Centennial (141 page)

“He couldn’t plow a straight line,” Grebe protested.

“Exactly, that’s his virtue,” she said, and she arranged for Bellamy to come to the farm and invited the Volkemas and others to listen as the postmaster explained again what the error had been.

“From the mountains to the border of Nebraska—you have one unbroken sweep of plowed land. The wind gets started as it comes down off the hills and begins to pick up the harrowed soil. It gets bigger and stronger and all the time it picks up more of our soil, until half the state is in the air.”

“What should we do?” Magnes asked.

“Tie the soil down. You’ve got to tie it down”

“How?”

“Never plow in a straight line. Never plow with the fall of the land. Plow across it. Never plow all the land. Leave strips of grass, and for God’s sake, burn your harrow. Leave the soil in clumps too big for the wind to lift.”

The farmers began to see that he was right, that if an endless corridor of plowed and harrowed land lay in the path of the wind, it could roll that land up, mile after mile, and carry it away like a thief. But if the topsoil were tied down, one way or another, the wind could blow over it as before and accumulate nothing.

“This land will come back,” Charlotte insisted. With her own money she arranged for a symposium to be held in Line Camp, and in her black car, with the Grebe children to accompany her, she drove in to Centennial to pick up the featured speaker. The farmers who had emigrated from Ottumwa were astonished to see him, for it was Thomas Dole Creevey, now an old man who had lived to see the desolation he had fathered. Few men would have had the courage to come back to the scenes which had disproved their cherished theories, but he did. He wanted to see for himself what had gone wrong; he wanted to identify the corrective steps to be taken by those who followed.

He was not so fat now, but his ill-fitting clothes were even more unkempt. He stood before the men he had misled and told them, “I gave you ten principles, and only one was erroneous, the seventh. ‘Plow at least ten inches deep. Then disk. Then harrow.’ All wrong. What I didn’t foresee were the great winds. In every other respect my theories were correct, and future years will see these plains teeming with wheat.”

“What should we do now?” Earl Grebe asked.

“Pray for rain. Throw away your harrows. Never have an endless chain of plowed fields that the wind can get at.”

“How deep should we plow?”

“Three inches, maybe four. But keep the ground covered.”

“Is your farm at Goodland producing?”

“It’s blown away,” Creevey said. “When the rains return, it will return.” He said that in spite of everything that had struck the plains, he still believed in those great words which God had delivered to man during their first meeting in Eden: “Replenish the earth and subdue it.” He concluded, “To do this we must study the earth more than we have. We must be more careful to attune ourselves to its eternities. If at periods it produces great winds, we must learn how to live with them.” He assured his listeners that the plains were not intended to be a desert and would again be rippling with wheat.

Charlotte Lloyd drove him back to the station in Centennial, where he boarded the train to meet with other drought-stricken farmers. On the way back to Line Camp, when her black car climbed to the top of a hill from which she could see the seared plains that had once been a part of the Venneford Ranch, she felt a great dizziness, so that the plains and sky became one, and she lifted her foot from the gas pedal, allowing the car to drift slowly off the road and into the parched fields, where she was found next morning, her hands still gripping the wheel.

The unabated optimism of Dr. Creevey did little to help the men whose farms were being sold for taxes, and Philip Wendell was picking up some terrific bargains at forced sales. Farms were going for a dollar an acre ... fifty cents an acre ... and in some cases, for a used car that would enable the owner to reach California.

At the Grebe farm there was one bright note. In November, Alice returned much improved. Vesta Volkema’s salty attitudes had teased her back to reality, and with Ethan driving the school bus again, at least a little money was coming to the family. In fact, Earl said that things were beginning to look up.

Then, in March, a blizzard swept across the prairie and snow piled the roads; what was worse, a gale bearing no snow howled down from the mountains. Farmers shouted to their wives, “Ground blizzard!” This meant that what snow had fallen would now whip across the open plains, engulfing anything it encountered.

Ethan Grebe had already started on his afternoon drive north delivering children to Wendell when the blizzard struck, and there was no logical way for him to escape it. He thought of turning and trying to run back to Line Camp, but the road was too treacherous for that. He therefore plunged ahead, satisfied that he had enough gasoline to keep the children warm even if he were forced to pull up for an hour or two.

But then the winds whipped a fearful burden of snow across the prairie and within minutes the windward side of the bus was banked with snow. The wheels were unable to move.

Ethan kept the motor running for three hours, trusting that farmers at either Line Camp or Wendell would launch rescue parties. He led the children in singing and made them huddle together. As the gasoline gauge dropped and night fell, it became obvious that pretty soon the bus would be completely buried in snow, with no possible way of keeping the children warm.

Biting his lower lip, he looked at the nineteen frightened faces and made his decision. “I know where we are,” he said slowly. “Three miles to the Rumson farm. They’ll bring help. Now, Harry, what are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“Mind the door,” he said.

“That’s right. No one must leave. Now you wait here.”

And he was off into the heart of the ground blizzard. Nineteen children were in his care and he must do everything within his power to save them, whether it seemed a reasonable act or not. He had not been out in the storm more than three minutes before he realized that this blizzard was overpowering. It was not abating, and the winds roared at him with such force that he could barely move, but on he plodded. He walked three awful miles, and by the time he reached the Rumson gate he was so near death that he could not force it open, but with his last strength he created a banging, and a dog heard him and barked, and the children were saved.

President Roosevelt himself sent a message to the Grebes, praising them for having reared such a son, and Alice treasured it, but often when she read it she wondered why the government did nothing to help the farmers that produced such young men. “They don’t grow by accident, you know,” she told Mr. Bellamy.

In the months following Charlotte Lloyd’s death, decisions had to be reached concerning the Venneford Ranch. The majority owners in Bristol were suffering from the world-wide depression as much as anyone else, and they had no surplus funds to sink into a distant venture which had never paid substantial dividends. They had watched their ranch shrink from five and a half million acres to something like ninety thousand, and with every shrinkage their American managers had assured them, “With a tighter operation we can begin to show real profits,” but such profits had never been forthcoming.

In 1887 it had been the great blizzard and in 1893 the nationwide panic and in 1923-24 the first drought. In 1925 they had written to Beeley Garrett, who was managing for them:

It seems that the western cattle business is always going to prosper next year, if only conditions remain stable, but stable conditions have not been known since the industry began. Every messenger we have sent from Bristol to Venneford has returned with gallant tales of how exciting the life is on the range, and what a great bull Emperor IX is, and we have concluded that this immense industry is run for the pleasure of cowboys and bulls, and to the disregard of investors.

Now, in this summer of 1935, they were fed up. They wanted to sell their remaining holdings and were offering them at a bargain. Charlotte Llyod had been the principal stockholder in America, so it was natural that her heirs should be offered first chance to buy, but here a problem arose. She and Jim had had only one child, a daughter Nancy, who had married the grandson of Major Maxwell Mercy, the congressman. Nancy and Paul made a dashing couple, but they had been somewhat reckless, like old Pasquinel, from whom Paul was descended, and in attempting to fly over the Rockies in a small plane, they crashed near Blue Valley and were killed.

They left behind a frail daughter named Ruth, who was cared for by her grandmother, Charlotte, and it looked for a while as if the awkward girl might never marry, for her nervous mannerisms discouraged men. However, the year before Charlotte died, she took the Garrett boy aside one day and told him bluntly, “If you ever expect to manage this ranch, young Henry Garrett, you’d be well advised to marry that girl,” and he did. To show her approval, Charlotte had given the young couple a wedding present: her shares in the ranch. In her will she gave them the money to buy the stock still owned in Bristol, and when it was delivered to the castle, Beeley Garrett said, “For the first time in Venneford history this ranch is controlled by Americans, who should have controlled it from the beginning.”

Beeley continued as ranch manager, but the pressures of drought and wind and depression were telling on him, and he often indicated that he wished to retire from management and move to Florida. In this he was supported by his wife, Pale Star Zendt, five-eighths Indian and as lovely as all the women of her family. She had grown to dislike northern winters, and Beeley told her, “We’ll stick it out a few more years. Maybe in that time Henry and Ruth will become more solidly united than they seem now. You can’t run a ranch with a wobbly couple at the head.”

In the fall of 1935 Beeley faced a difficult decision. With cattle prices the lowest he had ever seen them, he had to make up his mind whether to ship a load of steers to Chicago in the blind hope that he might earn even a dollar a head profit on them, but his chances were not bright. His accountant submitted the disheartening figures:

The best Herefords America has ever produced are selling in Chicago for $14 a head. Our figures show that we spend $11 a head to grow them. This means a profit of $3 each, which is not bad for these times. But for us to ship the animals to Chicago costs us $6.10 a head, so that for every Hereford we sell, we lose $3.10. And the more we sell, the more we lose.

Garrett could not believe that this preposterous situation could long continue. He remembered good years like 1919, when even a mediocre Hereford brought $58.75. In a relatively bad year like 1929 he had sold his steers at $55.35. The precipitous drop of the 1930s was unconscionable, and the nation must be going crazy if it thought that cattlemen could continue to market their beasts while losing money on each head. To sell choice steak at twenty-three cents a pound was ridiculous, and he felt certain that prices to the rancher would soon rise.

He therefore decided to take the gamble and send two hundred prime head to Chicago, hoping that by the time they reached the slaughterhouse the price would be up to $30.00, where it ought to be. He talked some of his neighbors into taking the same risk, and a cattle train was put together with animals from as far away as Fort Collins and the ranches south of Cheyenne.

As soon as word leaked through the district that a cattle train was being assembled, the participating stockmen were besieged with offers of assistance from young men in the area. Beeley Garrett, with his headquarters not far from Centennial, where the train was forming, was especially vulnerable. From dawn till midnight awkward young men came knocking at his door, cowboy hats in hand: “Hear tell you’re sendin’ some cattle east. I’d sure like to help.”

“Your name.”

“Chester—Otto Emig’s grandson.”

“I knew your grandfather. Have you tried the Roggen people? Otto had good relations with them.”

“Nothin’ out there. They sent me here.”

“I’ll take your name, Chester. You’re a fine young man and maybe we could use you.”

One after another the young cowboys came to the door, begging for a job that paid nothing and for which they had to pack their own food. Of course, they would get a chance to visit Chicago, but what allured them was that after the cattle were delivered, each cowboy received a free ride home on a Pullman.

But it was not this enticement that drove Dr. Walter Gregg, a young professor at the college in Greeley, to apply for a job. “It’s imperative that I get to Chicago,” he pleaded with Garrett. “To attend a professional meeting.”

“Is it that important?”

“It’s crucial. They’ve asked me to read a paper. It could make all the difference ... in my career, that is.”

“If it’s that important, why not take the train?”

“We’ve absolutely no money.”

“I’d like to help, Dr. Gregg, but the idea of a college professor ... riding a cattle train ...”

“Please,” the man begged. “The leaders in my field will be there. My whole future depends on this.”

“I’ll take your name, Professor. You may hear from me.”

On the day when the decision had to be made, Beeley was visited by an unlikely candidate, Jake Calendar’s son Cisco, a thin, taciturn young man with yellowish hair. He was probably the best cowboy among the applicants, but he had a surly attitude which irritated Garrett.

“Hear you’re lookin’ for a couple of hands to ride the cattle cars,” he said in a mumbling sort of way.

“It’s the other way around, young man. A lot of people have been here applying for the job.”