I SPENT THE MONTH OF OCTOBER 1973 SEARCHING CENTENNIAL for some man or woman whose life epitomized the history of the west. I wanted to send the US editors in New York a kind of capstone to our project, a detailed and intimate portrait of what westerners were doing and thinking about in these critical years prior to our national birthday celebration.
At first I focused on Centennial’s black barber, Nate Person, grandson of the only black cowboy ever to have ridden point on the Skimmerhorn Trail. The story of how this family achieved its position of love and leadership in my small western town was an American epic.
Then I shifted to Manolo Marquez, descendant of those redoubtable Mexicans, Tranquilino and Triunfador. He had a fascinating story to tell of breaking through prejudice and winning a solid place for himself. But these were special cases, and their association with Centennial began rather late in its history. I needed someone more deeply rooted in the community, and more typical. And then, on the last day of the month, I found my perfect prototype.
Early in the morning on November 1 I was breakfasting in a corner of the large room at Venneford Castle. Three moose heads, long undusted, stared down at me as I chatted with Paul Garrett, forty-six years old, tall and graying at the temples. He was one of the most perceptive men in Colorado, and a leader in many fields.
What attracted me to him especially was his combination of seriousness and self-deprecating good humor. For example, as I finished my tar-flavored cup of tea he told me, “My family has always favored that strange-smelling stuff. My grandmother, Pale Star … She was an Arapaho Indian you know … she said it tasted to her like charred jockstrap.”
“Who were your grandparents?” I asked, and he produced from his cluttered desk a standard breed book in which he kept track of his prize Herefords.
“I’ve already studied the history of the Venneford bulls,” I told him, but he said, “Not this one,” and he opened the book to a page which he had filled out about himself, as if he were a Hereford. It showed his ancestors back to the fifth generation, and after I had studied it for a few minutes, I was confirmed in my earlier opinion that here was the man I needed to complete my report.
The Garretts had started in sheep, it is true, but they’d had the good sense to shift over to cattle. Paul had army people like the Mercys in his ancestry, and frontiersmen like Pasquinel. One branch of his family had been English, so he would know that interesting aspect of western development, and another branch was Indian.
“Garrett, Messmore and Buckland were of English stock,” he told me as I put the book down. “The Lloyds were a Welsh family that emigrated to Tennessee and Texas. Patrick Beeley was a hard-drinking Irishman. Pasquinel and Mercy were French, and writers usually ignore the French influence in western history. Zendt, Skimmerhorn, Staller and Bockweiss were Germans. Deal was Dutch, but originally he spelled his name a different way. Red Wolf and Pale Star were full-blooded Indians. Lucinda McKeag, whom everyone seemed to love, was the daughter of a squaw named Clay Basket, about whom the mountain men wrote in their diaries.”
“Pretty mixed up,” I said.
“Damned near incestuous,” he confessed. Then he slapped the breed book and said, “If you follow the history of the really great bulls, you’ll find many instances of very close in-breeding. My case, the same way. A son of Lucinda McKeag married the daughter of her brother. Messmore Garrett married his first cousin. And Henry Buckland, father of the formidable Charlotte you’ve spoken about so often, married his niece, if you please.”
Before I could respond to this last bit of information, the telephone rang and an elderly Mexican serving woman shuffled in to report, “It’s very important.” And she handed him the phone from his desk.
It was the new governor of Colorado, eager to share some exciting news: “At my ten o’clock press conference this morning I’m announcing your appointment as head of our executive committee responsible for the state centennial celebration.” This was a greater honor than a stranger might have appreciated, because Colorado alone of the fifty states would be celebrating in 1976 not only the two-hundredth birthday of our nation but also the hundredth anniversary of the state.
“This fits in perfectly,” I said when I heard the news. “What I’d like to do, Mr. Garrett, is to follow you around a bit. For a couple of weeks. Listen in as you conduct your business … give my editors a feeling for what a westerner is doing these days. If you wouldn’t mind, I wish you’d carry this tape recorder with you when I’m not there. Just in case there’s something you’d like to get off your chest.”
“A month ago I’d have said no,” he replied. “It isn’t easy, Vernor, when your wife dies. Not even when you haven’t been really married, which was my case, as you may have heard.”
“I’ve heard a good deal about you,” I said. “I’d like to know more.”
“If the tape recorder works, you may know a helluva lot more.” He insisted on my staying for lunch, and as we ate beneath the moose heads, word of his appointment penetrated to various corners of the state, and his phone began jangling, with citizens from the western slope of the Rockies demanding to know if they were to form part of the twin celebrations, or if they were as usual to play second fiddle to the greater concentrations of population along the front range. “Of course you’re counted in,” he assured them. “First thing I do tomorrow is drive across the mountains to consult with you. Get your crowd together. Decide what you want, and I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow night … in Cortez.”
On November 2 he got me out of bed early, filled his gray Buick at the ranch gasoline pump and headed for the mountains. There had been rumors that gas rationing might be imposed, and perhaps a speed limit of fifty miles an hour. “Impossible speed for the west,” he muttered as he settled the car into its normal cruising speed of eighty. By the route we had planned, the day’s drive would cover some six hundred miles, but with the excellent roads that crisscrossed Colorado, this was a short trip for a western driver. Cutting onto the interstate west of Venneford, we roared south toward Denver, skirted that city and headed into the high passes at ninety miles an hour.
We had gone only a short distance when Garrett saw something which had always pleased him. It demonstrated the imaginative manner in which Colorado had confronted some of its problems, for in the building of the interstate the engineers had to cut through a tilted geologic formation, and instead of simply bulldozing a path through the little mountain, they had made an extremely neat cut which exposed some twenty geological strata. A park had been built around the multicolored edges, so that schoolchildren could wander across the steep slopes of the cuts and actually touch rocks which had formed two hundred million years ago. They could inspect the purple Morrison formation in which the dinosaurs had been found, and could see how layers of sea deposit had been thrust upward when the Rocky Mountains erupted. “This is one of the best things accomplished in Colorado in the past twenty years,” Garrett told visitors, “and it cost practically nothing. Just some imagination.”
He loved driving, for he responded to the motion of the car as it leaned gracefully into the well-banked curves. There was a kinesthetic beauty about pushing a quietly running automobile through the mountains, and it helped him sense the quality of the land he was traversing. Looking above him as he sped along, he saw once more the noble peaks of Colorado. Often he had astonished eastern visitors by asking, “You’ve surely heard of Pikes Peak. How many mountains in Colorado are higher? Give a guess.”
Many easterners had never heard of Colorado’s other mountains, and they were always surprised when he told them, “We have fifty-three mountains higher than fourteen thousand feet—many, many more than any other state. Pikes Peak is a mere hill. It’s number thirty-seven on the list—only 14,111 feet high.” Even Longs Peak, which his family had always called Beaver Mountain, was no more than fifteenth on the list. This was truly a majestic state.
He kept his foot well down on the throttle as we roared toward Eisenhower Tunnel, highest major tunnel in the world; it would take us deep beneath the Continental Divide and at its western end bring us into some of the loveliest valleys on earth. Here new ski centers were being developed, and he stopped briefly at several to alert the proprietors that he expected them to contribute some topnotch sports events for the celebration.
At Vail, where we halted for midmorning coffee, sixteen local leaders met with him, showing him the imaginative plans they had developed for the centennial. He liked the people of Vail and was impressed with their energy. Some years ago the ecologists had feared that the proliferation of ski resorts might ruin the mountains, but he had supported the ski runs, for he saw mountains as places for recreation, a locale in which city people could escape their pressures, and he had been right. A properly planned ski resort did not scar the landscape; it made the rewards of nature available to more citizens—but only if enough primitive area was held inviolate. Whenever the Vail plans threatened the wilderness, Garrett would have to oppose them.
“If you want new runs along the highway, I’ll support you,” he promised. “But on your plans to commercialize the back valleys, I’ve got to oppose you.”
Since he had championed the resort in previous applications, the Vail people accepted his veto, and as we left he assured them, “We’ve got no budget yet, but when we get one, I’ll allocate funds for planning. You’re on the right track.”
We now doubled back to Fairplay, a beautiful village surrounded by mountain peaks, and there Garrett encouraged the leaders to come up with their own ideas. Then we crossed a series of trivial bridges which always pleased him, for under them ran those minute rivulets which formed the headwaters of the Platte. Here, high in the Rockies, these clear, sweet streams ran through alpine meadows; it seemed impossible that they could coalesce to form the muddy serpent that crawled across the plains.
Then came one of the most enjoyable parts of the drive, a long leg south through those exquisite valleys that so few travelers ever saw, with giant mountains on both sides and the road pencil-straight for fifty miles at a time. He drove at ninety-five and felt his heart expanding as the Sangre de Cristo Range opened up before us to the east. He had known Tranquilino Marquez before the old man died and had once heard him tell of the impression this desert road had made on him when he first came north from Old Mexico to work in the Centennial beet fields. “It was like the finger of God drawing a path into the mountains,” the old man had said.
At the end of the valley we turned west and soon found ourselves driving along a river not often recognized as a Colorado stream. It was the Rio Grande, tumbling and leaping as it dropped out of the mountains, and as he watched its whirlpools he reflected on the crucial role his state played in providing water for the nation. Four notable rivers had their birth in the Colorado uplands—Platte, Arkansas, Rio Grande, Colorado—and what happened there determined life in neighboring states like Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, California, and even Old Mexico. Colorado was indeed the mother of rivers.
Now Garrett flicked on an invention which in recent years had given him much delight, a cassette player built into the Buick, one into which the driver inserted a small plastic cassette containing ninety minutes of music recorded on tape. Two speakers at the rear of the car provided a stereophonic effect, and as the car headed west for the Spanish country, the cassette poured forth a flood of luscious sound. The sensation of driving ninety-five miles an hour over flawless roads, with towering mountains watching over you while music reverberated through the car, was a sensuous joy.
Today, and for some time past, Garrett played only Chicano songs. Some years ago he had formed the habit of taking his lunch, when in Centennial, at Flor de Méjico, the restaurant owned by Manolo Marquez, and there he had grown acquainted with the flamboyant folk music brought north by the Chicano beet workers, and the more of it he heard, the more he loved the rowdy, rambunctious rhythms. Now “La Negra” echoed through the speeding car, a saucy, tricky beat. After that came “La Bamba,” in which a girl singer with a provocative voice shouted, “Soy capitán, soy capitán, soy capitán.” That was followed by “Little Jesus from Chihuahua,” which he had grown to like very much, but then came the finer songs, the ones that caused him involuntarily to slow down.
“Las Mañanitas,” the birthday song with that totally strange beginning “This is the song King David sang,” captivated him, and he always sang along. “It must be the strangest birthday song in the world,” he told me, “and the best.”
As for “La Paloma” and “La Golondrina,” they were songs of such ancient beauty that he wondered if any country had ever produced such appropriate popular music to summarize its contradictory longings: “If a dove should fly to your window, treat it with charity, for it is really me.” No self-respecting American would dare write words like that, nor elect them as a national symbol if he did.
Now the Buick was crawling along at forty-five, toward Wolf Creek Pass, for the tape had come to that strange song which had possessed him in recent months. No other person he had spoken to in the Anglo community had ever heard of it, and only a few Chicanos knew it. “Dos Arbolitos” it was called, and he had it in two versions. The first, which now drifted dreamily from the speakers, was played by an orchestra of forty violins and a few wind instruments; it was quite unlike usual Chicano music, for although it bespoke a deep passion, it also had a sweet gentleness. The melody was simple, with delightful rising and falling notes and unexpected twists. It was the song which first awakened him to the fact that Chicano music was something other than “La Cucaracha” and “Rancho Grande.”
It was this song that had lured him on his first trip to Mexico, when he had driven those desolate miles to Chihuahua and those flower-strewn miles farther south. Places like Oaxaca had been a revelation to him, and he had come home with two records of “Dos Arbolitos,” one the stringed version which he had just played and another in which two voices, male and female, sang the sentimental words:
“Two little trees grow in my garden,
Two little trees that seem like twins.”
The Buick had dropped to a mere forty while Garrett joined the singers, tilting his head back and barely watching the road. When the song ended, he leaned forward and reversed the tape until he felt it had returned to the starting point of the violin version, then released it to play again. Once more “Dos Arbolitos” sounded, and he sang with the violins.
We had a very late lunch at Pagosa Springs at the western end of Wolf Creek Pass, where he met his first delegation of Spanish-speaking citizens. He told them he wished he could address them in their own language, but whereas he understood Spanish when they spoke it, his attempts to respond were laughable.
“Let us laugh,” one of the Chicano leaders suggested, so he said a few words. “It’s pretty bad,” the Chicano agreed.
He told them that in the forthcoming celebrations there would be an honored place for Chicanos. “We’ve heard that before,” they said with some bitterness.
Montezuma and Archuleta had recently started a mock-serious separatist movement, seeking to join New Mexico, since distant Denver never gave a damn for their interests. “That’s all changed,” Garrett assured them. “The governor himself wanted me to come down here to tell you of our plans.”
“Him, yes,” the Chicanos said. “But what about his successor?”
“Those of us on the front range have learned our lesson. We know you exist.”
He made little impression on the suspicious men of Pagosa Springs, so late in the afternoon we headed for Durango, pausing there briefly before continuing to our final destination, Cortez, not far from that historic spot where four states meet, the only place in America where that happens. In Cortez we had a late dinner with leaders of the Chicano minority and talked with them late into the night.
On November 4, which was a Sunday, we made several extended tours with the Anglos of Cortez, and they showed us their plans for a ceremony at Four Corners, a bleak point in the desert but a place with considerable emotional appeal. “I can imagine lots of Americans wanting to drive this way,” Garrett said, “if we have something to offer them when they get here.”
On November 5 we headed back to Centennial by the northern route, and once more we roared along the spacious highways while Chicano music thundered from the cassettes. Again Garrett slowed down when it came time to sing along with “Dos Arbolitos,” but after a while he turned off the machine, and during the long haul from Grand Junction to Glenwood Springs he discussed the difficult problem he would face the next day.
It was election day and Colorado would be the first state in the nation to face up to the future, for it was electing an officer of a new description. His title was resounding, Commissioner of Resources and Priorities, and his task was to steer the state in making right industrial and ecological choices. It was appropriate that Colorado should be the state to experiment with such a concept, for its citizens had always been pioneer types, willing to sponsor change. Colorado had led the nation in old-age pensions, proper funding of education, liberal labor laws, and it had been the state which turned down the 1976 Winter Olympics as destructive to the environment.
When one looked at the original settlers, men like Lame Beaver of the Arapaho, Levi Zendt of Pennsylvania, Potato Brumbaugh from Russia and Charlotte Buckland from England, it was no wonder that traditions of individualism had been established. Now the state would lead the nation in trying to define an acceptable use of its resources.
The new officer had already been dubbed the Czar, and tomorrow the first man to occupy the crucial office would be elected. Like most Coloradans, Garrett felt that the Republican party represented the time-honored values of American life and could be trusted to place in office men and women of probity who would remain above temptation. Whenever a Republican officeholder turned out to be a crook, as one or another did year after year, he explained away the affair as an accident.
On the other hand, he felt that in time of crisis, when real brains were needed to salvage the nation, it was best to place Democrats in office, since they usually showed more imagination. And when one Democrat after another proved colossally stupid, he termed that failure an accident too.
He was always willing to split his ticket, not wishing to be like the old beet farmer at Centennial who said, “Me! I vote for the man not the party. Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Landon, Willkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater.” For example, Garrett had voted for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but looking back, suspected that he had made a mistake each time.
The preceding night, while we were watching television in his motel room, he found his politics becoming confused. Julie Nixon Eisenhower was shown defending her father. “Fight, fight, fight. My father will never resign,” the attractive young lady proclaimed, and Garrett judged it to be improper for a father to use his daughter in such an undignified way. “If he wants to defend himself,” he had growled at the television, “let him do it himself … not hide behind his daughter’s skirts.” He had voted for Nixon, had met him twice in Denver and had liked him, but now he told me, “I’m beginning to wonder if the man can ever extricate himself from the morass he’s fallen into.”
He found himself equally bewildered when he considered his choice on Tuesday. The Democrats had nominated for commissioner a lackluster man from the western slope, and it would be fairly easy to vote against him, except that the Republicans had chosen a man from Centennial, and to Garrett he was simply unacceptable.
The candidate was Morgan Wendell, born the same year as Garrett and a graduate in the same class from the University of Colorado. He was a wealthy man, his father having made a killing in wheat during World War II, and in business relations he was quite reliable. He had done well in college and had served the state in various capacities. It looked as if he would win handily, so that whether Paul Garrett voted for him or against him was of little moment.
But Garrett prized his vote. It seemed to him the noblest ritual of American life, and he had never failed to vote, nor had he voted carelessly.
The Buick slowed perceptibly as he asked himself, What is it about Morgan Wendell I don’t trust? He put aside the secret gossip which had circulated within the Garrett family. Paul Garrett’s grandfather, Beeley Garrett, had told the family, with Paul listening, that a Mr. Gribben, before he died, had confided that Maude and Mervin Wendell had stolen their first house from him by working the badger game.
“What’s the badger game?” Paul had asked.
“It’s when a man gets caught with his pants down in somebody else’s bedroom and is afraid to admit it.” Grandfather Garrett had continued with the part of the story that worried Paul: “We had a Swede come to town about that time, man named Sorenson, and he disappeared. A lot of his money was missing. Something that Sheriff Dumire told me at the time made me think that he suspected the Wendells of having done away with the man. I know for a fact that Dumire was on to something, but before he could settle it he was killed in a street fight.”
That was rumor, and Paul dismissed it as something that had happened more than eighty years ago. What possible difference did it make now? But the next charge was not rumor, and it was a harsh one. Paul’s own father related the details when Paul was twelve years old.
It was on the first day of World War II, back in 1939, and the Garretts were having their usual early breakfast when the phone rang. It was Philip Wendell, the real estate man, and he had called to inform Paul’s father that a deal they agreed upon—Henry Garrett would buy back four thousand acres which had once belonged to Crown Vee—was called off.
“But we shook hands on that deal, Philip,” Henry Garrett said. There was a brief silence, and then he said, “Of course. There’s nothing signed. You never brought me the paper. But doesn’t your word mean anything?” Another silence, followed by Henry Garrett’s shouting, “You miserable son-of-a-bitch!” after which he slammed down the phone.
Returning to the breakfast table, he trembled for some moments, then turned to Paul, saying, “Never in your life have anything to do with a Wendell. He went back on his word.”
“What does that mean?” Paul had asked.
“He shook hands with me, promised to go through with a deal at a price agreed upon. Something’s happened whereby he can make a little more money, so he refuses to honor our agreement.”
“What could it be?” Paul’s mother asked, but her husband ignored the question, and she left the room. Turning to his son, he shook hands formally and said solemnly, “If you shake hands on anything, Paul, and then break your word, I do not care ever to see you again. The association of men is founded on honor, and no Wendell has ever understood that basic truth.”
“Henry,” his wife called. “Listen to what the radio’s saying!” And when the fact of war was known, Philip Wendell’s revoking of his promise was understood. “If he plants all that land in wheat,” Ruth Garrett said, “he’ll be very wealthy … if the war continues.”
“Let him have it,” her husband said with smoldering fury. “Paul, never earn money that way. It’s not worth it.”
From that time Paul Garrett had watched the Wendells with deepening interest, and he concluded that his father was right. The Wendells, none of them, had any basic sense of responsibility. At the university Morgan Wendell had done everything to ingratiate himself with older men in power—professors, athletic coaches, fraternity leaders, he had toadied to them all—but no one ever knew what principles he stood for, and on this program he prospered.
And in his adult life he had continued to prosper. Now he stood on the threshold of becoming an important official of a great state, and perhaps Paul Garrett was being overly cautious in wondering if he could vote for such a man. As we drove eastward toward the Eisenhower Tunnel he grabbed the tape recorder and started dictating, as if determined that I have an exact account of what he was disclosing:
I don’t trust him, Vernor. It’s as simple as that. It’s not the things his grandparents did … and I haven’t told you that whole story because it really doesn’t concern you. And it’s not because his father was a sneaky operator, because I don’t believe the sins of the father are visited on the heads of the sons. It’s just that he’s a low-grade individual without principle. He’s a technician. He can perform. He can keep things from getting tangled. But in a crisis he’ll have no base from which to operate. He believes in nothing. At the university he took no classes that made him think. He’s never stretched his mind, because he’s never faced himself … or the facts … or the future. And I think democracy can’t function unless it’s led by men and women who know what kind of people they are. How can you solve an equation if x is never known?
When we reached the interstate leading back to Greeley he drove at a hundred and five, telling me, “Tomorrow I’ll get up at dawn and figure this thing out. I’ll saddle Bonnet and ride over to look at the Herefords.”
On Tuesday, November 6, Garrett did not get to the polls till late, because when he returned to the castle following his long ride, he was deeply agitated. For some time he sat alone, his head in his hands, pondering not the election, for on that his mind was fairly made up, but the painful confrontation he faced regarding his beloved Herefords. When he had seen those stalwart beasts in their distant pastures and watched as they moved slowly toward him, white faces shining against red coats, he felt a knife-thrust of pain as he recalled the vicissitudes he and his family had brought upon this noble breed. The Garretts had always acted in good faith where the Herefords were concerned. Great-Grandfather Jim Lloyd had loved them almost as dearly as he had loved his own daughter, and the ranch had always bought the top bulls, but somewhere things had got onto the wrong track, and now they must be corrected.
“I’d rather cut off my right hand,” Garrett said, and he meant it. He was about to make a phone call to Montana when he heard footsteps on the porch, and when he went out he found to his astonishment that Morgan Wendell, the presumptive Czar, was standing there.
“I had to vote early,” Morgan explained. His manager had told him, “Be there at seven. I’ll have photographers on hand, and we’ll make all the afternoon papers.” He had stood by the voting machine with his wife, both of them smiling.
“I trust you’re going to vote, Paul.”
“Never miss.”
“Isn’t this rather late to be campaigning?”
“I’m not campaigning. It looks as if I’ll win safely, and I don’t give a damn how you vote.”
Garrett had made no move to invite Wendell into the castle, a place the real estate man had rarely visited, but this sharp rejoinder brought him to attention. “What’s the reason for the visit, Morgan?”
“Something very important, Paul.” The candidate hesitated, and Garrett said, “Come on in,” and Wendell said, “Thanks.”
As Garrett ushered him into the big room with the moose heads, Wendell said abruptly, “Paul, you and I have never gotten along well, and I suppose that when you do vote, you’ll vote for Hendrickson.” Garrett shrugged his shoulders but said nothing. “What I’m here for is to tell you that I need your help … need it badly.”
“You just said you didn’t give a damn.”
“On the voting … who cares? But on the morning after I’m elected—and I think I will be—I’m going to require some first-rate brains to help me out. No, don’t interrupt. Brains are not my long suit. But sensing what’s happening in the world is—anticipating what troubles people.”
“How does this involve me?”
“Most directly. The great problem in the next decade in Colorado will be to save the state. I really mean that. To save the forests, the trout, the elk—and especially things like the rivers and the air we breathe.”
Paul Garrett leaned back and studied his visitor. “You know, Morgan, for the first time in your life you’re talking sense.”
“I’ve learned it from men like you,” Wendell said. “The first appointment I want to give to the press is my deputy, Paul Garrett.”
“It’s a job I’d have to accept … if offered.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“But, Morgan, I won’t take it just to provide a façade for you. When you speak about ecology it’s the popular word, the in-thing to do politically. And I have no objections, because men have to get elected. But when I use the word it summarizes my whole life. I may not be an easy man to live with.”
“That I understand,” Wendell said. “Let’s leave it this way. You make every decision about our natural resources just as you see it, and when you become totally intolerable, I’ll fire you with a ‘Dear Paul’ letter and replace you with someone a little more congenial. I judge we can tolerate each other for at least three years, and in that time the basic task can be started.”
“Sounds workable,” Garrett said. Then he thought of something that might prove disqualifying. “You know, Morgan, that I’m testifying at the Calendar trial this week. It could prove sticky.”
Wendell lowered his head, for this was unpleasant news. The Calendar trial was bound to agitate voters across the state, and to have his deputy take sides was bound to be unsettling. “Couldn’t you duck that one, Paul?”
Garrett laughed. “You see, even before you make the appointment you’re asking me to draw back. Morgan, the Calendar trial is at the heart of all we’ve been talking about. Of course I can’t duck it. Of course I’m going to embarrass you.”
“Maybe I could delay announcing your appointment. That would be reasonable.”
“Anything is reasonable,” Garrett said. “Anything on God’s earth can be given a reason. But if you delay, I won’t accept the appointment. Can’t you see, Morgan, I will always be a thorn in your side, because the protection of this state will invariably irritate people whom you want to placate … whom you must placate. It’s going to be a dogfight every inch of the way. We know that. Question is, can we live with it?”
Wendell contemplated this forthright declaration of difference, then said, “Your job will be to protect all the natural good things of this state, and I know you’ll do it. My job is to see that industry gets a fair shake so there will be jobs and tax rolls. You conserve the water. I want every drop I can get for new cities and new factories. It will be difficult, and you want to make it worse by getting mixed up in the Calendar affair … infuriate every hunter in the state.”
“You wouldn’t want me, Morgan, if I weren’t committed on such issues.”
Morgan Wendell, facing the first difficult decision of his future administration, took a deep breath and said something which took Garrett completely off guard. “Paul, do you know who my favorite American of all time was? Warren Gamaliel Harding. Because he came along at a lush period of our national life, when we had a comfortable margin for error. And he proved how horrible an elected official can be. He’s a warning for all politicians. On the day we take office we all think of President Harding and we say to ourselves, ‘Well, I won’t allow myself to be as bad as that.’ Harding keeps the ball game honest, and I judge him to be one of the most useful Americans who ever lived. I’m not going to be the Colorado Harding.”
“I’m having lunch in town,” Garrett said. “At the Marquez place. Join me.”
So the first public appearance the Czar made was in the Flor de Méjico, with a man who was known to be cool toward his candidacy. It did Wendell a lot of good in the district, but shrewd politician that he was, he saw something that day which would aid him even more. He had an unusual gift for sensing what was going on in his vicinity, and as he entered the restaurant with Garrett he noticed that Paul hesitated in the doorway and looked in all directions, then walked to the table, plainly showing his disappointment.
Later in the meal Wendell was watching Garrett out of the corner of his eye and saw his future deputy’s face brighten. Looking toward the kitchen, Wendell saw Manolo Marquez’s daughter come in with an armful of dishes. Townspeople knew that she had been married in Los Angeles, but after only two weeks, she had returned home with a scar down the side of her face and grounds for divorce. Well, I’ll be damned! he said to himself. Old blue-blood Garrett and a Chicano girl! That could make me very popular with the Chicano voters in the southwest. I will be damned.
That afternoon when Paul Garrett went into the secrecy of the polling booth and looked at the two names confronting him—Charles Hendrickson, a man who lacked every qualification that Democrats sometimes had, and Morgan Wendell, a man without the basic character expected in Republicans, he felt a great nausea. I’ll be damned if I can vote for either of them, he decided, and after pulling the lever for one of the Takemoto boys who was running for school board and another lever for a German woman, he left the booth without voting for Czar on either ticket.
On the following day he began his series of inspection tours, those brief trips during which he simply looked at the land he would be protecting. His journeys east through the drylands sometimes brought tears to his eyes as he surveyed that chronicle of lost hope, but he was even more deeply distressed by what he saw along the front range from Cheyenne down to the New Mexico border:
When I was a boy we had an old book, Journey West by John Brent of Illinois. He came this way in 1848, and I remember his writing in his diary that one morning, while they were still one hundred and five miles east of the Rockies, they could see the mountains so clearly they could almost spot the valleys. Look at them now! We’re ten miles away and we can’t see a damned thing—only that lens of filth, that curtain of perpetual smog. What must be in the minds of men that they are satisfied to smother a whole range of mountains in their aerial garbage? This must be the saddest sight in America.
South from Cheyenne, clear across Colorado, hung a perpetual veil of suspended contamination. The lens appeared to be seven hundred feet thick, composed of industrial waste, especially from the automobile. Week after week it hung there, stagnant. Had it clung to the ground, it would have imperiled human breathing and would have been treated as the menace it was, but since it stayed aloft, it merely blotted out the sun and dropped enough acid to make the eyes smart twenty-four hours a day.
From Centennial, Beaver Mountain was no longer visible, and whole days would pass with the cowboys at Venneford unable to see that majestic range which once had formed their western backdrop. Men who used to stand at the intersection of Mountain and Prairie, inspecting the Rockies to determine the weather, now had to get that information from the radio.
Garrett was especially perturbed about what had happened to Denver, once America’s most spectacular capital, a mile-high city with the noblest Rockies looking down on the lively town, made prosperous by the mountains’ yield of silver and gold. Now it was a smog-bound trap with one of the worst atmospheres in the nation, and the mountains were seen no more.
There were days, of course, when the contamination was swept aloft by some intruding breeze, making the peaks visible again for a few hours. Then people would stare lovingly at the great mountains and tell their children, “It used to be this way all the time.”
During the past ten years Paul Garrett had often had the dismal feeling that no one in Denver gave a damn. The state had succumbed to the automobile, and any attempt to discipline it had seemed futile. Year after year, two citizens a day were killed by cars throughout the state, and no one did anything to halt the slaughter. Drunk drivers accounted for more than half these deaths, but the legislature refused to punish them. It was held that any red-blooded man in the west was entitled to his car and his gun, and what he did with either was no one else’s business.
The west had surrendered to the automobile in a way it had once refused to surrender to the Indian, for the car in one year killed more settlers than the redman did during the entire history of the territory. The concrete ribbons ate up the landscape and penetrated to the most secret places. And if by chance some valley remained inviolate, the snowmobile whined and sputtered its way in, chasing the elk until they died of exhaustion. No place was sacred, no place was quiet, in no valley was the snow left undisturbed.
Paul Garrett, pondering these problems in the early days of November, made a series of promises: “As Deputy Commissioner of Resources and Priorities I’m going to switch to a small car. I’m going to drive slower. Day and night I’m going to tackle the Denver smog. And I’m going to ban snowmobiles in every state forest.” Even so he feared that such measures might be too late, and he muttered sardonically, “Pretty soon, if you want to see the unspoiled grandeur of Colorado you’ll have to go to Wyoming.”
On Friday, November 9, Paul Garrett faced up to a most disagreeable task. He shaved carefully, dressed in a conservative business suit, and with his razor, trimmed some of the gray hair about his ears. This would be his first public appearance since the announcement of his appointment to the new position, and he wanted to make a good impression.
He drove to the Federal Court in Denver, where the trial of Floyd Calendar was to start. The judge was a small, alert man with a well-known sense of humor, and the contesting attorneys were men who typified the forces at stake in this case. The district attorney, representing the conservation forces of the nation, was a former athlete who could not in the slightest degree be termed a bleeding heart, while the defense attorney was a famous outdoors man, well known as a hunter and a rancher.
The accused was something else again. Floyd Calendar was a mean-looking, thin, heavily bearded man in his early sixties. He wore no tie and his suit seemed several sizes too large, even though he was a tall man. He had one tooth missing in front, which made his normally surly countenance almost sinister. Even so, he represented hunters, men who loved the outdoors and ranchers who sought to protect their livestock.
Calendar was involved in two serious crimes: shooting bald eagles, our national bird, from a plane and killing bears, an endangered species, in “a cruel and unfair manner.”
The first prosecution witness was Harold Emig, from Centennial. The government lawyer wanted to use him to establish the kind of man Floyd Calendar was.
“He was a guide,” Emig said. “First public job he had was putting parties together to shoot prairie dogs.”
“Are prairie dogs edible?” the prosecutor asked.
“Oh, no! You just shoot prairie dogs for the fun of it. Floyd knew where all the dog towns were. There aren’t many these days, you know. And for a dollar a head he would take us out there, and we’d rim the prairie-dog town. We’d be on the west, you understand, so’s the sun would be in the critters’ eyes, and Floyd had drums and whistles and he knew how to make the little fellows stick their heads up, and when one did we’d blaze away.”
“How many dogs would you kill?”
“Well, on a good day when Floyd’s whistles were working, each man would get maybe ten, twenty … that’s not countin’ probables.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Nothin’. A prairie dog ain’t good for nothin’. You couldn’t eat ’em. It was just the fun of seein’ a little head pop up from the hole and blasting it with a well-aimed shot.”
“Does Mr. Calendar still conduct such hunts?”
“No, sir. After a while the dogs were pretty well cleaned out, and he turned to rabbit drives. You get sixty, seventy men with clubs and you range over a pretty large area, always closin’ the circle, and in the end you have an excitin’ time, everybody clubbin’ rabbits to death.”
“I thought that was stopped some years ago.”
“Yeah. Life magazine slipped a photographer into one of Floyd’s hunts and took pictures of the men … I was in the middle of one of the shots. Well, it sort of irritated a lot of women back east … grown men you know, clubbin’ jackrabbits that way, but they never seen what damage a rabbit could do.”
“Then what did Mr. Calendar do?”
“Well, he came up with a real fine idea. Lot of men in pickup trucks and special huntin’ dogs, and we’d go out onto the prairie, far away from everything, and we’d turn up some coyotes, and we’d chase after ’em for mebbe ten miles and then we’d let the dogs go and they’d zero in on a coyote.”
“Then what?”
“Then the dogs would tear him apart.” There was a pause in court, and Emig added, “It was necessary, of course, because coyotes eat sheep.”
“Your sheep?”
“No.”
“Mr. Calendar’s sheep?”
“No. We just went along for the fun.”
The prosecution now called a new witness, Clyde Devlin, a dynamiter. “What we done, there wasn’t no more prairie dogs, and the coyotes was used up, so Floyd, he kept lookin’ for anything sportin’, and his mind fell on the rattlers up at the buttes. We bought small sticks of dynamite and threw them into the dens. Killed a lot that way, but the fun was standin’ around with shotguns and blastin’ the others as they crawled out.
“But the reason people was willin’ to pay money for the dynamitin’ was the fun of seein’ Floyd handle rattlers. He had a way of pinnin’ ’em down with a forked stick, then pickin’ ’em up by the tail and snappin’ ’em like a whip. The rattler’s head would fly off. I seen him whip sixteen snakes in one day, and nobody else had the guts to try even one. Me? I wouldn’t get near ’em.”
The prosecutor turned to the first serious charge. Calling to the stand Hank Garvey, pilot of a small plane stationed at Fort Collins, he asked, “When, in your opinion, Mr. Garvey, did Mr. Calendar first direct his attention to eagles?”
“We were flyin’ one day, about five years ago, and in the distance we seen this eagle come off a dead tree, and we both watched it flyin’ for some time, and Floyd said, ‘Hell, Hank, with the right attention a man could stay on that eagle’s tail and blast him right out of the sky.’ So we spent a whole week makin’ dry runs, seein’ if we could spot eagles and close in on them, and we found it was right easy. Eagles don’t fly half as fast as they show ’em in the cartoons.”
“When did the idea … I mean, whose idea was it to do this commercially?”
“That came natural. Floyd and I knew a lot about hunters, him bein’ a guide and all, and we knew how tough it was for a hunter to bag hisself a eagle. Some very good shots tried for years without ever gettin’ close to one, let alone hittin’ it. And this bugged ’em, because on their walls they would have the head of a rhinoceros from Africa and a tiger from India, but they wouldn’t have their own national bird. There was a blank spot on their wall, and they were hungry to do somethin’ about it, because nothin’ looks better, when it’s mounted right, than a bald eagle.”
“When did the commercial aspect begin? Your first customer, that is?”
“One day when we were practicin’ on dry runs we came so close to a big bird that Floyd cried, ‘Shit, a man don’t even have to aim. If he can point a gun he can get hisself a eagle this way.’ So there was this dude from Boston. Had one of everything in his game room except a eagle. Even had a Kodiak bear, and wanted a eagle so bad he could taste it.
“He told Floyd before takeoff, ‘I don’t think you can get a eagle this way, but if you bring me onto one, I’ll give you five hundred dollars.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘And there’ll be a little somethin’ in it for you.’ So we were bound to locate a eagle.”
“Did you?”
“We cruised for a while west of Fort Collins and didn’t find nothin’. So we sorta drifted down over Rocky Mountain National Park, where we turned up a big, beautiful bird. The dude wanted to fire as soon as we saw it, but we didn’t want to shoot him over the park, because we might run into trouble when we landed to pick it up.
“So I swung the plane south of him and we worked him north, out of the park, and when he was over plowed land I moved in real close.
“Now, the eagle and the plane fly at about the same speed, so it was just like the bird was standin’ still. And that’s where we made our big mistake on our first try. I got too close. Hell, you could of killed that eagle with a broom.
“So when the dude does fire he practically disintegrates the eagle. We spent the better part of a hour pickin’ up the various bits and pieces, and when we hauled them in to Gundeweisser, the taxidermist, he looks at the pile and asks, ‘How do you want this job made up? As a duck or a eagle? I can play it either way.’
“He turned out a masterpiece. Spread-eagled, talons projectin’, glass eyes flashin’. The dude was delighted and sent us the picture you have over there. When we showed it to Gundeweisser, he said, ‘That eagle’s two-thirds plastic, but he’ll never know.’ So after that I kept the crate a little farther away so’s the gun blast didn’t tear the bird apart.”
“How many did you kill from your platform in the sky?”
“Somethin’ over four hundred, but me’n Floyd never shot a single one. Always some sportsman who wanted our national bird on his wall.”
Taxidermist Gundeweisser confirmed these figures. “The boys brought me their eagles because I’d perfected the knack of making them look extra ferocious—talons extended. I was able to do this because I bought only first-class eyes from Germany—hard glass with a flash of yellow. I mounted over four hundred eagles, and nobody ever wanted the bird just looking natural. Always had to be in the act of killing something, talons extended.”
One of the state naturalists was now called, and he testified that he and his associates had been watching Floyd Calendar for some time. “National publicity on the eagle thing scared him off that line, and we never saw the plane again. What he directed his attention to was bears. There was almost as good a market for bears as there was for eagles, and he devised a sure-fire way of helping an eastern hunter bag his bear.”
“Explain it, if you will.”
“He learned to trap bears. He probably knows more about bears than any man in America. At the beginning of each season he’d trap eight or ten beauties and hide them in cages deep in the woods. When some sportsman came along Floyd would charge him one hundred dollars for the hunt, two hundred if he bagged a bear. He would take the sportsman to one of several cabins in the woods, and about a quarter of a mile away he would have one of his bears in a cage. At five in the morning he’d sneak out and let the bear loose and at five-fifteen he and the sportsman would start trailing it, and by five-thirty the bear would be dead. I investigated three dozen cases like this, and never did the hunter suspect what Floyd had done. He handed over two hundred dollars and was delighted with the deal.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, every now and then Floyd would release a bear that would take off in some unanticipated direction, and there’d be no chance of trailing him. So he adopted the practice of not feeding the caged bears for two weeks prior to releasing them. Now there were few escapes, because the bear would stop to eat, and the sportsman could creep up and gun it down.”
“We’d like to hear what Mr. Calendar tried next.”
“Ranger Quarry will explain that.”
A very young man took the stand, with a collection of gadgets to which the clerk gave numbers. “Mr. Calendar was still not satisfied, for an occasional bear would still get away. We have evidence that his new plan was inspired by an article in National Geographic in which I detailed experiments I had made in Canada on the hibernating habits of bears. In the article, which now I’m sorry I wrote, I explained how we attached to the bear a very small radio device, like this. Wherever the bear went, it sent a signal, which betrayed his position at all times. Then I put one of these direction finders in my cap, and I could move about and always know where the bears were.
“Well, Floyd Calendar discovered who manufactured the broadcasting and listening devices, and after that whenever he captured a bear to be used later, he planted one of these transmitters around his neck. Then when a sportsman came into the mountains to get himself a bear, all Floyd had to do was let the bear loose, listen to where he was going, and zero his hunter right onto the scene without any chance of failure.”
“Didn’t the hunter realize what was happening when he got to the dead bear and saw the broadcast device?”
“No. Because Floyd never let him shoot at the bear till he—Floyd, that is—was all set for a running start. Then, while the hunter jumped in the air with joy, Floyd ran in, bent over, and with one quick swipe, tore the little transmitter from the bear’s neck, and no one was the wiser.”
Now came the turn of Paul Garrett, who was introduced as deputy to the commissioner. Spectators in the courtroom leaned forward as he took the stand, because feelings ran high in this case, and some citizens felt that it was unfair to confront Calendar with an official like Garrett.
“I’ve known Floyd Calendar all my life,” Garrett said under questioning. “Knew his father, too. And my family knew his grandfather.”
“Tell us about Mr. Calendar and turkeys.”
“About ten years ago I lured a family of wild turkeys onto the north edge of my ranch. We fed them, protected them, and after a while we had quite a colony. The wild turkey is a very sensitive bird, almost extinct in these parts, and we watched our brood very carefully, because they’re our real national bird.
“But apparently Floyd Calendar was watching them too, because after they reached a certain number they began to decline, and we could find no sign of coyotes. We worried about this until a friend of mine in Massachusetts sent me a copy of a form letter he’d received from Colorado. Here it is.”
The judge instructed the clerk to read it, and the spectators were either amused or outraged when Floyd Calendar’s mimeographed letter to his clients was divulged: “I can make you a guarantee that no other guide in America can make. Come to the Rockies and I’ll show you how to bag both of our national birds, a baldheaded eagle and a wild turkey.”
“Where did he get the turkey?” the prosecutor asked.
“From my protected sanctuary. When I saw the letter I staked one of my men out to guard the turkeys, and sure enough, here comes Floyd Calendar with a hunter from Wisconsin, shooting my turkeys.”
“Now, Mr. Garrett, there are rumors circulating as to what you did then. Will you tell the court.”
“I became very angry and waited till I saw Calendar go into Flor de Mèjico, that’s the restaurant run by Manolo Marquez, and I went up to him and I said something like …”
“We don’t want to hear ‘something like’ what you said. What did you say?”
“As well as I can remember, I said, ‘Calendar, if you ever set foot on that turkey range again, I’ll kill you. If I’m there when you come, I’ll do it there. If I miss you when you sneak in, I’ll come into this restaurant and get you while you’re eating.’ ”
“Did you say, Mr. Garrett, that you’d get him while he was eating?”
“I did. I was very angry.”
This early confession of his threat took some of the sting out of the cross-examination, but the defense attorney made a good deal of the fact that a man who would be working with sportsmen in his new job had threatened to shoot one of them in a public restaurant. By the time the interrogation ended, Garrett did not look good.
The last prosecution witness was a Centennial man who had had several run-ins with Calendar, and his testimony was devastating: “With Floyd Calendar, killing became an end in itself. He hated everything that moved—prairie dogs, rattlers, antelope and, like you heard, bears and eagles. I think if you gave Floyd a free hand, when he got through with the animal kingdom he’d start on Negroes and Mexicans and Chinese and Catholics and anyone else who wasn’t exactly like himself. He hates anything that intrudes on his part of the world, and considers it his duty to wipe it out. To call him a sportsman is obscene. He’s a one-man ecological disaster.”
The defense attorney, of course, objected to this whole tirade, and the judge ordered it stricken from the record.
When the first defense witnesses appeared the general tenor of the trial became clear, for they were ranchers and hunters who testified that bald eagles carried away young lambs and should therefore be exterminated. They also testified that Floyd Calendar was one of the finest men in the west—everyone said he had been kind to his mother—and on that edifying note the court recessed over the weekend. One rancher, as he left the courtroom, told Garrett, “You have a nerve, testifyin’ against a real American,” and Paul was relieved to know that he would be required to testify no further.
On Saturday, November 10, he worked on the ranch, riding north to inspect the wild turkeys. They were most handsome birds, big and heavy. They always looked as if Pilgrims with long guns should be chasing them for the 1621 Thanksgiving, and Paul was delighted that they shared the ranch with him.
He also rode over to a corner of the range he had set aside for a prairie-dog town. Slowly the little creatures were making a comeback, sharing their burrows with sand owls. Their return was not an unmixed blessing, for one of Garrett’s horses broke his leg in a burrow and had to be shot. The ranch foreman wanted to bulldoze the town out of existence, but Garrett refused permission: “You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.”
The fact that he had sought the company of turkeys and prairie dogs reminded him of how deeply he was afflicted by the permanent American illness. A deep depression attacked him, which he could identify but not explain, the awful malaise of loneliness:
I’ve never understood why so many Americans are so committed to loneliness. I know it runs in my family. When Alexander McKeag, who could be called an ancestor because he held Pasquinel’s family together, spent the winter of 1827 alone in a cave, speaking to no one, he was succumbing to our sickness.
And when my other ancestor, Levi Zendt, turned his back on Beaver Creek and chose the dreadful isolation of Chalk Cliff, he was behaving like a typical American.
Sheepmen like Amos Calendar elected to live by themselves. Like their prototype Daniel Boone, they preferred living alone “rather than with all them people.”
Only the white Americans did this. The Arapaho always combined in large communal societies. Chinese railroad workers lived in colonies, and so did Chicano beet workers. The Japanese clung to their communities and so did the Russians. It took the American to build his ranch far from everything, his farm where no one else could see him. Why?
Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one’s own cottage.
It had been the same with all subsequent frontiers. If a man was inwardly afraid of loneliness, he had small chance of adjusting to the terrible isolation of the Kentucky forest. A predisposition for living alone became almost a requirement for survival in America, and even now, Garrett thought, the world held few places so lonely as the average American city.
The prairie had intensified the challenge, for there the emptiness was inescapable; even the sheltering tree was absent. A family moving west could anticipate fifty days of travel without encountering a sign of human habitation, and the wife whose husband decided to settle in Wyoming had to face an endless expanse of nothingness.
And there had been that ultimate in isolation, the snowbound mountain man passing the winters in some forgotten spot, allowing the drifts to cover him during the silent months, reading nothing, conversing not even with animals, who were also in hibernation. This was a form of exile difficult to comprehend, but there were always men who sought it.
The only heroes I had as a boy were loners. The isolated defenders of the Alamo. Nathan Hale operating alone and taking his punishment solo. The pioneer mother defending the Conestoga wagon after her man was slain. The Pony Express rider pointing the nose of his horse west and going it alone. These were my symbols.
This had an effect on every aspect of American life. One courageous man building a solitary log cabin and calling it home. Any self-respecting family must live apart … by itself … in its own little cabin, and any unfortunate who failed to achieve this alone-ness was either pitied or ridiculed. The unmarried elder sister became the focus of pity because she had to live with others. Any son-in-law who had to live with his wife’s parents was an object of ridicule.
When the west was opened, people did not live in communities. One ranch was thirty miles from the next. During the period of Indian raids no one gave the remote settler hell for trying to make it alone. He was cheered for being brave enough to face the Indians on his own.
As a consequence of all this, Americans became the loneliest people on the face of the earth. We’re even lonelier than the Eskimos, who live in close units. We’re much lonelier than the Mexicans, who occupy the same type of land to the south, for Mexicans retain the extended family in which people of all ages live together in reasonable harmony.
There were compensations, Garrett had to admit. Living alone meant that men had to be more ingenious, which led to inventiveness. Old patterns had to be surrendered, so revolutionary new ones could be more easily accepted. Forward-seeking led to the development of the brash, resolute, outgoing man. The world needed him, but he evolved at a terrible price in loneliness.
For Garrett was also aware of the heavy social cost. Americans were both wasteful and cruel with their old people, especially their older women. Three factors conspired to produce a plethora of elderly women. First, as in all nations, females tended to live about five years longer than males. Second, custom encouraged a man to marry a woman somewhat younger than he. Third, American tradition required the man to work himself to death to support his woman, so that many men died prematurely. Adding these data, the average wife could look forward to about fifteen years of widowhood.
Other civilizations had grappled with this phenomenon. The American Indian who used to live at Rattlesnake Buttes solved it by depriving the widow of everything, even shelter, and encouraging her to starve to death. Asian Indians adopted a crueler solution: the widow was expected to climb the funeral pyre of her husband and burn to death. Arab nations developed the sensible device of multiple wives. In America, Garrett saw, the survivors were condemned to infirmity and loneliness.
Men fared only slightly better. Some of the loneliest men Garrett had ever known were the heads of corporations, trusting no one, confiding in no one, living out their lives in quiet despair, each wealthy man immured within his own castle.
What the hell am I doing living in a castle? he asked himself as he returned to ranch headquarters. Since the death of his wife he had been terribly lonely, felt himself no better off than the widows and the tycoons he had been pitying. He had a fine ranch, a profession he loved and now a responsible job with the government, but these did not compensate for his increasing sense of isolation.
About three o’clock that afternoon he took a shower, shaved and climbed into his car. When he left the ranch he could not have said where he was heading. Vaguely he wanted to hear Cisco Calendar sing some good western songs, for Cisco was the best in the business and was home again from his television show in Chicago. He also wanted to assure Cisco that his testimony against Floyd indicated no grudge.
But Cisco was not the main reason for the trip to town. What he really needed was to see Flor Marquez, to make up his mind about that long-legged, dark-haired divorcee. She had first caught his eye during his visits to her father’s restaurant for some good Chicano food. It could not be said that he watched her grow up, for he was too preoccupied with other things to notice a Chicano girl, but he was aware that she had married a dashing fellow from Los Angeles, and of course it was a general scandal when she returned home after two weeks with a scar along her left cheek.
She had referred to her marriage only once: “How can a girl tell that a guy is a total creep?”
She was in the restaurant when Garrett arrived. “Let’s go see if Cisco will sing tonight,” he suggested, and she was eager for an excuse to leave the restaurant. They walked west on Mountain, then down Prairie and along the railroad tracks to where Cisco lived in an old clapboard house. He was sitting on the porch, as he usually did in the afternoon, just watching things go past. Like his older brother, he was tall and lean, with the face of a man long accustomed to outdoor work.
“Hiya, folks,” he said amiably, without getting up.
“Came by to tell you I’m sorry about the run-in with Floyd … in court, that is.”
“He’s a mean one. Anything you said was probably true.”
“I only testified about the turkeys.”
“How they doin’?”
“Checked them this morning. There they were, fat and sassy.”
“Come on over tonight,” Flor said. “Give us some songs.”
“I just may do that,” Cisco said.
They knew it was unnecessary to say anything more. If he felt like it, he would stop by Flor de Méjico around ten and entertain his neighbors. Flor knew that in places like Cleveland and Birmingham he could command thousands of dollars for a night’s performance, but when at home he liked to associate with the people from whom he had learned his songs, the Chicanos and the cowboys.
Garrett and Flor walked back to the Railway Arms, where they stopped for a couple of beers. They were aware that townspeople were watching them, and that there had been a good deal of talk. Gossips claimed that Flor was his mistress, but a waitress who knew her said, “That hot tamale ain’t gonna let no man in her bed without a license.”
She was wrong. In various rooms in various towns Flor Marquez and Paul Garrett had been lovers for some time now, each wary of the other, each uncertain of what the future could be. On this afternoon, when each was feeling desolate with loneliness, they separated at the hotel, then found their way by back paths to a motel, where they stayed through the early evening.
About nine they slipped away, at different times and by different paths, to join me at the restaurant. Flor arrived first and made a desultory effort at helping her father serve the dinner crowd, and after a while Garrett drifted in, as he often did, to play the juke box.
At ten there was a commotion. “Cisco’s coming!” a boy at the door shouted, and in came the lanky singer with his guitar. Nodding to various friends, he made his way to where Garrett and I were sitting, then invited Flor to join us. He drank beer for about an hour, answering the questions of well-wishers who wanted to know about Nashville and Hollywood, and finally he took up his guitar, plucking a few notes.
Without warning he struck a series of swift chords, then placed the guitar on the table. “What would you like to hear, Paul?”
It really didn’t matter, for whatever Cisco Calendar sang evoked the west. If he sang of buffalo skinners, he called forth images of his own grandfather during the big kill of 1873, with his Sharps .50 firing until it was too hot to handle. If he sang of the dust bowl, he reminded listeners of his own father, Jake, who had gone broke in 1936 after watching his farm blow away; when his wife wouldn’t stop nagging him, he blazed away at her with a shotgun and spent a year in jail.
And if Cisco sang of cowboys, people could hear in his high, nasal complaint the rush of the tumbleweed or the harsh dissonance of a rattler coiled in a sandy path. He could sing of the hawk and the eagle and the Indian’s pinto and make the listener see these creatures, for he had in his manner a terrible reality, the art of a man who had absorbed a culture and found its essence.
“I’d like to hear ‘Malagueña Salerosa,’ ” Garrett said, and Cisco looked at him.
“That’s a tough one to start with.”
“I didn’t say it was easy.”
Cisco lifted the guitar and played the unique chords which framed this love song, perhaps the finest written in North America in the past fifty years. It was difficult to sing, requiring a command of Spanish-type falsetto, but Cisco respected it as the best of his Chicano repertoire:
“What beautiful eyes she has
Beneath those dark brows …
Beneath those dark brows …
What lovely eyes …”
The Chicanos in the restaurant applauded as he sang a passage in high falsetto. After finishing the song, he placed the guitar on the table and bowed to the applauders. “I am singing this song for my good friend Paul Garrett and my better friend Flor Marquez, who are in love.” Recovering the guitar, he played a long passage based on the theme of the song, then sang tenderly the exquisite conclusion:
“I offer you only my heart …
I offer you my heart
In exchange for my poverty …
She is pretty and bewitching
Like the innocence of a rose …”
With the last word he strummed the guitar softly and bowed again. He avoided the popular pitfalls like “Cool Water” or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” or “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” apologizing, “Those songs are for the boys with strong voices. I’m after somethin’ different, altogether different.”
As he unraveled bits and pieces of the songs he really loved, he built a portrait of a west that no longer existed but which men wanted to remember. Single phrases often evoked a whole era: “Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly.” Or “On a ten-dollar horse and forty-dollar saddle, I’m off to punch them Texas cattle.” Or “His wife, she died in a poolroom fight.” Or “Clouds in the west, it looks like rain. Derned old slicker’s in the wagon again.”
He sang for several hours—the last of the real cowboys, the last of the buffalo men. He had enjoyed great popularity in Europe as well as in the eastern cities, but he felt most at ease in the restaurant of Manolo Marquez, who had fed him free during the bad years. Here he had learned most of the good Chicano songs he sang, like his very popular translation of “The Ballad of Pancho Villa,” which American audiences appreciated for its outrageous nationalism.
But the highlight of any Cisco Calendar performance always came late at night, as it did now. Nodding to Garrett and Flor, he played the famous opening chords of the song they waited for. The words were as taut as Homer’s and strove for the same effect: the beginning of a memorable saga:
“ ’Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the year of ’73
A man by the name of Crego comes steppin’ up to me,
Says, ‘How d’you do, young feller, and how’d you like to go
And spend one summer pleasantly on the range of the buffalo?’ ”
The song had excellent touches—the smell of the west, the Indians, the tense narrative, the petulant cowboys:
“It’s now we’ve crossed Pease River, boys, our troubles have begun.
First damned buffalo that I skinned, Christ, how I cut my thumb!”
Now Cisco became something larger than life, an epic figure chanting in the darkness of the wild, free days that were no more. Sitting very straight, and moving his hands as little as possible, he approached the end of his song with the inevitability found in Greek tragedy:
“The season was near over, boys, Old Crego he did say
The crowd had been extravagant, we were in debt to him that day.
We coaxed him and we begged him, but still it was, ‘No go!’
So we left his damned old bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo.”
“The Buffalo Skinners” was the name of this splendid song. Its composer? No one knew, but the music hammered with the beat of buffalo hoofs on the prairie. Its lyricist? Some nameless Texas cowboy, down on his luck, who had tried his hand at buffalo-skinning during the year of the last great hunt.
“Well, that’s it,” he said as he finished. “If I was you two,” he said quietly to Flor and Garrett, “I’d get married and to hell with them.”
I did not see Garrett on Sunday, for he spent the day with Flor, talking seriously about the problems that would arise if they did marry. He was Episcopalian and she Catholic, but that was of no consequence to either of them. He had two children, and they were at a difficult age … well, all ages were difficult when a widower sought to remarry, because the children rarely approved, no matter whom he chose. The young Garretts had already stated that they would not like the idea of a Chicano stepmother. The principal objection, of course, had been removed by the death in February of Paul’s mother, Ruth Mercy Garrett. She had been a tense, unlikable woman who had always known of her husband’s protracted love affair with Flor’s great-aunt, Soledad, and because of it she despised Chicanos. When she heard that Paul was seeing Flor Marquez, a divorcee to boot, she put on a terrible scene, accusing her son of trying to hasten her death. She was so irrational that Paul could not discuss the matter with her, but he honestly believed that his mother might indeed have a heart attack if he married Flor, especially after she bellowed at him, “You’re just like your father! You’re carrying on with that Mexican hussy merely to spite me, the way he did.” Now she was gone and no one deplored her passing, not even her grandchildren, whom she had tried to pamper but who saw her for what she was—a miserable, self-pitying, self-destroying woman.
One of the real obstacles was Manolo Marquez, for he saw little chance that an Anglo-Chicano marriage might succeed. The few he had witnessed had turned out disastrously, and he doubted that Flor and Paul would do much better. Flor respected what he had to say, because while she was preparing for her first marriage he had predicted that it couldn’t last two months, and it had crashed after only eleven days.
“He’s a flashy macho,” Manolo had warned his daughter. “But you wouldn’t recognize the type because you don’t hang around poolrooms.” No description could better fit her unfortunate husband, a strutting would-be hero with ideas about the rights of the male in marriage so bizarre that one couldn’t even be amused by them. Flor was humiliated that she had been such a miserable judge of human behavior and felt little confidence in her belief that Garrett might be different.
But all doubts withered in face of the fact that she and Paul loved each other, wanted each other and felt like better people when in each other’s company. Sex with her first husband had been an appalling affair, without feeling or fulfillment, but to share a bed with Paul Garrett was totally satisfying. He was not afraid of letting her know that he needed her.
On this Sunday, for example, when they had made their way to the motel again, he told her, “I’m so lonely I can hardly bear it. I stay up there in the castle surrounded by acres of empty land, and they insulate me from everything. If I couldn’t see you in the restaurant, I’d go batty.”
It became obvious to each that they ought to get married. What held them back? It simply was not the custom in Colorado for Anglos to marry Chicanos. To marry an Indian was acceptable, but a Chicano? No!
Paul spent Monday away from Flor, trying to sort out his convictions. He applied himself to the job of getting the centennial commission functioning, and since one of his plans called for widespread use of radio, he needed to know what that medium was doing, and the more he heard, the more disgusted he became. On this day he wanted a tape of the major noon broadcast from the local station, and here is the complete transcription:
FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Well, folks, it’s high noon and the train is chuggin’ in from Poison Snake and Sheriff Gary Cooper is a-waitin’ at the station.
SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: It’s time for news, all the news, the straight news, delivered without fear or favor, the news you want when you want it.
FEMALE QUARTET (singing in close harmony):
“From north from south,
From east and west,
We bring it first,
We bring it best.”
FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Yessiree, like the girls just said, we bring it best. Remember you heard it first on Western Burst.
MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending):
“The news, the news, the news!
Here comes the news.”
SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: But first a brief message which is sure to be of interest. (Here followed two minutes of singing commercials.)
FIRST ANNOUNCER (breathlessly): West Berlin, Germany. This morning Chancellor Willy Brandt announced a radical shift in his cabinet.
SECOND ANNOUNCER (gravely): Oakland, California. At a special press conference called hurriedly this morning the management of the Oakland Raiders announced that Choo-Choo Chamberlain would—I repeat would—be able to play Sunday against the Denver Broncos.
MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending):
“No matter when the stories burst,
You hear it here, you hear it first.”
FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for all the news, the news in depth, the news behind the news.
MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (blending):
“All the news, the news you need.
Yes indeed. Yes indeed.”
FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Next complete news coverage one hour from now.
SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: Unless, of course, there is some fast-breaking news development anywhere in the world. If there is, you know we break in right away, regardless of the program. Because Western Burst is always first. All the news, the news in depth.
Resignedly, Garrett leaned forward and clicked off the set. Radio and television could have been profound educative devices; instead, most of them were so shockingly bad that a reasonable man could barely tolerate them. In one spell last winter television had offered him an automobile that talked, a housewife who was a genie, a village idiot who could move forward and backward in history, and eighteen detectives involved in forty-seven murders. When one station did run the B.B.C. series Six Wives of Henry VIII, the newspaper announced the first episode as a western, Catherine of Oregon.
There was the same illiterate cheapening in every aspect of life. One local restaurant had a big sign advertising its specialty, “Veal Parma John.” Another proclaimed, “Broken Drum Café. You Can’t Beat It. Our Chicken Has That Real Fowl Taste.” A refreshment booth featured “Custard’s Last Stand,” while a motel sign flashed “Just a Little Bedder.”
One gap in Colorado’s cultural life perplexed him. The state had no major publishing program, and whereas its history was perhaps the most varied and vital in the west, there were few local books to celebrate it. This was the more remarkable in that two neighboring states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, each had a university press which produced really fine volumes on western themes; Garrett was pleased that they kept him supplied with the books he needed but thought it deplorable that Colorado, a richer state with a better subject matter, published almost nothing, as if it were ashamed of its history.
He did not propose any radical moves in this area, because some years ago he had burnt his fingers badly trying to modify western taste. Denver had a City-and-County Building which faced the gold-domed capitol across a lovely plaza; together they formed one of the most attractive state centers in America. It had become traditional each Christmas to decorate the former building with an appalling collection of green, red, orange and sickly purple lights, and to leave them in position for the January stock show. One French architect, when asked his opinion of the decorations, exclaimed, “The ultimate flowering of early Shanghai Whorehouse.” After unrelieved ridicule had been heaped on the display, Garrett spearheaded a movement to replace it with something more appropriate, and a high-salaried decorator was flown in from New York to take charge. With an international taste he threw out the garish lights and substituted muted colors which blended with the dark Rockies towering beyond, but when cattlemen from various parts of the state descended on the city and found the lights to which they had been accustomed missing, they raised hell, disrupted a session of the legislature and informed the city that “if Denver don’t think enough of us to decorate the building properly, we’ll move our show to Omaha.” In panic the city fathers tore down the new lights and reinstalled the awful old ones, so that now Denver had one of the few unique Christmas displays in America. Flamboyant beyond description, it evoked no sense of Christmas, but it did exemplify a cattle show, and every Colorado rancher knew which of those two celebrations was the more important.
Wherever he looked Garrett saw this same lack of art, this failure of taste. He wondered what the state had to celebrate, except superhighways. Even the mountains were being abused. Brooding over Denver each night was a gigantic neon-lit cross occupying the whole face of a mountain. It had been placed there as an advertisement, and the majority of people in the city liked it, because, they said, “it puts the mountain to some practical use. Also, it reminds us that we are one nation under God.”
One of the first decisions his committee would have to make involved the application of an enthusiastic group who wanted permission to carve the whole front side of Beaver Mountain with likenesses of Buffalo Bill on his horse and Kit Carson shooting an Indian. Considerable popular support was being generated for the project on the ground that “if the mountains are there, they ought to be put to some use.” Garrett hoped that among the young people of the state he would find support in opposing this, even though he was powerless to remove the cross already in position over Denver.
I sometimes think that in the west we have produced only two serious works of art: the Clovis point engineered with such obvious love by primitive man twelve thousand years ago and that wonderful arch along the waterfront in St. Louis.
The more I study the Clovis point, the more convinced I become that it was brought into being by a true artist. His basic job was predetermined by practicality, but in its final stages it was executed with love. It is perfectly obvious that the point could have been left rougher and still been capable of killing a mammoth. But the maker went beyond that requirement and made it a work of art as well. The Clovis is as graceful as a butterfly wing, as lethal as a Thompson machine gun. Those first men set high standards for those of us who follow, and only rarely do we attain their level.
That arch in St. Louis does. It is appropriate that it stand as the gateway to the west. Many of my ancestors debarked at that spot on their way to Colorado—Levi Zendt, Lisette Pasquinel, Major Mercy, Frank Skimmerhorn—and the arch represents the spiritual forces that impelled them.
I can’t conceive how the city of St. Louis had either the imagination or the determination to erect such a monument. It’s perfect. A soaring symbol of the best in American life, and I suppose if it had been put to a popular vote, it would have been defeated on the grounds, “Who needs an arch?”
All of us need an arch. We need symbols that are bigger than we are. We need emotional reminders of who we are and what we represent. I hope to God our committee can come up with something for 1976 that will recall our simple past … the tread of feet across the prairie.
During this November of 1973 the nation was in sad disarray. Watergate, gasoline rationing, a crumbling Atlantic alliance, confrontation with the Arabs and a runaway inflation with wheat at $5.78 a bushel as a result of the mismanaged deal with Russia created a sense of lost direction. In no part of government was the chaos more apparent than in the commission responsible for planning the nation’s bicentennial. So inept was the leadership from Washington that it seemed America was afraid to celebrate its birthday lest citizens gather in the street; only the energy and enthusiasm of certain state leaders could save the anniversary, and no one had a more imaginative proposal than Paul Garrett, chairman of the Colorado commission.
“What is our nation’s principal contribution to world art?” he asked his committee when it met on the afternoon of November 13. “The motion picture. And what kind of movies do we make better than anyone else? The mythical western.” And he proceeded to unfold a plan that would cost little and produce much.
“What we’re going to do,” he explained, “is go back in the files and find thirty or forty of our best western films. We’ll arrange a gala festival in every town that has a theater. Charge no more than maybe fifty cents a night. Encourage everyone in the state to see the whole shebang. And we’ll teach more about the spirit of the west than we could in any other way.”
He insisted that his committee join him on a ride north to Cheyenne to see a film which had been highly recommended by French critics. None of the others had even heard of it, but as we sped through the starry night with the prairie opening out on either side, he spoke enthusiastically of what the festival might accomplish.
“I must warn you, I have strong ideas about films. Best heroic western I ever saw was John Wayne in Red River. It was spoiled somewhat by the ridiculous plot which called for Montgomery Clift to whip Wayne in a fist fight, but apart from that, it was a masterpiece.”
He also liked The Covered Wagon and other old-timers which few had seen. It was when he reached the recent movies that he ran into trouble. For example, he wanted to be sure that McCabe and Mrs. Miller ran during the first week to set a standard of honesty for the festival, but two of the committee had seen it and found it to be insulting. “Nothing but whores and cheap grifters,” one complained, to which Garrett replied, “And who did you think populated our first towns?” One of the other members pointed out that John Wayne had objected to the movie most strenuously, on the grounds that it impugned the standard characters of the west, whereupon Garrett said, “We’re honoring Wayne as an actor, not as a critic.”
He especially recommended two Indian pictures which none of the committee had seen. “On these you can trust me. They’re marvelous depictions. Cheyenne Autumn tells about the tribe on its long march north to Fort Robinson and what happened there in 1878. It’ll break your heart. And I do want people to see A Man Called Horse. Wasn’t big at the box office, but it comes closer to Indian life than anything else I’ve seen.”
The committee wanted some preparation for what they were to see in Cheyenne, because Garrett’s sponsorship of McCabe worried them. “Have no fear,” he said. “I’m taking you to a masterpiece.”
And he did. It was Monte Walsh, a low-budget picture starring Lee Marvin, Jack Palance and Jeanne Moreau, and it unfolded with such simplicity, such heart-ripping reality that a strange mood developed. Everyone who had any knowledge of the old west sat transfixed by the memories this film engendered, but those who had known the region only secondhand felt irritated at the wasted evening. Masterpieces are like that; they require an active participation and offer nothing to those who are unwilling to contribute.
Monte Walsh had its principal effect on Paul Garrett; he was bowled over by the integrity of the cowboy played by Marvin and the haunting tragedy of his love for the hanger-on, played by Jeanne Moreau. Garrett was nervous all the way back to Venneford, and on Wednesday morning he said to me, “Damn it all, Vernor, she’s a Chicano, so let’s do it the Chicano way!”
We waited till evening, then rode in to Denver, seeking out a night club that had imported a mariachi band from Old Mexico, and he propositioned the leader, who said, “Why not?”—and it was arranged.
The band played at the club till two in the morning, then shared with Garrett the tamale dinner he paid for. They drank some good Mexican beer and at three-thirty piled into the bus he had rented, all fourteen of them.
It was nearly dawn when we reached Centennial, and the driver parked in an area where the bus would attract no attention. Then the mariachis assembled at the railway station, where the leader told Garrett, “It was never this cold in Mexico,” and he assured them, “When you start to play, it’ll warm up.”
No one in town had yet spotted the band, but now the leader gave a signal and with an explosion of sound the mariachis began “La Cucaracha,” the song of the poor little cockroach who couldn’t negotiate very well because he had no more marijuana to smoke.
Lights went on in all the streets leading off Prairie as the mariachis marched north, then turned east on Mountain, where they played the ear-shattering “La Bamba” and then “La Negra.” By the time they reached Third Street two members of the police force were running after them.
“It’s all right,” Garrett assured them. “Just listen.”
The mariachis had now reached Flor de Méjico, and under Garrett’s direction they formed a large semicircle and launched into “Las Mañanitas,” the birthday song. They played half the stanza without voices, then six of the players blended harmoniously in that most gracious and tender song:
“This is the birthday song
Sung by King David.
Because this is your day,
I sing it to you.”
There were four verses to the song, and the men sang with such delight that it seemed a true serenade from a man to the woman he loved. When it was finished, Garrett signaled to the conductor, who beat twice with his right arm, and the mariachis began their gentle rendition of “Dos Arbolitos.” A light appeared in an upper window and Flor Marquez looked down.
“What goes on here?” the reporter from the Clarion asked, for by now the noisy musicians had half the town awake.
“I’m serenading the girl I’m going to marry,” Garrett replied.
“Is that an announcement?” the newsman asked excitedly.
“Ask her.”
So the reporter went to a spot beneath the window and asked, “Can I report that you and Mr. Garrett are getting married?” Flor had tears in her eyes, for women are not often serenaded by a band of fourteen, but she replied in that lovely phrase of Chicano insolence, “Si, ¿como no?”
On Thursday morning, November 15, Garrett met with some ranchers from the northeastern corner of the state, who wanted to discuss range management, and after he left them he reflected upon the regrettable sheep wars that had marred the area at the beginning of this century. Many lives had been lost defending the theory that where a sheep had trod, no cow would graze, but today most of the cattlemen occupying land that used to belong to the Venneford Ranch ran cattle and sheep side by side, and each prospered.
Take Hermann Spengler, for example. His grandfather Otto had killed a sheepman in 1889 and no jury in the area could be found to convict him, because of the general opinion that death by gunfire was too good for any man who would bring sheep onto the open range. Today Spengler ran seven hundred Herefords and two thousand sheep. They grazed together on the same fields and complemented each other nicely, the coarse manure of the cattle blending with the more concentrated manure of the sheep to keep the grama grass flourishing.
Even so, one amusing custom still operated throughout the district. A man might run five thousand sheep, but if he had even six steers, he called himself a cattleman, and in all the area around Centennial, there were thousands of sheep but no sheepman. That was a name of opprobrium that no prudent man would take upon himself.
As noon approached, Paul Garrett began to feel uneasy, for this was the third Thursday of the month, and on this day the cattlemen of the region convened at the Railway Arms for lunch in the old-style upstairs dining room. They called themselves the Sirloin Club, and they met in close-knit grandeur, the last of their breed. Czar Wendell would be there, and Hermann Spengler and Dade Commager; and young Skimmerhorn, who ran a big herd of French Charolais. I would be an invited guest.
The room we met in was decorated with photographs of the historic figures of the region: Earl Venneford of Wye, looking natty in his Scottish tweed, had been photographed at the railway station; Oliver Seccombe was seated in his carriage on an inspection tour of Line Camp Four among the pines; the Pettis boys had been photographed in rocking chairs on the veranda of the hotel; and Otto Spengler stood with legs apart, hefting a double-barreled shotgun. One of the finest pictures showed R. J. Poteet fording the Platte River with Nate Person riding behind. This was a room dedicated to cattlemen, and soon the hotel would be torn down, since modern travelers preferred antiseptic motels at the edge of town.
Paul Garrett had never been wholly accepted by the Sirloin Club, since one of his ancestors had been responsible for introducing sheep into the area, and regardless of Paul’s lifelong devotion to Herefords, the contaminating smell could never be completely removed. Now that his engagement to a Chicano was known, the time-honored antipathies against Mexicans might be revived, and he was apprehensive about his reception.
He need not have been. When he entered the room the cattlemen cheered and Dade Commager embraced him, slapping him on the back and proposing a toast: “To Paul, who’s doing what should have been done years ago.” Morgan Wendell, having satisfied himself that Garrett’s marriage to a Chicano would be highly popular in Denver and the southwest portions of the state, proposed a toast of his own: “To Paul Garrett, public servant extraordinary.” And all joined in.
Now the ritual began. At twelve-fifteen on the dot we took our places at three oilcloth-covered tables, and tumblers of ditch—bar bourbon and Platte water—were circulated. Wendell raised his glass and cried, “Gentlemen, to the open range!” All drank, and Hermann Spengler proposed, “To the Hereford.”
Waiters now came in with large baskets of French fried potatoes, which they emptied onto the middle of each table, forming golden pyramids, over which they sprinkled handfuls of salt. The doors swung open and the waiters reappeared with huge trays. Before each of us they placed a sizzling platter containing nothing but a monstrous sirloin cut from some super-steer at the Brumbaugh feed lots.
Steak and potatoes, the food of real men. Hands reached into the golden stacks to grab potatoes, and knives cut into tender steak. For the first few minutes there was not much talk, then Wendell recalled the time the club had entertained a senator from Rhode Island. The members had been most attentive to him, for on a matter of vital concern he held the crucial vote, and things looked promising until the sirloins were served. In a quiet voice he had asked, “Could I have some catsup?”
There was a ghastly silence. To these men, putting catsup on a sirloin was like dumping cigarette ashes in holy water. No one knew what to say, but everyone was adamant that no bottle of catsup would disgrace that table, even if the supplicant was a senator commanding a vital vote. The impasse had been broken by Wendell’s father, a steely-eyed man: “Senator, as you know, your vote is crucial to us, and there is nothing in the world we would not do for you. I think we’ve given you ample proof of that. But I would rather see horse piss sprinkled over my steak than see this table profaned by a bottle of catsup. No, Senator, you may not have catsup.”
“How’d he vote?”
“He was a good sport. Never allowed the bill out of committee.”
Now the steaks were gone, and one of the ranchers turned to Garrett with an embarrassing question: “They tell me, Paul, you’re thinkin’ of meddlin’ with your Herefords. Believe me, don’t do it.”
“Haven’t made up my mind,” Garrett said. Of the eighteen men at the tables, sixteen ran Herefords, and any defection by a rancher as important as Paul Garrett would have serious consequences for them, for if word got around that Crown Vee was dissatisfied with its white-faces, the whole market might become unsettled.
The waiters reappeared with coffee and apple pie, and as the meal ended, Hermann Spengler gripped Garrett by the shoulder, saying, “I’d be honored, Paul, if I could attend the wedding.” Others, hearing this remark, expressed a similar interest, so Garrett said, “We’re being married tomorrow at two … in her father’s restaurant.”
“We’ll be there,” the ranchers promised.
The next day we all gathered in Flor de Méjico as Father Vigil, now an old man speaking in a whisper, conducted the service. When Garrett placed the ring on Flor’s finger he felt a surge of tenderness for his beautiful bride, and at the end of the ceremony he embraced Manolo Marquez, thanking him for having raised such a splendid daughter.
I did not see either Paul or Flor over the weekend, for they had gone to Line Camp Four on their honeymoon, but on Saturday he telephoned me with a startling piece of news.
“Vernor? Have you heard the decision in the Floyd Calendar case?” His voice was agitated and he was obviously furious.
“Did the jury find him guilty?” I asked.
“They acquitted him on every major count,” Garrett stormed. “The law of the west. ‘No man is guilty of anything, unless he’s an Indian.’ But guess what they did find him guilty of?”
I had had no experience with western juries and offered no opinion, so Garrett continued: “Operating a zoo without a license. He’d held his bears in cages for periods of more than thirty days.” He uttered a string of profanities, then added, “Now guess what his fine was. For killing four hundred and thirteen bald eagles, two hundred bears wired for sound and eighty-one of my turkeys … a fine of fifty dollars.”
“Go back to your honeymoon,” I told him. Laughing, he hung up.
Late that afternoon he must have turned on his television, for when he returned to town he handed me a tape which he especially wanted me to hear:
When President Nixon started to speak to the newspaper editors I was much encouraged, and told Flor, “Great! Just what he ought to be doing. If he’d explained all this six months ago, we’d have had no Watergate.” But then I heard him say to the American public, “The people have to know whether their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I have got.” I felt sick. How undignified. How damned awful. I snapped off the television and sat with my head in my hands. My world seemed to be coming apart. Shortage of gasoline. Rampant inflation. Plants in Denver closing down for lack of raw materials. Spiro Agnew, a man I had trusted, kicked out because of his own misbehavior. And now my President proclaiming that he was not a crook.
I told Flor, “No man should ever find it necessary to make such a statement in public. It’s like a doctor assuring everyone in Centennial that he doesn’t give his patients strychnine. Who in hell said he did? A President of the United States buttonholing a bunch of editors and telling them, ‘I’m not a crook.’ Who said he was?” And Flor said, “You must admit he started the rumor.”
Early Monday morning Paul and Flor drove back to Venneford, where Bradley Finch, one of America’s leading experts on water supply, waited to take Garrett to a meeting of the Water Board. It was to be held at a research station near the headwaters of the Cache la Poudre, and Garrett said, “I think Professor Vernor would be interested in seeing what we’re doing,” and Finch said, “Come along. Might as well start to worry now as later.”
When I asked him what this meant, he said, “Our citizens seem to be rather worried about gasoline rationing. That’ll be child’s play compared to what’s going to happen when we start rationing water.”
“Will it come to that?” I asked.
“It already has. When you see our analog model, you’ll understand.”
“What’s an analog model?” I asked.
“It’s easier to demonstrate than to explain.”
As we drove up the beautiful canyon of the Poudre, Finch told Garrett, “This is your first appearance as a member of the board, Paul, and it’s crucial. We’re looking to you for leadership. You’ve got to make some very tough decisions, and you mustn’t show yourself as wishy-washy.”
“You make it sound ominous,” Garrett said.
“It is.” As we parked the car before a low building hidden beneath tall evergreens, Finch concluded, “You and I will have to decide who shall live and who shall not live. It’s as serious as that.” Before he could say more, other members of the Water Board spied the new deputy and gathered to congratulate him.
“I don’t even understand the questions, let alone the answers,” Garrett protested.
“You will, by lunchtime,” Welch assured him.
We assembled in an austere room, one wall of which was painted white. Bradley Finch, as chairman of the board, said briefly, “Our technicians worked all last week to get a slide show ready for you, Garrett, and I think we’d better plunge right in.”
He darkened the room, and a young woman, who was introduced as Dr. Mary White from Cal Tech, said, “I’m to give the presentation, Mr. Garrett, and if you have any questions, press that buzzer at your desk.” Forthwith she unfolded the dramatic story of water, as it affected all the western states. Slide after slide developed the inevitable theme: population, agriculture and industry were all growing so fast that available supplies of water simply could not keep pace. States like Colorado, Arizona and Utah faced permanent drought conditions.
Garrett pushed his buzzer and the slides halted. “You keep mentioning the word aquifer. Define it for me.”
The lights went on, and Finch said, “Dr. Welch, I’ve heard you handle that question rather well. Care to take a crack?”
Dr. Welch went to a blackboard and drew a heavy, solid line from left to right. At one end he wrote “Rocky Mountains,” and at the other “Nebraska.” Beneath the line he wrote in bold letters “Platte River.”
“This is us,” he said.
With red chalk he drew three dramatic lines leading away from the Platte. The first he labeled “Towns and Other Social Use.” The second he labeled “Agriculture.” The third was “Industry.” “These are the agencies which want our water, and right now they’re prepared, among them, to take away far more than we can provide.”
Finch, himself an engineer from M.I.T., interrupted. “That shows you rather well the basic problem, Garrett. The three outgoes already exceed the various inflows. Your job … that is, the job of our committees … well, we have to apportion our available water.”
“What’s the aquifer?” Garrett repeated.
Dr. Welch resumed. “The only inflow we have, really, is fourteen inches of precipitation on the plains out here. Pitifully small. Just barely enough to keep life going. And lots of snow up here in the mountains. It all winds up in the Platte … or the Arkansas … or one of our other rivers.
“Now, as the water comes down the river system, several things happen. Some of it we can see—like the Cache la Poudre outside this building. And some of that is diverted into dams and irrigation ditches. And some of the diversion seeps into the ground and creeps back into the Platte.”
“That sounds like one of Potato Brumbaugh’s theories,” Garrett said.
“But what even he failed to take into account,” Welch said, “was the water we can’t see. And having missed that, he missed exactly half the equation.”
Deftly he sketched in the various inflows into the great system: the snowfall, the rainfall, the dams, the ditches. Then, with a broad stroke of his chalk, he laid down two boundary lines about five miles north and south of the river, and with hasty, sweeping movements filled in the space between so that the river and its intricate relationships could no longer be seen.
“That’s your aquifer,” he said. “Underground and invisible. Four million years ago, when the Platte was being carved into the silt thrown down from the Rockies, there was this impermeable basement of shale and limestone. On it rested deposits of highly permeable gravel and sand, in some places two hundred feet thick, and as you can see, up to ten miles wide. For millions of years this catchment lay hidden, covered over by whatever topsoil came along. It now forms a lens whose interstices can be filled with water. It’s really a massive subterranean reservoir, and it acts as the balance for our entire Platte system.”
The lights were turned off, and various slides were flashed on the wall to indicate the operation of this mysterious phenomenon. As Garrett traced the intricate manner in which water seeped down into the aquifer and then escaped upward through springs and artesian wells and filtration—this constant coming and going of the water that sustained all life—he could not help thinking of old Potato Brumbaugh, who had lived his life sitting on top of the great reservoir without comprehending either its existence or its operation. He had plumbed all the secrets except the biggest.
“We must think of the aquifer as the permanent invisible counterpart of the visible river. Had we left it alone, it would have served us forever, but unfortunately, some years ago we began to sink wells into it, and now it’s in grave danger.”
Dr. White resumed her slides, showing how ranchers, like Paul Garrett, had sunk artesian wells into the aquifer and were drawing off millions of gallons of water that should have been left in the subterranean system.
“This invention,” she said, flashing onto the screen a photograph of an ingenious watering device, “has done more harm to the Platte River than anything else in history, for it has almost destroyed the aquifer.”
On the wall appeared the photograph of a flat, treeless, open range. In the middle stood a steel tower resting on self-propelled wheels. To it came electricity and water, and it moved ceaselessly in a circle, throwing a fine spray of moisture from a set of nozzles on top. Twenty-four hours a day this tower could revolve, watering an immense area.
That was not all. Eight to thirteen such towers could be linked together, side by side, each with its own motor, each moving around the circle at the appropriate speed. The combined towers thus formed a vast arm reaching out a quarter of a mile and irrigating an area containing one hundred and twenty-five acres. These were the fairy circles that I had seen on my first tour in Garrett’s plane.
The lights went on, and Finch said, “So that’s our aquifer. And it’s in peril. Not only are present demands on it depleting, future demands threaten to exhaust it. Detlev Schneider has some news on that front.”
Schneider, trained in demography at Oxford, was a robust man with an effusive sense of humor, and as he spoke, Garrett reflected on one of the most reassuring aspects of Colorado; it enlisted help from the best sources in the world: Oxford, Cal Tech, M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford.
“We face a real dilly,” Schneider was saying. “Because Colorado is such a popular state, fifty thousand newcomers want to move in each year. We’d like to welcome them, but we haven’t enough water. And within the state itself, twenty thousand of our rural people a year want to move into Denver. Love to have them, but no water. We also have scores of industries that want to establish their headquarters here. Executives want instant skiing, and we need their tax dollars. But we simply don’t have the water.”
Harry Welch interrupted to say that the Colorado legislature had been handed a bill denying permission to anyone from outside the state to move into Colorado. “We’ll set up checkpoints at the borders and turn them back,” he said.
“Completely unconstitutional,” Schneider retorted. “Any American citizen can move anywhere he likes.”
“But not into Colorado,” Finch said. “The analog model takes care of that.”
In a small room at the rear of the building stood a pegboard forty feet long by five feet high, simulating in minute detail all aspects of the Platte system. The river was represented by a heavy copper wire, to which came smaller wires for the contributory streams. Soldered to these were thousands of electrical resistors of varying strength, duplicating the water-bearing properties of the region. Just as rocks impeded the flow of water through the aquifer, resistors impeded the flow of electricity through the model.
At each junction of four resistors a capacitor was attached, storing electricity the way porous rocks and dams stored water. With everything operating, this complex electrical system reproduced every attribute of the river and the aquifer, and any flow of water that came into the real system was reflected in the model.
“But what about the outflow?” Garrett asked, and Schneider explained, “You see these small light bulbs scattered about the plan? And these little resistors? They draw off electricity in the same way that irrigation ditches and wells withdraw water.”
As Garrett inspected the model, Finch said, “It shows you the Platte as it is today. But it can also show you what will happen five years from now if we continue to increase the demand for water. Let’s see what Harry Welch was warning us about with his red outgoes.”
The electrical input, representing precipitation, was kept constant, but a large light bulb representing increased demand by communities of new people was turned on. “Watch the oscilloscope,” Finch said.
There, on a screen placed to one side of the model, were graphically shown the effects of the new demand: a shadow-line which had been depicting the even flow of the river dropped dramatically toward the bottom of the screen, forming a deep cone of depression. “It proves what we predicted,” Finch said. “Look downstream. Real shortages down there, but we still have a river.”
Schneider said, “But now let’s increase the demand for industry too,” and he turned on various bulbs. The line on the oscilloscope dropped ominously toward the bottom of the screen.
“At this point agriculture is hurting like hell,” Finch said.
“Now let’s crank in five years of drought,” Schneider said, “such as we’ve often had.”
Instead of adding new bulbs to simulate increased demand, current was diminished in the mountains, indicating low snowfall, and other current was stopped to show decline in rainfall. The oscilloscope line vanished; the Platte no longer flowed.
The model was turned off. “There you have it,” Finch said. “If we encourage the population of Colorado to increase, and invite more industry, and continue to deplete the aquifer with agricultural pumps, we shall destroy the state. Your job, Garrett, is to see that this doesn’t happen.”
“Do we still have options?” Garrett asked.
“Yes, but you must explain them to the citizens. For example, if we continue to steal water away from our farms, onions will have to cost ten dollars apiece.”
On the drive home, a much-sobered Garrett reflected on his new job as protector of resources: “I thought the task was to provide the people of Colorado with good air to breathe. Now I’ve got to see that they have water to drink. And when the soil experts get through their indoctrination, I suspect my principal job will be to ensure that we have earth to till. This nation is running out of everything. We forgot the fact that we’ve always existed in a precarious balance, and now if we don’t protect all the components, we’ll collapse. I never knew my great-grandfather, Jim Lloyd—he died before my time. But I’ve heard my Grandfather Beeley tell how Lloyd loved the earth and never wanted to do anything to disturb its balance. He wouldn’t allow one extra steer to graze on a field that might be damaged by close cropping. We’ve got to get back to that sense of responsibility toward the earth. When I think that the people of this state didn’t give a damn when Floyd Calendar shot eagles and bears and turkeys—just for the hell of it, just to titillate some eastern sportsmen …”
On Tuesday, November 20, it was the farmers and the financiers who had to bite the bullet. The climactic meeting of Central Beet was held in Denver, with Paul Garrett and Harvey Brumbaugh present as board members, and they sat in silence as the dismal figures were paraded.
“The beet industry,” droned the chairman, “has fallen on evil times. So many people covet our land for so many new purposes that the farmer can’t afford to reserve it for beets. He’s got to sell to the subdividers, who build new towns for people from the east. And even if he did hold on to his land, he couldn’t find anyone to work his fields or harvest the crop in the fall.” He continued his painful litany until he reached the obvious conclusion: “And so, gentlemen, we have no alternative but to close down our plant at Centennial. We won’t lose money, because a real estate developer from Chicago has made us a most attractive offer. He wants to build ninety-seven Colonial-type houses.”
Harvey Brumbaugh was the first to react. As the owner of a large feed lot where young steers were assembled for fattening, he had relied on sugar-beet pulp and molasses as a convenient source of feed. Now he would have to look elsewhere and absorb the cost of shipping.
The chairman listened to this complaint, then said, “The time may be at hand when the cattle industry will be forced to quit Colorado. Our state is so beautiful, and so many people want to live here, that I suspect ranchers like Paul Garrett will no longer be able to run their cattle economically. A whole pattern of life is vanishing, gentlemen. We’re just the first to feel the pinch.”
The chairman did not say so, but all present realized that in some forthcoming meeting, say within three years, the first topic on the agenda would be: “Shall we dissolve the company altogether?”
It was incomprehensible to Garrett that this great institution, which had once dominated life in Colorado—“We live and breathe as Central Beet directs,” the farmers had said—should be on the verge of collapse. Even when he was a boy, as late as 1936, Central Beet had dictated to banks and school boards and sheriffs’ offices. For thousands of farmers and small-town businessmen, Central Beet was Colorado, and to watch it fall from that high estate was painful.
“What went wrong?” Garrett asked Brumbaugh as they rode home together.
“We didn’t pay enough attention to the relationship of land and people,” Brumbaugh said. “I glimpsed something of the problem when I developed the feed-lot concept. Take the young cattle off the land, herd them in lots and stuff them with feed for market. Well, that idea seems to have run its course. You know what I’m thinking right now?”
Garrett turned to look at the man who rode beside him. Harvey, like his great-grandfather, Potato, had a far-ranging mind, one that was ever willing to investigate new potentials. Now Brumbaugh said, “I have a suspicion that before long we’ll be raising cattle the way they raise those new-style chickens. Never touch the earth. Live in sanitized pens from birth to death. Cowboys will be city fellers with college degrees, dressed in white aprons. They’ll ship manure away in desiccated pellets.”
Excited by his vision of the future, even though it entailed hardship for him, Brumbaugh continued: “Time’s got to come when we can no longer afford to keep cows in Colorado. First they’ll move to Wyoming and Montana, but land prices are rising there too. Know what’s going to happen?”
Garrett had been thinking, for some time, that ranching in Colorado was doomed, but he had not deduced where the business would go, and he listened with fascination as Brumbaugh said, “Within a few years we’ll be raising most of our cattle on cheap land back in states like Indiana … close to the feed supply. On the other hand, I’ve heard some good reports on cottonseed cake as feed for Herefords. I may move my whole operation to Georgia … or maybe Alabama.”
Garrett was impressed by the facility with which Brumbaugh could leap from one alternative to the next, without allowing sentiment to intrude where it could serve no useful purpose. He wasn’t able to do that. If the time came when he could no longer afford to run Hereford cattle, a large part of his life would be shattered, and with these gloomy thoughts of change and the flow of life he dropped Brumbaugh at the feed lot and drove north.
On Wednesday Paul faced an ugly necessity, one he had been postponing for some weeks. Now he must meet the people concerned and report the bad news.
When it was announced that he would be chairman of the Centennial Commission, a delegation from Blue Valley in the heart of the Rockies visited him with an elaborate plan for making that historic area a focus for the celebration. When he first studied the proposal he had been offended by its garishness and its pandering to every base item in Colorado’s history, but as the days passed and he heard further details, he was downright revolted. The men and women of Blue Valley did not seem to know that in 1976 a great state and a greater nation would be celebrating their birthdays and that what was required was a rededication to the principles that had made them outstanding in the first place. In Blue Valley they wanted a carnival.
With reluctance he drove into the high mountains to visit the ugliest town in America. As he reached the top of the steep ascent and looked down into the valley he felt compelled to record his thoughts:
This used to be one of the loveliest spots in North America. That stream was crystal, filled with beaver. Those bare flanks were covered with trees. Deer and elk abounded, and the mountains stood like sentinels protecting it. My ancestors discovered the place, and that old Indian I told you about found gold here.
Well, no spot anywhere in the world, no matter how lovely, can withstand the discovery of gold … or oil. Look at this abhorrent thing—no trees, a fouled stream, no wildlife except dogs left to die by summer visitors. The old opera house rotting, the railroad trestle falling in—and those goddamned neon signs.
Before the first open sewer had been laid down the middle of Main Street, the town of Blue Valley had been a disgrace. For sheer destruction of nature, it took the prize in a state which had so often defiled its finest treasures. Not a single redeeming feature had been built into the town, and those that remained stood as memorials to man’s greed and insensitivity.
“The whole damned thing should be burned to the ground,” Garrett mumbled as he drove into town. But then he slammed on the brakes and studied the problem anew, spotting here and there some old building which might be restored for travelers to gawk at:
The mind of man is provoked to speculation by ruins, and the paintings of Hubert Robert that show the desolation of Rome or the dark, powerful etchings of Piranesi showing the ruins of those somber castles excite us. Maybe the committee’s right. Maybe we could salvage something that would remind the city traveler of the past.
He looked disconsolately at the awful modern excrescences that monopolized the town—the hot-dog stands built like hot dogs, the Moorish motels, the towering neon signs, the trash in the gutter, the preposterous architecture, and everywhere the assault on taste and judgment. Even the ski slope, built at enormous expense, was contaminated. In winter, candy-bar wrappers lay frozen in the snow. In summer, they mingled with beer cans and broken bottles:
It’s beyond redemption. Everything about it is wrong. Look at how the highway stupidly crosses and recrosses the stream, which can no longer be seen. The only possible salvation for this place would be to hire gigantic helicopters with huge dredges to fly over it, day after day, and fill the whole valley with earth and hope that within a couple of hundred years the eroding stream might create something lovely again.
The worst awaited him in the town itself, where a group of men representing saloons and motels had gathered to outline their ideas for the centennial.
“What we have in mind,” the spokesman said, “is the re-creation of scenes which will inspire the visitor and give him a feel of the old west. We’re gonna take that building on Main Street and false-front it into a Wells Fargo station. Every day at noon a band of outlaws—we can hire eight cowboys at a price we can afford—will hold up the stage, and a big gun battle will last for about five minutes. Jeff, tell him about the hangin’.”
“Well, we figure that for less than a hundred dollars we can erect a gallows over there, where we have lots of parkin’, and at three each afternoon we’ll enact the hangin’ of Dirty Louie and Belle Beagle. Now, we know that the actual execution took place about four miles up the stream—charge was claim jumpin’, and her bein’ a whore and all that—but we figure no one’ll complain if we move it into town.
“The highlight comes at seven o’clock each night. We’re gonna rename the saloon ‘The Bucket of Blood’ and come sundown we’re gonna reenact the shootin’ of the Pettis boys. We’ve contacted Floyd Calendar and he’s agreed to play the part of his grandfather—Amos Calendar, the one who gunned them down—”
“Say,” a motelkeeper asked Garrett, “wasn’t one of your kinfolk involved in that shootin’?”
“Yes. And so was Harvey Brumbaugh’s.”
“Do you think that on the actual anniversary we could get you and Brumbaugh to join Calendar and come down the Main Street blazin’ away? We could have television and it’d make every station in the country.”
The dismal plans went on and on—the whores, the dry-gulching, the bank robbery, the runaway stagecoach. As Garrett listened he wondered if these men had any comprehension of western history. Did they think it was all murder and mayhem? Didn’t they know that ordinary men and women also settled the west, and that most of them had deplored the very excesses this committee wanted to celebrate. Jim Lloyd had left a brief memento of his foray into the mountains in search of the Pettis boys:
From that moment on I have never handled a gun. I have found even the shooting of a rattlesnake abhorrent, and I recommend to all my descendants that they keep away from firearms, for I have found that they do far more damage to good men than to evil.
At lunch the committee presented its one good idea. The chairman said, “We’ve saved this till last, because we know you’ll like it. What we’re going to do is put a big billboard on every major road leading into the state. We’ll tell the tourists, ‘Come to Blue Valley and Eat Like the Pioneers Ate.’ ” With this he snapped his fingers, and the cooks brought out the sourdough bread, the beans and onions, the johnnycake and the elk meat.
It was an imaginative concept, and Garrett was loath to discourage the men. Such a meal, served on red-checked oilcloth in a rough surrounding, might prove popular with tourists. The other proposals were offensive, and Garrett wanted nothing to do with them, but he had to concede that these men would do no worse damage to the valley than their predecessors had already done.
Grudgingly he told them, “If you can scrape up forty or fifty thousand dollars to clean this town up … and build some false fronts …”
“Then you’ll play your grandfather in the big shoot-out?”
He smiled. “As chairman of the statewide committee, I mustn’t show any partiality.”
“Of course. We’re gonna call our show ‘Ghost Town Lives Again.’ ”
“I wasn’t aware you’d ever been a ghost town.”
“Well, we fudge the history … a little, here and there.”
On Thursday, November 22, Garrett took Harvey Brumbaugh aside before the beginning of the committee hearing and told him, “Blue Valley has made us an offer we can’t refuse. We’re to wear revolvers, stalk down Main Street, and gun down the Pettis boys again.”
“I can hardly wait,” Brumbaugh said, brushing aside the levity. “Let’s get your lynching party over with.” He sat erect in the chair reserved for him, placed both hands on the table and said, “I suppose you gentlemen have reached a conclusion?”
“We have,” the chairman said. “Harvey, much as it pains me … well, the health problem … the smell … the future plans for Centennial … We’ve studied everything and we can reach only one conclusion.”
“You want me to move my feed lot out of here?”
“We do,” the chairman said placatingly. “Now, we don’t want you to move too far. Ten, fifteen miles maybe. The workers at the lot want to stay with you.”
“How soon?” Brumbaugh asked coldly.
“We’re not going to rush you. Eight … nine months.”
One member said brightly, “We hear you’ve taken an option on some of the Volkema land out at Line Camp. That would be just great.”
Brumbaugh pushed himself away from the table to survey carefully the ecologists who were driving him out of business, and when his eyes met Garrett’s he gave a slight wink. “Gentlemen,” he said slowly, “I may have a surprise for you.”
He was imposing that morning—fifty-six years old, tough-minded like Potato Brumbaugh, and one of the wealthiest cattlemen in the west. He had prospered by being ready at any moment to make unpalatable decisions. The citizens of Centennial had considered him crazy when he sold his bottom lands along the Platte, but he had seen earlier than they that sugar beets were a dying proposition. They had predicted failure when he devised his plan for buying young steers and fattening them scientifically, absorbing the risks of the market, so that if prices went up he made a fortune, which he could easily lose if they dropped. He was the new type of westerner, the revolutionary entrepreneur, and for some time he had been anticipating the day when ecological considerations would force him to abandon his huge feed lot. Indeed, the closing down of the sugar-beet plant, with its resultant loss of pulp, would make a change of location desirable for him, so as an opportunist in the good sense of the word he welcomed the committee’s decision.
Garrett could not anticipate what his long-time friend was about to do, so he listened attentively as Brumbaugh said, “For some months past I’ve been weighing the merits of a change, and your decision this morning forces my hand. I think we’d better call in the press.”
The chairman coughed nervously. “Are you sure this is the time?”
“Quite sure,” Brumbaugh replied, winking again at Garrett, and as the men waited for the reporters, Brumbaugh asked, “Aren’t you weighing some rather serious decisions of your own, Paul?”
Garrett flushed, then said, “None that I know of.” In fact, he was perplexed on many points, but he did not care to discuss any of them with his neighbors.
“I mean about your Herefords.” Garrett tried not to betray emotion, and Brumbaugh continued: “I heard in Montana the other day that Tim Grebe was heading down this way, and in our business, when Tim Grebe shows up, it means only one thing.”
“He could be heading for Denver,” Garrett said evasively.
“They said he was coming to Venneford,” Brumbaugh said, staring at Garrett.
Now the reporters filed in, and Brumbaugh addressed them: “For some time the citizens of Centennial have opposed, and rightly so I think, the continuance of my feed lots on the edge of town. Reasons of health, sanitation and odor have been advanced, and I concur. Gentlemen, I’m in a position to announce that starting immediately, I shall move.”
The chairman interrupted to say, “Mr. Brumbaugh is taking his lots out to Line Camp. So we won’t really lose the benefits of his operation, only the smell.”
This brought smiles, which Brumbaugh halted with an announcement that stunned his listeners: “I’m dividing the lots into two halves. One part will locate west of Ottumwa, Iowa. The other part, northeast of Macon, Georgia.”
“Can Centennial survive?” the reporter from the Clarion asked. “Losing Central Beet on Tuesday, Brumbaugh Feed Lots on Thursday?”
“Centennial’s always survived,” Brumbaugh said. “It’ll adjust to this new situation.” After allowing this harsh conclusion to be digested, he added, “Newspapers and radio stations should be preparing citizens for the time, perhaps not far distant, when even the famous cattle ranches in this area will have to close down. You can’t run Herefords on land worth two thousand dollars an acre. Especially if your aquifers run dry and you have to import hay. I’m taking my feed lots to where the rain is … to where hay is abundant. If you take away my beet pulp, I have to go to the cottonseed cake.”
That was a gloomy night in Centennial, for many families were hit by the dual loss. “Is the town finished?” descendants of the pioneers asked. “Are we to go the way of Line Camp and Wendell?” The town banker, who saw two substantial accounts vanishing, told his wife, “It’s possible for every banking need in this town to be supplied from Greeley, or better yet, Denver. All we’re left with is a holding operation, and that has never appealed to me. I think we’d better reconsider that job offer in Chicago.”
It was on November 23 that the hardest blow for Garrett fell. Early that morning a large red Cadillac sped south from Cheyenne, pulling up at the Venneford Ranch. It was driven by Tim Grebe, now fifty-one years old, a handsome, florid-faced cattle salesman from eastern Montana. After the slaughter of his family he had lived with Walter Bellamy, the former land commissioner, who had sent him to the agricultural college at Fort Collins, where he had graduated near the top of his class. He had been hired by a large Hereford rancher in Wyoming, and some years ago had left that job to become managing partner in a very large ranch put together in Montana by a Texas oilman. He had gained fame as an innovator and in recent years had traveled widely throughout the west, helping ranchers revitalize their herds, introducing new methods and new types of exotic European cattle.
He had trained himself to be a master persuader, and as he put down his teacup he looked directly at Garrett and spoke with that gentleness which had earned him a leading position in the industry: “Paul, I’m an old Hereford man myself. I can remember the psychological wrench I suffered when I had to give up my herd, and I understand how men feel when they finally decide to protect themselves.” And from his papers he produced that famous newspaper photograph from the year 1936. It was enclosed in plastic and showed a fourteen-year-old Timmy embracing a Hereford.
“I remember that,” Garrett said. “I was nine,” and he remembered, too, the other events of that fatal day. Tim Grebe exploited his photograph for that very reason; when ranchers recalled the gruesome deaths at Line Camp, they were more apt to be receptive to Grebe. He was no longer a big-shot rancher from Montana with brash ideas and the million-dollar Texas bank account. He was a country boy who had survived his own hell.
“So when I come to reason with you, Paul, I come as a friend who’s been through the mill. Let me tell you,” and he accented the word you slightly, “what your real position is.” And he ticked off each of the problems that had been concerning Garrett.
“First, your Herefords are not entirely freed from the dwarfism introduced by Charlotte Lloyd and her fancy experts. You clung to the Emperor line too long. Great bulls for exhibiting in hotel lobbies during the stock shows. Fatal when it came to breeding. To eliminate the errors Emperor introduced, you’ve got to have new blood.
“Second, your Hereford yearlings don’t weigh enough. You’ve watched ranchers who’ve switched to the exotics shipping their steers off to market eight weeks ahead of you and saving all that feed.
“Third, and this isn’t of top importance, because of light pigmentation the Hereford has always been subject to eye cancer and udder burn. You can eliminate both these faults with a simple crossbreeding.
“Fourth, your cows, when they do have calves, never produce enough milk to fatten them.” He paused and lifted his empty cup.
“Want some more of that tea?” Garrett asked quietly. Skillfully Grebe had identified each weakness Paul had been pondering.
“That’s a great tea. Sort of smoky. What’s in it?”
“Special blend my family’s been drinking for generations. Cured with tar.” He sipped from his own cup, then said with awkward sincerity, “I appreciate your coming.”
“Let’s look at your problem from a detached point of view, and believe me, Paul, you can consult anyone you wish, and if they’re honest, they’ll tell you about the same. So I invite you to check up on every statement I make.” He drank deeply of the hot tea and continued.
“If you stick to pure Herefords, Paul, it’ll take years to tighten up your herd, and even then you’ll have made no progress on the big items that mean money. So I say bluntly, ‘You’ve got to crossbreed.’ You’ve got to introduce new blood in new ways, painful though the thought may be.”
“I’m prepared.”
“Good. Now, you can do it in two ways. The Curtiss people have some truly great bulls and they’ll sell you semen for artificial insemination. Pick the right breed and the right bull, and you can turn your herd around in five years. First year you get half-bred cattle. Second year you get three-fourths. Third year it’s seven-eighths. And in the fourth year you get fifteen-sixteenths, which in our profession counts as full bred. I’ve used A.I. and it works. You breed more of your cows, and you breed them in the first estrus cycle, which means ninety-six more pounds per calf at the end of the growing season as compared to the cow that gets caught only in the fourth estrus cycle.”
He leaned back, allowing Garrett time to digest the arguments of the opposition. “If you want to go A.I., I can put you in touch with two fine young men who work for Curtiss, and they’ll have the semen out here the minute you want it. But I earnestly advise you to consider my way.”
“That’s why I asked you to come down,” Garrett said.
“Good. Paul, I’m going to hit you with a blizzard of revolutionary ideas, so fasten your seat belt. I want you to buy, from me, if you like the breed I’ve selected, sixty young bulls, thirty of them half-bred at four hundred and fifty dollars each, thirty of them three-quarters bred at six hundred each. That’s an initial investment of thirty-one thousand, five hundred and it sounds like a lot, but let me show you how you can amortize it overnight. I want you to sell every one of your Hereford bulls to the bologna manufacturers—they’re paying top dollar these days because they want tough, tasty old meat. I can get you a very good contract, and you wind up owing me less than ten thousand dollars, which I’ll spread out over three years.”
“What’s your thinking on specific breeds, Tim?”
“It’s all here in the book,” Grebe said, handing Garrett a pamphlet with numerous photographs showing the results of crossbreeding Hereford cows with bulls of the various European breeds imported recently into Canada. But before Garrett had a chance to leaf through the pages, he said, “One of the very best crosses, of course, is one you know well, Hereford and Black Angus. The dark pigmentation of the black bull eliminates eye cancer and udder burn. And you get a handsome calf, body jet-black like the Angus, face snowy white like the Hereford.”
Now he let Garrett turn the pages. “Briefly, the story on the Europeans is this. The biggest animal is the Chianina from Italy, a white bull, but I don’t like the color of the Hereford-Chianina calves, and I don’t think you would either. Most popular has been the Charolais, and with the Hereford they throw a beautiful tan cross, but it has many weaknesses. Hottest new item is the Maine-Anjou, a French animal, black-and-white, very good on milk production and beef. But the beast I like—and I’ve put my money where my mouth is—is the Simmental, that big reddish animal from the Simme Valley in Switzerland. I’m not going to sing its praises, because you’ve seen the literature, but as an old Hereford man I will tell you this. Because the Simmental’s basic coloring is so close to the Hereford, you can have a Simmental-Hereford cross and the calves will retain a red body and a good white face.” He showed Garrett color photographs of sixteen such crosses, and the calves looked so much like Herefords that sometimes Garrett could not detect the cross.
“I’m not concerned with color,” Garrett lied. “What else will the cross do for me?”
“It will introduce hybrid vigor. Any cross will improve a Hereford ranch ten percent. Any fine European will improve the herd fourteen percent, simply because it introduces new strains of resistance. And the best Simmental will improve it eighteen percent.
“Your cows will give more milk. Eye cancer and udder burn will be diminished. But the big difference will be that the Simmental has never been bred to look good in hotel lobbies. It’s a draft animal, big and rugged, and it shows in the calves. Look at these figures!” And he showed Garrett the comparisons:
| Measurement | Hereford | Simmental Cross |
| Weight of calf at birth | 70 | 87 |
| Weight at 205 days | 410 | 575 |
| Weight at 345 days | 940 | 1129 |
“And those extra pounds mean extra dollars. On the same amount of food, the crossbred will give you nearly two hundred pounds more per animal, and that’s profit.”
He waited for Garrett to study the chart, then said confidentially, “I think that because of your fine reputation as a cattleman, I might be able to get you a couple of rabbits.”
“Rabbits?”
“Haven’t you heard about the latest development in Canada?” Garrett hadn’t, so he explained. “As you know, none of the European exotics can ever be imported into the United States. Hoof-and-mouth disease. So we bring them into Canada and export sealed and frozen semen from there. All those great bulls you see in the pamphlets live in Canada. We have none in the States.
“But a team of brilliant Canadian veterinarians have developed a system that frankly amazes me. They do it with rabbits, and it goes like this. They identify the finest Simmental cow in the world. They inject her with hormones, so that she produces not one or two ova but scores. Then they inseminate her with the very best bull in the breed, so that instead of producing one superior calf a year, like an ordinary cow, she is prepared to produce sixteen or seventeen at one shot.
“Of course, her womb wouldn’t be big enough to accomplish this, so as soon as the ova are fertilized, she is cut open—perfectly harmless operation—and the fertilized ova are stripped away from her tubes, and we have a dozen or so potential calves from the two greatest parents in the world.
“But we don’t want them in Canada, we want them in the United States. And here’s where the rabbits come in. We take female rabbits ready to conceive and place in their uterus the inseminated Simmental ova, which grow there just as well as they would in the uterus of a cow. The rabbits are then flown to the United States and operated upon. The ova are taken from them and placed into any substantial kind of cow who happens to be at hand. Doesn’t have to be a Simmental, because the characteristics of the future animal are in the ovum, not in the substitute mother.
“In due course the ersatz mother produces her offspring, and it’s a pure-bred Simmental, as beautiful as any reared in Switzerland.”
Garrett sat back. Such manipulation of nature was beyond his comprehension, and the image of a two-pound rabbit carrying a potential two-thousand-pound bull in her womb was preposterous. “Is it legal?” he asked.
“Well,” Grebe replied, “it may not be for long, but I’d like you to import three or four of these rabbits, because I haven’t told you the best part. Each rabbit is impregnated with two ova, and they go into the mother cow, so that time after time what you get is not one Simmental but twins. We’ve found a way to make cows produce twins about eighty percent of the time. So with four rabbits you ought to get seven calves for sure and maybe eight.”
The ideas were coming too fast for Garrett to absorb, so he strode about the room for a while, then asked, “Is the Simmental-Hereford cross a good one?”
“I think it’s the best,” Grebe said. “But, of course, I may be prejudiced.” Watching Garrett carefully, he realized that now was the time to repeat the clinching argument required to close any sale. “The good part is, the Simmental looks like a Hereford. Before long you’ll like the new animals the way you did the Herefords.”
“That I doubt,” Garrett said. For some minutes he looked up at the moose heads, then made his decision. “I’ll take thirty of your best bulls, Grebe. Fifteen half-bred. Fifteen three-quarters. I’ll keep thirty of my best Hereford bulls, and we’ll split the herd. See which does best.”
“Splendid idea,” Grebe said quickly. “You want to come to Montana to pick them out?”
“I’ll trust you, Tim.”
“If you do, I’ve got to see you get the best deal.”
When he was gone, Garrett went in to tell his wife, “I’ve done it. We’re selling off half the Hereford bulls.”
She had never understood much about ranching and could not appreciate the gravity of her husband’s decision, but she was aware of his feeling for the white-faces, and she said consolingly, “We’ll get to like the new ones just as much.” This was little reassurance, so after kissing her he left the castle and saddled his horse, riding to the far fields.
How history repeats! he reflected. A century ago it was English millionaires using textile profits to buy great ranches and introduce Herefords. Today it’s Texas oilmen and Chicago doctors using tax dollars to buy the same ranches and introduce things like Simmentals. They’re still absentee landlords buying the land for investment.
When he reached the fields where his bulls were grazing he began the painful task of deciding which would be kept, which sent to the bologna factory, but after inspecting nineteen bulls, he had condemned only one and reprieved eighteen. “To hell with it,” he growled. “I’ll let someone else do the picking.” Riding off, he turned for one last look at the great beasts, their horns drooping down beside their eyes. They had never looked better. “Christ,” he muttered, “I hope I’m doing right in selling them.”
Early Saturday morning, November 24, the governor sent Garrett, by special messenger, a confidential, prepublication copy of a report assembled by a team of research scientists working out of Montreal, Canada, with the notation: “What can we do about this?” With fascination Garrett read the study. He had heard rumors of its compilation and had wondered how his state would fare. He had expected Colorado to do moderately well, but the results staggered him.
The scientists had posed a simple problem: “Of the fifty states, which ones provide the finest quality of life, and which the poorest?” They had isolated forty-two criteria which any sensible citizen would accept as relevant. Garrett looked at the list and tried to rate Colorado:
How many dentists per 1000 population?
How many hospital beds per 1000?
How many miles of unpolluted streams per 1000?
How many books in public libraries per 1000?
How many square miles of national park or forest per 1000?
How many tennis courts per 1000?
When scientists arranged the states in order, Garrett found to his astonishment that Colorado led the list! California came next, then Oregon, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The bottom slots were occupied by those southern states which until recent years had refused to spend money on parks and playing fields and library books because they were afraid that blacks might want to use them too.
The rating would raise a serious problem for Colorado, for when it was published across the nation, as it would be, thousands of people who had only vaguely thought of moving to the state would now be inspired to do so, and there would be a flood of immigration and a corresponding torrent of local protest.
Garrett was about to put the report aside, figuring that its problems would have to be faced by others, when he saw that the governor had flagged one of the footnotes. It said:
Colorado would lead the comparisons by an even greater margin were it not for its shocking abuse of one of its greatest resources, the Platte River. As it passes through Denver, this stream is treated as a public sewer. Its condition is appalling, and it creates the suspicion that there has never been in either the Colorado legislature or the Denver city council one man or woman who cared. We recommend that Colorado send a commission to San Antonio, Texas, to study in detail what that city has accomplished in utilizing its trivial river. The imaginative creation of an old-style Mexican village, La Villita, could be duplicated by any city determined to salvage its history, and Denver with its great resources could do even more. That it allows its river to be devastated within its boundaries is a disgrace.
By the middle of December this criticism would hit the local papers and editorials would begin asking questions as to why Colorado tolerated the continued abuse of the Platte:
And the critics will be right, Vernor. Damn it, they’re right. The earth is something you protect every day of the year. A river is something you defend every inch of its course. All the men who tried to save the river are dead now, and what have fellows like me done in the past twenty years? We are judged only by the future, and men like me have allowed the river to go unattended … to our disgrace.
He then did something that would cause his neighbors to wonder if he were sane. He decided not to go to the Colorado-Nebraska football game, even though he had tickets!
“Flor!” he called. “How about phoning Norman? And ask him to get the plane ready.”
“We have to leave for the game.”
“We’re going to skip the game.”
“What about our picnic?”
“We’ll take it with us.”
“But the tickets?”
The absolute apex of the social year in Colorado was the Nebraska game. Good tickets could be sold for two hundred dollars a pair, or even more if the day was good, and for a Chicano woman to be going to this almost sacred rite was something so special that even Flor, who had little sense of vanity, had to be pleased. Since Denver had no opera, no regular theater and no grand balls, the whole cultural scene was compressed into one football game, and Flor was right to wonder why her husband would waste their tickets.
“Call Sam Pottifer,” Paul said. “I think he’d grab at them.”
While her husband shaved, she called Pottifer, a Chicago millionaire who had recently bought a large spread in the foothills west of Centennial, and he was amazed that at the last minute such good fortune should befall him. As a newcomer, he had been trying vainly to get a pair of tickets, but not even his wealth enabled him to break so quickly into the magic circle of those who possessed season tickets.
A lawsuit dealing with the value of these tickets was being watched by important families in the state. It had gone through the lower courts and was now being adjudicated in the supreme court. A man named Colson and his wife had seats on the forty-yard line, which they had owned for some thirty years. Mrs. Colson died, and the university, deciding that Colson now needed only one seat, arbitrarily took the other one away from him and awarded it to someone who had been waiting eleven years. Colson’s suit was for a mandamus ordering the university to give back his second seat on the logical grounds that the deprivation condemned him to bachelorhood in that “no self-respecting woman of the type I might want to marry would consider me if she knew that I had only one ticket to the university football games.”
So Flor’s picnic lunch, which should have been consumed from some tailgate in the shadow of the stadium and shared with the first families of the state, was stowed in the Beechcraft, and at ten the newlyweds were aloft, heading due west for the high Rockies.
“Where are we going?” Flor asked excitedly.
“I have to survey the Platte and report to the governor.”
“The river’s down that way,” Flor said, pointing south.
“Not the part we want to see.”
Below them, there was no sign of the Platte, only the peaks, one after another in mighty congregation. The perilous passes were already blocked with snow, and herds of elk were gathering where only a short time ago summer campers had pitched their tents. It was a world of whiteness, and if a plane crashed here, and some did each winter, it might lie hidden for months before it was discovered.
The plane turned south to enter the area where small mining villages had once flourished, and at Fairplay a small stream, barely noticeable, wandered through the snow.
Garrett directed his pilot to follow this fork of the South Platte across level areas eight thousand feet high and down the cascades as it tumbled to the plains.
In the distance Flor could see the smog hanging like a cloud over Denver, and she thought they would fly into it, but instead the pilot turned west again, to fly up the valley of another fork. This branch penetrated to the very highest mountains, a little stream lost among peaks.
It was the confluence of these two forks that formed the South Platte, and for about an hour Garrett and his wife flew up and down them, finding not a single error in their utilization. So long as the streams kept to the mountains, they were pure and free; it was when they mingled with men that the abuses began.
At the approaches to Denver the Platte became a squalid thing, compressed between unkempt banks; it was one of the ugliest stretches of river in America, not much better than the Cuyahoga, which caught fire in Cleveland one day because of its cargo of filth and oil. Garrett, looking down at the river and the smog, asked Flor, “If Colorado is first on the list, what must the others be like?”
Northwest of Denver lay the university town of Boulder, and Garrett directed his pilot to fly over the huge gray stadium, and saw the approaches to it clogged with thousands of automobiles. He wondered how the game was going. Each year Colorado enthusiasts vowed that this time they would defeat Nebraska, and each year their hopes were dashed: 1970, Nebraska 29 Colorado 13; 1971, Nebraska 31 Colorado 7; 1972, Nebraska 33 Colorado 10.
Garrett, staring down at the frenzied scene of which he had so often been a part, both as player and spectator, reflected that if the most superior intellect on Mars had landed in the United States to study its educational system for a year, that brain could not have understood the accidental development whereby America’s state universities had become operators of professional football teams. The universities were judged not on their libraries or their research centers or their courses in philosophy, but only on their capacity to buy a football team, most of whose members did not come from the home state or reside in it. Often they were not even true students connected with the university; they were young men dedicated principally to the job of landing contracts with acknowledged professional teams after their so-called graduations from the institutions of which they had never been a real part. Garrett, who had been a tackle at Colorado when the team was truly amateur, could laugh at the system now:
It’s the craziest pattern ever devised. Here you have the citizens of two great states growing apoplectic about a football game played not by their own people but by hired thugs imported at great expense from all over the United States. A large percentage of the players are blacks who would not be welcomed if they wanted to stay in the state after their playing days were over. They’re coddled and paid and pampered, then thrown out on their ass. And for one Saturday afternoon in November the prestige of two states depends upon their performance. And the whole damned thing is done in the name of education!
North of Boulder they intersected the valley of the Cache la Poudre, and the plane turned back into the mountains where Garrett pointed out the lakes built by Potato Brumbaugh. When the Beechcraft climbed to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet Garrett pointed down to the tunnel Brumbaugh’s men had dug under the mountains in order to steal a river from Wyoming so that the Platte could be more fruitful.
The plane turned eastward, following the braided Platte as it moved toward the Nebraska line. The river seemed an infinite chain of wooded islands strung along the merest thread of water, for the irrigation ditches had drawn off almost every usable inch of moisture. At Julesburg, near the Nebraska border, the Platte was a bare trickle, exactly the way Potato Brumbaugh had planned, but as the river crossed the state line, waters escaping from the irrigation ditches returned, so that in the end Nebraska received its lawful share.
“This is the part that never ceases to fascinate me,” Garrett told his wife as the plane continued into Nebraska. Pointing ahead, he showed her the North Platte and the South running side by side for almost forty miles, each refusing to surrender its identity. Because he wanted a faithful transcription of what he was about to say, he again took up the tape recorder and said:
During the Korean War, I took one leave in Southeast Asia and saw their rivers—Brahmaputra, Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy. But I can tell you that no rivers I have ever seen moved me the way those two down there do. Look at them, two lovers yearning to come together, yet afraid. Isn’t that the damnedest thing, really? And here, at North Platte, where they finally join, how excellent.
The plane traversed the site several times, with Flor pressing her face against the window to see the union of the rivers. Then, impulsively, Garrett said, “We’ll fly to the Missouri,” and the plane hit top speed, following the twists and turns of the Platte as it crossed Nebraska, past Fort Kearny where the Oregon Trail wagons had rested, past the Pawnee village where Pasquinel and McKeag had first fought the Indians, then traded with them, and on to that mysterious, wooded, swampy, useless spot where the Platte surrendered its identity and lost itself in the Missouri. Garrett, imagining scenes in which his ancestors must have participated at that forlorn confluence, looked down and said to Flor, “No one in Colorado will believe it, but this river is more exciting than football.”
The week had been one of tension, but Sunday was given over to frivolity. On that day hundreds of spectators would gather at the spacious ranch of Sam Pottifer to watch the Appaloosa exhibition, and whereas Paul Garrett could conceivably skip a Colorado-Nebraska football game, it would have been inconceivable for him to miss the Appaloosas. If a stranger had asked him, “Paul, what are you proudest of in your life?” he would have been entitled to give various replies: high government position, leading Hereford breeder, his conservation work with turkeys and prairie dogs and buffalo, but most certainly he would have replied, “The fact that I helped rescue the Appaloosa from extinction.”
It was somehow gratifying for Garrett that he spent so much of his time and money on the Appaloosa for this lovely breed of horse had originated in the Rattlesnake Buttes area about a million years ago, and was now considered by many to be the oldest continuing strain of horses. “To have revived this particular breed,” Garrett wrote in one report, “is to have helped nature remember her best.”
When the land bridge existed between Alaska and Asia, this horse had emigrated from Colorado to the old world. There it had flourished, and ancient art was replete with depictions: Cro-Magnon man painted the Appaloosa on the walls of his cave; Chinese artists loved to display this unique animal; Persian miniatures show him to advantage, his dotted hindquarters flashing in gold and silver; and many of Europe’s greatest painters, like Titian and Rubens, showed the animal in battle scenes.
Not a big horse, he was lively, strong, had great endurance and was easy to train. He liked people and from the first seemed to enjoy showing off, for many of the Lippizaners of Austria had originated from this breed.
His survival in America was a miracle, nothing less. He returned to this continent by accident—three or four of the horses brought over by Cortez and the early Spaniards being Appaloosas. In the new world he died out, except for a rare few that were taken far north of Arizona, where some time around 1715, they fell into the hands of the Nez Percé Indians of Idaho. These famous horse traders recognized them as superior animals. By careful husbandry, the Nez Percé produced a large number of Appaloosas, which they used as cavalry in their running fight with the United States government.
When the Nez Percé were finally defeated, the incoming missionaries handed down three decrees: “You must stop dancing, because it leads to debauchery. You must not wear beads and feathers any more, because they remind you of battle. And you must sell your spotted horses, because when you gallop them over the prairie you think of war.” So the Nez Percé Appaloosas, named for the Palouse Indians in Idaho, were taken from their owners and sold indiscriminately throughout the west.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century different ranchers began to notice among their herds stalwart horses with dots on their hindquarters, and one or two experts, remembering old paintings of the frontier, suspected that these might be the famed speckled horses of the Nez Percé. They began buying up such animals whenever they appeared on the market, and through a process of meticulous breeding, assured the continuation of this beautiful species.
It was not until the 1950s that the story was completed. Then owners began to assemble large numbers of Appaloosas. Garrett and some friends from Idaho found an old Nez Percé chief who remembered how his tribe had bred Appaloosas:
This old fellow had no teeth, could barely talk. But he loved horses, especially the spotted breed that had carried Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé warriors in their fights against our cavalry. I remember him, almost too weak to stand, running after one of my mares and holding her as he said, “You watch the pregnant mare carefully till she is a hundred and fifty days. Then you place her in a corral painted with black dots. Seeing these dots day after day, she gets them on her mind. During her last week you take a bucket of black paint and dip your right hand in and place it on her right hip and say, ‘Dots, dots, appear, appear.’ Then with your left hand you do the same on her left hip, repeating the same words. If you have painted the corral properly, and if you make good fingerprints on the hips, she will always throw a colt with Appaloosa markings. But I have noticed that this magic works only if she is an Appaloosa mare to begin with.”
When Garrett first organized his Appaloosa Club he did so out of his love for the handsome horses, but he had owned his string only a short time before he saw that he and his friends would find their greatest joy in recalling the heroic days when Nez Percé warriors used them as war ponies. The club therefore encouraged its members to acquire trappings and costumes that would evoke Indian life of the last century. Garrett would accept no one into the club who was not willing to provide himself or herself with an authentic Nez Percé costume, and he sent each prospective member this message:
It is obvious that with the sleazy modern materials available in any five-and-ten a rider can produce a pretty handsome costume. And with the flashy colors available in make-believe leather, we can deck our horses so they look like Christmas trees. While such effects gain applause in a parade, they are not exactly what this group is striving for. We ride our Appaloosas in honor of Chief Joseph and his Nez Percé heroes, who, when they were allowed to own these horses, kicked the living hell out of the American cavalry. We ride in honor of the great Arapaho and Cheyenne horsemen who once owned the land we occupy. Above all, we ride out of respect for our national heritage, so when you ride with us, you will ride as an Indian or keep the hell out.
It was against this background that he had presented Flor Marquez with a wedding present: an authentic Nez Percé costume made by Broken Paw’s wife in Idaho. As Paul tore away the protecting paper, Flor saw for the first time the exquisite gray-white elk skin tanned so that it was heavy as brocade, but infinitely softer, all decorated with porcupine quills and elk’s teeth and silver. When she slipped into it, donned a headband of iridescent cowrie shells and twisted silver strings into the braids of her black hair, she looked completely Indian.
When Garrett saw her, he caught his breath, then embraced her. “You’re a true Nez Percé princess,” he whispered.
The Crown Vee cowboys had loaded the seven Venneford Appaloosas in gooseneck trailers, and at ten we all began the short drive west to the Pottifer ranch. There was sun on the plains, snow in the mountains, and from various parts of northern Colorado tourists had gathered to see the curious and moving exhibition put on by the dentists, doctors, lawyers and merchants of the region. A newsman, sent out from Chicago with a camera crew to cover this unusual event, asked Garrett why grown men and women would play at being Indians, and I recorded what he said:
My wife and I are Indians. Now, those others, as you point out, aren’t. But we all have this in common. We respect our Indian heritage. There’s not a phony in that bunch. Not one imitation dress or saddle. But to be perfectly honest with you, the secret is the Appaloosa. If you’ve never bred this amazing horse, you can’t begin to imagine the excitement that comes over a family when their Appaloosa mare is pregnant. You wait for the birth with anxiety … yes, a real anxiety. What kind of foal will it be?
We took the camera crew to the Venneford trailers, where Garrett’s horses were being unloaded: a gray stallion with black spots like a leopard; three fawn-colored mares with blankets of stars over their hips; a big male with reddish circles covering his hindquarters; and two delicate mares of such beautiful black-and-white configuration that watchers applauded as they came gingerly down the ramp.
When you breed Appaloosas you deal with the mystery of nature. You never know what you’re going to get, but when you see horses like these, each different, each magnificent in its own way … Mister, there are about two hundred possible colorings for an Appaloosa, and you ask me my favorite combination. I’ve narrowed the choice down to twenty-seven, and every morning when I look at one of my own horses I say, “That’s the best color.” And the next day I’ll choose the stablemate.
The riders mounted, thirty-one men and women dressed in authentic Nez Percé costumes, and the cameramen expected some kind of dazzling exhibition, but none evolved. The horsemen simply rode back and forth as Indians might have done on their range two hundred years ago, and after a while, from the ravines to the west, a group of twenty additional riders appeared, each on an Appaloosa of a different marking, and they rode down the slopes not as enemies galloping to attack a camp, but as visitors from another tribe, and the two groups commingled and from time to time some rider in exquisite costume would appear at the crest of a ridge and stand silhouetted against the mountains. Cameras would click, and when Paul Garrett and his wife, he on the leopard-spotted stallion, she on a black-and-white mare, cantered easily down a slope, the crowd cheered.
Of course, at the end of the leisurely exhibition, a group of fifteen cowboys dressed like American cavalrymen of the 1880s did appear from the south, firing carbines, and the Nez Percé did flee, starting their long trek through the mountains, as they had done in the past, and when the last Appaloosa disappeared behind the ridge, the plains were empty and the watchers felt as if they had shared, for those brief moments, in the history of their land.
On Monday, November 26, Garrett was approached by an assistant professor from the university who wanted to question him about the baleful influence of British imperialism on the prairie. The young man had mastered the relevant figures:
“Earl Venneford of Wye put together a ranch of five million, seven hundred thousand acres. Of these he actually owned, legally or illegally, only twenty thousand acres, for which he paid, I calculate, not more than sixty cents an acre for a total of only twelve thousand dollars in cash.
“In addition, he laid out something like a hundred and fifty thousand for his cattle, equipment and supplies. Now, I’m willing to admit that his partners later on did add additional cash to pay for land they had been using, so that in the end the British put in a total, let’s say, of three hundred thousand dollars.”
“What’s your point?” Garrett asked.
“Look at the profits Venneford and his gang made.”
“I don’t think they were a gang. They were a group of businessmen who operated within the laws of this country.”
“Be that as it may,” the professor said. “I calculate that Venneford took out of this state not less than thirty thousand dollars a year for thirty years. What’s that? About a million dollars. At the end of that period he sold his holdings of three hundred thousand acres at around ten dollars an acre, or three million dollars, plus another million for stock and equipment.”
“You’ve done a lot of research,” Garrett said with some admiration.
“Thus, on an original investment of three hundred thousand dollars the British picked up a neat profit of four million seven hundred thousand dollars, or a whopping 1566 percent.”
“That seems to work out,” Garrett said. “But one of my ancestors in that period invested rather liberally, and his returns were not nearly so good, as I can attest.”
The professor ignored this remark. “Nor was ranching the only form of investment. Englishmen owned coal mines and gold mines and irrigation ditches and railroads and insurance companies. In fact, Colorado was a colony of Europe, and it remained so until about 1924. Year after year thousands of European-controlled dollars funneled into the plains while millions of dollars in profits made their way back to Europe. It was an example of economic imperialism at its worst.”
“Was it?” Garrett asked.
“The facts speak for themselves.”
“I wonder if they do? Colorado borrowed European money and on it paid a handsome interest, but in the end Earl Venneford had his dollars and we had a state. It’s my opinion that Colorado could have afforded to pay Venneford ten times as much for the use of his money, and still come out way ahead. The men in London who built the irrigation ditch did get their interest, year after year, but a thousand farmers got land that paid them infinitely more. I’d say the best investment America ever made was to allow Englishmen to develop our plains for us. No price would have been too great to pay for railroads and mines and irrigation. In the Venneford deal, which I know pretty well, it was the state of Colorado that made the killing.”
“But the economic control? The imperialism?”
“Venneford tried to keep out sheepmen and lost. They tried to keep out farmers and lost absolutely. They tried to hold their five million acres and every damned year they lost more and more. No English battleship ever sailed up the Platte to blast hell out of the Russians and the Japanese who were cutting the English throats.”
“Russians? Japanese?”
Paul Garrett rarely cursed, but now he could not refrain. “Goddamnit, Professor. Don’t waste my time if you haven’t done your homework. Who in hell do you suppose stole the land from Venneford—the Methodist Church?”
This was such a non sequitur that the professor fumbled for a moment. “What … I mean, there were no big Russian or Japanese investments.”
“Potato Brumbaugh? Goro Takemoto? They were the most insidious imperialists ever to hit this neck of the woods. Almost as bad as Triunfador Marquez, that damned Chicano.” The professor looked shocked. “Don’t worry, Doctor. I married his granddaughter.”
The interview was ending in confusion, and Garrett thought he ought to give the man some solid data. “Seems to me, Professor, that two salient facts saved us in Colorado. Europe was a long way off, and America was a strong, self-confident nation. We never permitted warship diplomacy. We never wavered before European military threats. Small countries today don’t have that security, and sometimes they’re badly abused. There is such a thing as imperialism, but in Colorado it didn’t operate.
“The other advantage we had, we were a people with a free system of education. The clever British could come here and run ranches and build ditches and do everything else, but they couldn’t keep our bright young men from learning the tricks of the trade. European investment bought us time to learn what we had to learn. They were great teachers, men like Oliver Seccombe …”
“Who was he?”
Garrett stopped in disgust. This scholar knew all the figures, all the profit-and-loss statements, but he knew none of the men. What could Garrett say about Seccombe, that brilliant, uneven man? That he put together a great ranch? That he introduced Herefords to the west? “He shot himself, at the age of sixty-nine, in that field over there.”
The interview left a bad taste in his mouth, and when the scholar was gone he poured himself a heavy drink, even though he was opposed to daytime alcohol. He was gulping it down when Flor came in to announce that her brother had shown up unexpectedly and insisted upon interrogating him. Before Garrett could ask on what, into the room burst a fiery young man of twenty-three.
“What are you going to do?” he shouted at his new brother-in-law.
“About what?” Paul asked quietly. He did not like Flor’s brother, and was disgusted with the way he had dropped out of college after one week with the complaint “None of the professors are relevant.”
“I’m speaking about La Raza,” the young firebrand shouted.
“Keep your voice down, Ricardo,” Paul snapped, and immediately he was sorry that he had lost his temper.
“Aren’t you offering me a drink?”
“It’s over there.”
This interview was going even worse than the one with the professor, and Garrett could think of no way to save it. For some time young Ricardo had been seeking a fight, so let it come.
“I’ve been sent to warn you that this state will not be allowed to hold any kind of centennial celebration unless La Raza has a dominant say in what’s done. After all, this state belongs to us … historically.”
“Your request makes a great deal of sense,” Garrett conceded. “Have you been told that the first thing I did upon being appointed was to visit Cortez? And invite two Chicanos onto the committee?”
Young Marquez ignored this attempt at conciliation. “We demand that your reactionary committee issue a press release admitting that the principles of Aztlán will govern the entire celebration.”
“What are the principles of Aztlán?”
“I have them here.” Paul reached for the paper, but the young revolutionary pulled it back, for he wanted to read it aloud: “ ‘Those who have stolen from La Raza the land of Aztlán—the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Colorado—confess their crime and admit that the brown people of the continent own these states and by rights must govern them.
“ ‘False owners who came from nations like Russia, England, Italy and Japan to steal these lands from La Raza confess their crime and submit to just demands for indemnity. If La Raza decides that these thieves may continue in Aztlán, they must surrender all political control to La Raza and live here as immigrants, bound by the laws of Aztlán.’ ”
The young man read on and on, inflamed by the beauty of his words and the simplicity of the solutions they outlined. When he was finished, Garrett asked, “I can see how your plan might have appeal in Arizona and New Mexico, but do you really think the Anglos in Texas are going to move away and give the state to you?”
“They’ll be allowed to remain,” Ricardo said. “But only if they submit themselves to our laws.”
“Will you be able to supply a group who can write the laws?”
“We have the inspiration,” Marquez replied.
“Sit down,” Garrett said.
“I prefer to stand.”
“Then excuse me while I sit. Ricardo, don’t you think it strange that your people have missed chance after chance at self-education?”
“Anglo education is not relevant.”
“I was making a comparison the other day. No, listen. You may find this interesting. The Takemoto family came here about the same time as the Marquez family. The five Takemotos of this generation have had ninety-seven years of free education. That’s almost twenty years for each one. As a result, they’re doctors and legislators and dentists. The Marquez family also has five in this generation, and all of you together have had thirty-eight years of education. And it’s been waiting there, free.”
“The Takemotos are slaves to the establishment,” the young man said contemptuously. “We Chicanos don’t want to be servile dentists and all that crap.”
“Then become lawyers,” Garrett said, “so that you can fight for your people.”
“The whole court system is crap,” Marquez shouted.
“Lower your voice, Ricardo. What I’d like to do is pay for your university education. I’m interested …”
“You’re trying to buy me off. Subvert the revolution. I know how my grandfather slaved in your fields …”
It seemed more than strange to Garrett that a young man whose sister had just married an Anglo should be abusing that very Anglo as an enemy of the race. It showed distorted thinking, but in the back of his mind Garrett suspected that if he were in Ricardo’s place, he would be tempted to behave much like him. He felt a real empathy with his brother-in-law.
“Learn their system, Ricardo. Beat them over the head with it. I’m on your side, you know.”
“You’re the enemy,” Marquez said. “And I’m warning you now. We’re going to destroy your celebration if you try to organize it without us.”
“You weren’t listening. I said I’d already brought two Chicanos onto the committee.”
“Ah! Them! The faithful old biscuits.”
“What do you mean—biscuits?”
“Brown on the outside. White on the inside. Traitors to La Raza.”
“Whom can I appoint? That you would accept?”
“The leaders of the revolution, that’s who.”
“Would they serve?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Have them see me on December first and I’ll appoint them.”
“But we shall insist on gaining control of Texas.”
“Ricardo, my dear brother in blood, that will be a long time off. The problem is, what can we do now, you and your sister and I? Because Flor and I want you to live with us.”
“You can’t buy me off, Garrett.” And he left the house, gunning his old Ford down the lane.
On Tuesday Garrett was awakened by a cry which always made him feel good: “Jenny’s headin’ north.” It came from the yard below his window and signified that once more he would have to take down his shotgun with the rubber pellets.
“Come on, Flor. Jenny’s heading north.”
They dressed hurriedly, laughing as they did, and as they ran out through the kitchen, each of them grabbed a shotgun and a handful of special bullets. It took a fairly determined stand to turn Jenny around, and one shotgun blast never did the trick.
In 1960 Garrett had purchased sixty buffalo from breeders in Canada and had trucked them onto his spread. Jenny, a female weighing more than half a ton, had kicked out the sides of three trucks before the Canadians got her tranquilized for the trip south, and when she was released onto the Venneford acres she tried to revenge herself, knocking two men flat.
She seemed to have a built-in radar beamed to her old home in Canada, because each year when the time came that buffalo traditionally migrated, she would stand in the middle of the prairie, sniff in various directions, then start to walk north, ignoring fences, roads, railroad tracks and state boundaries. The only way she could be turned about was to take a position about twenty-five feet ahead of her and fire a blast of rubber pellets smack in her face.
The first shot accomplished nothing. She merely blinked, lowered her head and kept coming. It was the second and third shots, which looked as if they might blast her head off, that finally delivered the message. She would stop, shake her head as if flies were bothering her, turn around and come home.
“She’s still headin’ north,” one of the cowboys said as the Garretts reached the pasture, and there stood the shattered fences through which Jenny had walked with her accustomed insolence.
“We can head her off north of the road,” the cowboy suggested, and he drove the jeep at a good speed in the direction of the errant buffalo. After twenty minutes they saw her, head down, plodding away in response to some ancient impulse. They watched her for a few minutes, laughing at her determination. When she came to a fence she barely paused, applying her great bulk and pushing it flat.
“We’ll have to go up to the other road,” Garrett cried, so they went farther north and took their stand directly in front of the lumbering old cow. She must have seen them, but on she came.
Paul fired right at her face, but she merely swept her head from side to side. “Fire, damnit!” he yelled to his wife, and Flor banged away with a second shot. Jenny hesitated, so the cowboy sent a blast right at her. She shook her head, looked about, then turned resignedly and started back to the Crown Vee pastures, where the other buffalo were grazing peacefully.
Tim Grebe kept his promise. He arranged a deal for the sale of Garrett’s bulls to a bologna factory, but when the butcher phoned to complete the details, Garrett lost heart and said, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I couldn’t possibly sell you the bulls.” He then summoned his foreman and said, “There’s got to be some smaller ranch around here that could use thirty good bulls. Sell them for whatever you can get. Give them away, if you have to.” He’d be damned if he’d sell prime Herefords to be ground up for sandwich meat.
When the foreman left, Garrett stormed about the castle in a state of anxiety. He had made a major decision and already it was haunting him. Once he grabbed me by the arm, saying earnestly, “You can see my position, can’t you, Vernor? I can’t run this ranch as a hobby. And if the Simmentals will bring in more money, I’ve got to consider them.” I nodded.
Then he snapped his fingers and shouted to Flor, “It’s time I visited the family. I’ve had some of my best ideas when I’ve been up there,” and within fifteen minutes he and Flor had packed and we were speeding north to the reservation in western Wyoming where the remnants of the Arapaho tribe were sequestered.
Each year, from the time he was a small boy, Garrett had visited his Indian relatives, taking them presents. Most of his friends in Colorado overlooked the fact that he was part Indian, five thirty-seconds, if you traced it out on the chart in the breed book.
“I’ve never been a professional Indian apologist,” he told me as we sped along the great empty roads of Wyoming, “and I’ve always refrained from trying to capitalize on that heritage for political effect, but I do sometimes feel like a true Indian. At least I’m sympathetic to their problems, and if I were twenty years younger, I suppose I’d be one of the gun-toting activists.”
As we neared the reservation he became moody, and I could see that he was now regretting his impulse. On his previous visit he had found his various aunts and uncles caught in despondency, and now as we drove onto the Indian lands he said prayerfully, “God, I hope they’re in better shape this time.”
They weren’t. Aunt Augusta, bitter and ancient, launched her mournful litany the moment we arrived: “Government says we can have a recreation hall, but the damned Shoshone want it on their land and we want it on ours, and we may have to go to war against them.” The old Arapaho-Ute antagonism was as venomous as it had been in 1750. The Shoshone were an offshoot of the Ute and nurtured the animosity that had always existed between the two tribes, made permanent by that unfortunate mistake in 1873 when President Arthur gave permission for the remnant of the Arapaho to share the reservation formerly occupied only by the Shoshone. There was enough land for two tribes, more than enough, but not when those tribes were mortal enemies.
In spite of her complaining, Garrett had always enjoyed Aunt Augusta, and now she demonstrated why: “Our whole trouble stems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Did you know the agent is so terrified of us that he won’t sleep on the reservation? He sleeps in town.” She narrated several outrageous stories about the bureau, then said, “It all began when General Custer was head of Indian Affairs.”
I assumed that her mind must be wandering, for so far as I knew, it had been Custer’s job to fight Indians, not govern them, but then the sly old lady winked and said, “In 1876 General Custer left his office on the way to Little Big Horn and said, ‘Don’t do anything till I get back.’ ” There was a long pause, and then Flor comprehended what the old woman was saying, and burst into laughter. “That’s right!” the old woman said. “He never came back, and they’ve not done a damned thing since.”
Then she resumed her lament. “Did you hear, Paul, what happened to Sam Loper’s boy?”
On our way to Loper’s shack Paul explained, “He’s my cousin, some way or other. His real name is White Antelope, but the government said it was silly for a grown man to be named after an animal, so he cut it down to Lope and added an r. Same way with Harry Grasshopper. Had to change his to Harry Hopper.”
Sam Loper was an older man, and his son, like so many Indian youths, had taken to heavy drinking. A week before, as he staggered home from an all-night party, he had fallen into a small ditch, not two feet deep, and drowned.
Now his father sat in his jumbled kitchen, swilling coffee and beer. And Flor wanted to weep as she listened to his narrative: “The boy left a wife and three children, but she drinks heavy. Ain’t sober days at a time. The kids—where in hell are they?”
We stopped by the Mission of Christ and asked the young director, “Can’t anything be done for the Loper family?” and he shrugged his shoulders.
“The awful problem is that no girls in America, and I mean none, are better brought up than these Indian girls. At nineteen they must make God smile in satisfaction at His handiwork. They study here at the mission and they’re clean, devout, abstemious—filled with the excitement of life. Then they marry. And who do they marry? The tall, good-looking young men on the reservation …”
“Do Arapaho ever marry Shoshone?”
“Unthinkable. And what happens to these promising young men who play basketball so well when they’re nineteen? They drift. They lose interest. They have no future, no hope. So they start drinking, and often after the first baby comes, the utter chaos of their lives becomes unbearable. They start beating up their young wives. Yes, the girls come to me with horrible bruises and broken teeth. So the only contact the wife is able to maintain with her husband is to join him in drinking, and whole families stay drunk week after week.”
“I know,” Garrett said impatiently, for he had heard this dismal story too often. “But what can we do about the Loper widow?”
“Nothing,” the missionary said. “She’s a lost alcoholic and I cannot even approach her.”
“The children?”
“The boy will become like his father. The two girls, if I remember them, will be as beautiful as their mother, and at age twenty-eight they’ll be hopeless alcoholics.”
As always on his trips to the reservation, Garrett spent his last moments in the small cemetery where Sacajawea was buried, and this time the visit would be doubly meaningful, for he wanted Flor to see the grave of the Indian woman most revered in American history, the tall and beautiful Shoshone who had led Lewis and Clark to Oregon. But he was not prepared for the emotional punishment he himself was to undergo, for while Flor studied the monument he wandered to another part of the cemetery, and there he saw a new gravestone, that of Hugh Bonatsie, who had died in the spring. Across the stone was engraved the message: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” The words were banal, perhaps, but the carving that accompanied them was not. There on the face of the stone, chosen for its redness, were etched the things Bonatsie had loved most in life: a white-faced Hereford bull and two cows.
On the way south from the reservation Garrett drove slowly, for he was assailed by an anguish so complex that he wanted me to preserve it accurately:
The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation’s unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences.
There’s no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased—much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues.
Looking at that reservation as it exists now … what in hell can a man say? It seems clear the Indian never intended to accommodate himself to white man’s ways, so that our grandiose plans of “fitting him into white society” were doomed. He formed an indigestible mass in the belly of progress and had to be regurgitated. Like Jonah, he came out about as well as he went in. It seems inevitable that his land had to be taken from him. The white man was in motion, the Indian wasn’t. The whole thrust of our national life placed us in opposition to his requirements, and even though we signed the land treaties with the best intentions in the world, the wisest of the white men knew, at the very moment of signing, that the papers weren’t worth a damn. Before the ink was dry, the Indian was dispossessed.
We drove in silence for some time, crossing the great prairies once controlled by Paul’s ancestors, and finally Flor pointed out that when her husband spoke of the Indian problem, especially when he became intellectually excited, he always referred to himself as part of the white establishment which had committed these crimes against the Indian part of his inheritance:
No! When I come to Wyoming and lose myself in these empty prairies … I think this part, right here, is the most beautiful section of America. Look! Not a house, not a fence, not a road except the one we’re on. When I’m here I’m an Arapaho. And I’ll tell you this. I’m immensely impressed with the cultural persistence of my people. We may find, and very soon, too, that if the white man wants to survive on the prairie, he’ll have to go back to the permanent values of the Indian. Respect for the land. Attention to animals. Living in harmony with the seasons. Some kind of basic relationship with the soil. An awful lot of the white man’s progress will come to grief when the next dry spell comes along.
Again we drove in silence, with Flor vainly trying to imagine what her life would have been like in those days. She probably had in her veins a much larger proportion of Indian blood than he, yet their tradition was totally alien to her, while Paul could easily become an Indian once more. Her reverie was broken when he lifted both hands off the wheel and slammed them down on the horn-rim, sending wild surges of sound across the prairie:
This trip’s been worthwhile, Vernor. I may not know what I think about Nixon or Agnew or Watergate, but at last I know what I think about the American Indian. Every reservation in this nation should be closed down. The land should be distributed among the Indians, and if some of them wish to continue living communally, they should be encouraged, like the Pueblos in New Mexico. The rest should enter the dominant culture, to sink or swim as their talents determine. The way my family had to. The way Flor’s did in Old Mexico. Many good things will be lost, but the best will persist—in legend, in remembered ways of doing things, in our attitude toward the land. I can no longer support a system which keeps the Indians apart, like freaks of nature. They aren’t whooping cranes, to be preserved till the last one dies out. They’re part of the mainstream, and that’s where they belong.
At dusk on November 28 we took motel rooms in Douglas, home of the fabled jackalope, half-jackrabbit, half-antelope. Local taxidermists were so skilled at grafting small deer horns onto the heads of stuffed jackrabbits that many visitors, including Flor Garrett, believed the mutant existed. A huge statue in the town square confirmed her belief, and when she asked where a live jackalope could be seen, Paul broke into laughter.
“You’re precious,” he told her. “A typical tourist. What the United States ought to do right now is take the money we’re spending in Southeast Asia and on space shots and build a barbed-wire fence around the whole state of Wyoming. Declare it a national treasure and allow only five hundred thousand visitors a year. When you come through the gate, the officer ties a little broadcasting radio around your neck, the way Floyd Calendar did with his bears, and they’d keep track of you, and after seven days a message would go out, ‘Paul Garrett, driving a gray Buick with a beautiful Chicano girl. He’s been inside a week. Kick him to hell out.’ ”
Flor pointed out that whereas he had wanted to dissolve a small Indian reservation, he now wanted to initiate a huge Wyoming reservation, and she thought this contradictory, but he said, “Not at all. Human beings cannot be kept in a state of preservation, but irreplaceable natural resources can. I say, ‘Declare Wyoming a national park and treat it as such.’ ” After dinner he bought her a small jackalope, and as he presented it to her formally, he announced to the diners in the restaurant that she was now protector of this rare creature.
On Thursday, November 29, we drove to the spot which Garrett loved most in America, the one he visited at least twice each year. It was of little consequence, really, and even though it had at one point played a specific role in American history, it had not been a major one; few Americans could ever have heard of it. But the site had been preserved with such intelligence that it stood as an example of almost flawless restoration.
It was Fort Laramie, still standing in silence at the spot where the swift dark Laramie River emptied into the North Platte. Wild turkeys still roamed the fields where the Indians had camped during the Treaty of 1851, and elk could sometimes be seen on the range where the Oglala Sioux had hunted. In the soft limestone west of the fort the deep ruts of wagon wheels could still be seen, where straining forty-niners had dragged their covered wagons.
The old buildings had been preserved if their walls were sound, or reconstructed if only their foundations remained, and not a false note had been struck. There were no mighty cannon or ramparts filled with dummy soldiers firing at nonexistent Indians. Only the materials available in the 1860s and 1870s had been used, and the sutler’s store where the emigrants had bought their last food before heading west for Oregon still offered Arbuckle’s coffee and those handsome white blankets of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Not many visitors came to Fort Laramie, for it was in no way spectacular, but scores of men and women who loved the west made pilgrimages to its clean, well-ordered acres to recapture the reality of American settlement:
Down there is where Pasquinel and McKeag had their winter headquarters. Lame Beaver and his Arapaho spent one winter over there. Levi Zendt and that remarkable girl, Elly Zendt … she’s the one whose diaries you read. The wagons came down that hill and camped on the other side of the Laramie. The great convocation you read about … 1851 when all the Indians came here. The Crow came in from the northwest over there. It must have been a tremendous sight, the whole Crow nation on horseback. And this building over here is where McKeag and Clay Basket had their store. That’s where my great-great-grandfather Maxwell Mercy first met them. This other fine building … Old Bedlam it’s still called. That’s where my ancestor Pasquinel Mercy served before he went to Little Big Horn with General Custer.
Our visit ended on a bitter note, because as Garrett was about to leave the fort, he saw on the bulletin board an announcement that any letters mailed there would be posted with the handsome three-cent stamp honoring Francis Parkman, and if there was one man in American letters Garrett despised, it was Parkman:
Honoring a man like that! He debased the Oregon Trail with one of the feeblest historical books ever written. He had no comprehension of what the trail signified, no compassion for the Indians who roamed it and no generosity for the emigrants using it. He could turn a phrase rather well, but in human understanding he was pitifully deficient. He made fun of Mexicans, ridiculed Indians, heaped abuse on hardworking farmers from the midwest, lacked any comprehension of Catholic culture and, worst of all, failed to understand the prairie. He judged all life by the meanest Boston yardstick, and almost every generalization he made about the west was wrong.
Some of his phrases fester in my mind. He called Chief Pontiac, one of America’s best-balanced Indians, a “thorough savage to whom treachery seemed fair and honorable, the Satan of his forest paradise.” I remember one passage in which he excoriated the farmers passing through as little more than animals, concluding, “Most of them were from Missouri.” But the one that best sums up his miserable view of life stated that he divided the human race as he saw it, into three divisions “arranged in the order of their merit: white men, Indians and Mexicans,” and he doubts that to the Mexican can be conceded the honorable title “white.”
I’ll tell you one thing, Vernor. If you ever send me a letter bearing Parkman stamps I’ll burn the damned thing unopened. I don’t want him in my house. What I resent most is that by getting his book published first, he scared away other writers infinitely better qualified. He never looked at the plains, nor the Platte, nor the Arapaho, nor the beaver, nor the coureur de bois, nor the bison. Of course, I’m speaking as an Arapaho, but I’ll promise you this. If I run into him on the Happy Hunting Grounds, I’ll scalp the son-of-a-bitch.
As we crossed the state line to enter Colorado, Garrett breathed deeply, saying, “It’s so good to be home.” Over dirt roads we drove to the ruined town of Line Camp, where only the grain elevator and the two stone buildings erected by Jim Lloyd more than a century before remained. Where was the sign that boasted WATCH US GROW? Where were the library and the bank and Replogle’s Grocery Store? Where was the tractor agency that used to sell sixty tractors a year? And worst of all, where were the homes that had been so painstakingly built, so painfully sustained during the years of drought?
They were gone, vanished down to the building blocks of the cellars. A town which had had a newspaper and a dozen flourishing stores had completely disappeared. Only the mournful ruins of hope remained, and over those ruins flew the hawks of autumn.
Our car pulled up before one of the low stone buildings and Garrett got out to knock on the door. For a moment it seemed that no one was there. Then a very old man with fading reddish hair and deep-set eyes came to the door. He was eighty-six, but he moved and spoke with youthful enthusiasm, almost as if the excitements of life were just beginning.
“Paul Garrett, come in! Tim Grebe told me you’d married a beautiful Chicano, and I see she’s as pretty as he said. Come in! Come in!”
He led us into the office from which he had once helped give away a hundred and ninety thousand acres of drylands, and he had watched as the defeated had abandoned the land. Now only he survived. With firm voice he spoke of those distant years, of the good rainfall at the start of the pestilential years. His memory was acute, and he could recall most of the families.
“What was the worst thing that happened in those years?” Garrett asked. In whatever celebration Colorado organized for its birthday, he would insist that the tragic times be remembered too, for they were a part of history that should not be denied.
Bellamy pondered this question for such a long interval, staring out the low window of the stone house, that I supposed he had not heard. “Was it the Grebe tragedy?” Garrett asked.
“No,” Bellamy said brusquely, as if he had already dismissed that possibility. “That was an accident, without cause or consequence. But there was one terrible moment. The farmers were starving. The dust was finger-high inside the houses. Everyone was losing hope. Then Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey visited us. What a godlike man! He visited with every farmer he had persuaded to come here. He walked over the land and assured us that the good years were bound to return. He confessed his mistakes and was especially helpful with the wives, for he gave them courage.”
“What was so terrible about that?” Garrett asked.
“When the meetings ended, he came in here, alone. He fell into that chair you’re sitting in and asked for a drink of water. When I placed it on the table before him, he shuddered. Then, without touching the glass, he uttered a piercing shriek and covered his face with his hands. After a moment he looked up at me and whispered, ‘May Christ forgive me for what I did to these men and women.’ Then he pulled himself together and Miss Charlotte drove him back to Centennial, but he refused to touch the water.”
On the short drive home to Venneford, Garrett studied the great rolling fields sown in winter wheat. He could see that every prediction made by Dr. Creevey half a century ago had been fulfilled. Wheat prospered on The Great American Desert, and vast farms like that of the Volkema brothers earned huge profits, for the owners had learned not to plow deep and never to harrow.
A new law helped, too: if any farmer saw that because of poor management his neighbor’s fields were beginning to blow away, with the inevitable consequence that other fields in line would blow away too, the observant farmer was allowed by law to plow his neighbor’s field correctly. The cost of doing this would be added to the taxes of the remiss farmer. If any farmer persisted in his sloppy husbandry, his land would be taken away from him, for it imperiled the entire district. Never again would fields be allowed to blow away.
The old two-part system that had prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century—rancher and irrigator—was now a tripartite cooperation: the rancher used the rougher upland prairie; the irrigation farmer kept to the bottom lands; and the drylands gambler plowed the sweeping fields in between, losing his seed money one year, reaping a fortune the next, depending on the rain. It was an imaginative system, requiring three different types of man, three different attitudes toward life, and Garrett was honored to have found a niche within it.
How powerful the land was! Continuously men did strange and destructive things to it, yet always the land endured. It was the factor which limited what men could accomplish; it determined what the irrigated fields would produce and how many cows could be grazed on a section. Even when men walked upon the moon, they remained attached to their native land by electrical impulses, and to the land they must return.
To be engaged in the protection of this land, as Potato Brumbaugh had been in his long wrestling with the river, or Jim Lloyd in his guardianship of the grasslands, was an honorable occupation, Garrett felt, because each generation was obligated to leave the land in a position to defend itself against the next generation.
As the car approached the castle, Garrett reflected on the grand circularity of history. On that hill to the west the good men of Centennial had once beat up the Chicano Penitentes for their weird practices, and the other day a crowd of young fellows from the town had thumped the Jesus Freaks for behaving differently from decent Methodists or Baptists. Last week a judge in Denver had announced from the bench that if Colorado still had any red-blooded men, they’d go out in the streets and thrash the Hare Krishna, who offended law-abiding citizens with their yellow robes and crazy cymbals.
At the castle we found Arthur Skimmerhorn pacing beneath the moose heads: “Forgive me for letting myself in, but I had to see you, Paul.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment, he blurted, “Have you sold those Hereford bulls?”
“Why?”
“I want to buy them.”
“I told the foreman to get rid of them.”
“Has he sold them?”
“We can find out soon enough.”
Skimmerhorn listened apprehensively as Garrett rang the foreman: “How about those thirty bulls I told you to sell?… A man in Kansas is trying to make up his mind … Did you make a promise of any kind to him?… It doesn’t have to be writing … You gave him an option?… Till when?… He was supposed to make up his mind yesterday and he didn’t bother to call?… Ring him right now and tell him we sold them to Skimmerhorn in Colorado.” He replaced the phone and told Skimmerhorn, “They’re yours. And I’m delighted they’ll be staying close to home where I can watch them.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
“I thought you’d switched to Charolais.”
“I did. Got the results they said I’d get, too. Bigger calves. More money. With your Simmentals you’ll do the same. Those fancy boys don’t lie.”
“Then why the eagerness to buy my Herefords?”
“Well,” the young rancher said with a touch of sarcasm, “they tell the truth but they’re not obliged to tell the whole truth. Look at my figures.” And from his pocket he produced a folded sheet which summarized the fuller story: Hereford cow–Charolais bull. Calves so big they could only be born by Caesarean section, fifteen percent. Calves so big they had to be born with the help of calf-puller, nineteen percent. Calves dead at birth or shortly thereafter, fourteen percent.
“What it means,” Skimmerhorn said, “is that you do get extra money when you sell your steers, but you waste it all on veterinary fees. So I figure, if I’m working extra hard just to pay the vet, why not run cattle I really like?” He accepted the drink Garrett proffered and slumped into one of the chairs beneath the moose heads. Twirling his glass, he confessed, “I’ve done very well with the Charolais. No complaints, and I’m going to keep some of those big bulls … to tighten up my herd, you might say. But when I haul your thirty Hereford bulls over to my ranch, and then pick up some good white-face cows at the Nebraska sales, well … I’ll feel I’m an honest man again.”
“I can drink to that,” Garrett said.
On the last day of November, Paul Garrett was wakened early by a cowboy shouting, “The Simmentals are here!”
There, waiting by the barn, were cattle trucks which had hauled the thirty red-and-white bulls nonstop from Montana. At first Garrett wanted no part of introducing them to their new home, for this was Hereford country and they were trespassers, but then he felt ashamed of himself. “If we’re experimenting with Simmentals, we’ll do it right,” he said to me, and he went down to assist with the unloading.
The new bulls were big, full-bodied, and they looked as if they could care for themselves, but they were flabby, more like dairy cows than range Herefords. One of the hands cried softly, “Moo cow, moo!” But then he saw the boss and scurried off.
“Pete!” Garrett called. “Come back here. They may look moocow, but they’ll be paying your wages. Show them respect.”
So the Simmentals were unloaded, and Garrett could see that Tim Grebe had sent him thirty strong bulls. They’d do well on Crown Vee land, and maybe the balance sheet would look better in a year or two. But when the animals moved out to take possession of land which for a century had reverberated to the hoofbeats of Herefords, Garrett felt sick to his stomach, and that afternoon he went in to Centennial alone, to drink at the bar of the Railway Arms. Next year it, too, would be gone.
And as he drank he grew increasingly mournful over the fate of Centennial. It had known a hundred good years and now was perishing. The sugar-beet factory, the feed lots, the Hereford ranches—all the old patterns of life were dissolving.
He banged his glass on the table and grabbed at a stranger. “This was a good town, a great one,” Garrett shouted at him. “Do you know that Edwin Booth played in our theater, and Sarah Bernhardt? William Jennings Bryan stopped here, and so did James Russell Conwell and Aristide Briand.” The man was obviously unfamiliar with these names, and pulled away.
A freight train, one of the few that still came through town, sounded its querulous whistle, evoking a new set of memories. Garrett left his table and went over to the stranger, saying compulsively, “Listen to that, pardner. That’s the Union Pacific. I remember the day, thirty-four years ago this month, when Morgan Wendell … he’ll take office in January …”
His phrases dribbled off, but not his memories. He left the bar and went out onto the veranda, and cold air reminded him of that distant time. Morgan Wendell had come to the ranch and said, “Let’s go down and see it today!” and they had hitchhiked their way to a point along the Platte some miles east of Centennial. There they waited along the shore, two boys twelve years old skipping stones across the water, watching the hawks.
Then Morgan had looked at his birthday watch and said, “It’ll be pulling out of La Salle about now,” and they left the river and stationed themselves as close to the railroad tracks as possible.
In the west they heard the purring of a giant cat, the swift movement of some immense creature across the prairie. It was like nothing they had heard before, a singing rush of air, and Morgan called, “Paul! Here it comes!”
It was the City of Denver, that majestic gold-and-silver streamliner that left Denver each afternoon at four-fifteen, speeding almost nonstop to Chicago. It bore down upon them, its mighty engines humming. It had been built without a single protrusion—a sleek, perfect thing. Its thirty cars could not be differentiated, for flexible doors enclosed what in former days had been open space between them. This humming, lovely thing moved as a unit, swift and unbelievably quiet.
“Oh!” Morgan whispered as it bore down upon him, ninety miles an hour, a flashing drift of gold on its way to Chicago. He sighed as the last car leaped onward, vanishing in the distance.
It was the finest train that had ever run, a marvel of grace and utility. But it had dominated the prairie only briefly. It was the most civilized form of travel thus far devised, but after less than three decades its elegance was no longer appreciated and now it gathered rust.
Garrett stared across the silent tracks and saw, on the far side of the Platte, automobiles whizzing by in one unbroken chain, filled with men and women who had left Omaha that morning and who would sleep in Denver that night, ghosts of the Interstate, most of them zombies who set their speed at ninety and ignored all of America except the big cities, where tonight’s motel was totally indistinguishable from last night’s.
“Look at the stupid bastards,” he said to no one. “They haven’t even seen Grand Island, where the rivers join, or Ogalalla, where the cowboys rioted, or Julesburg, where a third of a million emigrants swam the Platte …” He stayed for some minutes watching the unceasing flight down the Interstate. Soon the drivers would be safe in Denver, and each year that city would grow larger, uglier and less congenial.
“Those bastards would be afraid to detour for an hour at Line Camp,” he mused. “Afraid to see American history staring at them.” And he knew that with the continuing exodus, one day soon Centennial would become the next ghost town. Kicking at the rotting boards of the veranda, he said gloomily, “Well, we’ve had a good hundred years. Perhaps another hundred years from now people with sense will start coming back to these towns.”
About nine that night Cisco Calendar was told by friends that Paul Garrett was sloppy drunk in the Railway Arms, so he called me and we took charge. We led Garrett unsteadily to Flor de Méjico, where we forced him to eat a chili-size—toasted bun, hamburger with onions, all smothered in hot chili beans and covered with melted cheese—after which Garrett sobered a little and asked Cisco to sing “Buffalo Skinner.”
“Don’t have my guitar,” Cisco said.
“Get the damned thing,” Garrett said, and a boy was sent to fetch it. Then the diners quietened as Cisco sang of Jacksboro, Texas, in the spring of 1873. He sang many other songs, so aching with the memory of the west that Garrett lowered his head on the table, lest his neighbors see his reddened eyes.
After a while Cisco put the guitar aside and told Garrett, “I know how you feel, Paul. I could live anywhere in America … anywhere in the world, I suppose. All I need is my guitar and a Sears Roebuck catalogue for buyin’ a new pair of jeans now and then. But I keep livin’ in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why?
“A man needs roots. Specially a singin’ man tryin’ to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin’ for. When he walks down the street it’s got to be his street. The rootless guys I sing about are interestin’ only if they’ve lost one place and are lookin’ for another. Like they say, Paul, a man springs from the soil but he don’t spring far.
“I live in Centennial because at night, when I’m through workin’ I can jump into my pickup and be up in the Rockies inside of an hour—pitch my tent in Blue Valley up beyond the crud, beside a real stream of water, and wake up with trees in my eyes, and maybe in the high country an elk starin’ at me. Paul, that’s somethin’—that is truly somethin’.
“But what I like even better, I head the pickup east and in fifteen minutes I’m lost on the prairie with nothin’, absolutely nothin’, visible to the horizon except maybe a jet airplane thirty thousand feet high streamin’ from New York to L.A. I pitch my tent the way men been doin’ out there for ten thousand years. And when you do that you are alone … Man, are you alone! And somethin’ seeps into your soul you simply can’t pick up in Chicago or Dallas.
“I live in Centennial because it’s maybe the best spot in America … could even be the best remainin’ spot on earth.”
“Could be,” Garrett said. “It damn well could be.”