Centennial (98 page)

And it wasn’t only Englishmen who graced the dining hall. The lovely Jerome sisters, daughters of a New York banker, came out from the east. Clara, the older, would marry Moreton Frewen, the Englishman who maintained his castle in northern Wyoming. Jennie, the younger, would marry Randolph Churchill and become the mother of the great Winston.

Bankers from all parts of the United States flocked into Cheyenne to look into the cattle business, and as they dined at the club and heard what the enterprising Englishmen were accomplishing, they felt an irresistible urge to invest their own funds, so that Boston financiers began to appear on British boards, and millionaires from Baltimore and fiduciary agents from Philadelphia, and in due time each of the new investors had to be initiated, to his sorrow, into the meaning of that subtle phrase
book count
.

Whenever John Skimmerhorn watched Oliver and Charlotte Seccombe hitch up their four bay mares for the drive to Cheyenne, he felt a pang of fear. “What’ll they buy this time?” he would mumble to himself. He did not begrudge the couple their mansion, although as an austere man he felt it pretentious, nor did he mind the extra work when delightful people like the Jerome sisters and their suitors stayed at the ranch. Indeed he told his wife, “It’s sort of fun to have dukes and earls on the place. Makes our cowboys spruce up a bit.”

What did worry him was the fact that each year Seccombe sold off more of the ranch’s basic stock. Each year the discrepancy between actual count and book count widened.

“Jim,” he asked Lloyd one autumn when the Seccombes were frolicking in Cheyenne, “how many breed cows do you estimate we have?”

“No one can say. They’re scattered ...”

“How many? You’re a damned shrewd man, Jim, and I know you have your guess.”

“I’d say ...” Jim stopped. He was thirty years old and most satisfied with his job. It was precisely how he wanted to spend his life, and he could look forward to many more years of employment. As he had neither wife nor children, the Venneford Ranch occupied his whole attention, and he would do nothing to endanger his position.

“You’re not puttin’ this down in a book somewheres, are you?” he asked suspiciously.

“Nope.”

“You’re not aimin’ to use it against Seccombe? Him spendin’ so much of the ranch’s money?”

“I’m asking your opinion!” Skimmerhorn snapped. “You run the cattle. I have the right to know.”

“Okay then,” Jim flashed. The two men were on tricky ground, and each knew it. As boss hand among the cowboys, Jim had to have a horseback opinion on everything, and he had one, but he did not want his information used to Seccombe’s disadvantage.

“If I was in court, properly sworn, I’d say we have about twenty-nine thousand, countin’ everything.”

“Book count says close to fifty-three thousand.”

“The book is wrong.” He was angry, both with the questioning and with the facts. For some time he had known that the books were badly inflated, and he also knew that sooner or later someone from Bristol would discover that fact, and there would be hell to pay.

“Jim, I’m on your side,” Skimmerhorn said placatingly.

“You don’t sound it.”

“What I think we should do is this. Every six months you and I will submit to Seccombe, in writing, our best guess as to the actual condition of the herd. Everything. New bulls, cows, calves, steers.”

Jim nodded.

“We’ll give them to Seccombe. What he does with them is his business. But I think we’re obligated—”

“I’ve been doin’ it,” Jim broke in, and he went to his desk and produced a ledger with honest estimates. When Skimmerhorn studied it he had nothing to say. He thought some of the figures too pessimistic and with pen and ink altered them upward, initialing his estimates.

When he was through he looked up at Jim and said, “Sometimes I think you were lucky, Jim, not to get married. She’s killing him, that one.”

Jim flushed and looked away. It was clear to him that Oliver Seccombe was in way over his head, with the headquarters mansion a monstrous weight around his neck, but never once did Jim think that Seccombe would have been better off unmarried. When he watched Charlotte greet the boss with a kiss and when he saw how proud Seccombe was to introduce his wife to their guests, he knew that whatever cost the Englishman paid was worth it. He saw Charlotte as a high-spirited woman, never afraid of skittish horses, and God knows she spent a lot of money. But she was laughter and a bright breeze and the dip of a bird’s wing. And. to Jim Lloyd, without a woman of his own, these things were more important than book count.

The reassuring success Potato Brumbaugh was having with his irrigated fields should have satisfied him, for his produce was bringing premium prices in Denver, but instead it exasperated him, for during every planting season and every harvest he compared the trivial portion of his irrigated land against the massive proportion of and land, which produced nothing, and the imbalance infuriated him.

He made two experiments. First, he tried planting his arid land, but with a rainfall of less than fifteen inches a year, all he got was a luxuriant stand of foliage in May, when the last rains fell, and withered vegetables in September, when the land lay gasping in the sun. For three successive years he spent considerable money and effort, producing nothing except the hard-won conclusion that without irrigation his benchlands were useless, except to grow native grass for the grazing of cattle.

His second experiment proved what irrigation could accomplish. Purchasing six galvanized buckets from Levi, he plowed up a small corner of his dry benchland, planted it with varied crops, then directed his wife and children to haul water all summer to keep the plants alive. It was hard work, but in September the family had melons and corn and half a dozen other things that had been waiting only for water.

“The soil is even richer than down along the riverbed,” Brumbaugh said, and the idea that hundreds of acres of productive land were going idle grieved him, and he began to brood.

He stalked along the Platte, a stoop-shouldered man in his forties, powerful and with enormous energies. Catherine the Great had been wise to import such men to her wasteland along the Volga and the later Czars had been fools to let them go, for these were the kind of men who loved the soil, who lived close to earth, listening to its secrets and guessing at its next wants. It was inconceivable to Potato Brumbaugh that nature intended those superfertile lands to lie unused, and he tried to fathom ways to bring them under cultivation.

“There’s lots of water,” he grumbled as he watched the Platte flow past. “I could pump it up.” But he had neither the pump nor the power. “We could carry it up,” but even that year’s small experiment had exhausted the resources of five strong people.

He strode along the river for so long, and with such intensity, that he became the river. He moved with it, felt it in his bones. He sensed each nuance of the flow throughout the year and slowly he began to visualize this noble river as a unit, an exposed artery with channels flowing out and back in from all directions. It held the land together and made it viable.

One day he developed an image of himself standing on dry land and pulling the river and all its tributaries up by the roots, and what was left was an empty canal, and from that conceit he began to formulate his concept of the Platte.

“It’s not a river!” he told his family with excitement dancing in his eyes. “It’s a canal, put there to bring water to land that needs it. We could go into the mountains and force the lakes to empty their water into little streams, and they’d bring the water to the Platte, and the river would carry it right to us. We could dig our own lakes, down here on the dry land, and imprison the flood water that comes during the spring and release it later as our replenishment.” He was only a peasant, but like all men with seminal ideas, he found the words he needed to express himself. He had heard a professor use the words
imprison
and
replenishment
and he understood immediately what the man had meant, for he, Brumbaugh, had discovered the concept before he heard the word, but when he did hear it, the word was automatically his, for he had already absorbed the idea which entitled him to the symbol.

The Platte is merely a canal to serve us,” he repeated, and with this basic concept guiding him, he directed his attention to the best way to use the beneficence the river provided. For three weeks he struggled with the problem, and then by a stroke of good luck he met some farmers in nearby Greeley who were grappling with the same problem, and together they saw what needed to be done.

Well to the west of Centennial rose a river which fed into the Platte, and it bore one of the most musical names in the west, Cache la Poudre. It had been named by some French trapper who had hidden his powder there during an exploration of the higher mountains, and its pronunciation had been debased to Cash lah Pooder. Usually it was known simply as the Pooder, and during the first years of the white man’s occupancy it had been ignored.

However, when farmers entered the area the Cache la Poudre assumed major significance, for it contributed to the flow of the Platte twenty-nine percent of the total. The Platte itself accounted for only twenty-two percent of its final flow, the rest coming from streams much smaller than the Poudre, and it did not take canny farmers like Potato Brumbaugh long to realize that in their Pooder they had a flowing gold mine.

Shortly after Brumbaugh tapped the Platte in 1859 for his small ditch, Greeley farmers took out from the south bank of the Poudre a small ditch, First Ditch, that irrigated the rich lands between the Poudre and the Platte, the ones lying close to the new town. This was a puny effort, not much larger than the private ditch dug by Brumbaugh, and it did nothing for the important accumulations of benchlands to the north.

It was Brumbaugh’s idea to cut into the north bank of the Poudre, far to the west, and to build a major canal, Second Ditch, many miles long, that would follow the contours of the first bench, bringing millions of gallons of water to dry lands, including his own. Some farmers in Greeley, called upon to share in the cost, predicted disaster and refused, but others recognized the potential value of such a project and subscribed their fortunes to its building.

Through the early years it was known as “Brumbaugh’s Folly,” for it cost four times what the Russian had predicted, and some estimates for siphons and conduits had to be multiplied seven and eight times, so that the cost of throwing water upon an acre of land rose appallingly, and many advocated that the wasteful project be abandoned. Banks would lend no more money and only the stubborn courage of men like Brumbaugh, his friend Levi Zendt and a few of the religious men of Greeley kept the ditch going.

“I can’t understand them,” Brumbaugh cried in frustration as one after another of his partners withdrew. “What if it cost ten times as much as I said? Does that matter? Suppose we get water on our dry land and each acre produces thousands of dollars? Who cares about original cost?”

It was the end product that mattered, always the end product. If fearful men had set out to build the Union Pacific, they would have quit, and if cowards had been called upon to pioneer an Oregon Trail across two thousand miles of unmarked land, they would have retired. But there were always men like Potato Brumbaugh who saw not the disappointing canal but the irrigated field, and if it cost an extra two thousand dollars to build the canal, that cost was nothing—it was absolutely nothing—if from it came water that ultimately would irrigate a thousand acres for a hundred years.

It was also Brumbaugh who visualized the great fishhook at the end of the Second Ditch. The canal had gone eastward as far as practical, but it still carried a good head of water, in spite of the smaller ditches draining from it, and Brumbaugh suggested, “Let’s lead it back west,” and he encouraged the surveyors to find new levels which would permit the water to return toward its point of origin.

“He’s takin’ the water back to use it over again,” cynics joked, and when Brumbaugh heard the jest and contemplated it, he realized how sensible the critic’s idea was, and out of his own pocket he employed a water engineer from Denver to study what actually happened to water diverted from a river, and the expert, after measuring the Platte and the Poudre at many sites, concluded that whereas Brumbaugh’s Second Ditch did unquestionably take out a good deal of water from the Poudre, seepage allowed more than thirty-seven percent to drain back into the Platte downstream. The water was used, but not used up, and the engineer calculated that with more thrifty procedures, as much as fifty percent of any irrigation water would find its way back to the mother river, available for use again and again.

“It’s what I said!” Brumbaugh cried with as much joy as if the returned water were coming back to his advantage. “The whole river is one system, and we can use it over and over.” He went from one community to another, expounding his views, showing farmers how the Platte could be plumbed as an inexhaustible resource, but one shrewd man in Sterling pointed out, “You say you send half the water back, and that’s true, but you also use up half, and if we keep using half of half of half, we dry up the river.”

“Right!” Brumbaugh shouted. “We use it up as it is now. But if we build tunnels up in the mountains and bring water that’s now wasted on the other side where it isn’t needed over to our side where it is ...”

“Now he wants to dig under mountains,” one of the Sterling men said, and again Brumbaugh shouted, “That’s right. That’s just what I want to do. When the Platte flows past my farm I want it to be as big as the Mississippi, and when it leaves Colorado to enter Nebraska, I want it to be bone-dry. This valley can be the new Eden.”