Centennial (5 page)

I Was eating lunch at Flor de Méjico—sandwiches, not enchiladas—when I heard a man’s voice inquiring, “Manolo, you have a man from Georgia eating here?” Marquez replied, “Right over here, Paul,” and he brought a tall, well-dressed rancher-type to my table.

“I’m Paul Garrett,” he said, extending his hand. “Mind if I sit down?”

I asked him to do so, and he said, “Heard you were in town. When Miss Endermann was here before we did a lot of work together. And I wondered if you’d like to take a little orientation spin in my plane.”

“Very much!” I said. “I understand things better when I see the geographical layout. But I’m leaving Friday.”

“I meant right now.”

“I’m free.”

He drove me out to an airstrip east of Beaver Creek, where his pilot waited with a six-seater Beechcraft, and we piled in. Within minutes we were high over the Platte, and for the first time I saw the meanders of this incredible river from aloft. “The braided river,” one expert had called it with justification, for the strands of the river were so numerous and the islands so interspersed, it did seem as if giant hands had braided the river so it now hung like a lovely pigtail from the head of the mountains.

Several times we flew up and down the Platte, and I appreciated better how it dominated the area, where it overflowed its banks, where it deposited huge thicknesses of gravel, and how men had siphoned off much of its water into irrigation ditches. It became an intricate system rather than an isolated ditch.

Garrett then directed the pilot to fly north to the Wyoming line, and as we left the river and crossed the arid plains, coming at last to bluffs which marked the end of Colorado in that direction, he told me, “This is the old Venneford spread. I want you to see it, because you won’t believe it” He asked the pilot to fly west toward the mountains, and below I saw the shining white expanse of Chalk Cliff.

“I was down there this morning,” I said.

“Good spot. The boundary’s a little farther west.” He pointed to an old wire fence, and we dropped low to inspect it. “That’s where the Venneford lands began,” he said. “Now until I tell you different, everything you see down there once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Everything.”

We sped east for half an hour, over an immense tract of land, and I became fascinated by a phenomenon I had not seen before at periodic intervals great circles were indented into the surface of the plains, as if gigantic fairies had built magic rings or Indians their tipis of enormous size. I could not imagine what these circles were, and was about to ask Garrett when he said, “It’s still Venneford land.”

We flew for an hour and fifteen minutes, deviating north and south for short excursions to explore arroyos, and at the end of that time he pointed ahead: “The Nebraska line. That’s where the earl’s land ended.”

“How much?”

“One hundred and eighty miles east-west, fifty miles north-south.”

“That’s nine thousand square miles!” I hesitated. “Are my figures right?”

“Well over five million acres,” he said.

I stared at the magnitude of the land, the empty, lonely expanse, and guessed that it hadn’t been good for much in those days and wasn’t good for much now.

“A hundred and eighty miles in one direction,” he said as we turned homeward. The foreman would inspect about ten miles a day in his buggy. Eighteen days merely to cover the middle and forget the north and south borders. It’s that kind of land, Professor Vernor. It requires more than sixty acres to support one cow-and-calf unit.”

“Miss Endermann told me you’d bought some of it,” I said.

“I’ve only a hundred and thirty-three thousand acres. Maybe the best part, though.” He asked the pilot to fly north of the Venneford castle, where he outlined a rugged terrain of barren plains, foothills and some attractive low mountains. “A real challenge,” Garrett said. “If you come back, come up and look it over.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

“Back east, how many acres to the unit?” he asked as we headed toward Centennial.

“My uncle in Virginia needs only one acre for what you call a unit—bottom land, along the river.”

“There you have the difference between Virginia and Colorado. One to an acre your way. One to sixty our way. That makes your land sixty times better than ours. But we work seventy times harder, so we come out a little bit ahead.”

He drove me back to the hotel and I asked if he’d join me in a drink. “Never during the day,” he said, and before I could Ask further questions, he was gone.

I now had Centennial keyed in, as far as prairie, mountain and river were concerned, so I directed my remaining stay to the town itself. The Garrett plot, at Ninth and Ninth, was a brooding place with a nineteenth-century wooden house dominating scrubby trees. The Morgan Wendell place, one block south, was a handsome ranch-style home covering a large and beautifully landscaped area. But it was the land east of town that preoccupied me, for to a Georgian, what went on there was new. Beaver Creek protected the town from the encroaching prairie. West of the creek lay bottom lands, largely swampy and a place for birds; east of the creek stood Centennial’s two commercial enterprises.

North of the highway stood the dominating sugar factory of Central Beet. Its pungent aroma, even in the spring of the year, permeated Centennial with a clean, earthlike smell. To a man like me, reared in the cane country, it seemed profane that men would try to extract sugar from beets, but they did.

South of the highway was something I had never seen before: vast corrals delimited by wooden fences, containing not a shred of grass nor any growing things except hundreds upon hundreds of white-faced cattle, all the same size, all being fattened for the slaughterhouses in Omaha and Kansas City. Never before had I seen so many cattle at one time, and I tried to estimate how many there were. When I reached two hundred in one corral and realized that there were two dozen corrals all equally crammed, I concluded that my original estimate of hundreds had to be multiplied by ten.

The place was like a factory—
Brumbaugh Feed Lots
, the sign said—with overhead conveyors bringing the grain to each corral, and traps for hauling away the manure, and waterpipes everywhere—and all convenient both to the sugarbeet factory, from which came beet pulp for feeding the animals, and to the railroad, which brought in calves and hauled away fattened cattle. What really astonished me was to discover that every animal I saw was either a heifer or a steer—no bulls, no cows, just yearlings bred specially for butchering.

On Thursday afternoon I drove out to Line Camp, and again I was affected by the strange allure of sweeping prairie and lonely vista. I was east of the deserted village when I saw before me a sight of compelling interest: twin pillars rising a sheer five hundred feet from the surrounding land. For miles in every direction there was nothing but empty land, then these twin pillars of red and gray rock shooting skyward.

They were so conspicuous that I was sure they must be named, and I looked about for someone to question, but there was no one. For mile upon mile there was no one, only the silent pillars and a hawk inspecting them from aloft.

The late sun made the red rocks flame and I watched for a long time, trying to guess how such spires could have been left standing, but finding no answer. In Georgia such a phenomenon would have been a natural wonder. “The Devil’s Darning Needles,” or something like that. In the west they were not even marked on the map, so prodigal had nature been with her displays:

Every night I ate dinner at the hotel, and my waiter was a man whose ancestors had come to Centennial with the building of the railroad in the 1880s and had lingered. When Nate Person gave me a haircut he told me that an ancestor of his had come north from Texas with the cattle drives and had lingered. Manolo Marquez had a father who had come north from Chihuahua to work sugar beets and he too had lingered, and it occurred to me that unlike Garvey, Georgia, where my ancestors had lived for three hundred years, everyone in Centennial had arrived within the last hundred and twenty years—just drifting through—and all had lingered.

I was much taken with the town. I had a good time with Marquez and Nate Person. I liked Paul Garrett immensely and wanted to know more about him. And the setting, with that incredible Platte River dominating everything, was much to my taste. What deterred me, then, from telephoning James Ringold and saying, “I’ll take the job”?

Vanity. As simple as that. I hated to play second fiddle, anonymously, to someone else, especially a beginning scholar much younger than myself. I suppose the fact that she was a girl added to my resentment, but in an age of Women’s Lib, I was not about to admit that. I feared the whole project was undignified and a potential threat to my professional reputation. I was therefore prepared to inform New York that I could not accept, when I took one last walk Friday afternoon. I was reflecting on the fact that during my visit to Centennial, I had met a black, a Mexican and many Caucasians, but not one Indian. I considered that symbolic of today’s west.

I walked idly through North Bottoms in order to catch a better understanding of how Central Beet and Brumbaugh Feed Lots interrelated, when I saw ahead of me a lone workman operating a back-hoe in the extreme elbow of Beaver Creek, and I went over to ask -him what he was doing.

“Gonna build a bridge over the creek. So’s the beet trucks from the west can enter the plant easier.”

As I watched him gouging the back-hoe into the soft earth, I became aware of a third man who had joined us. He introduced himself as Morgan Wendell, director of Wendell Real Estate, “Slap Your Brand on a Hunk of Land.” He had left his offices, walked across Mountain and come through the North Bottoms to stand not far from me. I could not imagine why the digging of foundations for a bridge abutment should have concerned him, but he was obviously perturbed, and for good reason, apparently, for just as he took his place by me, the swinging arm of the back-hoe slammed down into the soft earth with extra force, hit rock and fell into a hole. It required considerable dexterity for the operator to manipulate his machine out of this difficulty, but he succeeded. I watched the maneuvering with interest; Morgan Wendell watched with horror.

When the back-hoe was again free, the driver climbed down to inspect what had trapped him. I too moved forward to peer into the hole. But Morgan Wendell elbowed us both aside and took command.

“You’d better quit work at this spot,” he told the operator. “Sink hole or something. Work on the other side.”

“They told me to work here,” the man said.

“I’m telling you to work over there.”

“Who are you?”

“Morgan Wendell. I own the land on this side.”

“Oh!” He shrugged his shoulders, cranked up his machine and drove it ponderously along the creek to Mountain, crossing over to the eastern side.

As soon as he was gone, Morgan Wendell looked at me and said, “Well, that’s that,” and he began edging me away from the hole. I showed no inclination to go, whereupon a very firm hand gripped my arm and led me back toward town. I decided that prudence required my acquiescence, for Morgan Wendell was a tall, heavy-set man who weighed a good deal more than I and had a much longer reach.

When we got to First Street, just opposite Wendell Place, the old headquarters of the family, I said, as casually as I could, “Well, I’ll have some chili at Flor de Méjico.”

“It’s good there,” he said.

When I left him, keeping my glance carefully ahead but watching as much—as I could out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rush back to the exposed hole and climb in. He was there for some time, perhaps fifteen minutes, after which he climbed out carrying something wrapped in his coat. He walked south along the bank of Beaver Creek, crossed the highway and went into his office building.

As soon as he was out of sight I ran to the opening, climbed down and found myself inside a cave, not large but very secure ... until the back-hoe punctured the roof. It had been formed, I judged, by the action of water on soft limestone and must have been very old. Along the western side there was a small bench, not formed by man yet appearing almost to have been made as a piece of built-in furniture. At the far end of this bench lay an item which Morgan Wendell had apparently overlooked: a small bone, which I suspected was human.

I placed it in my pocket and climbed out of the little cave. I was none too soon, for the back-hoe operator, who was then on the other side of the creek, was now directed by Morgan Wendell to bring his lumbering machine back to the western side, come up the creek bank and begin filling in the cave and tamping it down with his machine. When he had finished, Wendell inspected the job and satisfied himself that no one would be likely to detect that a long-lost cave had been accidentally laid bare that afternoon.

I returned to my room at the Railway Arms and put in a person-to-person call to James Ringold at
US
: “This is Vernor. I’ll take the job.” I heard him call out to Leeds and Wright: “Get Carol. Good news.”

I said, “But I’ll have to do the work my way.”

“Wouldn’t want you to do it any other way.”

“My first reports may go a little deeper than you intended,” I warned.

“It’s your ideas we want.”

“But I’ll get it done by Christmas.”

“Jingle bells, jingle bells” sounded over the telephone—three male voices, joined later by a soprano. It would be an interesting time till Christmas.

When the earth was already ancient, of an age incomprehensible to man, an event of basic importance occurred in the area which would later be known as Colorado.

To appreciate its significance, one must understand the structure of the earth
(
See Map 02 – Structure of Earth
)
, and to do this, one must start at the vital center.

Since the earth is not a perfect sphere, the radius from center to surface varies. At the poles it is 3950 miles and at the equator 3963. At the time we are talking about, Colorado lay about the same distance from the equator as it does now, and its radius was 3956. Those miles were composed in this manner.

At the center then, as today, was a ball of solid material, very heavy and incredibly hot, made up mostly of iron; this extended for about 770 miles. Around it was a cover about 1375 miles thick, which was not solid, but which could not be called liquid either, for at that pressure and that temperature, nothing could be liquid, as we know that word. It permitted movement, but it did not easily flow. It transmitted heat, but it did not bubble. It is best described as having characteristics with which we are not familiar, perhaps like a warm plastic.

Around this core was fitted a mantle of dense rock 1784 miles thick whose properties are difficult to describe, though much is known of them. Strictly speaking, this rock was in liquid form, but the pressures exerted upon it were such as to keep it more rigid than a bar of iron. The mantle was a belt which absorbed both pressure and heat from many directions and was, consequently, under considerable stress. From time to time throughout this story, the pressures will become so great that some of the mantle material will force its way toward the surface of the earth, undergoing marked change in the process. The resultant body of molten liquid, called magma, will solidify to produce the igneous rock, granite, but if it is still in liquid form as it approaches the surface, lava results. It was in the mantle that many of the movements originated which would determine what was to happen next to the visible structure of the earth, and although we shall not often refer again to the mantle, we must remember it deep beneath our feet, accumulating stress and generating enormous heat as it prepares for its next dramatic excursion toward the surface, producing the magma which will appear as either granite or lava.

At the top of the mantle, only twenty-seven miles from the surface, rested the earth’s crust, where life would develop. What was it like? It can be described as the hard scum that forms at the top of a pot of boiling porridge. From the fire at the center of the pot, heat radiates not only upward, but in all directions. The porridge bubbles freely at first when it is thin, and its motion seems to be always upward, but as it thickens, one can see that for every slow bubble that rises at the center of the pan, part of the porridge is drawn downward at the edges; it is this slow reciprocal rise and fall which constitutes cooking. In time, when enough of this convection has taken place, the porridge exposed to air begins to thicken perceptibly, and the moment the internal heat stops or diminishes, it hardens into a crust.

This analogy has two weaknesses. The flame that keeps the geologic pot bubbling does not come primarily from the hot center of the earth, but rather from the radioactive structure of the rocks themselves. And as the liquid magma cools, different types of rock solidify: heavy dark ones rich in iron settle toward the bottom; lighter ones like quartz move to the top.

The crust was divided into two distinct layers. The lower and heavier, twelve miles thick, was composed of a dark, dense rock known by the made-up name of sima, indicating the predominance of silicon and magnesium. The upper and lighter layer, fifteen miles thick, was composed of lighter rock known by the invented word sial, indicating silicon and aluminum. The subsequent two miles of Colorado’s rock and sediment would eventually come to rest on this sialic layer.

Three billion, six hundred million years ago the crust had formed, and the cooling earth lay exposed to the developing atmosphere. The surface as it then existed was not hospitable. Temperatures were too high to sustain life, and oxygen was only beginning to accumulate. What land had tentatively coagulated was insecure, and over it winds of unceasing fury were starting to blow. Vast floods began to sweep emerging areas and kept them swamp-like, rising and falling in the agonies of a birth that had not yet materialized. There were no fish, no birds, no animals, and had there been, there would have been nothing for them to eat, for grass and trees and worms were unknown.

There were in existence, even under these inhospitable conditions, elements like algae from which recognizable life would later develop, but the course of their future development had not yet been determined.

The earth, therefore, stood at a moment of decision: would it continue as a mass with a fragile covering incapable of sustaining either structures or life, or would some tremendous transformation take place which would alter its basic surface appearance and enlarge its capacity?

Sometime around three billion, six hundred million years ago, the answer came. Deep within the crust, or perhaps in the upper part of the mantle, a body of magma began to accumulate. Its concentration of heat was so great that previously solid rock melted partially. The lighter materials were melted first and moved upward through the heavier material that was left behind, coming to rest at higher elevations and in enormous quantities.

Slowly but with irresistible power it broke through the earth’s crust and burst into daylight. In some cases, the sticky, almost congealed magma may have exploded upward as a volcano whose ash would cover thousands of square miles, or, if the magma was of a slightly different composition, it would pour through fissures as lava, spreading evenly over all existent features to a depth of a thousand feet.

As the magma spread, the central purer parts solidified into pure granite. Most of it, however, was trapped within the crust, and slowly cooled and solidified into rock deep below the surface.

What degree of time was required for this gigantic event to complete itself? It almost certainly did not occur as a vast one-time cataclysm although it might have, engulfing all previous surface features in one titanic wrenching which shook the world. More likely, convective movements in the mantle continued over millions of years. The rising internal heat accumulated eon after eon, and the resultant upward thrust still continues imperceptibly.

The earth was at work, as it is always at work, and it moved slowly. A thousand times in the future this irresistible combination of heat and movement would change the aspect of the earth’s surface.

This great event of three billion, six hundred million years ago was different from many similar events for one salient reason: it intruded massive granite bodies which, when the mountains covering it were eroded away, would stand as the permanent basement rock. In later times it would be penetrated, wrenched, compressed, eroded and savagely distorted by cataclysmic forces of various kinds. But through three billion, six hundred million years, down to this very day, it would endure. Upon it would be built the subsequent mountains; across it would wander the rivers; high above its rugged surface animals would later roam; and upon its solid foundations homesteads and cities would rest.

A relatively short distance below the surface of the earth it rides, this infinitely aged platform, this permanent base for action. How do we know of its existence? From time to time, in subsequent events which we shall observe, blocks of this basement rock will be pushed upward, where they can be inspected, and tested, and analyzed, and even dated. At other memorable spots throughout Colorado this incredibly ancient rock will be broken by faults in the earth’s crust, and large blocks of it will be uplifted to form the cores of present-day mountain ranges.

It is beautiful to see, as it sticks its head into daylight, a hard, granitic pink or gray-blue substance as clean and shining as if it had been created yesterday. You find it unexpectedly along canyon walls, or at the peaks of mountains or occasionally at the edge of some upland meadow, standing inconspicuously beside alpine flowers. It is a part of life, an almost living thing, with its own stubborn character formed deep in the bowels of the earth, once compressed by titanic forces and heated to hundreds of degrees. It is a poem of existence, this rock, not a lyric but a slow-moving epic whose beat has been set by eons of the world’s experience.

Often the basement rock appears not as granite but as unmelted gneiss, and then it is even more dramatic, for in its contorted structure you can see proof of the crushing forces it has undergone. It has been fractured, twisted, folded over to the breaking point and reassembled into new arrangements. It tells the story of the internal tumult that has always accompanied the genesis of new land forms, and it reminds us of the wrenching and tearing that will be required when new forms rise into being, as they will.

It must be understood that basement rock is not a specific kind of rock, for its components change from place to place. It has been well defined as the “layer of rock below which lies ignorance.” In some places it hides far below sea level; at others it marks the tops of mountains fourteen thousand feet high. Throughout most of the United States it lies hidden, but in Canada it is exposed over large areas, forming a shield. Nor was it all laid down at the same time, for variations in its dating are immense. In Minnesota it was deposited more than three and a half billion years ago; in Wyoming, only two and a half billion years ago; and in Colorado, only a few miles to the south, at the relatively recent date of one billion seven hundred million years ago.

After the basement rock had been accumulated at Centennial, later than almost anywhere else in the United States, one of the most extraordinary events occurred. About two billion years of history vanished, leaving no recoverable record By studying other parts of the west, and by making shrewd extrapolations, we can construct guesses as to what must have happened, but we have no proof. The rocks which should have been at hand to tell the story have either been destroyed beyond recognition or were never deposited in the first place. We are left in ignorance.

This situation is not confined to the small area around Centennial, although there the gap is spectacular. At no spot in North America have we been able to find an unbroken sequence of rocks from earliest basement to recent sediment. Always there is a tantalizing gap. Over short distances it can have amazing variations in time and extent; for example, during the missing years at Centennial, massive accumulations of granite which would later form Pikes Peak were being assembled only a few miles to the south.

For hundreds of millions of years at a time Centennial must have lain at the bottom of the sea which at intervals covered much of America. The grains of sediment, eroded from earth masses remaining above sea level, would drift in silently and fall upon the basement, building with infinite slowness a sedimentary rock which might ultimately stand five thousand feet thick.

At other intervals the new-forming land would rise from the sea to be weathered by storm and wind and creeping rivers long vanished. This cycle of beneath-sea, above-sea was repeated at least a dozen times; repeatedly magma sent upward by the mantle broke through the crust and crept over the land; repeatedly erosion cut it away and left new forms much different from their predecessors.

The time required! The slow passage of years! The constant alterations! Now part of an uplifted mountain, now sunk at the bottom of some sea, Centennial experienced wild fluctuations. Because of the erratic wanderings of the earth, it stood sometimes fairly close to the equator, with a baking sun overhead; at subsequent times it might be closer to the north pole, with ice in winter. It was swamp during one eon, a desert the next. Whenever it came to temporary rest, it should have been exhausted, a worn-out land, but always new energies surged up from below, generating new experiences.

Those lost two billion years lie upon the consciousness of man the way vague memories or ghosts survive in the recollections of childhood. When man did finally arrive on the scene, he would be the inheritor of those vanished years, and everything he did would be limited to some degree by what had happened to his earth in those forgotten years, for it was then that its quality was determined, its mineral content, the value of its soil and the salinity of its waters.

About three hundred and five million years ago occurred what can be called the first event which left an identifiable record at Centennial, and with it our story begins. Within the mantle, forces developed which produced a penetration of the earth’s crust. The basement broke into discrete blocks, some of which were pushed upward higher than their surroundings, to relieve the pressure from below.

The resulting mountains covered much of central Colorado, following fairly closely the outlines that the historical Rocky Mountains would later occupy, and at the conclusion of five or ten million years they constituted a major range.

It was not born in cataclysm. There was no dramatic opening of earth from which fully formed mountains emerged. Nor was there any excess of volcanism. Instead there was the slow, unceasing uplift of rock until the new mountains stood forth in considerable majesty. They were the Ancestral Rockies, and since they left behind them rocks which can be analyzed, we can construct for them a logical history.

They were not soaring peaks, like their successors, but they did rise from sea level and would have seemed higher above their pediment than today’s Rockies, which although they lift far into the sky, take their start from plains already high.