Centennial (143 page)

“You stay away from Jake,” his wife warned.

“If anybody has the courage to stand up to these bastards, Jake does.”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Grebe protested. “Losin’ the farm’s bad enough.”

“It’s got to be stopped!” Magnes shouted. Grebe tried to quieten him, but his sense of outrage was so great that no reasoning had effect. “I’m gonna see Jake Calendar, and I’m gonna see him right now,” the infuriated man said, and he was gone.

Vesta prepared a meal for her distraught neighbors and tried to console the children. She saw that the family failure was having its severest impact on Timmy and tried to divert his attention with idle talk about Rodeo. “He’s doin’ good,” he said, but there the conversation ended, for Victoria asked, “If we get thrown off the farm, Timmy, what’ll you do with Rodeo?” and he ran from the house to keep from bursting into tears.

On the day of the sale Sheriff Bogardus and three deputies arrived to maintain order. In the Dakotas ugly things had been happening at these forced sales, and Bogardus was determined that this one, unfortunate though it might be, must go off smoothly. As he toured the premises and stared at each of the sullen farmers, seeking to intimidate them, he told his followers, “It’s gonna be all right. I think we can handle whatever they may have in mind.”

“Un-unh!” one of his assistants groaned. “You spoke too soon.”

And everyone turned to watch as a shifty-eyed man in his late fifties sauntered into the yard to look over the equipment Earl Grebe had put together over the years. He was accompanied by two young men as lean and surly as he, and the trio paid no attention as the crowd whispered, “It’s the Calendars. Everything’s okay.”

“Hiya, Jake!” Sheriff Bogardus said with unnecessary effusiveness. “Fine day for the sale.”

“Best,” Jake said, continuing his slow inspection.

“Hiya, Cisco. How was Chicago?”

“Okay,” the younger of the boys said as he kicked the tire of the tractor.

News of the sale had been widely circulated, and buyers had come in from Kansas and Nebraska, for here was a chance to get nearly thirteen hundred acres of first-class farmland, with a prospect of making real money when rain returned to the plains.

The auctioneer was a tested man, Mike Garmisch of Fort Collins. He had an ingratiating way of pulling a crowd together and chivvying them into bidding a little more than they had intended. “It’s a fine day for a fine farm,” he said for openers, and after a few jokes that stayed well clear of the day’s tragedy—dispossessing a man for the lack of a few dollars—he got down to the business of the sale.

“We have here a good house, a very strong barn and one thousand, two hundred and eighty acres of prime, rolling drylands. Friends, you give this land one year of proper rain, it’s gonna be a gold mine—a gold mine, I said.”

He invited any bid above one thousand dollars, and a real estate man from Kimball, Nebraska, offered fifteen hundred. By slow steps this rose to three thousand, two hundred. Then an investor from Kansas bid three thousand, four hundred, and the bidding stopped.

“Three thousand, four hundred once ...”

At this point Jake Calendar and his sons elbowed their way through the crowd toward the successful Kansas bidder, and as they moved, slowly, like rattlesnakes, Sheriff Bogardus caught sight of a little boy throwing a ball against the barn. Choosing this as an excuse to avoid a showdown with the Calendars, he said in a loud voice, “We can’t have that boy disrupting our sale,” and he motioned to his three deputies, who silently filed out behind him to halt this misdemeanor.

When the lawmen were gone, Jake Calendar zeroed in on the Kansas bidder and grabbed him by the throat. “Did you make that last bid?” Calendar asked in a grim whisper.

“Yes.”

Holding the man in his left hand, Jake produced a huge pistol. Thrusting it against the Kansan’s temple, he issued his ultimatum: “If you don’t withdraw that bid, I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

The visitor paled and looked about for the sheriff. Unable to locate him, he tried to find the deputies, but they were gone too. There was only that monstrous pistol touching his head.

“I understand you want to reconsider your bid,” Calendar said softly.

“I do. Oh, indeed I do.”

“He wants permission to reconsider,” Calendar announced to the crowd. “Floyd, Cisco, step over there and help the auctioneer.”

The two young Calendars, pistols drawn, elbowed their way to the podium, where they stood glaring at Mike Garmisch, who said in a quivering voice, “Gentlemen, I’m advised that the bidder from Kansas was under some kind of misapprehension. Is that right?”

“Indeed it is!” the Kansan said eagerly. “I understood that the farm implements were included in this part of the sale.”

“They certainly are not. It states that on the notice.”

“In that case I withdraw my bid.”

“Gentlemen, we want to run the fairest sale possible, and if this good man thinks he has in any way ...” The two Calendar boys nudged him and he stopped the palaver.

“The gentleman from Kansas withdraws his bid. Does the gentleman from Kimball, Nebraska, wish to stand by his?” One flourish of Jake Calendar’s horse pistol satisfied the investor from Kimball that he, too, had misunderstood the terms of sale.

“Gentlemen, the only fair thing will be to start over,” Garmisch said, his throat very dry. “Do I hear a bid?”

“Five dollars,” Vesta Volkema said in a clear voice.

“Five once, five twice, five three times-sold! To Mrs. Volkema for five dollars.” The words came in one gasp.

When Sheriff Bogardus and his deputies heard the gavel fall, they left the law-breaking boy and wandered back into the sales area. A representative of the bank rushed up to Bogardus, complaining that the bank had been defrauded of its money.

“In a sense that’s right,” Bogardus agreed. “You’re entitled to the total proceeds of the sale, after taxes.”

“But since the farm only brought—what was it?—five dollars.” The sheriff shrugged his shoulders. He had no intention of bucking forty angry farmers, most of them with concealed guns, not when they were led by the Calendars.

“Where the hell were you?” Auctioneer Garmisch asked the sheriff, for he, too, had been bilked of his fee.

“Enforcing the law,” the sheriff said, pointing to the miscreant boy with the ball.

Difficult as these years were, they were not devoid of the rowdy humor that had always characterized western life.

In 1935 Denver society was bedazzled by the visit of Lord Codrington, announced as the scion of a family who had long been associated with Colorado ranching. He was a charming man, from Oxford he said, whose gracious manners won him entry to the very topmost levels of Denver society, where he courted several marriageable heiresses and lent both amusement and dignity to the better clubs. He ran up some bills, but not many, ordered suits at various tailors patronized by his hosts, but not an excessive number, and in the end was discovered to be a complete fraud, a Cockney sailor off the Cunard Line who had mastered his accent studying Ronald Colman movies while his ship plied the Atlantic.

His downfall was a six-day wonder, with the cream of Denver society made to look like asses in the local press. The photographs, taken earlier by bored cameramen dragooned into covering for the society page, now made front page, top and center: “Mrs. Charles Bannister, leader of Denver society, presenting Lord Codrington to the Delmar Linners at the March Fete.”

And then the affair took a typical Colorado twist. No one in Denver would bring suit against Lord Codrington. As Mrs. Bannister said, in an interview which brought chuckles and a sense of restored propriety: “Who did he hurt? He was utterly delightful and provided everyone with a sense of joy during a rather bleak period in our lives. He did me no harm.”

Her husband, Charles Bannister, said pretty much the same: “I’m certainly not going to bring charges against a man who bilked me out of three suits. I pay a lot more than that these days without getting half the entertainment.”

When the police bustled the errant lord out of town, with a warning never to appear within the precincts again, at least two dozen leaders of Denver society appeared to bid him farewell as he stepped aboard the train which would whisk him to Chicago and deportation. Three young women ignored the flashing bulbs to kiss him goodbye, and Delmar Linner, father of one of the girls and a leading banker, told reporters, “He looks a damned sight better in that suit than I ever did.”

At about this time Centennial became the butt of a prank by a group of high school students, who had been complaining about poor food served in the cafeteria. They erected over its portals a sign which infuriated some, evoked hilarity in others. Unfortunately, all the perpetrators were offspring of Republican families and a regrettable political overtone was cast over the affair, where none was intended. The sign read:

ALFERD PACKER MEMORIAL CAFETERIA

And when the teachers saw it, all hell broke loose, the local Democratic leader claiming that to erect such a sign on a building paid for by taxpayers was an insult to Franklin D. Roosevelt, not a favorite figure in the area. The leader of the Republicans had the wit to snap back, “Nonsense! That sign has no national significance whatever. It merely recognizes, and belatedly at that, a thoughtful citizen of Colorado who performed a public service for which we should all be grateful.” And so the confrontation raged, until some children from Democratic families tore the sign down.

Alferd Packer had been a mountain guide, as mixed up as the spelling of his first name, and late in 1873 for a grubstake he volunteered to lead a hunting party of twenty into the western mountains. When a blizzard struck he got lost with five of the members. The party was snowbound for three months. They ran out of food, so Packer, as the man responsible for the leadership and survival of the group, began eating his fellow sportsmen.

When the spring thaws came Alferd Packer returned, picking his teeth and showing no signs of ordeal, but later the skeletons of his companions were found, each skull showing signs of having been smacked with the sharp edge of an ax.

The macabre episode might have passed unnoticed into history as one more macabre affair along the Continental Divide, except for the memorable charge made by the judge when he sentenced Packer. Whether the judge actually said these words cannot now be proved, but they have passed into the folklore of the state, providing Colorado with its one indisputable folk hero. Said the judge, “Alferd Packer, you voracious, man-eating son-of-a-bitch. They was only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them.”

This affair made Packer the patron saint of the Republican party, and small wallet cards are printed up bearing his well-fed, handsome, bearded face accompanied by the legend: “I admire the example set by the great Alferd Packer and wish to be a member of his club. In proof of my fidelity to his sterling principles, I agree to eliminate five Roosevelt Democrats.” It must be pointed out that Packer escaped punishment, for a clever Republican attorney proved that whereas the supposed crime had been committed while Colorado was a territory, the case had been tried under the criminal laws of the new state, and any fair-minded man would have to agree that that was unfair.

Contributions to public hilarity were also made by the Mexican community. In 1920 Pancho Villa, having made a fool of General Pershing, was about to launch a similar campaign against the Mexican government. They bought him off with a spacious ranch in Durango, where he ruled like a feudal lord, even resuming his less provocative original name, Doroteo Arrango.

However, many citizens remembered not his victories over the Americans but his brutal assassinations of Mexicans, and one hot afternoon, July 20, 1923, as he was driving in his new Dodge, he was ambushed by seven ancient enemies. When colored postcards of his disemboweled body were placed on sale, little white arrows pointed to forty-seven bullet wounds.

Villa was buried in his favorite city of Chihuahua, but one night in 1926 persons who had suffered at his hands invaded the cemetery, dug up his coffin and made off with the skeleton. The official history reports the grisly denouement: “Being carried off his skull to New Mexico, vile opportunists there continue to sell it six or seven times each year to rapacious norte-americanos.”

Two of his skulls landed in Denver, brought there by tourists, and controversy arose as to which had once been the real Pancho Villa. Skull One was large and round and looked as if it might once have belonged to the legendary bandit. Skull Two, however, had been sold for twice the amount of Skull One, and therefore had to command respect. Furthermore, it had been sold by a woman who offered written affidavits proving that she was the one legal widow of Pancho Villa and was selling the skull only to help educate Pancho’s children, whereupon the owner of Skull One produced a newspaper clipping from Old Mexico: “There are no fewer than twenty-seven women with papers proving each to be the only true wife of Pancho Villa, and of these, sixteen have skulls to sell.”

Once more the argument was resolved in a manner which did credit to Colorado. The Anglo owners of the skulls agreed to put the decision in the hands of men from the area who had fought in Villa’s army. They were brought to Denver to compare the skulls, and Centennial was proud when their own Tranquilino Marquez boarded the train to serve on the jury. The old soldiers looked at the two skulls, and in few minds was there any doubt that the bigger and rounder skull—that would be Skull One—conformed to the remembered physiognomy of their martyred leader, but there was that nagging problem raised by the fact that Skull Two had cost more and had come with a written documentation.