Centennial (146 page)

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 those 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.
(
See Map 14 – Paul Garrett Geneology
)

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.”