and very carefully lest even the snap of a twig betray them.
It was about five in the afternoon when they reached the level of the old camp, and there they waited till dusk. What an ugly place it was, Jim thought, as he studied the dirty stream that ran past his feet, the weather-stained boarding of the old mines, the dismal saloon, the few houses. Once he had heard Levi Zendt describe the valley as it had been when Alexander McKeag and Clay Basket occupied it, and he thought, They must have been thinking of a different place.
When dark settled over the valley, Calendar quietly slipped into the main street and with infinite patience scouted the saloon. When he came back his eyes glowed with excitement. “They’re in there!” And then he explained the battle plans: “I’ll take care of Frank. The one with the mustache. Jim, you’ve got to get Orvid. He’s a killer, Jim, and either you get him on the first shot or he’ll get us. Potato, you fire at Orvid, too.”
He showed his accomplices how the two gunmen were standing, and Jim interrupted: “I don’t shoot no man in the back.”
“It won’t be in the back, not when I’m through.”
“Calendar, I will not shoot a man in the back.”
For the first time in all the years that Jim had known him, Calendar touched another person. Placing his hand on Jim’s arm, he said, “I promise, it won’t be in the back.”
Through the darkness the three men crept toward the saloon. Finally they stood at the door, and in the silence Calendar looked at each man. He took a very deep breath, then did a most extraordinary thing.
Kicking open the door, he uttered a wild, terrifying scream that might have come from a pack of maddened coyotes. It was unearthly, hellish, a scream of such intensity that everyone in the bar, including the Pettis boys, automatically turned toward the door and grabbed for their guns.
As they did so, Calendar fired his buffalo gun right at Frank Pettis, blasting a great hole through the outlaw’s chest. At the same moment Jim Lloyd fired five times at Orvid Pettis, who stumbled and fell forward, to intercept full in the face an enormous load of buckshot fired by Potato Brumbaugh.
Less than ten seconds after Calendar’s scream, the three intruders had backed out of the saloon and disappeared into the night. No one volunteered to pursue them, considering their devastating fire power, nor did any of the witnesses try to identify them. Everything had happened so swiftly that men could not even agree as to how many gunmen there were: “They was four, I seen them, and one was black.” “No, they was two, the shotgun and the little fellow with two revolvers.” No one saw three men.
When the avengers were gone, two comments were made, and each passed into the folklore of the ghost town. One ashen-faced man, staring at the body of Orvid Pettis, asked in a whisper, “How we gonna know which was which? This’n ain’t got no head.” And the bartender, gaping in horror at the ghastly hole made in Frank’s chest by the buffalo gun, said, “I could pass a stein of beer through there and not get the edges wet.”
Spring, in 1886, was unusually dry, and years after the disaster residents of the area recalled: “Spring was mighty dry that year and the summer that followed was even drier.”
Otherwise it was a fine summer, with long even days that produced exhilaration and cool nights made for visiting. On the eastern range Amos Calendar tended his sheep, seeing no one for weeks on end, talking only to his dog Rajah, a singular animal who listened so intently and with so much joy in human companionship that he seemed capable of talking back.
Along the river Potato Brumbaugh pursued his various objectives, forging a farm that was practically a demonstration of how to apply water to land, how to make the desert blossom. He now shipped carloads of melons to Denver, raised sweet corn and was making a big success of his sugar beets, which for the time being he fed to cattle, since there was no sugar factory in the region. “A strange place,” he complained. “A land capable of growing the best beets but the men too lazy to build a plant to make sugar. In Russia we had a plant forty years ago.” He intended doing something about this.
In town Levi Zendt was coming to the end of a fruitful life. His many projects had prospered modestly; his son was doing well and only the absence of his daughter Clemma disturbed him. He was sorry that the area no longer contained Indians, for he felt deprived when day after day passed with no blanket-shawled Arapaho coming to his store to sit and watch proceedings. “This land was made for Indians,” he told Lucinda one day, “and without them we are all cheated.”
The man in town whose fortunes were taking a dramatic turn for the better was Messmore Garrett. His determination to protect his land and to extend his sheep holdings had been so persistent and so valiant that the bankers had begun to respect him, and even the Clarion declared a truce in its war against sheep.
In fact, the paper had become noticeably more tolerant of many things, including Englishmen, as demonstrated by the gracious article it ran in late June:
A recent visitor to our offices lent grace and a good deal of dignity to our modest surroundings. It was none other than the venerable Earl Venneford of Wye, come to Centennial for the first time to inspect his far-flung holdings. The Earl, a handsome, thin, gray-haired man in his seventies, spoke with an accent that would lend distinction to the Denver stage. He could play Hamlet’s uncle or King Lear as well as those who customarily essay those roles, although his voice might be a little weak for the mad scene in the latter play.
When we asked how the ranch was going, he replied like any eastern banker, “We always seem to be buying more cattle than we sell.” But his most memorable response came when we asked admiringly, “What kind of cloth is in your jacket?” For the information of our readers it was a heavy bluish-gray with what appeared to be little sticks of sagebrush woven in. “It’s Harris tweed, from the Hebrides,” he told us. “Cured by leaving it in horsep—.” He invited us to test the truth of this last statement by smelling the cloth, and from our long acquaintance with stables we are prepared to affirm that the noble Earl was telling the truth.
Venneford spent three weeks at the ranch, then rode in a comfortable wagon up to Line Camp Four, where he reveled in the piñon trees and erosion sculptures, but he felt himself really at home only when he reached the Cheyenne Club, with its afternoon polo games and delightful tennis. The long summer evenings he spent outdoors playing croquet by torchlight, a game at which in spite of his years he was most adept.
Charlotte Seccombe was with him constantly, assuring him of the progress of his ranch and introducing him to the other British ranchers in the area. At times the club seemed an adjunct of some military club off St. James’s Street, so many Englishmen with military connections kept appearing, but mostly it was the hearty cattlemen of Wyoming who clustered around Venneford to talk about mutual problems. Claude Barker was there with his tales of fending off sheepmen from Horse Creek, and the sturdy Scotsmen from Chugwater gave their own accounts of that feud.
But when the festivities were over, and Lord Venneford was preparing to board the train for Chicago and New York, where the boat would be waiting, he struck fear in Oliver Seccombe’s heart by announcing in a thin, reedy voice, “I’ve seen wonders I never expected to see. Oysters in Wyoming! The beauty of Line Camp Four! The charm of my hostess! And God knows what else. The only thing I haven’t seen is cattle, so as soon as I reach home I shall be sending Finlay Perkin out to look into that. He shall be wanting a strict accounting. Of that I’m sure.” And without further formality, he strode onto the train and disappeared.
It must be said in his favor that in no way did Oliver Seccombe seek to incriminate his wife. He did not accuse her of forcing him to waste money, nor did he ridicule the castle she had built at headquarters. He had enjoyed thirteen years of happiness with her and found her now as exciting and unpredictable as when he first courted her. She still sang her words with a delicious accent; she still laughed at the contrarieties of life and had never once complained that existence in Colorado was less than she had hoped. She loved the range and was an exemplary ranch wife.
It was true that she wasted money, but principally it was her own. That Oliver had “begged and borrowed a bit from the ranch,” as he put it, was his decision, not hers, and no matter what defalcations Finlay Perkin might uncover, they would rest on Seccombe’s head and not his wife’s.
“Why is Venneford sending Finlay Perkin out?” Charlotte asked.
“We’ve spent somewhat more than we can account for,” he evaded.
“What do you mean?”
“Book count. We ought to have a lot more cattle on the land than we do.”
“That’s easy to explain. Cows sometimes don’t have calves.”
They rode by wagon back to Line Camp Four, and there he forced her to face up to the difficult problems that would be raised when Perkin arrived with his notebooks and papers.
“He’ll have a list of every cow we ever bought, and he’ll want to tick off each one.”
“Will that be possible?”
“Not with a thousand cowboys could he do it.”
“Then, what’s the worry?”
“He’ll niggle away until he turns up every discrepancy, and in the end he’ll see that somewhere around twenty-four thousand cattle have disappeared.”
“What in the world …”
“They have disappeared, Charlotte. No one’s stolen them, like that, but they just aren’t here. And how can I explain that to a man like Perkin?”
How indeed? He arrived at Cheyenne on September 15, 1886, and insisted that he be taken immediately to Line Camp Four. He was a small, wispish man sixty-six years old, accompanied by so much luggage that it required two porters to lift it off the train and into a special wagon. In the past eighteen years he had never once been outside Bristol, not even to visit his parents in Kincardineshire or the bankers in London, yet from reading reports and studying maps he had an exact knowledge of Wyoming and northern Colorado.
“Ah yes,” he said thinly as he sat in the carriage, hands folded, looking left and right. “This is the Union Pacific and our lots eighty-one through eighty-seven lie just over there. Yes, this is the deep well we drilled in 1881, and I see it’s still pumping. This, I take it, is the new Glidden barbed wire. Is it standing up well?”
He knew to the quarter mile when they should be turning south to reach the camp, and as he approached it he recognized new fencing and pastures from which cattle had been removed. “It’s a pity,” he said, “a great pity that the government won’t sell us these intervening sections.”
“We have the use of them anyway,” Seccombe said with an attempt at airiness.
“Using is never the same as owning,” Perkin said abruptly. “Ah, this is the gate to the camp itself.”
When the carriage drew up before the cabin, he did not even look at the living quarters but went directly to the low stone barn, inspecting its woodwork and the stalls for the horses. “Splendid building,” he said. “In 1868 when Skimmerhorn recommended wood I counseled stone. See how it’s stood, as good today as when it was built. Clinger did a fine job.”
“Who?” Seccombe asked.
“Clinger. The stonemason from Cheyenne. Expensive, but in the long run the cheapest. Tell me, before we go in, do you happen to have any of the Illinois Shorthorns pastured nearby?”
“They’re off east.”
“Very good.”
During three days of preliminary investigation, everything Perkin wanted to see was either off east or off west, but this absence apparently did not disturb him. He simply noted in his books that the Illinois Shorthorns were for the moment grazing to the east.
He wanted to know everything, and quickly demonstrated that he comprehended much more of the intricate maneuverings of ranch management than Seccombe. His questions were quiet, never provocative, and never abandoned until he had a specific answer which he could write in his book.
“He is on to every discrepancy,” Seccombe told Charlotte the third night as they went to bed.
“He seems to be building a case against you, Oliver. I had the strong feeling that he was recording your answers so that later on he could show them to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd and invite them to contradict you.” To this Seccombe had no response, for he, too, had guessed the nature of Perkin’s game.
“Tell me, Oliver, will those two support you?” No reply. “I mean, can we trust them to be fair?” No reply. “What I mean, Oliver, is, will it be to their advantage to betray you … No, that sounds as if you were guilty of something evil. What I mean is …”
“I know what you mean. Skimmerhorn and Lloyd are two of the most honest men in ranching. That’s why we’ve done so well … if it weren’t for that damned book count Bristol’s been relying on.” He paced the floor. “Why can’t they realize that on a ranch this big, you can’t go around earmarking every cow?”
“That’s what Perkin wants.”
“That’s what he’ll never get.”
“Then you trust Skimmerhorn?”
“I’d better. He has our fate in his hands.”
They had estimated Perkin correctly, for he was patiently building a document against them. It would be meticulous and just, but it would be terribly damning. What they had not anticipated was his thoroughness when it came to cattle.
“We’ll ride down to headquarters,” Seccombe suggested on the fourth morning.
“No,” Perkin said, “we’ll start over at Line Camp Five.”
“What do you wish to see there?”
“I’m going to count the cattle,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’ll start west and work over to the Nebraska border.”
“You can’t count …”
“That’s been the trouble, Seccombe. You may not be able to count, but I can, and I propose to start tomorrow. Assemble the cowboys.”
And when the cowboys reported at Line Camp Five, not far from where the dinosaur bones had been found, Seccombe discovered that Perkin’s luggage consisted mainly of cans of special blue paint developed in Germany, and a dab of this paint was to be placed down the spine of every living animal on the four million acres of Venneford Ranch, insofar as Perkin could catch them.
When word was passed, the cowboys began to laugh. Perkin showed no displeasure. “If we paint each cow, then we won’t be tempted to count twice,” he explained. “By the time we reach Nebraska we’ll know exactly how many we have.”
“We’ll miss thousands,” a foreman protested. “You can’t ride up every draw. Half our cattle may be in Wyoming right now, looking for good grass. We ain’t got much left here.”
“It will be your job to search the draws and if necessary ride into Wyoming,” Perkin said calmly, and for five weeks this prim little man rode in a buckboard eastward across the great prairie, dabbing blobs of German paint on such cattle as could be rounded up and brought before him. He was tireless. Cowboys who had been in the saddle all their lives grew exhausted in the warmth of this unusual autumn, merely following Perkin and his buckboard.
By the time he had worked his way to the Nebraska border he had used up gallons of paint and had been up every draw on the ranch, seen all the watering places, the homesteaded areas and the government sections interspliced with the Venneford holdings.
“You were wise to run the sheepmen off those eastern edges,” he said approvingly, and he praised the fencing program. “I like to see our own land protected.” But it grew painfully apparent to everyone that no matter how many Crown Vee cattle were daubed with paint, the grand total was pitifully short of what the Venneford outfit had presumably purchased.
“We’ll ride back to headquarters,” Seccombe proposed during the last week in October, but Perkin astonished him yet again by saying, “No, we’ll go directly back to Line Camp Five.”
“But why?”
“I want to run a test. We’ll inspect all the cattle we find there. Check the paint. See how many we overlooked the first time, then correct our figures accordingly.”
It was a hilarious undertaking, one that cowboys sang about for years afterward:
Finlay Perkin is a-jerkin’
One end of an empty rope.
His bright blue paint has grown quite faint
The little guy has got no hope.
The song was accurate, if unkind. When the buckboard reached Chalk Cliff the cowboys corralled some two hundred Crown Vee steers, and not one bore a sign of paint. There were sniggers as the little Scotsman inspected each animal and recorded it as a new find. But after he did this for each of the two hundred, it occurred to him that for the first inspection to have missed every one of these steers was unlikely.
“We’ve had no rain,” he said reflectively.
“None,” Skimmerhorn said.
“Catch me some more animals.”
So they moved to a different area and rounded up another three hundred, and not one of them showed any paint, either. “The chemist assured me the paint was waterproof,” he said with no intimation of complaint. He was merely reporting what he had been told.
“How about sun-proof?” Skimmerhorn asked.
“On that he didn’t commit himself,” Perkin said, so they got some boards and he painted stripes, and the sun that autumn was so strong that after a few days the stripes began to disintegrate, and the costly, time-consuming experiment proved worthless.
“We’re back to book count,” he said primly. “We know there ought to be fifty-three thousand cattle and we hope there are more.”
“It always comes back to book count,” Seccombe said.
Now, at last, they rode to headquarters, and after one look at the costly mansion Perkin knew that he had a substantial case, whether German paint lasted or not.
“I should like to check the books on your buildings,” he said in clipped accents. “Barns first.”
Seccombe was able to prove how the red barns, the most handsome in Colorado, had been paid for, and the corrals and the storage areas. But when it came to the castle the accounts were in deplorable shape.
“Now, these funds, if I interpret correctly, came from the account of Henry Buckland, your wife’s father in Bristol? Good, that can be checked. But these funds over here?”
Seccombe fumbled, and never once did Perkin hurry him or in any way agitate him. If Seccombe drew back from explaining exactly where the funds had originated, Perkin said nothing, made notes and passed on to the next item. His thrust for the jugular was insatiable. He knew that grave misapplications had occurred, but he could not easily penetrate to the specific defalcation, and until he could do so, he had no case, and he knew it.
Then abruptly he left the house and started probing into the irrigation expenses. He could see no reason why Venneford should have spent so much money bringing water onto land that didn’t need it, and the more he saw of the ditches and the useless meadows, the more concerned he became, until Skimmerhorn prevailed upon him to visit Potato Brumbaugh, who reacted with enthusiasm: “Mr. Perkin, look at those grasslands. Look at those stacks of hay for winter feeding.”
“But in this climate we’ve never needed hay for winter feeding,” Perkin pointed out. “This is a waste.”
“Mr. Perkin!” Brumbaugh shouted. He pronounced the name Berkin, much to the Scotsman’s irritation. “The winter will come when that hay will be gold. On my farm I have almost as much hay as you do, and the winter will come when I shall sell it for dollars uncounted.”
When the interview ended Perkin asked acidly, “Who is that man?”
“The most successful farmer in these parts,” Skimmerhorn said. “A Russian.”
“A Russian!” Perkin exclaimed. “What’s he doing here?” And Brumbaugh’s evidence was discounted. The irrigation project was an indefensible wastage of Bristol funds.
On the fifteenth of November, Finlay Perkin knew all he required to know, and that night, in fairness to the Seccombes, he told them frankly the results of his investigation: “Lord Venneford sent me here to ascertain certain facts. I’ve done so. You’ve wasted our money. You’ve accepted cattle without counting them. I have a strong suspicion that you’ve been in concert with the sellers. And it’s clear that you’ve sold off our calves and cows to pay for this monstrous castle. I’ll present my findings to his Lordship, and I must warn that he may decide to start legal proceedings. Certainly, if he seeks my counsel, I shall advise him to do so, for if I ever saw fraudulent conversion of corporate funds, it’s here.” With that he went to bed.
He was not able to catch the train at Cheyenne, for that night the thermometer dropped crazily to several degrees below zero, most improbable for that time of year. “We’ll go tomorrow,” Seccombe advised, but before morning a howling storm attacked, depositing seven inches of snow and piling it in drifts.
“In November it melts quickly,” Seccombe assured his visitor. Certainly he did not want to keep the unpleasant little man a day longer than necessary, but that afternoon the storm increased, throwing down another six inches. On the third night seventeen inches fell. From the northern borders of Montana to the Platte the west was snowbound, and it would remain that way through a long and disastrous winter.
The burden of the blizzard fell principally on Jim Lloyd, for it was his job to keep the cattle alive, and he proceeded in his efforts to do so. In the first hours of the storm he rode to Potato Brumbaugh’s farm and told the Russian, “I’m buying all your hay.”
“Smart move,” Potato said. “We’re due for a long, hard winter.” He would not give Jim all his hay, for he had a few cattle of his own and his bones warned him that this snow was different, but he did sell a portion, keeping the brown piles, now under two feet of snow, on his place till Jim sent his men to haul them away.
When Jim presented the bill on the afternoon of the first day, Finlay Perkin said furiously, “One little storm and you panic.” To his surprise Jim fought back, briefly but with silencing effect: “It’s my job to feed those cattle. I’m gonna do it.”
On the second day, when drifts had closed the roads and were beginning to cover the windward sides of the ranch buildings, Jim saddled his strongest horse and tried to visit the longhorns in nearby pastures, but he was unable to breast the accumulations of snow. No matter what direction he chose, he could not get far from the ranch, and during that whole day he saw no cattle.
On the third day he had difficulty getting his horse from the stable. A howling wind had sent the snow whipping across the countryside until it encountered some stationary object; then drifts piled to an amazing height. At the headquarters they reached ten and twelve feet.
On the evening of the third day Jim saw his first cattle. They had come down from the north, moving stolidly with the storm, keeping the wind to their backs. In this way they hoped to stumble upon feed and, more important, water.
The first freezing beasts packed up against a fence, and when later arrivals pushed in behind them, those in front broke down the fence and drifted eastward. Jim tried to halt them, threw out thin supplies of hay from the barns, but they pushed on, always keeping their heads away from the whipping wind. For days they pressed on, till the storm abated, eating nothing, drinking nothing, never resting until they came upon a fence or some other immovable object. At that perilous moment they would begin to pile up, and if not led to safety, many would perish as one heaped upon the other.
“They’re drifting with the storm!” Jim told the hands. “We’ve got to stop them!”
So the cowboys scattered across the frozen ranch, miles from food or water, and tried valiantly to head off the slowly moving cattle. It was heartbreaking work. The frostbitten men struggled through drifts, their horses deep in snow, and when they did get to the cattle, they could only try to head them in directions which seemed safer than those they were pursuing.
To feed them was impossible. “We’ll have to wait till it quits,” Jim advised Skimmerhorn, and he reported the situation to Seccombe and Perkin.
“Will the loss of cattle be serious?” Perkin asked.
“We could lose them all,” Skimmerhorn said bleakly.
“Oh, dear!” Perkin said. And he canceled his trip back to Bristol. If the blizzard posed a threat of that magnitude, it was his job to stay on the spot and provide what help he could.
He proved surprisingly resourceful. When no thaw came and cattle at the far reaches of the ranch would surely starve, it was he who proposed, “Load boxcars with Brumbaugh’s hay and ship it out to Julesburg. Hire men to distribute it from there.” And when the railroad, sensing that the ranchers had no alternatives, upped the freight rates, it was Perkin who fought them, threatening to write letters to the London Times. To Jim this seemed a futile gesture, but it had prompt results in Omaha, since the railroad had to depend substantially on financing from London, and realized that a condemnatory letter in the Times might adversely affect bond issues.
But as before, the principal burden fell on Jim Lloyd, and it was he who took teams into the remotest corners of the great ranch, succoring cattle wherever he found them. Thousands of head had wandered down from Wyoming, and he fed them, too, when he came upon them along the Platte. He guessed that perhaps as many as ten thousand Crown Vee longhorns had wandered into Nebraska.
“We won’t see them till spring,” he told Perkin when he returned to headquarters.
“But will we find them?” Perkin asked.
“Maybe a thousand,” Jim said.
“You mean nine thousand may die!” the little clerk asked.
“They’re probably dead now,” Jim said dolefully.
The Crown Vee animals who had stayed on the ranch survived, thanks to Jim’s heroic efforts and the hay he had prudently stored up, and when Perkin accompanied Seccombe to the Cheyenne Club in early January and heard the stories of total disaster that had overtaken some of the Englishmen ranching in Wyoming, he began to appreciate the good management at Venneford.
“There’s never been a storm like it,” Claude Barker said. “For fifty miles you can’t see where Horse Creek is—frozen solid and covered over from bank to bank. If the thaw doesn’t come soon, we’ll be wiped out.”
“No,” Perkin assured him. “Our man Jim Lloyd told me he had three or four thousand of your cattle down on our pastures.”
“Thank God. They getting any food?”
“Jim’s feeding them some hay.”
“Thank God.”
By mid-January it looked as if the freak storm had worn itself out. A series of warm days began to melt the snow, and on the trip back to the ranch Seccombe said, “Two more days of this and the snow will be off the grass. Then you’ll see the cattle recover.”
“Oliver,” the little Scotsman said, “I am deeply impressed by the men you’ve hired. They know cattle. Better yet, they love them. Crown Vee came out better than any of the others, and I shall take this into consideration in my report.”
The two men reached headquarters in a state of suspended animosity. Charlotte had a piping-hot dinner waiting, and Perkin told her, “Your husband turns out to be a prudent rancher,” and she replied stiffly, “We’re so pleased that you could see for yourself what running a ranch involves.” And disregarding her attitude, he said gallantly, “I’ll be leaving Friday, and taking with me the kindest memories.”
Again he did not leave. That night a wind unprecedented in western history roared in from the arctic, dropping the thermometer from a benevolent fifty-three above to a gelid twenty-two below. The moisture which had accumulated from the melting snow froze into an impenetrable layer of ice.
“This is most grave,” Seccombe said when he saw the glistening shield.
“Why?” Perkin asked nervously, unable to comprehend what had hit the ranch.
“The grass is sealed off. No cow can reach a blade of it. If this doesn’t melt within two days …”
Instead of melting, the ice became even thicker, for the thermometer dropped to minus twenty-seven.
Then, on the night of January 15, the great blizzard of 1887 struck. It piled sixteen inches of snow atop the layers of ice, creating drifts which covered barns and obliterated roads and dropping the temperature to a historic forty-five degrees below zero. All pasturelands were buried beyond the capacity of any animal to penetrate. With no hay in storage, no feedcake available, most ranchers in western America sat impotent by their hearths and prayed for the storm to abate, while millions of cattle froze to death or starved.
For five terrible days the intense cold continued, with more snow each night. The entire prairie was encased in ice, and anguished ranchers were forced to acknowledge that their dangerous gamble of running cattle on an open range, with no stores of feed to succor them in case of storm, had come to an end.
The cow was the animal least fitted to fight a blizzard. The buffalo had learned to swing his massive head and push away the snow. The horse would paw down through the snow, finding grass beneath. Sheep would eat snow if water was lacking. Turkeys roosted in trees to escape the drifts, and chickens pecked till they reached ground and gulped snow to form water. The cow never learned any of these survival tricks; up to its belly in snow, it would die of thirst.
Jim Lloyd had a cowhand from Texas called Red, who fancied himself as a roper. He walked with an exaggerated swagger and kept his thumbs locked in his belt, the way he had seen older men do. He was twenty-two and could be one of the best if he settled down. During one respite in the blizzard Red volunteered to ride the north boundary to report on what was happening. This was sheer bravado, and Jim allowed him every opportunity to change his mind. Not Red! He saddled up and headed east, taking pack rations and a flask. He was gone for nine days, and when he got back he was gaunt and red-eyed.
Finlay Perkin suggested that he come into the kitchen at the castle and report on what he had seen, and he sat there just like the tough cowboy he wanted to be, gripping his coffee cup with both hands and talking in clipped sentences. But then as the phrases came out, his lower lip began to tremble and he had to put his cup down. For long moments he could not speak.
“I seen …” He looked helplessly at Seccombe. “I seen in that draw by the three piñons …” He could not go on.
After a period of silence he began again. “I seen dead cattle piled one on top of another till they seemed to fill the whole draw. I seen Pine Creek lined with what musta been a thousand carcasses. I seen over by the draw that runs into Line Camp Two a whole field of ice with horns and noses sticking out, musta been five hundred longhorns buried there in the first storm. I seen …”
He couldn’t continue. Dropping his red head onto the table, he remained silent, too tough to cry, too choked to speak. His listeners looked away, and after a while he mumbled, “Half our herd must be dead.”
It was. But even so, Crown Vee came off better than most, solely because of the unflagging efforts of Jim Lloyd and his feeding teams. When the icy snow did not abate, he encouraged the carpenters to convert the ranch wagons into rude sleighs, and these he drove to all parts of the ranch, hauling hay. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day, and sometimes when he came unexpectedly upon a herd of longhorns who had perished in some draw, their bleak faces still turned hopefully away from the wind, he came close to tears.
Across the west these were days of anguish, when tough cowboys like Texas Red could not contain the tragedy they saw, when gay and gallant ranchers like Claude Barker at Horse Creek surveyed the situation and said, “Well, that’s the end of the ranch. It was a good thing while it lasted.”
The open-range cattle industry as the ranch barons had enjoyed it in the golden years of 1880 through October of 1886 was gone forever. No more could a man run his cattle wild through the clement winter, depending upon them to forage grass from the lightly frozen ground. No more could a man boast of owning five million acres of unfenced land and cattle so numerous he could not count them. The old days were dead; the Englishmen who had done so much to pioneer the west would be going home. New ideas would be needed: fences, new types of cattle, new systems of control.
At no ranch were the consequences more bizarre than at Venneford, where during the dreadful days three mutually suspicious people were imprisoned within a castle—Oliver, Charlotte and Perkin, each in his separate corner tower. They met only for meals served in the drafty dining room—each keeping a watchful eye upon the other, each aware that the basis of his life was shifting, each pondering how best he could adjust to new requirements. The wind wailed and the ice formed, and each remained in his cell, like monks in a crumbling monastery a thousand years before.
Oliver Seccombe was now sixty-nine years old, a man whose life was fairly well used up. It was ending in decay, with an ugly lawsuit threatening, and he saw no escape from almost certain catastrophe. He would have to surrender his position at the ranch, the lovely days at Line Camp Four among the piñons, his position as squire of the region. Leaving Charlotte’s castle would be no sorrow; it had been an expensive demon. But leaving the ranch would be, for this was his creation. Without his persistent enthusiasm it could never have come into being, and it was ironic that he should have been an agent of its destruction. The only consolation he had was that even after the collapse, Charlotte would possess enough money of her own to survive on, and somehow she would be able to find a good life. As for himself, Perkin had quite openly suggested that he resign. Well, ranchers in Argentina were always making inquiries among the Englishmen in Wyoming, and perhaps he could hook up with one of them. His deepest regret would be the loss of the Cheyenne Club, that amiable group of gentlemen, that Athens of the west, where the food was good, the wine better and the talk best of all. Damn, he would miss that club.
Charlotte Seccombe had no such elegiac thoughts. Shrewd girl that she was, she realized something that neither her husband nor Perkin had yet thought about. With the tremendous losses suffered by all ranches during the blizzard—as high as ninety-three percent in some parts of Montana—the discrepancy between Finlay Perkin’s book count and the actual number of cattle on the range was wiped out! It simply did not exist! In October 1886 Finlay Perkin could point to his ledgers and say, “You paid for so-and-so many cattle, but you have only so-and-so many. You must have stolen the difference.” But in March 1887 Seccombe could reply, “The missing cattle died in the storm.” As the bartender at the Cheyenne Club had cynically observed during the worst of the winter, “Forget the dead cattle, gentlemen. Doctor your account books.” She perceived that Perkin would have no case in court, even though he might make things unpleasant with the Bristol directors. So she began to treat him with studied contempt, inventing various ways to demean him. She laughed at the wrong time and took delight in contradicting him or even making him look foolish. Twice during the blizzard, when they were locked inside the castle with poor food and inadequate heat, she brought up the subject of the paint. “We lost a great deal of money and effort on that foolishness,” she said. “The paint cost little,” Perkin said defensively. “True, but the hours the cowboys wasted! They could have been cutting fall hay!” As for her husband, she had only the kindliest thoughts, but they were condescending. She saw that he had not the acumen of Perkin, nor the integrity of Skimmerhorn. He was a man gifted with words and initial action, but never one to see a difficult situation through to the end. As she had observed once to Jim Lloyd, whom she respected as a man of courage, “Oliver has never done a dishonest thing in his life.” When Jim looked up in surprise, she added, “He’s always hired someone else.” She hoped Oliver would come out of this impasse in one piece. Perhaps resigning would be the honorable solution. If not, there were other alternatives, both for him and for her.
On Finlay Perkin the blizzard had a profound effect. Up to now, the cloistered little Scotsman had known a horizon delimited by Kincardineshire and Bristol. But in the storm he found himself at the center of a turbulent world where great fortunes could be dissipated overnight, where nature in one vast sweep of her hand could wipe out an area as large as Europe. But he knew it was more than the blizzard. Ranchers who had fallen into sloppy ways will complain that the storm ruined them, he mused as he shivered in his tower, but they were doomed long before the weather changed. Book count, overgrazing, careless management, stubborn refusal to look at new ways of operating—damn, damn, what a wasted world! He understood what should have been done because he was discovering that he liked cattle. He also had a keen appreciation of land; like Jim Lloyd, he had a feeling for what it could be made to do, what it would balk at. He saw Wyoming and Colorado as empires, scarcely touched so far as capacities were concerned. And most of all, he had evolved a very solid sense of what the cattle ranch of the future ought to be. He was aware that Oliver and Charlotte suspected him of compiling a dossier against them. Far from it. He held them in little consideration; Seccombe had no doubt abused his prerogatives and perhaps had misappropriated Venneford funds for the building of this ridiculous castle, but he was no longer of any central concern. The important thing was to encourage Seccombe to resign as soon as possible. He saw that with the interposition of the blizzard, and the wiping away of whole ranches, it would be petty and unfruitful to make a case at law over the disappearance of a few thousand Crown Vee cattle. He caught himself: What am I saying? A few thousand cattle? He must have diverted twenty thousand. More than six hundred thousand dollars snatched from under our noses. And because of the blizzard, we can’t do a thing about it. Our job is to build solidly for the future. Six years of honest operation and we’ll have a million back …
It was late March when the thaw finally came, and as Jim Lloyd moved about the ranch he saw that many of the emergency measures he had taken had worked. He felt that he had learned from this dreadful year many secrets for the successful handling of cattle, and he was therefore surprised and even a little irritated when Finlay Perkin, with his snooping ways, subjected him to intensive interrogation.
“Did we pay a reasonable sum for our irrigation ditches?”
“Of course. We dug most of them ourselves.”
“Did this Russian, Potato Somebody, profit from the ditches?”
“Mr. Seccombe got the idea from him!”
“Did Mr. Seccombe ever sell any of the hay?”
The little clerk hammered at one point after another, and in time Jim deduced that he was trying to force accusations against Mr. Seccombe, and after this line of questioning had continued for a while Jim got mad and snapped, “Listen, Mr. Perkin, I work for Mr. Seccombe, and he’s one of the best bosses a man ever had. I’ll not say a word against him.”
“I would never want you to,” Perkin said evenly.
“You sure sound as if that’s what you wanted.”
In some dismay Jim took his problem to Mr. Skimmerhorn, who slapped his leg and said, “Damn! He followed the same line with me.”
“What’s he up to?” Jim asked. “Why’s he testing Mr. Seccombe after what we’ve been through?”
Skimmerhorn pondered this for some minutes, drumming with his fingers on the headquarters table. “The logical conclusion,” he said slowly, “is that he hasn’t been testing Mr. Seccombe at all. He’s been testing us.”
“What have we done? Saved his cattle, that’s all.”
“He was testing to see whether we were loyal to the man we’re working for.”
“I was. How about you?”
“I’m loyal to my boss till the moment he goes to jail.”
“You think Mr. Seccombe may go to jail?”
“Not after the blizzard. Could Mr. Perkin possibly go into court and say to the judge, ‘Some of our cattle are missing.’ If the judge owned any, he might reply, ‘Hell, all of mine are missing.’ Perkin has no case and he knows it.”
“I don’t like that little son-of-a-bitch,” Jim said, and he was not on hand when the Scotsman said goodbye.
Seccombe and his wife took the clerk to Cheyenne, where at the railroad station Perkin said his farewells. “You did a remarkable job, Oliver, bringing us through that blizzard. You have our thanks.”
“But you’re determined to press the lawsuit?”
“Not if you resign, Oliver. You’re almost seventy. Resign.”
The train pulled into the station. The conductor cried, “All aboard for North Platte, Grand Island, Omaha!” and Charlotte bade the little clerk a restrained farewell. Oliver shook hands with him formally, then led Charlotte to the Cheyenne Club.
He found there an autumnal mood, as if the end of an era were at hand. Instead of the vivacity that had always marked the card rooms and the bar during March, when winter was ending and polo about to begin, he found solemnity.
“Claude Barker? Wiped out. Hasn’t a sou.”
“Moreton Frewen! Dreadful shape, poor fellow. Said something about South Africa.”
“The Chugwater people? No celebrations in Dundee this year. Someone said their losses were so heavy they may run sheep.”
And so the mournful litany went: thousands of head of cattle starved; on some ranches ninety percent; no more money from Boston; seventeen club members, mind you, seventeen of our most secure men, eliminated—gone bust.
The club itself was in sad shape. More than half the members had lost heavily and were relinquishing membership. The dining rooms, which had once been so gay in spring, were desolate areas where bleak white tablecloths served only to remind the few diners of their fields covered with snow. Even the room in which the Seccombes stayed seemed shabby.
How sad, how infinitely sad it was. Oliver bore it for two days, then told Charlotte with gray despair, “It’s all ending so poorly, so very poorly.”
“Forget that little worm,” she snapped. “He’s powerless to hurt us.”
“It’s not Perkin, it’s me.”
“There’s nothing wrong we can’t put right. What’s book count? If we’d had the damned cattle, they’d have frozen.”
He was dismayed to realize that she had no comprehension of the anguish he was feeling or its cause, and he tried to explain: “When I watched Jim Lloyd in the blizzard … and Texas Red … and saw them taking command, doing the things a cattleman ought to do.”
“They’re paid to do it. It’s their job.”
“Even Claude Barker rode through the storm thirty miles to summon help … lost two fingers …”
“Claude Barker is a silly, ineffectual man, and if he’d stayed home, he wouldn’t have frozen his fingers.”
He said no more. There was an acceptable way for men to behave if they presumed to run cattle, and he had failed. All heart was gone out of him and much of his strength. He longed for the cleanliness of the great ranch he had put together, but when they returned to the preposterous castle which had diverted so much of his energy, he brooded, barely hearing Charlotte’s efforts to cheer him up, avoiding the staff, snapping at Skimmerhorn, drinking each day more heavily and far into the night hours.
Then one day in April, when the sun gave signal that winter was ended, he seemed rejuvenated and moved about the mansion as if he had reached a significant decision. When he came down from his tower he told Charlotte, “I’d like to see how the grass is doing,” and he walked far to the east, where he could see the limitless plains of the empire he had created.
It was Jim Lloyd who heard the shot echoing in the thin spring air. He could not imagine rustlers so close to the main buildings, but he saddled his horse and rode over the rim of the hill, where he found a white-haired man lying on the prairie, his face against the earth. After a while he rode back to the castle, calling in a soft voice so as to cause no panic, “Mrs. Seccombe! Mrs. Seccombe! I think you’d better come.”
Levi Zendt received one more letter from his family in Lancaster. It was written in brother Mahlon’s cramped, ungenerous script:
Brother Levi,
We have just heard the most exciting news. The United States government is passing a law which permits any white man who married an Indian woman under pressure I mean when he married her to help keep the peace before there were soldiers to shoot the Indians, why he is free to divorce her. All you have to do is go to the postoffice and tell them that you had to marry the Indian and they will tell you how you can get divorced and it wont cost you nothing.
This is a fine chance Levi to correct a bad thing because as you know your brothers and me have been mighty ashamed of you being married to that Indian, and she being sister to the Paskinel murderers, and we have kept it very quiet unless the people in Lancaster heard about it. Now you can make everything right. Just go to the postoffice.
Your brother,
Mahlon
Levi was so appalled by the letter that he threw it down, then stared at it, unable to believe that another human being could write in such manner of a woman he had never seen and about whom he knew nothing, except that she was an Indian. He shook his head in disgust, then lifted the sheet of paper by one unsavory corner and with his left hand applied a match to it. He did not want it about where Lucinda might stumble across it, but as it was burning close to his fingers his wife passed, tall and graceful, and she saw the fire and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Burning an old bill,” he said.
“I hope it’s paid.”
“Long ago,” he replied, and the ashes fell to the floor.
But he could not protect her from the indignity of the new law. One morning as he was sweeping out the store he heard her laughing, and when he turned to see her standing in sunlight, she was holding a printed broadside. It explained things pretty much as Mahlon had reported, except that the husband who wished to be free should go to the courthouse, not the post office. She thrust the handbill at him, and after reading only a few lines he crumpled it, uttering several Mennonite obscenities.
“I’m sorry you saw it,” he said.
“You knew about it?”
“Trust Mahlon. That bill I said I was burning, it was Mahlon telling me of my wonderful opportunity.” He put his arm about her and said softly, “This is a disgraceful thing for the government to do. The last in a long line …”
“They’re confused,” Lucinda said, feeling very Indian in her resentment. But as a woman, she could not resist testing the man with whom she had lived for so long, through so many divergencies and trials. “You can get rid of me,” she whispered.
He had led her to a chair, and as she sat he stood before her, a heavy-set Dutchman nearing seventy, a man who had wanted her more than anything else in life. “Get rid of you!” he repeated. “If you were back in St. Louis again, I’d crawl on my knees to fetch you.”
She looked up at him and smiled, and reached out her hand.
As soon as Finlay Perkin returned safely to Bristol, he drafted one of the sagest documents ever to come from the cattle country. It was addressed to the Venneford directors, but with his customary prudence he saw fit to send copies to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd. After a brilliant analysis of the industry as it would have to operate following the blizzard, he gave these instructions:
1. We must get rid of the stupid idea that we can supervise a ranch of four million acres. Sell off all land east of Line Camp Two. Sell off all land north of the Colorado-Wyoming border.
2. Hold back Line Camp Four, with the short trees, and sell it as a separate parcel to some rich industrialist in Cheyenne.
3. When our holdings are compact, fence them in.
4. Settlers who want to erect towns on our property should be given every opportunity to buy personal holdings, and we should contribute free land for the town hall, the churches, the school and a small business district.
5. Sheep are an abomination. Keep them out.
6. Grow more hay.
7. John Skimmerhorn is to be manager. Jim Lloyd is to be his assistant. The young cowboy known as Texas Red is to take Lloyd’s old job. These are tested men, of proven loyalty. We should rely upon their guidance for many years.
And then he added, out of the blue as it were, an eighth directive which would in the long run be more determinative than any of the others, making Crown Vee the famous ranch of the next forty years:
8. I believe our ranch will best prosper if we speedily submerge our longhorns and Shorthorns and change over completely to Herefords. From what I saw of our range, and its climate, the Hereford will thrive and we will prosper therefrom. I am sending by Cunard liner and Union Pacific a fine Hereford bull I saw at Leominster and six of the best Hereford cows. Skimmerhorn is to consult with T. L. Miller, of Beecher, Illinois, and acquire others.
He ended with a clerk’s summary, a sensible conclusion to the disaster of 1886–1887:
9. We have expunged from our books thirty thousand cattle, presumed to be dead in the snow. This represents a loss of three-quarters of a million dollars, but we are prepared to absorb it in the faith that from a proper second start we can quickly recover. I feel certain that Skimmerhorn and Lloyd must have their own private guesses as to how many cattle we actually have. For the moment we shall enter the figure as twenty thousand, but if that is too high or too low, Skimmerhorn must inform us immediately, for never again do we wish to rely upon book count.
When the first carload of Herefords reached Centennial, Jim Lloyd’s life assumed a new direction. He was at the station, of course, when they arrived, and after the planks were carefully laid and the first two cows descended and he saw those handsome white faces and reddish bodies, the sturdy legs and the long, straight backs, he knew that real cattle were at last coming under his care.
But when the bull came down, Jim and all those watching caught their breath, and you could hear sighs, for here was one of the finest animals England had so far produced, King Bristol, close to a ton in weight, with a flawless white face and ponderous red body. His horns sloped down at a sharp angle, ending well below his eyes. His forehead was ample, studded with bone and covered with white curly hair. His snout was a healthy pale pink and his mouth drooped as if he had a surly disposition, while down the back of his neck ran a heavy line of twisted white hair.
What made him most memorable, during those first few minutes, so that people throughout Colorado would soon be talking of King Bristol, was the majestic way he walked, flexing the knees of his forelegs, pulling the hoofs far back, then plopping them down heavily, as if he owned the earth. The cows had come down the ramp tentatively, for to them this was a new, untested land; but the bull came clumping down as if to occupy an empire.
He took possession of the ranch, siring calves from each of the six Hereford cows and from eighteen of the longhorns, too. From his pure Hereford offspring came four bulls, three of whom would be kept for the herd; the bulls from longhorn cows were castrated to be sold later as fat steers.
But the half-longhorn, half-Hereford heifers were kept, and bred back to Hereford bulls, and their offspring were three parts Hereford, one part longhorn; and after five such crosses, Crown Vee had cows that were thirty-one parts Hereford, one part longhorn, and at that point, biologically speaking, the famous longhorns of Texas were extinct so far as Venneford Ranch was concerned.
How beautiful the Herefords were! In the morning when Jim went out to check them in the distant pastures he would delight as a line of heifers turned to face him, their white countenances shining in the sun, their red flanks swollen with unborn calves. No domesticated cattle had ever had the capacity to generate love in a man’s heart the way a string of Herefords could. They were clean beasts, easy to handle, responsive to good treatment and astonishingly able to fend for themselves in unfavorable conditions.
“Herefords will survive where others will perish” became the axiom of the unprotected range. The cows were good mothers too, but most of all, they were beautiful and well suited to range conditions in the west.
“They stand on the range as if they had been carved there,” Jim told Skimmerhorn one morning as they surveyed the new calves. “A calf one day old looks ready to fight a wolf.”
But the stunning animals were the great Hereford bulls. King Bristol became the most famous stud in the west, with other ranchers hauling cows long distances on the chance they might throw a bull his equal. He grew extremely heavy, walking like a mountain from one valley to the next, and Jim never tired of seeing him flex those massive knees, drawing his hoofs in, then throwing them forward to eat up the next reach of earth.
His sons, too, were fine bulls, and some built distinguished reputations on other ranches, but none really compared with the massive progenitor. He was indeed a king, and other ranchers, buying his offspring, would stand for some minutes, just looking at the old fellow and admiring his perfect configuration, his massive head, the down-drooping horns and the heavy snout.
“A child can lead him,” Jim assured the visitors, and sometimes he would allow Ellen Mercy, John Skimmerhorn’s granddaughter, to bring the great bull to the fence. But the thing that pleased Jim most about the Herefords was, as he said, “they look so right on the land.” It was as if the clever breeders of Herefordshire, starting a hundred years earlier, had bred this unique animal from Old English strains for the specific purpose of filling the western ranges in America.
The ranch made its income in two ways. It castrated nineteen-twentieths of its male calves, allowed them to wander over the range and sold them at age three to packers in Chicago, receiving cash in return. The heifers were kept on the ranch to breed, but each year ranch owners from all parts of the west visited Venneford to buy Crown Vee heifers for upgrading their own stock, and a few were released at good prices. Also, from time to time Venneford sold young bulls to start Hereford herds in other areas. Thanks largely to the pioneering efforts of the Venneford people, and Jim Lloyd’s scrupulous attention to honest breeding, the Hereford became the noble animal of the west, and there were many like Jim whose hearts beat faster when they saw the range area populated by “white-faces.”
Some people claimed afterward that the bishop in Chicago had done it on purpose, because, as they pointed out, his father had tried to ranch in Nebraska and had failed. But there seemed little likelihood that any churchman could have been so malicious.
The Union Church on Third Street required a new minister, and the bishop in Chicago sent a glowing report about a serious young man named Bluntworthy who had done a good job in rural Iowa. The bishop did not confide, however, his personal opinion that young Bluntworthy was one of the most gawky and naïve clergymen who had ever served under him. The congregation voted to invite him to preach a trial sermon, and a committee of six, including John Skimmerhorn, Jim Lloyd and three other ranchers, was directed to meet the train, take the reverend to his hotel room and produce him for the Sunday service.
The more they talked with the tall shy man, the more they liked him. His theology seemed sound; he had a reassuring attitude toward pastoral work; and he loved farms: “I was brought up on one and feel that towns like Centennial, representing as they do the best of urban and rural, will form the backbone of this nation.”
“You couldn’t have ideas much better than that,” Skimmerhorn said approvingly, and at the church, even before Bluntworthy began to preach, committee members passed the word, “We’ve found our man,” and the banker’s wife elbowed her way into the group to insist that the new reverend dine with them. He accepted with a smile which avoided unctuousness.
When he opened the service with prayer, his delivery was firm, and when the first hymn was sung, his voice could be heard, not too strong but right on key. Men who had been worried about their chance of finding the proper minister prepared to contribute with extra generosity to the collection plates, but then Bluntworthy spoiled everything when he began to preach.
“My text stands close to the heart of every true Christian, for better than any other it epitomizes the spirit of our Lord. It comes, fittingly, from the last chapter of the last Gospel, John 21.”
A rancher in the front pew who knew his Bible muttered, “Oh, no!” but Reverend Bluntworthy in his firm, clear voice lined out the message: “ ‘Jesus saith to Simon Peter … Feed my lambs.’ ” A whisper passed along the pews. “ ‘He saith to him the second time … Feed my sheep.’ ” Skimmerhorn and Lloyd looked at each other in confusion. “ ‘He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas … Feed my sheep.’ ”
From this unfortunate beginning Bluntworthy launched into a perfervid oration about sheep as the symbol of humankind, Jesus as the shepherd, and the world as a great meadow in which right-thinking men took it upon themselves as a holy obligation to Feed my sheep. He must have used this exhortation fifteen times, increasing the volume of his voice until at the end of his sermon he implored every man in church to go forth and become a shepherd.
The collection was one of the bleakest ever taken at Union Church, and in the closing hymn only the minister’s voice could be heard.
It was a custom in Colorado churches for members of the committee to stand in the doorway with the minister as parishioners left, but three of the members refused. “The man must be a fool,” one said, and his neighbor muttered, “He’d have been smarter to use Exodus 22, verse 1 for his text. There God said that if one of His people stole an ox, he must give back five oxen. But if he stole a sheep, he had to give back only four. God understood.”
The banker’s wife sent a boy to inform Skimmerhorn and Lloyd that her husband had been called to Denver and she could not therefore have the minister to dinner, and half the congregation left by a side door so they wouldn’t have to shake hands with the perplexed visitor, who was left standing alone.
Finally Jim Lloyd took his place beside the clergyman, and some semblance of decency was maintained, but when the parishioners were gone, Jim was left with the bewildered minister. “Let’s have dinner at the hotel,” Jim said. “You can catch the evening train.”
“I had hoped to meet …”
Jim felt he owed the man some kind of explanation, so as the meal was being served, with several ranch families staring balefully at Bluntworthy, he said, “The Lord may be partial to sheep, but this is Hereford country.”
As these words were spoken, Reverend Bluntworthy was about to put a forkful of food into his mouth, but his right arm froze and over his face came first a look of puzzlement, then pained comprehension, and he put down his fork and said, “I don’t feel hungry. In fact, I may be sick, if you’ll excuse me.”
“You can rest in your room,” Jim said. “The five thirty-eight will come in over there.”
The Crown Vee Herefords suffered from one major weakness which afflicted all American Herefords: they were cat-hammed, and whenever Hereford men met with other stockmen, especially Black Angus breeders, they had to suffer the jibe: “Up front you have a good-looking animal, but it’s awful cat-hammed.” To this charge, there was no rebuttal, for whereas the forequarters were sturdy, they tapered off too quickly, producing a hindquarter much like a cat’s, lean and scrawny. This not only made the Hereford fore-heavy, but it also cut down on the steaks he could provide, and that’s where the money lay.
“We’ve got to eliminate those cat-hams,” Jim told Skimmerhorn. “You ever seen a Hereford bull with real strong hindquarters?”
“No, but they must exist.”
So the two cattlemen began their search for the young bull that would correct the deficiency, but with no success. Exhausting local sources, Jim went as far as Indiana, where the Hereford was popular, but those bulls were as cat-hammed as his.
“Looks as if we’re stuck with what we’ve got,” he reported when he reached home, but he continued looking, and one day he came up with a good idea: “Let’s write to Mrs. Seccombe, in Bristol. She could go right into the Hereford country and try to find us something.” So Jim wrote to the widow, and he and Skimmerhorn waited impatiently for her to reply.
One afternoon as Jim was passing time with Levi Zendt at the store, he noticed how the old Dutchman walked, picking up his feet and planting them solidly, and he burst into laughter. “What’s so funny?” Levi asked.
“You walk just like King Bristol.” Jim chuckled, and he imitated the great bull, and Levi understood the joke but did not laugh.
“If I was you, James, and I was thirty-four, I wouldn’t be content to be in love with no herd of cows, white-faced or not.”
Jim flushed. Others had teased him about tending his Herefords so lovingly, and he asked, “What would you do, Levi?”
“Find me a girl and get married.” And instantly Jim replied, “If I could find Clemma, I’d get married.” And Levi asked, “After all these years?”
Yes, after twenty years Jim Lloyd still believed that one day a stranger would come to Centennial with news of Clemma’s whereabouts, and he would hurry there to claim her. No stranger came, but one afternoon the army officer who had been stationed in Denver years before did return to the area, and as a courtesy he stopped by Centennial to pay his respects to the Zendts.
“Yes,” he said expansively, after informing them of his duty along the Canadian border and of his adventures in pacifying Indians, “believe it or not, I’ve met your daughter. Actually talked with her. I was waiting to change trains in Chicago and went into this little Irish restaurant. Kilbride’s Kerry Roost …”
As soon as Lucinda had the name properly written down she sent a messenger up to the ranch to inform Jim Lloyd, and he rushed down to discuss the startling news that Clemma had been located. And once more he made plans to seek her out.
“James!” Levi reasoned when the cowboy told him he was going to Chicago. “She’s known where you were all these years. If she’d wanted …”
“Don’t you care for your own daughter?” Jim cried. “All you ever think about is your son. Because he’s here, helping you. Well, Clemma’s not here, and she needs me.”
Levi saw no sense in further argument, no reason to explain to this irrational cowboy that he thought of Clemma every night, even prayed for her in Mennonite German.
So Jim caught the night train to Chicago, and as soon as he landed in that busy city, hurried to Kilbride’s Kerry Roost, where the white-haired, lugubrious owner remembered Clemma Ferguson: “Fine-looking girl. Good waitress.”
“Where is she now?”
“Owner of a fancy restaurant came in here for lunch, saw her, offered her a better job.” He shook his head mournfully, as if to indicate that bad luck hounded him.
Jim found her working in an oak-paneled restaurant near the railway station used by the Union Pacific. From the doorway he watched her as she managed her customers with that raffish smile and naughty good humor he had loved years ago. She seemed smaller and her eyes were deep-sunk. She was older, much older, but strangely, she did not look worn out.
He waited till she paused in her work, then walked firmly toward her, extending his hand. “It’s me, Jim Lloyd. You’re to come home with me.”
As gaily as if she had talked with him only a day ago, she said, “Jim! How nice to see you again.”
“You’re to come home,” he repeated.
“Sit down. I’ll bring you a menu.” She deposited him at one of her tables, and after a decent interval, handed him a printed menu offering many dishes.
Later she came swinging back, treating him as if he were a first-time customer. “The lamb’s good.”
“I don’t eat lamb.”
“Of course not. The veal here is very good. Crown Vee calves only.” She was laughing at him, and before he could order she had moved deftly away to tend another customer.
When she returned, with her order pad open, she asked, “What is your desire?” and the words sounded so awful that he threw the menu down, then quickly recovered it and said, “I’ll take the veal.”
“You’ll not regret it,” she said professionally, and after he had finished the excellent meal, unable even to speak a dozen words to her, she presented him with a bill, and he caught her hand.
“Please!” she whispered. “Mr. Marshall watches me.” She took his money and returned with his change.
“When can I see you?” he pleaded.
“I work here every night.”
So every night he walked from his quarters near the railway station to the restaurant and tried unsuccessfully to engage her in serious conversation. On the fourth night he grew desperate, and finally thought of something which he hoped would pierce her armor: “Your parents can’t live forever. Don’t you want to see them?”
“I see lots of people,” she parried, but he could see that she was affected.
“Not too much idling, there,” Mr. Marshall warned as he walked by.
“What keeps you here?” Jim whispered when the owner had moved on.
“Wait for me outside,” she said in a low voice.
She led him to her cheerless room, where she tried to convince him that return to Centennial was impossible: “I like the city. I never want to go back to that tiny town.”
“You like this?” And with a wave of his hand he indicated the drabness of her flat. “Surely you can remember the good land?”
She cut him off. “Here in Chicago it doesn’t matter if you’re an Indian. Life is better when no one knows who you are.”
The bleakness of such reasoning was so contrary to the warm love he had known on that Texas farm with his mother, and so alien to the friendships he had experienced on the trail north with Poteet, that he could not accept it. “You must come home. Where people love you,” he pleaded.
She replied, “You know I’m grateful to you, Jim. Coming all the way to Chicago just to talk with me.”
“I went to St. Louis, too.”
For a brief moment she appreciated the stubborn love this cowboy must always have had for her, and she was tempted. “I’d marry you … if I could. You know that. But I already have a husband.”
“Ferguson? I was told he left you.”
“He did. But we’re still married.”
“Get a divorce. That’s no problem. We’ll go to court tomorrow.”
This innocent phrase had a terrifying effect on Clemma. She drew back, and a real look of terror came into her eyes. Without another word she ran past him and out the door, and for three days Jim could not find her.
Eager for any clue to her strange behavior, he went to the Kerry Roost to ask the mournful proprietor, “Has Clemma been here?”
“Nope.”
Jim stayed at the counter, explaining that things had gone well with them until the mention of divorce sent her flying away.
“She’s never been divorced, so far as I know,” Kilbride said.
Jim toyed with his coffee cup, trying to re-create the scene. “I did mention divorce … said she could go into any court …”
“Well,” Kilbride broke in. “That explains it.”
“You mean court?”
The Irishman seemed hesitant to explain, but Jim reached out and caught him by the wrist. “Has she ever been in court?”
“Just that once … when the judge gave her a year.”
“You mean in jail? A year?”
“It wasn’t her fault. Even the judge admitted that. It was that fellow Harrigan who gave her the bad checks to cash.”
“Where is he?” Jim asked, instinctively reaching for his belt, as if he were once more carrying Mule Canby’s army Colt’s.
“He skedaddled … and she went to jail.”
“Jail!” Jim repeated with all the anguish he would have experienced if the sentence had been his. “God, I’ve got to find her.”
But as he started for the door the weary Irishman said quietly, “Young bucko! Finish your coffee.” And when Jim returned to his seat at the counter the old man leaned forward to confide, “I’ve seen all sorts in my time, and I’ve learned one thing. If a girl takes it in her mind to run away, no man on earth can stop her. I couldn’t keep Clemma in my restaurant, and you can’t keep her in your bed.”
With each word Kilbride spoke, Jim’s tired and muddled brain visualized a headstrong young woman with high cheekbones and squarish jaw; she was fleeing the prairie as if braves of an alien tribe were pursuing her, and there was no mortal way of stopping her.
With a pain so great he could not contemplate it, nor seek relief, he walked through the desolate streets and back to his lodging. There he packed his bag, then caught the train for Omaha. As the wheels rattled through the darkness he slowly began to gain control of his emotions. I’ll be a fool no longer, he pledged. There’s always the ranch. And a man never knows enough about Herefords. I’ll work. I’ll work.
He believed he had found the solution to his problem, and that he was at last free of Clemma. But then the rhythmic clacking of the wheels reminded him of the girl’s teasing laughter, and all his bold defenses crumbled. Covering his ears to stifle her taunts, he confessed: It must have been my fault. If I had been able to bring her back to Centennial … And as dawn broke over the prairie, he could see in the flaming clouds the figure of an Indian girl, running and laughing.
After Oliver Seccombe shot himself, his young widow, not too surprised by this action, faced a series of perplexing decisions: Where to live? How to dispose of her castle? And especially, where to look for a new husband?
Her confusion was unraveled, as she might have expected, by old Finlay Perkin. Anticipating her troubles, he wrote:
You must come to Bristol. The directors will buy your castle, deducting such moneys as they feel you owe them. And as for the ranch, I want to assure you that I have every confidence in Skimmerhorn and Lloyd, two trustworthy and loyal men. They are ideally prepared to look after your interests.
It was a strange letter. “Your interests.” Why had he spoken as if the ranch belonged to her?
When she arrived in Bristol she understood. Earl Venneford was a very old man, and he had sold all his stock in the ranch except one large block, which he intended deeding to Charlotte, whose mother had been related to him. When Charlotte visited him to pay her respects she found him painfully thin, bundled up in tweeds, but bright of eye.
“You’re a spunky girl,” he said. “I’m giving you my share of the ranch. I want to think of those wild acres as belonging to someone who will appreciate them.” He asked what her plans were, and when she proved vague, he said, “Find yourself a good man … someone who’s served in India … or an army man with African experience. How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Prime of life. Woman’s never better. Has some sense to go along with her beauty, and you always were a beauty, Charlotte.” Then he asked bluntly, “Was it Seccombe who stole our money out there?”
“He stole nothing. He managed the ranch well, and if the blizzards hadn’t come …”
“I’ve found that blizzards usually do come,” he said.
Later that afternoon, when she informed her father that through the kindness of the old earl she now owned a substantial portion of the ranch, he surprised her by confiding that one day she would own a great deal more, because it was he who had bought the shares the old earl had disposed of. “When I die, you’ll own nearly half the stock.”
“Is it a good investment?” she asked.
“Excellent. Of course, you’ll never make any money running cattle—too much book count.”
“Where will the profit come from?”
“Land. Each year that enormous spread of land will become more valuable. Never sell, even if you have to borrow money to pay the taxes, because that land is gold.”
He advised strongly against her ever returning to Colorado. “Keep out of their way. It’s a man’s job, and your job is to stay here, rely on Finlay Perkin and collect your dividends.”
“What if Perkin dies?”
“He’ll never die,” Buckland said. “He’ll wither down to a little lump, but he’ll still be able to scratch a pen.”
When she met with the old factotum she found him as vital as ever, a wisp of a man with only one concern in life: to keep the distant ranch profitable. “Miss Charlotte,” he said in an effort to erase the bitterness which had marked their last encounter, “one day you’ll own a great ranch … that is, a fair portion of it. I hope to serve you as faithfully as I have served your predecessors.”
“I couldn’t get along without you,” she said, and having placed her confidence in the little Scotsman, she turned to her major problem.
She spent her time in Bristol society, renewing old acquaintances and learning afresh how pleasant life could be in the placid west of England. She was more handsome than ever, in a horsy way, and since she was known to be an heiress, she became an attractive target for bachelors, either eligible or ineligible, who were seeking rich wives.
Most of them seemed interchangeable, like the parts of those new guns, where you could switch stocks and barrels and sights and never know the difference. There was one widower of forty-eight, home from India, but his life was dictated by his regiment, and when Charlotte was invited to dine with some of his fellow officers in London, it was painfully obvious that she was there on approval. Her being a good horsewoman enhanced her chances of acceptance, but her strong views on justice for Indians rather shot holes in her score, and by the time the evening was over, she knew that she had failed her tests. She was not for the regimental mess in India.
And then, in rapid-fire succession, two deaths made her desultory courtships seem unimportant. The old earl died peacefully one day, and scarcely was he buried when Henry Buckland, a much younger man but grossly overweight, dropped dead. It fell to Charlotte to supervise both funerals, and in this distressful time it was Finlay Perkin who helped her most. He was a canny gnome, and on the way home from her father’s funeral she confided, “I’ve received a perplexing letter from Colorado. All about cat-hamming and what I must do to avoid it.”
She showed him Lloyd’s letter, which he immediately saw as a way for diverting her from her sorrow. “What we must do, and promptly, Miss Charlotte, is search the countryside for a good bull.” So he took her from one farm to another; they found many bulls, but none with the characteristics they sought. And then one afternoon, as they rode home in disappointment, Perkin startled her with a proposal she could not have anticipated.
“When we do find our bull, Miss Charlotte, I think you should take him out to Colorado.”
“I never expect to see the place again.”
“I know, your father told me he advised you to stand clear. But I’m afraid he gave bad advice.”
“How?”
“Isn’t it obvious, child? Bristol’s not for you. The men you’ve been wasting your time on … you’d marry none of them. Go back and find yourself one of the Englishmen working the ranches in Wyoming—daring men like Moreton Frewen and Claude Barker.”
She did not respond to his counsel on marriage, but his mention of the west lingered most hauntingly. At times she would be looking at some cultivated, rock-walled English field and would see instead the sweeping prairie. Flakes of snow would fall and she would see a blizzard. Life in western America had a majesty, and the memory of it possessed her.
And then one day she and Perkin found their bull, and one sight of it made up her mind. She wanted to watch it grow on the prairie. She was homesick for Colorado. That night Perkin wrote to Skimmerhorn:
I feel every confidence that he is the bull we seek. He is from an admirable strain of dams, and I have always believed the inherent quality of a bull to be derived from the female side. In the rear he is most heavy, like his dam, and Charlotte has given him the appropriate name of Confidence. She has decided to bring him to you.
When she arrived with this excellent animal at the Centennial station, there was none of the awe that had greeted King Bristol, for the young bull lacked every characteristic which had made that noble beast so predominant: he was not heavy; he did not stride with kingly grace; he lacked space between his emerging horns. He had only two conspicuous qualities—extremely substantial rear quarters with never a hint of cat-hamming, and a prepotent power to stamp upon his offspring, especially his bull calves, the physical attributes he possessed.
“Cat-hamming is ended,” Skimmerhorn said, leading the young bull to a dray. Then, turning to the new owner: “Miss Charlotte, it will seem so natural, having you in the castle again.”
“I’ll be traveling in Wyoming,” she said.
Her search for a husband in Wyoming proved fruitless. The kinds of young Englishmen she had once known had long since vanished, expelled by the blizzard and the economic disaster that followed. The levity and the long evenings of croquet were gone, and several times she had the dismal feeling that her return to the west had been a mistake.
On her ride back to Venneford she realized with a pang that the ranch no longer owned Line Camp Four, where she had spent so many delightful days. It had been sold to a Cheyenne merchant, who used it several weeks each year. She considered buying it back, but took no steps to do so, for she was at odds with herself, unable to determine anything.
One day as she was walking idly out to inspect Confidence, she happened to see Jim Lloyd approaching from the other direction, and for the first time she noticed how straight he was, how lithe. She had rarely spoken to him but did remember that morning when he came to report her husband’s suicide. He had been gentle and perhaps more stricken than she by the death of his long-time boss. Beyond that she knew nothing except that he had come north as a boy of fourteen and through the years had been mixed up in some way with an Indian girl.
Actually, she knew him best through the letters of Finlay Perkin, who held him in the highest regard. What were the phrases? “Absolute trust … sober good judgment … fine man with Herefords.”
“Hello, Mr. Lloyd,” she said as he reached the corral fence. “How’s the bull?”
“He’s doing great, ma’am,” Jim said.
“As good as you hoped?”
“Better. He’s … he’s …” She wondered what word he was groping for and was surprised when he said, “He’s voluntary. Moves right out. That’s a good sign in a bull.”
“He’s certainly not cat-hammed,” she said.
They began to talk about many things, and she was impressed with his broad knowledge. He had read widely, had studied economics and was capable of expressing strong opinions. He was really much better informed than Mr. Skimmerhorn, who stuck pretty much to ranching. But she also detected that he was an isolated man, extremely lonely, and she sensed that if these were critical years for her, trying as she was to settle upon patterns she would follow for the rest of her life, they were doubly crucial for this cowboy. For her, finding a new husband was merely following a style of life; for him, taking a wife could be life itself, the acceptance of another human being; and she supposed that she was the only means whereby he could escape from the prison of loneliness in which he had immured himself.
So one afternoon she said, “Mr. Lloyd, would you care to have dinner with me tonight?”
“I’d be most obliged,” he said, and at six promptly, he appeared at the door of the castle.
“I had in mind about eight,” she said, and he replied, “I work early, ma’am.”
So she hurried up the cook and they sat in a kind of regal splendor in the round dining room, and she asked him how the sales were going, and then they got into differential freight rates and the possibility that if a sugar-beet factory ever started in the area, the beet tops might be utilized as feed for the Venneford cattle.
Suddenly she asked, “Are you still involved with that Indian girl?”
He reddened and said, “I wanted to marry her. She wouldn’t have me.”
It was growing late and Jim excused himself, but next day Charlotte saw him at the loading chute and said, “Last night was so pleasant, James. Could you come to dinner again tonight?”
“No,” he said, and when she showed disappointment, he added, “Because I’m inviting you to Centennial for a bite.”
At six he was at the door with a polished rig drawn by two bays. They rode quietly into town and dined at the Railway Arms, where several townsmen greeted them, then turned away to discuss the impropriety of an English gentlewoman’s consorting with a cowboy.
The same thing bothered Jim. In later years it would become accepted for heiresses or wealthy widows inheriting ranches to socialize with cowboys, but in 1889 such a relationship bore the marks of scandal, and Jim was a very proper man. He was also worried by the fact that he was two years younger than Charlotte, and that she had more money than he, more power at the ranch.
Offsetting these doubts was her beauty and her lively interest in the west. She was fun to talk with, always ready for an adventure, and she maintained a certain organization in her life. She really was a superior woman, Jim concluded, and he acknowledged his good luck in having excited her interest.
And so in this unresolved fashion they drifted through the mild winter and spring of 1889, dining here and there, working together, reading the same books and checking the same figures. It could have continued this way for a long time, but recently Charlotte had turned thirty-seven, and although the prairie she had learned to cherish was still expansive, her own life was closing in. She had rejected Bristol and would never return there. India was out. Africa, too. All that remained was her future in Colorado, and she had better get it organized.
So on a day in June she arranged a picnic, and even though she no longer owned Line Camp Four, she and Jim trespassed there, among the piñons and eroding spires, and it was after speaking of her regret at having allowed this heavenly spot to be sold that she said boldly, “If we don’t marry, James, then in the years to come we’ll have other regrets.”
He was playing with a pine needle, holding it between his thumbs to make a whistle. Blowing a long, sweet blast, he dropped his hands and without looking at Charlotte, said, “You’re right.”
“Then what shall we do about it?”
“Get married, I guess.”
Impulsively she thwacked him over the head. “Damn it! Are you proposing?”
“Yes!” he cried happily. Grabbing her around the waist, he hoisted her high in the air and carried her into the little stone house he had built twenty years before.
When their engagement was announced, there was much discussion of how that canny Texan had arranged “a good thing for hisse’f.” The ladies wondered how a rich gentlewoman like Charlotte could demean herself by marrying a poor cowboy, but the town banker confided, “You got it all wrong, ladies. Jim Lloyd’s no pauper. I’d call him one of the best catches in town.” When the women asked how this could be, the banker explained, “Because he saves his money, that’s why.”
The wedding was to be held in the Union Church soon after the Fourth of July, but on the first of that month the Union Pacific brought an unexpected guest to Centennial. It was Clemma Zendt Ferguson, only thirty-four years old but with the look of a tired and defeated woman.
As soon as Jim Lloyd heard she was in town he rushed to her parents’ home and found her in the kitchen. “I’ve got my divorce,” she said dully. “I’m ready to marry you now.”
Ignoring everything that had happened in recent months, Jim swept her into his arms, and as he kissed her his heart felt as if it were expanding. “I’m so glad you’ve come home,” he said.
That one embrace settled all problems for Jim. He realized that he was under serious obligation to marry Charlotte, and normally he could have done nothing to embarrass that fine woman. He knew also the advantages she would bring him, and whereas the community might view with distaste the marriage of a wealthy gentlewoman to a cowboy, he trusted that she would never use that whip against him. She was an honorable woman, and she would make a good wife. But to be with Clemma was to be with the earth he loved, with the Indian west that he revered. She was a total vision of life, and to win her, any sacrifice would be justified.
“Will you marry me right away?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied, acknowledging at last that for two decades this simple option which could have saved her life had lain before her, without her being able to appreciate or accept it. Now, at the end of a long trail, she was prepared to marry the man she should have married years before. His obvious love convinced her that she had been right in burying her fears and returning to Centennial.
Embracing her again, he excused himself with the remark, “I have some work to do at the ranch.”
“I’ll bet he does,” Levi said as he departed, and when Clemma asked what this meant, her father replied, “He has some heavy explaining to do. He was supposed to marry Charlotte Seccombe next week.”
And as he said these words he noticed that Clemma showed no surprise or remorse, as if Jim’s obligations were no responsibility of hers. “She’s a lot like the Stoltzfus girl,” Levi said to himself, and he was not happy with the comparison.
At the ranch Jim found Charlotte preparing her wardrobe for their wedding, and without any attempt at finesse he said, “Clemma’s back.”
Charlotte continued laying out her clothes, and said nothing.
“She’s back,” he shouted. “And I’m going to marry her.”
Charlotte did not even pale. She simply pulled Jim around by the arm and asked, “You’re what?”
“I’ve got to marry her. It’s her only salvation.”
Charlotte did not ask, “And what about me?” Instead she said quietly, “James Lloyd, our wedding is six days from now. Take those days to think this over. But bear in mind one thing. Clemma Zendt will ruin you. She’s a drifter. She cannot control herself. And you deserve better than that.”
He tried to explain, to protest, but she would hear none of it. “Please leave now,” she said firmly, a very proud and resolute woman. “Ride your horse, James, and do some thinking.”
She escorted him to the door, and felt inclined to shove him out, when a much wiser tactic came to mind. Holding him by one hand, she gave him a long kiss and told him, “You’re a man worth having, James Lloyd. And I intend to marry you.”
For two days he rode to the corners of the ranch in a fever of indecision. Twice he went into town to talk with the Zendts, and as soon as he came within the presence of Clemma he felt his heart pounding, and once when she kissed him goodbye it seemed as if all the passion of Colorado were compressed in her lithe and poetic body.
His mind was made up. Clemma was the only woman he would marry. But as he rode east of town to that crossing of the Platte where he had first seen her, a captivating little Indian girl of thirteen, he suddenly realized that all through the years he had continued to think of her as that fairy-tale child. He really knew nothing of her as a woman, or what had touched her in St. Louis and Chicago. And at last he had to face the truth: that he was in love with an obsession which he himself had cultivated.
However, on the fourth day, still indecisive, he returned to the Zendts’ to find that Clemma had been drinking, seeking to fortify herself against the charge circulating in the town that she had come home to take Jim away from Charlotte Seccombe. The accusation of course was false, since she could not possibly have known of the marriage plans, but when Jim tried to explain this, she repeated what she had predicted in Chicago: “They just don’t want Indians in this town.”
“Ridiculous! Your mother …”
She was no longer listening. Across the prairie the evening train whistled, and he could see that the sound tormented her, and that she was no longer a story-book Indian princess of thirteen but a tragic and haunted woman of thirty-four.
On the evening of July 4 the Zendts were in their kitchen when a knock sounded on their screen door. “Come in,” Levi called, and he was surprised when Charlotte entered. She nodded to the senior Zendts and asked if she could speak to their daughter alone. When they left, she shifted one of the chairs so that she could sit facing Clemma.
“I want you to leave on the morning train,” she said firmly.
“He wants to marry me.”
“I’m quite sure he thinks he does.”
“And I want to marry him,” Clemma said softly.
“Do you? Really?”
“I should have married him years ago.”
“Positively,” Charlotte said with real eagerness. “You should have married him while I still lived in England. You should have married him the year of the blizzard, when he was promoted. You should have married him a thousand times … but you didn’t.”
“I always meant to come back …”
“But you didn’t. You never had the courage.”
Clemma poured herself a small drink and felt better when it was downed. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mrs. Seccombe,” she said.
“We’re not talking about me,” Charlotte corrected. “We’re talking about your hurting James Lloyd.”
“Jim?” Clemma cried, and something in the way she said the word—as if he were inanimate—made Charlotte realize that this woman had never once considered Jim as a human being with rights and feelings of his own. She, Charlotte, had considered Jim’s estate most carefully; she would do nothing to demean him, would not even marry him if she thought she might in any way destroy or even imperil his manliness.
“Yes, Clemma, we’re speaking of James Lloyd … a real human being. Long ago you’d have destroyed him if he’d been one shade weaker.”
“I never meant …”
“I know you didn’t,” Charlotte said softly. “Even now you mean nothing wrong.”
“But you’re older than he is, Mrs. Seccombe. How can he love you the way …”
“He can’t. He’ll always love you. But with me he can make a life for himself. With you …” She hesitated, knowing that whatever she said next would be of crucial importance. “How long would you stay with Jim?”
“Well …”
“How long?” Charlotte asked with great force. “How long before the morning train took you away again?” There was no reply, and she added, “For the sake of a man who at last has a chance to build a life for himself, get out of here.”
She left Clemma seated in a chair, staring at the floor, a small glass in her hand. As Charlotte came onto the porch she told the older Zendts, “I advised her to leave.”
“You were wise,” Levi said. He was an old man now, entering his seventies, and he could sustain no illusions about his daughter; he supposed that she would leave in the morning and that they would never see her again.
She did leave. Jim Lloyd, weighing feed, heard about it from one of his cowboys who had delivered steers to the morning train. For two days he roamed the prairie, riding out to where Line Camp Two had been located, then up toward the Nebraska border, where he had long ago homesteaded that excellent piece of land at the mouth of the draw.
When his turbulent spirit came under control, he could see again that eternal prairie and his relationship to it. Bending low over the withers of his horse, he muttered, “You work. That’s what you do. You work the land and make it feed your cattle. And after a few short years they bury you in the earth, and what has happened in between doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. Just so long as you keep close to the earth.”
With a comprehension that would last for the remainder of his life he rode back to the castle and said simply, “I abused you, Charlotte, and I apologize. If you’ll have me, let’s get married.”
“I will indeed have you,” she said. “I fought for you, and together we’ll build something this state will be proud of.”
He clasped her hand, then said, “Before we ride in to see the minister I want you to have this paper. It’s my wedding present to you. I bought it two weeks ago.”
When she inspected the paper she found it to be the deed for the retreat among the piñons at Line Camp Four. He had spent all his savings to buy it back from the man in Cheyenne. “It’s proper that you should have it,” he said. “I built it years ago … for someone like you.”
CAUTION TO US EDITORS: There is no way you can exaggerate the cattleman’s contempt for the sheepman. When Charles Russell, the famous cowboy artist, first went from St. Louis to Montana, he could find no work on a ranch, so for two weeks he helped run sheep. Subsequently he completed over 3500 works of art, in which he portrayed every known kind of western animal: rabbit, bear, buffalo, you name it. But never once did he depict a sheep. In later years he became a lush, and when he was tanked up there was no way you could offend him except to claim that he had once herded sheep. That he would not tolerate.
I witnessed two vivid exhibitions of the old animosity. The Rotary Club at Centennial invited me to lunch, and my host, Morgan Wendell, asked my forgiveness in advance. “This is hardly a proper day to take a guest,” he said, but I didn’t understand. Before the meal the president apologized, saying, “Gentlemen, we must exhibit our sense of fair play. After all, a lot of people share Colorado, and we must live together. Once a year, to prove our brotherhood, this club serves lamb.” Six members rose and strode from the hall, including a grizzled veteran who had been sitting beside me. As he left he growled, “I’m seventy and I’ll be goddamned if any man will ever accuse me of eating sheep.” Three men at my table remained in the audience, but refused to touch their food. After the meeting they would go to some restaurant and have real food, and Morgan Wendell, a man with a college education, was among them.
Another time I was doing some investigation on the loneliest part of the prairies, at a ramshackle house which had broken the heart of homesteaders, who had abandoned it. An old squatter now occupied it, making his meals from cans. When I asked him who lived on the big ranch I passed, one with good water and a fine set of buildings, where the occupants were probably making a fortune, he said, “You wouldn’t want to bother with them … sad case … they run sheep.”
Warning. In Wyoming the range wars were a lot more virulent than in Colorado, but even though they do provide good illustrative material, I would advise against referring to them. Frank Horn was such a vile killer that after he was hanged, they skinned him and tanned his hide and from it sewed articles which they gleefully exhibited in the local drugstore. Frank Canton was a fascinating Jekyll-Hyde, churchgoing cattle detective by day, a moonlighting range murderer at night, always in the employ of members of the Cheyenne Club but never so careless as to be caught.
I would especially advise against dabbling in the Johnson County War, in which a Pullman train of Cheyenne Club types rode north with a massive arsenal to end, once and for all, the cattle rustling. Like an invading army, they shot up the countryside, checking off names from the list they had prepared in advance. There are some great photographs of the invasion, including one showing the entire army as its members awaited trial in Cheyenne. They were set free, of course, on the historic principle that the men who had been shot were probably better off dead. The cattlemen had a just grievance; local juries refused to find their neighbors guilty of rustling even when caught in the act, and vigilante action seemed the only recourse. Today, in ranching Wyoming, tempers are still high over the affair, with evidence being fabricated and suppressed on both sides, and it’s wisest to stand clear until the gunsmoke clears, which will probably not occur until sometime around 1995.
Irrigation. When I last flew over the Platte east of Centennial, I could not believe my eyes. It was late August, at the end of the driest period of the year, and for miles at a stretch, the riverbed was dry. Not a drop of water. Then suddenly for ten or fifteen miles it would become a flowing river, after which it would go dry again. What was happening was Potato Brumbaugh’s dream in action. Indeed, the dream had been exceeded, because with improved conservation techniques, the Platte was recovering not the thirty-seven percent of diverted water that he had predicted, but almost fifty percent. Each drop, as he had foreseen, was being used six or seven times and in obedience to such a well-conceived plan, when the Platte finally reached the exit point, it was carrying exactly the 120 cusecs which the Supreme Court had directed Colorado to deliver to Nebraska. No other place in the world uses so wisely every drop of water to which it is entitled by law.
Blizzard. In Montana the 1887 storms were even more devastating than in Wyoming, and if you want illustrative incidents or woodcut pictures of the disaster, they abound. Curiously, for Colorado south of the Platte the worst year was 1886, and you will find accounts which cite that as the bad year, but do not alter your text. For the area north of the Platte, things happened as I describe. In the winter of 1949 the worst blizzard in history struck the Wyoming ranches, exceeding even the one of 1887. This time government records and newspaper photographs documented events. (1) Cowboys had to lash themselves together with rope before attempting to negotiate the fifty feet separating bunkhouse from kitchen; (2) a helicopter flew 220 miles north from Cheyenne and saw no barns or houses, since all were submerged in snowdrifts; (3) the wind was so fierce and the snow so close to sleet that ice particles blown into the noses of cattle suffocated them; and (4) some ranchers could reach their horses only by digging tunnels from kitchen to barn.