Centennial (157 page)

“This is the part that never ceases to fascinate me,” Garrett told his wife as the plane continued into Nebraska. Pointing ahead, he showed her the North Platte and the South running side by side for almost forty miles, each refusing to surrender its identity. Because he wanted a faithful transcription of what he was about to say, he again took up the tape recorder and said:

During the Korean War, I took one leave in Southeast Asia and saw their rivers
—
Brahmaputra, Mekong, Ganges, Irrawaddy. But I can tell you that no rivers I have ever seen moved me the way those two down there do. Look at them, two lovers yearning to come together, yet afraid. Isn
’t
that the damnedest thing, really? And here, at North Platte, where they finally join, how excellent.

The plane traversed the site several times, with Flor pressing her face against the window to see the union of the rivers. Then, impulsively, Garrett said, “We’ll fly to the Missouri,” and the plane hit top speed, following the twists and turns of the Platte as it crossed Nebraska, past Fort Kearny where the Oregon trail wagons had rested, past the Pawnee village where Pasquinel and McKeag had first fought the Indians, then traded with them, and on to that mysterious, wooded, swampy, useless spot where the Platte surrendered its identity and lost itself in the Missouri. Garrett, imagining scenes in which his ancestors must have participated at that forlorn confluence, looked down and said to Flor, “No one in Colorado will believe it, but this river is more exciting than football.”

The week had been one of tension, but Sunday was given over to frivolity. On that day hundreds of spectators would gather at the spacious ranch of Sam Pottifer to watch the Appaloosa exhibition, and whereas Paul Garrett could conceivably skip a Colorado-Nebraska football game, it would have been inconceivable for him to miss the Appaloosas. If a stranger had asked him, “Paul, what are you proudest of in your life?” he would have been entitled to give various replies: high government position, leading Hereford breeder, his conservation work with turkeys and prairie dogs and buffalo. but most certainly he would have replied, “The fact that I helped rescue the Appaloosa from extinction.”

It was somehow gratifying for Garrett that he spent so much of his time and money on the Appaloosa for this lovely breed of horse had originated in the Rattlesnake Buttes area about a million years ago, and was now considered by many to be the oldest continuing strain of horses. “To have revived this particular breed,” Garrett wrote in one report, “is to have helped nature remember her best.”

When the land bridge existed between Alaska and Asia, this horse had emigrated from Colorado to the old world. There it had flourished, and ancient art was replete with depictions: Cro-Magnon man painted the Appaloosa on the walls of his cave; Chinese artists loved to display this unique animal; Persian miniatures show him to advantage, his dotted hindquarters flashing in gold and silver; and many of Europe’s greatest painters, like Titian and Rubens, showed the animal in battle scenes.

Not a big horse, he was lively, strong, had great endurance and was easy to train. He liked people and from the first seemed to enjoy showing off, for many of the Lippizaners of Austria had originated from this breed.

His survival in America was a miracle, nothing less. He returned to this continent by accident—three or four of the horses brought over by Cortez and the early Spaniards being Appaloosas. In the new world he died out, except for a rare few that were taken far north of Arizona, where some time around 1715, they fell into the hands of the Nez Percé Indians of Idaho. These famous horse traders recognized them as superior animals. By careful husbandry, the Nez Percé produced a large number of Appaloosas, which they used as cavalry in their running fight with the United States government.

When the Nez Percé were finally defeated, the incoming missionaries handed down three decrees: “You must stop dancing, because it leads to debauchery. You must not wear beads and feathers any more, because they remind you of battle. And you must sell your spotted horses, because when you gallop them over the prairie you think of war.” So the Nez Percé Appaloosas, named for the Palouse Indians in Idaho, were taken from their owners and sold indiscriminately throughout the west.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century different ranchers began to notice among their herds stalwart horses with dots on their hindquarters, and one or two experts, remembering old paintings of the frontier, suspected that these might be the famed speckled horses of the Nez Percé. They began buying up such animals whenever they appeared on the market, and through a process of meticulous breeding, assured the continuation of this beautiful species.

It was not until the 1950s that the story was completed. Then owners began to assemble large numbers of Appaloosas. Garrett and some friends from Idaho found an old Nez Percé chief who remembered how his tribe had bred Appaloosas:

This old fellow had no teeth, could barely talk. But he loved horses, especially the spotted breed that had carried Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé warriors in their fights against our cavalry. I remember him, almost too weak to stand, running after one of my mares and holding her as he said,
“
You watch the pregnant mare carefully till
s
he is a hundred and fifty days. Then you place her in a corral painted with black dots. Seeing these dots day after day, she gets them on her mind
.
During her last week you take a bucket of black paint and dip your right hand in and place it on her right hip and say,
‘
Dots, dots, appear, appear.
’
Then with your left hand you do the same on her left hip, repeating the same words. If you have painted the corral properly, and if you make good fingerprints on the hips, she will always throw a colt with Appaloosa markings. But I have noticed that this magic works only if she is an Appaloosa mare to begin with.
”

When Garrett first organized his Appaloosa Club he did so out of his love for the handsome horses, but he had owned his string only a short time before he saw that he and his friends would find their greatest joy in recalling the heroic days when Nez Percé warriors used them as war ponies. The club therefore encouraged its members to acquire trappings and costumes that would evoke Indian life of the last century. Garrett would accept no one into the club who was not willing to provide himself or herself with an authentic Nez Percé costume, and he sent each prospective member this message:

It is obvious that with the sleazy mode
rn
materials available in any five-and-ten a rider can produce a pretty handsome costume. And with the flashy colors available in make-believe
leather, we can deck our horses so they look like Christmas trees. While such effects gain applause in a parade, they are not exactly what this group is striving for. We ride our
Appaloosas in honor of Chief Jos
eph and his Nez Percé heroes, who, when they were allowed to own these horses, kicked the living hell out of the American cavalry. We ride in honor of the great Arapaho and Cheyenne horsemen who once owned the land we occupy. Above all, we ride out of respect for our national heritage, so when you ride with us, you will ride as an Indian or keep the hell out.

It was against this background that he had presented Flor Marquez with a wedding present: an authentic Nez Percé costume made by Broken Paw’s wife in Idaho. As Paul tore away the protecting paper. Flor saw for the first time the exquisite gray-white elk skin tanned so that it was heavy as brocade, but infinitely softer, all decorated with porcupine quills and elk’s teeth and silver. When she slipped into it, donned a headband of iridescent cowrie shells and twisted silver strings into the braids of her black hair, she looked completely Indian.

When Garrett saw her, he caught his breath, then embraced her. “You’re a true Nez Percé princess,” he whispered.

The Crown Vee cowboys had loaded the seven Venneford Appaloosas in gooseneck trailers, and at ten we all began the short drive west to the Pottifer ranch. There was sun on the plains, snow in the mountains, and from various parts of northern Colorado tourists had gathered to see the curious and moving exhibition put on by the dentists, doctors, lawyers and merchants of the region. A newsman, sent out from Chicago with a camera crew to cover this unusual event, asked Garrett why grown men and women would play at being Indians, and I recorded what he said:

My wife and I are Indians. Now, those others, as you point out, aren
’t
. But we all have this in common. We respect our Indian heritage. There
’s
not a phony in that bunch. Not one imitation dress or saddle. But to be perfectly honest with you, the secret is the Appaloosa. If you
’ve
never bred this amazing horse, you can
’t
begin to imagine the excitement that comes over a family when their Appaloosa mare is pregnant. You wait for the birth with anxiety ... yes, a real anxiety. What kind of foal will it be?

We took the camera crew to the Venneford trailers, where Garrett’s horses were being unloaded: a gray stallion with black spots like a leopard, three fawn-colored mares with blankets of stars over their hips; a big male with reddish circles covering his hindquarters; and two delicate mares of such beautiful black-and-white configuration that watchers applauded as they came gingerly down the ramp.

When you breed Appaloosas you deal with the mystery of nature. You never know what you
’re
going to get, but when you see horses like these, each different, each magnificent in its own way ... Mister, there are about two hundred possible colorings for an Appaloosa, and you ask me my favorite combination. I
’ve
narrowed the choice down to twenty-seven, and every morning when I look at one of my own horses I say,
“
That
’s
the best color.
”
And the next day I
’ll
choose the stablemate.

The riders mounted, thirty-one men and women dressed in authentic Nez Percé costumes, and the cameramen expected some kind of dazzling exhibition, but none evolved. The horsemen simply rode back and forth as Indians might have done on their range two hundred years ago, and after a while, from the ravines to the west, a group of twenty additional riders appeared, each on an Appaloosa of a different marking, and they rode down the slopes not as enemies galloping to attack a camp, but as visitors from another tribe, and the two groups commingled and from time to time some rider in exquisite costume would appear at the crest of a ridge and stand silhouetted against the mountains. Cameras would click, and when Paul Garrett and his wife, he on the leopard-spotted stallion, she on a black-and-white mare, cantered easily down a slope, the crowd cheered.

Of course, at the end of the leisurely exhibition, a group of fifteen cowboys dressed like American cavalrymen of the 1880s did appear from the south, firing carbines, and the Nez Percé did flee, starting their long trek through the mountains, as they had done in the past, and when the last Appaloosa disappeared behind the ridge, the plains were empty and the watchers felt as if they had shared, for those brief moments, in the history of their land.

On Monday, November 26, Garrett was approached by an assistant professor from the university who wanted to question him about the baleful influence of British imperialism on the prairie. The young man had mastered the relevant figures:

“Earl Venneford of Wye put together a ranch of five million, seven hundred thousand acres. Of these he actually owned, legally or illegally, only twenty thousand acres, for which he paid, I calculate, not more than sixty cents an acre for a total of only twelve thousand dollars in cash.

“In addition, he laid out something like a hundred and fifty thousand for his cattle, equipment and supplies. Now, I’m willing to admit that his partners later on did add additional cash to pay for land they had been using, so that in the end the British put in a total, let’s say, of three hundred thousand dollars.”

“What’s your point?” Garrett asked.

“Look at the profits Venneford and his gang made.”

“I don’t think they were a gang. They were a group of businessmen who operated within the laws of this country.”

“Be that as it may,” the professor said. “I calculate that Venneford took out of this state not less than thirty thousand dollars a year for thirty years. What’s that? About a million dollars. At the end of that period he sold his holdings of three hundred thousand acres at around ten dollars an acre, or three million dollars, plus another million for stock and equipment.”

“You’ve done a lot of research,” Garrett said with some admiration.

“Thus, on an original investment of three hundred thousand dollars the British picked up a neat profit of four million seven hundred thousand dollars, or a whopping 1566 percent.”

“That seems to work out,” Garrett said. “But one of my ancestors in that period invested rather liberally, and his returns were not nearly so good, as I can attest.”

The professor ignored this remark. “Nor was ranching the only form of investment. Englishmen owned coal mines and gold mines and irrigation ditches and railroads and insurance companies. In fact, Colorado was a colony of Europe, and it remained so until about 1924. Year after year thousands of European-controlled dollars funneled into the plains while millions of dollars in profits made their way back to Europe. It was an example of economic imperialism at its worst.”