Centennial (96 page)

When the time came for her to return to St. Louis for her final year she made no pretense of concern for Jim’s feelings and did not even volunteer a kiss, but seeing the despair in his eyes, she leaned from the train window, took his hand and said gaily, “Don’t look so glum, Jim. I’ll be back.”

On this small shred of hope Jim lived for three months, but at Christmas he could no longer deceive himself. Sitting in the Zendt kitchen, he confided that Clemma had not once written to him, whereupon Mrs. Zendt broke into tears.

“She wrote to us!” she said bitterly, showing the letter to Jim. And there it was:

Mom,

Lt. Jack Ferguson and I were married on December 10. He lives in New York and is very nice. I am going to have a baby soon.

Clemma

There was another letter, from Cyprian Pasquinel, and it was brutally frank, the letter of a relative who could not comprehend what had happened under the roof of his hospitality:

Of all the young men who courted her in our home, she chose with unerring instinct the weakest officer the United States Army has ever stationed in this district. If he stays with her a month after the baby is born, I
’ll
be the most amazed man in Missouri.

When this harsh estimate was shown Jim, he sat silently in the Zendt kitchen, drumming his fingers on the table. Twice he tried to speak, but there were tears in his eyes and he seemed afraid lest his voice break. Finally he pushed back his chair and said something the senior Zendts would never forget: “She’ll need me. I must go find her.” He withdrew what money he had in the bank and late that afternoon returned to the ranch, where he saddled his horse, riding all night to reach Cheyenne in time to catch the morning train for St. Louis, where he sought out Cyprian Pasquinel.

“Turn away from that girl, young man,” the congressman advised.

“You say that only because she’s an Indian,” Jim countered, willing to grasp at any straw.

Pasquinel laughed at him. “That’s unworthy, and you know it. Her mother is a member of our family. So is Clemma. Simple fact is, she’s inherited all the weaknesses of her uncles. And you know what happened to them.”

“That’s cruel!” Jim protested, but the congressman stuck to his guns.

“Forget that wild Indian girl,” he counseled. It was to no avail. Jim spent more than a week searching St. Louis for her, wandering through all parts of the city, hoping to pick up a trace of her—along the waterfront, in the hotels, through the mean streets. But he did not find her.

The winter of 1875 passed, and no one in Zendt’s Farm could even guess where Clemma might be, or whether her baby was safely born, or whether it was a boy or girl. The Zendts wrote letters to friends in Chicago and New York, and Cyprian Pasquinel made inquiries at the War Department in Washington. All that he discovered was that Lieutenant Ferguson had been dismissed from the service for embezzling government funds. He had taken his discharge in New Orleans and had not been heard from since.

And then in the spring of that year an army officer was dispatched to Denver to check on the western forts, and one afternoon he stopped by the store to tell Lucinda, “I knew your daughter in St. Louis. She was lucky to get shed of that Ferguson.”

“What happened to him?” Lucinda asked quietly. “Living with a French girl in Boston, I think.”

“And Clemma?”

“You mean ... you haven’t heard from her?”

“No.”

“I am sorry. You haven’t heard then that the baby died?”

“No.” All her Indian stoicism revealed itself in this brief word. Lucinda had no sense of shame, no reticence. Her daughter had vanished and she would be grateful for any information.

“I have no idea where she is,” the officer said, and Lucinda nodded.

When Jim heard this news he was distraught and announced his intention of trying once more to find her, but Levi forestalled him: “James, I shall never forget how you put everything aside to search for her, but that was enough. You’ve done all that could be expected and now you must put her out of your mind.”

“Can you put her out of yours?”

“No, but I’m her father.”

“I’m to be her husband,” Jim said. And instead of forgetting her, as he should have done, he became more obsessed with the belief that he was meant to find her, to care for her. Whenever he came to town he asked the Zendts if they had heard anything, and he convinced himself that one day she would write him, and would wait somewhere for him to rescue her.

Jim let it be known that he had no interest in meeting girls, and not much in other kinds of social life, either. He directed his energy toward the ranch, and became so proficient that he received attractive offers from several English corporations running large herds to the north, but he preferred to stick with Seccombe and Skimmerhorn, two men he trusted.

He intensified his study of nature, analyzing the habits of birds and small animals, but found his greatest delight in supervising the Crown Vee Herefords. He became known throughout the industry as “Jim Lloyd, the Hereford man,” a name in which he took restrained pride.

In 1876 everything connected with Zendt’s Farm reached a climax. To begin with, Congress at last agreed to accept Colorado into the Union as the thirty-eighth state, and it was decided that entry should be made on August 1, just after the hundredth anniversary of the nation.

Statehood should have come much earlier, in 1866, as a matter of fact, and it would have, except that southern sympathizers in the territory, combining with those who still revered Colonel Skimmerhorn for his gallant victory at Rattlesnake Buttes, proposed that the constitution of the new state contain a proviso ensuring that in Colorado, so long as the state endured, only white men should be allowed to vote. Since there were practically no Negroes or Chinese in the territory, and certainly no Indians, the only reason these patriots could cite for such exclusion was that it sounded fashionable.

“Sort of makes us modern,” they said, and their fellow citizens enthusiastically adopted the proposal. The national Senate and House accepted it, too, on grounds that the people of a state ought to be able to choose whom they wished to share their responsibilities with.

President Andrew Johnson, however, made short shrift of the bill when it reached his desk. He vetoed it with a sharp rebuke, basing his decision not on the moral problem of discrimination but on the practical fact of population decline plus the results of a recent plebescite which contradicted earlier mandates:

C
olorado, instead of increasing, has declined in population. At an election in 1861, 10,580 votes were cast. At the elect tign in 1864, the number of votes cast was 6192; while at the election held in 1865, the aggregate of votes was 5905
...
It is not satisfactorily established that a majority of citizens desire state government. In an election held for the purpose of ascertaining the views of the people, 6192 votes were cast, and of this number a majority of 3152 was given against statehood
.

Perhaps a divine counselor sat at Johnson’s elbow when he penned these words, for had he admitted Colorado at that time, her two senators would surely have voted against him in the forthcoming impeachment—they said so—and he would have become the only President to be removed from office. At any rate, in 1866 Colorado remained a territory.

Now, in pleasanter times, and with the offending proviso eliminated, Colorado was to become a state, and there were celebrations from border to border.

There were also elections! The new state would be entitled to two senators, who would be chosen by the legislature, since it was felt that the general public was not qualified to vote directly for such an august position, and one congressman; seeing that he was of a lower order, the public would be permitted to vote for him directly.

As the time for statehood approached, a sensible movement started in the little town of Zendt’s Farm. It was the schoolteacher, Miss Keller, who launched it, and no sooner had she uttered her suggestion, than it caught the imagination of everyone: “Zendt’s Farm is no name for a town that’s destined to be a city. Let’s celebrate the double birthday and rename ourselves Centennial!”

The idea was so popular that it was two days before anyone thought to ask, “What will Levi say? After all, he founded the place.”

He thought it a great idea. “Never did like Zendt’s Farm,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t like the name Zendt. Everyone I knew with that name either was stingy or ornery, except my mother. And she was born a Spreichert.”

Lucinda said she thought the name Centennial was perfect, and that afternoon dated a letter to Cyprian: “Centennial, Colorado, June 9, 1876,” the first appearance of the name in any document.

So the decision was made, and the town of Centennial was born. A flamboyant celebration was arranged at the river to usher in the second hundred years of American independence and the birth of the new town. Steers donated by the Venneford Ranch were roasted, and patriotic speeches were made, predicting a notable future for both the nation and the town, but festivities were dampened when word arrived on the train from Cheyenne that on an undistinguished battleground in Montana, Colonel George Armstrong Custer with all his men had been massacred by the Sioux and vengeful Cheyenne.

Pasquinel Mercy was among them, chosen specifically by Custer to be his aide after the buffalo hunt on the Union Pacific. When a young cowboy ran into the midst of the celebration, shouting the awful news, Mercy’s pregnant young wife, Laura Skimmerhorn, fainted, and some celebrants began to stare accusingly at Lucinda Zendt.

The nation was now a hundred years old, the town thirty-two, dating from that August day in 1844 when Levi Zendt and the McKeags arrived to establish their trading post. In the case of both nation and town, all major strands of future development had been identified; history would consist of their slow maturing. For the nation: what to do about race? how to control expanding business? how to distribute the growing wealth? For Centennial, history would be what it always had been: how could man adjust to his harsh surroundings? how could he use his land creatively?

CAUTION TO
US
EDITORS: As a southerner I have always shared the westerner’s suspicion of railroads. Had I been either a rancher or a farmer in the west, I would have been quite bitter about the insolent way in which the railroads treated me. Discriminatory rates, arbitrary rulings on cattle and feed grains, refusal to provide service and arrogant indifference to my problems—all of which we endured in the south—would have been infuriating, and I would have enrolled myself among the agitators. The abuses stemmed from the fact that the owners of the railroads never saw themselves as servants to an expanding nation; they were men trying to squeeze the last penny of profit from a good thing, and to accomplish this, they subverted legislatures, perverted economic law and persecuted anyone who tried to hold them to a more honest discharge of their duties. As a result, even today westerners buy airplane tickets with actual relish, and out here the current call for public support for the railroads falls on deaf ears. If Commodore Vanderbilt did indeed say, “The public be damned,” what the descendants of that public now say to the railroads is unprintable.

Diplodocus
. The dinosaur excavated at Chalk Cliff in 1875 became known as diplodocus, and some years later along the border of Colorado and Utah an expedition financed by Andrew Carnegie dug up two beautiful specimens. One now rests in a handsome setting in the Denver Museum of Natural History and is the gem of that collection. Carnegie was so delighted with his find that at his own expense he had molds made for each separate bone in the skeleton, hundreds of them, and circulated plaster casts to various museums throughout the world, so that people everywhere could enjoy “his dinosaur.” A later cast from the molds, this time in cement, now stands at the entrance to the museum at Vernal, Utah, not far from where the original diplodocus roamed 136,000,000 years ago, and it is enormous.

Triceratops
. The lands around Rattlesnake Buttes proved rewarding to many teams of excavators. Starting in 1873 and continuing through the rest of the nineteenth century, scientists dug a startling variety of bones. In the twentieth century, teams from Europe and eastern universities have continued the work. This year, in Pleistocene clay beds I myself found the jaw of an eohippus; it shone in my hand like a little jewel, and just north of Chalk Cliff, in a classic Morrison deposit, I had the thrill of finding an entire armored collar that triceratops carried about his neck, erecting it into a formidable defense whenever some predator attacked. It is very exciting, I can assure you, to hold in your hand the remnant of a giant lizard who stood 70,000,000 years ago where you now stand.

Warning
. You understand, and your caption writer must too, that no human being has ever seen a dinosaur bone. What I uncovered that day from triceratops was not a bone, but rather the petrification of a bone that had once existed. All so-called dinosaur bones are in fact stones formed within the matrix of the original bone. What happened was this: When the original bone was buried, water containing silica seeped into it, and ever so slowly the silica was deposited within the bone. In time the bony structure dissolved and was completely replaced by stone, in such minute detail that from the appearance of the stone we can today deduce with total accuracy even the cell structure of the original bone, and can indeed diagnose what diseases the bone may have suffered. No one has ever seen a bone of diplodocus, but the stony recollection of that great beast is even more exciting and beautiful than I have been able to describe.