Centennial (151 page)

A man by the name of Crego comes stepp
in’
up to me,

Says,
‘
How d
’
you do, young feller, and how
’d
you like to go

And spend one summer pleasantl
y on the range of the buffalo?’ ”

The song had excellent touches-the smell of the west, the Indians, the tense narrative, the petulant cowboys:

“
It
’s
now we
’ve
crossed Pease River, boys, our troubles have begun.

First damned buffalo that I skinned, Christ, how I cut my thumb
!”

Now Cisco became something larger than life, an epic figure chanting in the darkness of the wild, free days that were no more. Sitting very straight, and moving his hands as little as possible, he approached the end of his song with the inevitability found in Greek tragedy:

“
The season was near over, boys, Old Crego he did say

The crowd had been extravagant, we were in debt to him that day.

We coaxed him and we begged him, but still it was,
‘
No go!’

So we left his damned old bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo.
”

“The Buffalo Skinners” was the name of this splendid song. Its composer? No one knew, but the music hammered with the beat of buffalo hoofs on the prairie. Its lyricist? Some nameless Texas cowboy, down on his luck, who had tried his hand at buffalo-skinning during the year of the last great hunt.

“Well, that’s it,” he said as he finished. “If I was you two,” he said quietly to Flor and Garrett, “I’d get married and to hell with them.”

I did not see Garrett on Sunday, for he spent the day with Flor, talking seriously about the problems that would arise if they did marry. He was Episcopalian and she Catholic, but that was of no consequence to either of them. He had two children, and they were at a difficult age ... well, all ages were difficult when a widower sought to remarry, because the children rarely approved, no matter whom he chose. The young Garretts had already stated that they would not like the idea of a Chicano stepmother. The principal objection, of course, had been removed by the death in February of Paul’s mother, Ruth Mercy Garrett. She had been a tense, unlikable woman who had always known of her husband’s protracted love affair with Flor’s great-aunt, Soledad, and because of it she despised Chicanos. When she heard that Paul was seeing Flor Marquez, a divorcee to boot, she put on a terrible scene, accusing her son of trying to hasten her death. She was so irrational that Paul could not discuss the matter with her, but he honestly believed that his mother might indeed have a heart attack if he married Flor, especially after she bellowed at him, “You’re just like your father! You’re carrying on with that Mexican hussy merely to spite me, the way he did.” Now she was gone and no one deplored her passing, not even her grandchildren, whom she had tried to pamper but who saw her for what she was—a miserable, self-pitying, self-destroying woman.

One of the real obstacles was Manolo Marquez, for he saw little chance that an Anglo-Chicano marriage might succeed. The few he had witnessed had turned out disastrously, and he doubted that Flor and Paul would do much better. Flor respected what he had to say, because while she was preparing for her first marriage he had predicted that it couldn’t last two months, and it had crashed after only eleven days.

“He’s a flashy macho,” Manolo had warned his daughter. “But you wouldn’t recognize the type because you don’t hang around poolrooms.” No description could better fit her unfortunate husband, a strutting would-be hero with ideas about the rights of the male in marriage so bizarre that one couldn’t even be amused by them. Flor was humiliated that she had been such a miserable judge of human behavior and felt little confidence in her belief that Garrett might be different.

But all doubts withered in face of the fact that she and Paul loved each other, wanted each other and felt like better people when in each other’s company. Sex with her first husband had been an appalling affair, without feeling or fulfillment, but to share a bed with Paul Garrett was totally satisfying. He was not afraid of letting her know that he needed her.

On this Sunday, for example, when they had made their way to the motel again, he told her, “I’m so lonely I can hardly bear it. I stay up there in the castle surrounded by acres of empty land, and they insulate me from everything. If I couldn’t see you in the restaurant, I’d go batty.”

It became obvious to each that they ought to get married. What held them back? It simply was not the custom in Colorado for Anglos to marry Chicanos. To marry an Indian was acceptable, but a Chicano? No!

Paul spent Monday away from Flor, trying to sort out his convictions. He applied himself to the job of getting the centennial commission functioning, and since one of his plans called for widespread use of radio, he needed to know what that medium was doing, and the more he heard, the more disgusted he became. On this day he wanted a tape of the major noon broadcast from the local station, and here is the complete transcription:

FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Well, folks, it’s high noon and the train is chuggin’ in from Poison Snake and Sheriff Gary Cooper is a-waitin’ at the station.

SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: It’s time for news, all the news, the straight news, delivered without fear or favor, the news you want when you want it.

FEMALE QUARTET (
singing in close harmony
):

“
From north from south,

From east and west,

We bring it first,

We bring it best
.
”

FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Yessiree, like the girls just said, we bring it best. Remember you heard it first on Western Burst.

MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (
blending
)”

“
The news, the news, the new
s!

Here comes the news.
”

SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: But first a brief message which is sure to be of interest. (Here followed two minutes of singing commercials.)

FIRST ANNOUNCER (
breathlessly
) : West Berlin, Germany. This morning Chancellor Willy Brandt announced a radical shift in his cabinet.

SECOND ANNOUNCER (
gravely
) : Oakland, California. At a special press conference called hurriedly this morning the management of the Oakland Raiders announced that Choo-Choo Chamberlain would—I repeat would—be able to play Sunday against the Denver Broncos.

MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (
blending
)”

“
No
matter when the stories burst,

You hear it here, you hear it first
.
”

FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for all the news, the news in depth, the news behind the news.

MALE AND FEMALE QUARTETS (
blending
):

“
A
ll the news, the news you need.

Yes indeed. Yes indeed.
”

FIRST MALE ANNOUNCER: Next complete news coverage one hour from now.

SECOND MALE ANNOUNCER: Unless, of course, there is some fast-breaking news development anywhere in the world. If there is, you know we break in right away, regardless of the program. Because Western Burst is always first. All the news, the news in depth.

Resignedly, Garrett leaned forward and clicked off the set. Radio and television could have been profound educative devices; instead, most of them were so shockingly bad that a reasonable man could barely tolerate them. In one spell last winter television had offered him an automobile that talked, a housewife who was a genie, a village idiot who could move forward and backward in history, and eighteen detectives involved in forty-seven murders. When one station did run the B.B.C. series
Six Wives of Henry VIII
, the newspaper announced the first episode as a western,
Catherine of Oregon
.

There was the same-illiterate cheapening in every aspect of life. One local restaurant had a big sign advertising its specialty, “Veal Parma John.” Another proclaimed, “Broken Drum Café. You Can’t Beat It. Our Chicken Has That Real Fowl Taste.” A refreshment booth featured “Custard’s Last Stand,” while a motel sign flashed “Just a Little Bedder.”

One gap in Colorado’s cultural life perplexed him. The state had no major publishing program, and whereas its history was perhaps the most varied and vital in the west, there were few local books to celebrate it. This was the more remarkable in that two neighboring states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, each had a university press which produced really fine volumes on western themes; Garrett was pleased that they kept him supplied with the books he needed but thought it deplorable that Colorado, a richer state with a better subject matter, published almost nothing, as if it were ashamed of its history.

He did not propose any radical moves in this area, because some years ago he had burnt his fingers badly trying to modify western taste. Denver had a City-and-County Building which faced the gold-domed capitol across a lovely plaza; together they formed one of the most attractive state centers in America. It had become traditional each Christmas to decorate the former building with an appalling collection of green, red, orange and sickly purple lights, and to leave them in position for the January stock show. One French architect, when asked his opinion of the decorations, exclaimed, “The ultimate flowering of early Shanghai Whorehouse.” After unrelieved ridicule had been heaped on the display, Garrett spearheaded a movement to replace it with something more appropriate, and a high-salaried decorator was flown in from New York to take charge. With an international taste he threw out the garish lights and substituted muted colors which blended with the dark Rockies towering beyond, but when cattlemen from various parts of the state descended on the city and found the lights to which they had been accustomed missing, they raised hell, disrupted a session of the legislature and informed the city that “if Denver don’t think enough of us to decorate the building properly, we’ll move our show to Omaha.” In panic the city fathers tore down the new lights and reinstalled the awful old ones, so that now Denver had one of the few unique Christmas displays in America. Flamboyant beyond description, it evoked no sense of Christmas, but it did exemplify a cattle show, and every Colorado rancher knew which of those two celebrations was the more important.

Wherever he looked Garrett saw this same lack of art, this failure of taste. He wondered what the state had to celebrate, except superhighways. Even the mountains were being abused. Brooding over Denver each night was a gigantic neon-lit cross occupying the whole face of a mountain. It had been placed there as an advertisement, and the majority of people in the city liked it, because, they said, “it puts the mountain to some practical use. Also, it reminds us that we are one nation under God.”

One of the first decisions his committee would have to make involved the application of an enthusiastic group who wanted permission to carve the whole front side of Beaver Mountain with likenesses of Buffalo Bill on his horse and Kit Carson shooting an Indian. Considerable popular support was being generated for the project on the ground that “if the mountains are there, they ought to be put to some use.” Garrett hoped that among the young people of the state he would find support in opposing this, even though he was powerless to remove the cross already in position over Denver.

I sometimes think that in the west we have produced only two serious works of art: the Clovis point engineered with such obvious love by primitive man twelve thousand years ago and that wonderful arch along the waterfront in St. Louis.

The more I study the Clovis point, the more convinced I become that it was brought into being by a true artist. His basic job was predetermined by practicality, but in its final stages it was executed with love. It is perfectly obvious that the point could have been left rougher and still been capable of killing a mammoth. But the maker went beyond that requirement and made it a work of art as well. The Clovis is as graceful as a butterfly wing, as lethal as a Thompson machine gun. Those first men set high standards for those of us who follow, and only rarely do we attain their level.

That arch in St. Louis does. It is appropriate that it stand as the gateway to the west. Many of my ancestors debarked at that spot on their way to Colorado
—
Levi Zendt, Lisette Pasquinel, Major Percy, Frank Skimmerhorn
—
and the arch represents the spiritual forces that impelled them.

I can
’t
conceive how the city of St. Louis had either the imagination or the determination to erect such a monument. It
’s
perfect. A soaring symbol of the best in American life, and I suppose if it had been put to a popular vote, it would have been defeated on the grounds,
“
Who needs an arch?
”

All of us need an a
rc
h. We need symbols that are bigger than we are. We need emotional reminders of who we are and what we represent. I hope to God our committee can come up with something for 1976 that will recall our simple past ... the tread of feet across the prairie.