Centennial (134 page)

“Remember the Pettis boys?” he asked the old man.

The old Russian’s thoughts were far from such irrelevancies. He was staring at the mountains in a bold new way, seeing them for what they really were, a barrier thrusting itself into the heavens, impeding the natural circulation of clouds and knocking water from them before it could cross their crests and fall upon the eastern slope. It was the Rockies that had caused The Great American Desert; it was the Rockies that kept Potato Brumbaugh from getting as much water into the Platte as he wanted.

Now, at the very close of his life, he understood them for the implacable enemy they had always been. They were not the exquisite sculpture they seemed to be when a traveler first saw them from far out on the plains. They were the barrier, hard and rocky and almost impermeable. But they could be subdued.

Pointing with his right forefinger, Brumbaugh declared war. “What ... we ... do ... tunnel.”

Jim considered these strange words and repeated the crucial one: “Tunnel?” Brumbaugh blinked his eyes. “They’re already working on a tunnel,” Jim said. “The trains will go .”

“Water,” Brumbaugh said.

There was a long silence, at the end of which Jim rose and walked down to the edge of the river. He watched the avocets for some time, and after a while he came back and pushed the old man’s chair to a spot from which he could watch the birds too.

“You’re saying that we should build a tunnel underneath those mountains, bring the water that falls on the western slope—the water that isn’t needed on that side—through the heart of the mountains and ...”

Brumbaugh’s right eye flashed with youthful exuberance. Lloyd had understood. With considerable excitement the old man pointed at the dry bed of the Platte.

“And you want the water we get that way to be thrown into the Platte?”

With a sweep of his right arm Brumbaugh indicated to the east the great prairie that could be brought into cultivation by such a scheme. It was a vision that had been maturing in his mind for the past half century, but he had been unable to formulate it. Now he saw the whole intricate system: water—water through the heart of the mountain—untold quantities of water to feed the thirsty plains.

“But to dig a tunnel through the heart of those mountains,” Jim protested. “It would have to be ... how long? Fourteen miles? Twenty?” The very thought of the task frightened him.

It did not frighten Brumbaugh. Trying frantically to express himself in words that would not come, the old man was able to utter just one, but it explained everything: “Boom!”

If a man had enough dynamite, and enough brains, no tunnel in the world was impossible.

Jim was so impressed with Brumbaugh’s vision that he reported it to a writer at the
Clarion
, and that young man wrote a long article, with maps and photographs explaining how Potato Brumbaugh proposed diverting from the other side of the mountain all the water Centennial would ever need. The Denver papers caught Brumbaugh’s heroic image of a new agriculture on the plains, and they reported the theory, adding four learned explanations as to why it wouldn’t work. Most telling was the argument that mountains were porous, as every miner learned to his sorrow when water collected in his dig, which meant that whereas the water could be led into them from the west, it would seep away before it reached the eastern end of the tunnel. When Jim read this negative report, Brumbaugh merely brushed his right hand back and forth as if to dismiss it, but when Jim laughed, the old man brushed his hand more firmly, and finally Jim understood: “If there are holes in the mountain, cement them.”

So during the last days of his life the stubborn Russian kept his eyes fixed on the mountains. In his long years he had encountered many powerful opponents Cossacks, land thieves, the Pettis boys, those heart-tearing years of five-inch rain, the governors of Wyoming and Nebraska, and now the mountains. They could be conquered. The water the mountains held back from the Platte could be recovered through the tunnel.

And as he looked at those majestic heights he experienced the sensation that overcomes most fighters. He was pleased that his adversary was a worthy one. He had a feeling that the great masses of granite pushing their heads into the clouds would be gratified if he did penetrate them and bend them to his purpose.

But one day toward the end of August, as he sat facing the sunset, congratulating himself that he had at last solved the problem of the Platte, he discovered that he had missed the major point. The river was part of a totally different system from the one he had imagined, and to understand how that system functioned required a whole new set of constructs.

He made this shattering discovery while reflecting on a line from a poem his minister had quoted at a funeral some years before: “Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.” It had been offered as consolation, a reminder that even the most pain-racked life finds ultimate release, and the image it presented had appealed to Brumbaugh. He had imagined himself as that portion of the Platte which had been induced to run through his farm, irrigating his fields and then returning to the Platte—which ran into the Missouri, which ran into the Mississippi, which emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, which returned safely to the greater sea.

“Rubbish!” he cried, forming the word painfully. It wasn’t like that at all. Neither the poet nor the minister had had a glimmering of what it was all about.

What happens, he told himself, is that from the Pacific Ocean a wandering drop of water is drawn upward into a cloud, and that cloud rises and the water is frozen into a flake of snow, and the cloud moves east away from the ocean and across California, and when it reaches the Rockies their peaks clutch at it and the snowflake falls on a slope, where it melts and runs into the Poudre, and it tumbles into the Platte and I draw it off for my irrigation, and it goes back to the Platte, and then into the Mississippi and into the Atlantic, and somehow at the southern end of South America the two oceans balance out their water and my drop comes back into the center of the Pacific and it rises into another cloud and again it freezes into a snowflake and once more the flake falls on the Poudre. And this goes on forever and ever. There is no rest, neither for the river nor for the man. And the man is entitled only to as much water as he can borrow from this endless cycle. And when he has finished his work of struggling with the river, he does not go to some eternal rest. His body becomes the dust upon which the next snowflake fails, and he finds himself part of the endless cycle.

Toward five, when Serafina came to wheel him back into the farmhouse, she saw that he was dead. She was not given to excessive lamentation, for she had seen much death, and from the satisfied look on Brumbaugh’s face she concluded that he had died neither in pain nor in disappointment. She and Triunfador laid the body out, after which the boy went in to town to inform the police that the old man was gone.

Italians. Russians, Germans, Japanese and numerous Mexicans attended his funeral, all of them indebted to him for instructions and mortgages. Jim Lloyd, as the old man’s best friend, took charge of the burial and was deeply moved when the young minister said, “At such moments we find consolation not only in the Bible—but also in the words of our great poets, and never has the passing of an energetic man like Hans Brumbaugh been better summarized than in these beautiful words of Swinburne:

From t
oo much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

W
e thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Today we can visualize our tireless old fighter safe at rest.”

During the celebrations which filled the last weeks of 1918, when, as the
Clarion
put it, “American victory over the German hordes was confirmed and the honor of Europe salvaged by our brave doughboys,” Mervin Wendell experienced his first premonition of death.

For some months he had not been in good health, for his efforts during the war years had been titanic. As War Bond chairman for northern Colorado, he had appeared on platforms in places as distant as Omaha and Salt Lake City. He wore a modified uniform of his own design, featuring leather puttees and a Teddy Roosevelt hat, and spoke on such subjects as “Our Daring Adventure at the Somme” and “We Are Strong Because We Are United.”

At the Wendell mansion on Eighth Avenue he and Maude entertained most of the dignitaries who visited Colorado—Secretary of War Baker, General Pershing’s relatives from Wyoming, General Barker of the British army, whose father had run the big cattle ranch at Horse Creek—and he had often sat up late talking with them about strategy and the ultimate triumph of Allied arms.

He retained his old-time gift of mimicry; on tour his accent was principally Oxonian. With his dashing uniform, most of his listeners considered him an officer in the British Royal Dragoons, of whom he spoke frequently and with a certain intimacy ever since he had spent a long evening with a colonel of that regiment reviewing tactics. He collected a great deal of money for the war effort, and Maude Wendell, as the gracious chairlady for the Red Cross, supervised the rolling of interminable lengths of bandage.

But his principal effort was reserved for the manipulation of his extensive land holdings, which now totaled more than fifty-five thousand acres of better-than-average land scattered about forty-three farms and ranches which he had acquired at panic prices. All his holdings in Line Camp were now sold and he had pioneered a new community to the north. It was named McKinley, “after our martyred leader,” he invariably explained with a quiver in his voice. He had seen McKinley once in Chicago and considered him our greatest President.

He had made a real killing on his McKinley operation, having learned from his experience at Line Camp not to sell too quickly but to hold on till the town became established and its future assured. He had spent most of 1917 hauling prospective buyers to the northern settlement, and since wheat was then at $2.29 a bushel, he had little trouble peddling really sizable acreages to farmers from the east.

His pamphlet on McKinley outdid anything he had previously offered, for the photographs and text were downright shameless. One group of pictures featured the steady progress of Farmer Earl Grebe, from Ottumwa, Iowa, who had come to Line Camp penniless in 1911 and who had recently picked up another half-section, making 1280 acres in all:

Notice the rural mansion in which Earl and his lovely wife Alice live ... all paid for by $2.00 wheat, 36 bushels to the acre. The small building to the left is the sod but in which the Grebes lived while they were getting started. Prudent custodians, they now use the
“
s
oddy,
”
our affectionate name for such memorials of the past, as a place to entertain admiring visitors from the east. The photographs on the opposite page show what Earl Grebe has grown on his farm, which is located less than twenty miles from the land you will be purchasing.

The wheat shown was from the Grebe farm, but the large melons. apples and sugar beets had all been photographed on irrigated land along the Platte.

In late 1918 Mervin Wendell was expended. Everything he had put his hand to had prospered and he was the richest man in Centennial or any town north to the Wyoming border. He now had only one concern: to live past his seventieth birthday. And he took every possible precaution to see that he did so.

His heart had weakened, so he canceled all speaking engagements, but he did appear on the platform at victory celebrations. He also drove up to McKinley when the new school was dedicated, and he showed up at his office in town occasionally, directing his son Philip, now a stable married man of forty, in the intricacies of real estate. For the rest, he guarded his health, halting smoking altogether and drinking only occasionally.

He was delighted when the New Year came and passed, for he considered this a major milestone. “I’d have hated dying in 1918. when so many other things were happening,” he told Maude who seemed to grow younger with the passing years. She laughed at such a statement and assured him he would see 1920. “That’s a nice-sounding year,” he said. “I should like to welcome a new decade.”

It was not to be. During the second week of January he fell seriously ill, a complication of heart trouble and mild pneumonia. It was precisely the kind of terminal illness he would have chosen for himself, for it allowed him to lie in bed, unscarred and unafflicted by any loathsome disease. Each afternoon he held a kind of court in his bedroom, expatiating on all sort of subjects.

“Those frail-hearted persons who fear we have over-cultivated the plains will live to see ten farms where one is today. Mark my words, they’ll live to see three-dollar wheat ...

“The nation has suffered enormously from the prattering of Woodrow Wilson. At the Ludlow troubles he should have sent in twice as many troops and shot down twice as many miners. Colorado would have been much the better for it ...

“The theater will never die. Mark my words, it will never die. I remember when the great Edwin Booth came to Centennial in 1891. The Union Pacific deposited his red-and-gold private car where the grain silos stand now, and it rested there for three days while he regaled us with
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
and
Richard
III
. The car contained two baths—complete bathtubs I mean—and a library that would have done justice to an emperor. The Union Pacific brought in tubs of oysters in ice and gave a public dinner for three dozen. I was invited, of course, being of the theater ...