The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
As we passed the Flor de Méjico in the southeast, she said, ‘That’s where we ate last night. Down here by the tracks is where Manolo Marquez lives, and along here is Nate Person’s barbershop, where we came into town yesterday.’ In the remaining sector, the southwest, there was not much: along the tracks the ramshackle home of Cisco Calendar. ‘He could afford much better, of course, but that’s where his family has always lived.’
That was Centennial, at least the part I would be concerned with. ‘Not quite,’ Miss Endermann said. ‘Two more localities, and they loom large.’ And she drove me north on Prairie and well up toward the Wyoming line, where I saw something which astonished me: a massive castle complete with spires and donjon.
‘It’s Venneford,’ she said. ‘All the land we’ll be on today, and millions of acres more, once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Greatest cattle ranch in the west.’
‘Does the noble earl figure in my story?’
‘Not unless you want him to,’ she said. ‘But what we see next is the heart of your story.’
And she drove me east onto dry land such as I had never before seen, bleak and desolate, and at the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, ‘This is how they found it. A vast emptiness. Nothing has changed in a million years.’
In no direction could I see any sign that man had ever tried to occupy this enormous land—no house, no trail, not even a fence post. It was empty and majestic, the great prairie of the west.
Miss Endermann interrupted my reflections with a promise: ‘When we reach the top of that next hill you’ll see something memorable.’
She was right. As we climbed upward through the desolate waste, we reached an elevation from which I looked down upon a compelling sight, one that would preoccupy me for the next half year. It was a village, Line Camp, she said, and once it had flourished, for a tall grain silo remained, but now it was deserted, its shutters banging, its windows knocked in.
We drove slowly, as if in a funeral procession, through the once busy streets marked only by gaping foundation holes where stores and a church had stood. We found only devastation, gray boards falling loose, school desks ripped from their moorings. Somehow I must make the boards divulge their story, but now only hawks visited Line Camp and the stories were forgotten.
Two buildings survived, a substantial stone barn and across from it a low stone edifice to whose door came a very old man to stare at us.
‘The only survivor,’ Miss Endermann said, and as we watched, even he disappeared.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘We want you to tell us,’ she said.
It must have been obvious that I was captivated by Centennial and its environs, because at lunch we began to pinpoint my commission, and I said, ‘By the way, nobody has told me who wrote the story I’m supposed to fortify.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘I did.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. I researched this story on the scene for five months.’
‘I knew …’ I was confused. ‘Of course, I realized that the people here knew you. But I thought you’d been …’
‘Helping someone else? Helping someone important?’
She asked these questions with such a cutting edge that I thought we’d better get down to cases. ‘Miss Endermann,’ I said, ‘you’ll forgive me, but your magazine is asking me to spend a lot of time on this project. May I ask what your credentials are? Do you mind a few questions?’
‘Not at all,’ she said frankly. ‘I’d expect them. I know this is important to you.’
‘What do you think of Frank Gilbert Roe?’
Without batting an eye, she said, On horses, terrific. On bison, I prefer McHugh.’
This was a sophisticated response, so I proceeded: ‘What’s your reaction to the Lamanite theory?’
‘A despicable aberration of Mormonism.’ She stopped and asked apologetically, ‘You’re not Mormon, are you?’ And before I could answer, she said, ‘Even if you are, I’m sure you agree with me.’
‘I respect the Mormons,’ I said, ‘but I think their Lamanite theory asinine.’
‘I’m so glad,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could work with someone who took that sort of bull seriously.’
‘What was your reaction to the Treaty of 1851?’
‘Ah,’ she said reflectively. ‘Its heart was in the right place. But the government in Washington had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of Missouri that there was no chance—none ever—that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given. If it hadn’t been gold, it would have been something else. Stupidity. Stupidity.’
This young woman knew something. I asked her, ‘What is your judgment on the Skimmerhorn massacre?’
‘Oh, no!’ she protested. ‘It’s your job to tell us what you think about that. But I will confess this. I’ve studied the Skimmerhorn papers at Boulder and the court-martial records in Washington, and I’ve interviewed the Skimmerhorns in Minnesota and Illinois. I know what I think. Six months from now I want to know what you think.’
I had one final question, and this would prove the depth of her investigation. ‘Have you done any work on the reports of Maxwell Mercy?’
She burst into laughter and astonished me by rising and kissing me on the cheek. ‘You’re a real dear,’ she said. ‘I did my master’s thesis under Allan Nevins at Columbia on some unpublished letters I’d found of Captain Mercy. On my bedroom wall at home I have an old photograph of him taken by Jackson at Fort Laramie, and for your personal information I got damned near straight A’s at Illinois and honors at the University of Chicago, where I took my doctorate.’
‘Then what in hell are you doing knocking around with Cisco Calendar till four o’clock this morning?’
‘Because he sends me, you old prude. He sends me.’
Next morning I drove her to Denver, where she caught the plane back to New York. At the ramp she told me, ‘Stay the rest of the week. You’ll fall in love with this place. I did.’ When I wished her luck at the office, she said, ‘I’ll be working on maps.’ Then, impulsively, she grabbed my hands. ‘We really need you … to make the thing hum. Call us Friday night, saying you’re signing on.’
I drove back by way of the university at Boulder because I wanted to consult my old friend, Gerald Lambrook of their history department, and he said, ‘I can’t see any pitfalls in the arrangement, Lewis. Granted, you’re not writing the article and you lose some control, but they’re a good outfit and if they say they’re going to give it first-class presentation, they will. What it amounts to, they’re paying you to do your own basic research.’
Lambrook was an old-style professor, with a book-lined study, sheaves of term papers, which he still insisted on, and even a tweed jacket and a pipe. I worked in a turtleneck and it was sort of nice to know that the old Columbia-Minnesota-Stanford types were around. I had known him at Minnesota and it was easy to renew our old friendship.
‘But I’m interested, historically speaking,’ he said, ‘in the fact that you haven’t mentioned the thing for which Centennial is most famous. The area, I mean.’
I asked him what that was, and he said, ‘The old Zendt place.’
‘I know about it. Saw it yesterday. The fellow from Pennsylvania who wouldn’t build a fort but did build a farm.’
‘I don’t mean the farm. I mean Chalk Cliff, on his first place.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘That’s where the first American dinosaur was found.’
‘The hell it was!’
‘That great big one. Went to Berlin, and how we wish we had it back. And then, not far from there, but still on the original farm, the Clovis-point dig. Say, if you’re free, I think I could get one of the young fellows from geology to run us up there.’ He started making phone calls, between which he told me, ‘The university’s doing some work up there, I think.’ Finally he located an instructor who was t
We drove north along the foothills of the Rockies, past Estes Park on the west and Fort Collins on the east, till we came to what might have been called badlands. Dr. Kennedy pulled up to inform me, ‘We’re now entering the historic Venneford spread, and Chalk Cliff lies just ahead. I’ll open the gates, you close them.’
We proceeded through three barbed-wire fences behind which white-faced Herefords grazed, and came at last to an imposing cliff, running north and south, forty feet high and chalky white. ‘Part of an old fault,’ Kennedy explained. ‘Pennsylvanian period, if you’re interested. At the foot of the cliff, in 1875, down here in the Morrisonian Formation, Professor Wright of Harvard dug out the great dinosaur that can be seen in Berlin.’
‘I never knew that,’ I confessed. ‘I knew the dinosaur, but not its provenance.’
‘And two miles up, at the other end of the cliff, is where they found—1935, I think it was—that excellent site with the Clovis points.’
‘I have heard about that,’ I said, ‘but not that it was located near Chalk Cliff.’
We spent the rest of the morning there, inspecting this historic site, after which Lambrook and Kennedy drove back to Boulder. ‘Be sure to close the gates,’ they warned. That left me some time to inspect the brooding cliff, and as I kicked at the chalky limestone I came upon a fossilized sea shell, a frail, delicate thing now transformed into stone, indubitable proof that this cliff and the land around it had once lain at the bottom of some sea and now stood over five thousand feet above sea level. I tried to visualize the titanic force that must have been involved in such a rearrangement of the earth’s surface, and I think it was then I began to see my little object-town Centennial in a rather larger dimension than the editors back in New York saw it.
By back roads I drove east to Line Camp, seeing that desolate spot from a new angle, and was even more fascinated by the compression of history one observed there: Indian campground, cattle station, sheep ranch, dry-land farming, dust bowl, and then abandonment as a site no longer fit for human concern. The place attracted me like a magnet and I wished that I were writing of it and not Centennial, which at this point seemed pretty ordinary to me, but as I drove south, it occurred to me that I must be following the old Skimmerhorn Trail, and when I came to the low bluffs that marked the delineation between the river bottom and the prairie and I was able to look down into Centennial and its paltry railroad, with cottonwoods outlining the south side of the Platte, I had a suspicion that perhaps it too had had its moments of historic significance. What they were, I could not anticipate, but if I took the job I would soon find out.
I was eating lunch at Flor de Méjico—sandwiches, not enchiladas—when I heard a man’s voice inquiring, ‘Manolo, you have a man from Georgia eating here?’ Marquez replied, ‘Right over here, Paul,’ and he brought a tall, well-dressed rancher-type to my table.
‘I’m Paul Garrett,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Mind if I sit down?’
I asked him to do so, and he said, ‘Heard you were in town. When Miss Endermann was here before we did a lot of work together. And I wondered if you’d like to take a little orientation spin in my plane.’
‘Very much!’ I said. ‘I understand things better when I see the geographical layout. But I’m leaving Friday.’
‘I meant right now.’
‘I’m free.’
He drove me out to an airstrip east of Beaver Creek, where his pilot waited with a six-seater Beechcraft, and we piled in. Within minutes we were high over the Platte, and for the first time I saw the meanders of this incredible river from aloft. ‘The braided river,’ one expert had called it with justification, for the strands of the river were so numerous and the islands so interspersed, it did seem as if giant hands had braided the river so that it now hung like a lovely pigtail from the head of the mountains.
Several times we flew up and down the Platte, and I appreciated better how it dominated the area, where it overflowed its banks, where it deposited huge thicknesses of gravel, and how men had siphoned off much of its water into irrigation ditches. It became an intricate system rather than an isolated stretch.
Garrett then directed the pilot to fly north to the Wyoming line, and as we left the river and crossed the arid plains, coming at last to the bluffs which marked the end of Colorado in that direction, he told me, ‘This is the old Venneford spread. I want you to see it, because you won’t believe it.’ He asked the pilot to fly west toward the mountains, and below I saw the shining white expanse of Chalk Cliff.
‘I was down there this morning,’ I said.
‘Good spot. The boundary’s a little farther west.’ He pointed to an old wire fence, and we dropped low to inspect it. ‘That’s where the Venneford lands began,’ he said. ‘Now until I tell you different, everything you see down there once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Everything.’
We sped east for half an hour, over an immense tract of land, and I became fascinated by a phenomenon I had not seen before: at periodic intervals great circles were indented into the surface of the plains, as if gigantic fairies had built magic rings or Indians their tipis of enormous size. I could not imagine what these circles were, and was about to ask Garrett when he said, ‘It’s still Venneford land.’
We flew for an hour and fifteen minutes, deviating north and south for short excursions to explore arroyos, and at the end of that time he pointed ahead: ‘The Nebraska line. That’s where the earl’s land ended.’
‘How much?’
‘One hundred and eighty miles east-west, fifty miles north-south.’
‘That’s nine thousand square miles!’ I hesitated. ‘Are my figures right?’
‘Well over five million acres,’ he said.
I stared at the magnitude of the land, the empty, lonely expanse, and guessed that it hadn’t been good for much in those days and wasn’t good for much now.
‘A hundred and eighty miles in one direction,’ he said as we turned homeward. ‘The foreman would inspect about ten miles a day in his buggy. Eighteen days merely to cover the middle and forget the north and south borders. It’s that kind of land, Professor Vernor. It requires more than sixty acres to support one cow-and-calf unit.’
‘Miss Endermann told me you’d bought some of it,’ I said.
‘I’ve only a hundred and thirty-three thousand acres. Maybe the best part, though.’ He asked the pilot to fly north of the Venneford castle, where he outlined a rugged terrain of barren plains, foothills and some attractive low mountains. ‘A real challenge,’ Garrett said. ‘If you come back, come up and look it over.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said.
‘Back east, how many acres to the unit?’ he asked as we headed toward Centennial.
‘My uncle in Virginia needs only one acre for what you call a unit—bottom land, along the river.’
‘There you have the difference between Virginia and Colorado. One to an acre your way. One to sixty our way. That makes your land sixty times better than ours. But we work seventy times harder, so we come out a little bit ahead.’
He drove me back to the hotel and I asked if he’d join me in a drink. ‘Never during the day,’ he said, and before I could ask further questions, he was gone.
I now had Centennial keyed in, as far as prairie, mountain and river were concerned, so I directed my remaining stay to the town itself. The Garrett plot, at Ninth and Ninth, was a brooding place with a nineteenth-century wooden house dominating scrubby trees. The Morgan Wendell place, one block south, was a handsome ranch-style home covering a large and beautifully landscaped area. But it was the land east of town that preoccupied me, for to a Georgian, what went on there was new. Beaver Creek protected the town from the encroaching prairie. West of the creek lay bottom lands, largely swampy and a place for birds; east of the creek stood Centenn
North of the highway stood the dominating sugar factory of Central Beet. Its pungent aroma, even in the spring of the year, permeated Centennial with a clean, earthlike smell. To a man like me, reared in the cane country, it seemed profane that men would try to extract sugar from beets, but they did.
South of the highway was something I had never seen before: vast corrals delimited by wooden fences, containing not a shred of grass nor any growing things except hundreds upon hundreds of white-faced cattle, all the same size, all being fattened for the slaughterhouses in Omaha and Kansas City. Never before had I seen so many cattle at one time, and I tried to estimate how many there were. When I reached two hundred in one corral and realized that there were two dozen corrals all equally crammed, I concluded that my original estimate of hundreds had to be multiplied by ten.
The place was like a factory—Brumbaugh Feed Lots, the sign said—with overhead conveyors bringing the grain to each corral, and traps for hauling away the manure, and waterpipes everywhere—and all convenient both to the sugarbeet factory, from which came beet pulp for feeding the animals, and to the railroad, which brought in calves and hauled away fattened cattle. What really astonished me was to discover that every animal I saw was either a heifer or a steer—no bulls, no cows, just yearlings bred specially for butchering.
On Thursday afternoon I drove out to Line Camp, and again I was affected by the strange allure of sweeping prairie and lonely vista. I was east of the deserted village when I saw before me a sight of compelling interest: twin pillars rising a sheer five hundred feet from the surrounding land. For miles in every direction there was nothing but empty land, then these twin pillars of red and gray rock shooting skyward.
They were so conspicuous that I was sure they must be named, and I looked about for someone to question, but there was no one. For mile upon mile there was no one, only the silent pillars and a hawk inspecting them from aloft.
The late sun made the red rocks flame and I watched for a long time, trying to guess how such spires could have been left standing, but finding no answer. In Georgia such a phenomenon would have been a natural wonder. ‘The Devil’s Darning Needles,’ or something like that. In the west they were not even marked on the map, so prodigal had nature been with her displays.