Man had come to the plains. From the far northwest, from a distant origin, across strange bridges and down green corridors, the two-legged one had journeyed to the buttes, where before only the horse and the camel and the mammoth, the sloth and the beaver and the snake had lived. His first act was symbolic, the instinctive killing of the snake, and for as long as time endured, enmity between these two would continue.
At this watershed of history it might be prudent to look at the land as it then was, for we must remember our inheritance if we are to retain a vision of what it might once more be.
It was a cruel land, that year when man arrived. The New Rockies rose perhaps a millionth of an inch; certainly they did not stand still, for they never had and they never would. They were either rising in birth or falling in decay, and in time to come they might be higher than the Himalayas or lower than the Appalachians. In that year no man could have guessed what their destiny would be.
From the mountains great bodies of water and silt cascaded down onto the plains, as they had been doing for seventy million years. That year there was a flood which killed many bison and swept away all beaver lodges, but at the same time it deposited some of the silt and many of the minerals which would make the area unusually rich when time came for tillage.
The grass grew a little better than usual, making it one of the finest pasture areas in the world, and the bison increased in number, so that when the cows led the northern herd into the yearly convocation the count was at its maximum, around forty million, with thirty million in the southern herd. They darkened the earth in such great numbers, they could never be obliterated.
Beaver had a poor year. The floods killed many in their lodges, especially the kits and one-year-olds. The two-year-old beavers who were expelled from home that year had little trouble finding locations for their lodges, but a lot of trouble finding trees the right size for building their dams; the flood had uprooted too many and swept them downstream.
At Rattlesnake Buttes the animals lived in subtle and long-approved harmony. The little sand owls stole a burrow now and then from the prairie dogs, and occasionally they ate a young dog, but only one that was too weak to survive normally. They also kept the mice in check, but themselves provided food for hawks.
The main problem of the prairie dogs was not the loss of an occasional burrow to the owls, or even the constant depredations of the rattlesnakes, but the fact that in the summer the rutting bulls, frustrated as males often are by the problems of sex, insisted upon wallowing on top of the town where the earth was fine and dusty and then urinating on it; they did a lot of damage and it took time to rebuild a town after such treatment.
The pronged antelope and the wolverine and the sleek deer and gray wolves that watched everything lived together in delicate balance, each needing the other and each dependent upon the land and its abundant grass.
There was another factor which has not been mentioned but which would, in the years ahead, become increasingly important. This land was beautiful.
From the buttes at sunrise a man would be able to look east and see a hundred miles to unbroken horizons, stark meadow after meadow reaching beyond the human imagination. The colors were superb, but the uninitiated could look at them and not see them, for they were soft grays and delicate browns and azure purples.
The vast plains had a nobility that would never diminish, for they were a challenge, with their duststorms, their wild blizzards, their tornadoes and their endless promise, if men treated them with respect. They were a resource inexhaustible in their variety but demanding in their love. In the years ahead they would terrify easterners and Europeans afraid of loneliness, but they would be a haven for all who understood them, and they would be loved in contrary ways and with harsh curses. The great plains—illimitable in both challenge and fulfillment.
If a man looked northward from the buttes he could see the chalk cliffs of Nebraska, those extraordinary white rocks that had once lain at the bottom of some vanished sea. It was infuriating; he could be dying of thirst on the parched plains, yet know that the whole area had once been under water, and there the white cliffs were to prove it. If he poked among them he would find fossil fish and clams, and the only way such things could have been caught in the rocks was for everything to have been under water. Hell, in some places the rock was twenty thousand feet thick, and all of it made under water.
To the south were the cottonwoods, that thin line of useless trees, barely edible for beavers, who would eat any tree that grew. Yet when a traveler saw those trees, broken-branched and torn by storms, his heart skipped a beat, for they marked the South Platte, and wherever it ran, there was at least water, foul though it might be, and some chance that another human being could be in the vicinity, because he needed water too.
It was to the west, however, that the conspicuous grandeur lay, for there the mountains rose in such splendor that when men saw them they gasped. Row upon row the marvelous peaks marched north and south, so many and so varied that the eye could never tire of them. In winter they were white with snow and looked as if they had been pasted against the deep-blue sky. In spring they shone green in their lower reaches and granite-blue above the tree line. In all seasons they were glorious, reaching fourteen thousand feet into the air and visible for more than a hundred miles out in the prairie.
There was one peak visible from the buttes, the largest of all, which captured the affection of every man or woman who saw it from this area. It was a noble peak of itself and would have been outstanding even if it had no significant features, but up its eastern flank crawled a granite beaver. It was really the oddest thing, but when a man looked at this master-mountain, a thing of obvious majesty, all he remembered was that stone beaver trying to climb to the top. Travelers could see him from a long way off, and from the buttes he commanded attention. This peak should have been called Beaver Mountain, but unfortunately, men are sometimes not imaginative. Other peaks had poetic names like Never-Summer Range, Rabbit’s Ear, Medicine Bow, Sangre de Cristo, and one with a perpetual mark of snow in its crisscrossed ravines, the Mount of the Holy Cross. Even Pikes Peak had an alliterative ring, but the best mountain of them all, with a little beaver- crawling up its flank, was given the drabbest name of all—Longs Peak.
The Rockies had a characteristic not shared by other ranges of the west, and this both endeared them to people who lived in their shadow and infuriated those who came upon them as strangers. The air surrounding them was so pure that from a distance it was impossible to calculate how far away they were. Of course, the air was just as pure around the ranges to the north, but they were not faced by flat plains across which people traveled, so the phenomenon did not apply to them. If an immigrant came from a flat land like Illinois, he would wake up one morning after crossing the Missouri to see the Rockies as clear as a row of corn on his farm back home, and he would exult and cry, “Tonight we sleep in the mountains!”
But he could travel westward all the next day, and the mountains would still appear to be where they had been at dawn, and the next night they would be no closer, nor the next either. Distance could not be calculated, and occasionally a man and his wife would become mesmerized by the noble mountains; never had they seen anything so grand and so perplexing. The good part was that close up, these splendid ranges were just as impressive as they had been from a distance. They dominated the plains and served as a backdrop to extraordinary beauty.
It was at sunset that the mountains came into their own, for on some days clouds would rest over them like a light blanket and reflect the dying sun. Then the mountains would be bathed in splendor: gold and red and soft radiant browns and deep blues would color the underside of the clouds and frame the mountains in a celestial light, so that even the most stolid Indiana immigrant would have to halt his oxen and look in amazement at a setting so grand that it seemed to have been ordained solely for the stupefaction of mankind.
The loveliest moment came, however, when the sun had set and its
flamboyant coloring had faded. Then, for about twenty minutes, the softest colors of the spectrum played about the crests of the mountains, and the little stone beaver crawled toward the summit to sleep, and many a traveler bit his lower lip and looked away, thinking of a home he would not see again.
Centennial, when it was founded, would stand at the spot where a man could look eastward and catch the full power of the prairie, or westward to see the Rockies. The history of the town would be a record of the way it responded to the impossible task of conciliating the demands of the mountains with the requirements of the prairie. Many would destroy themselves in this conflict, but those who survived, assimilating the best of these two contrasting worlds, would attain a largeness of soul that other men who chose easier paths would not discover.
CAUTION TO US EDITORS. Even as I was working on this section a group of leading geologists announced that in their opinion the Pleistocene epoch, which covers the period of the glaciers, should be considered to start not at one million years before the present but two to three million. At the same time another specialist suggested that North America did not experience the five periods of glaciation which I was taught—with five interglacial periods, the last being the one we are in now—but rather a recurring series of shorted-lived glaciers interspersed with many interglacial periods. I tend to agree with each of these opinions, because they are consistent with ideas I have expressed before, that we will probably push all dates back in time. We are older than we used to think. However, in my notes I have respected the established chronology. If your own researches incline you toward the newer dates, use them.
Land bridge. I must also warn you concerning two facts about the land bridge. Its existence cannot be challenged, but it may not have been as vital as my notes make it out to be. A very good geologist told me the other day, “There is no need to posit this famous land bridge of yours. For much of the time when the exchange of animal life was under way the Asian plate and the North American were in contact and the two continents were undifferentiated. The so-called bridge must have then been two or three thousand miles wide, and glaciers had absolutely nothing to do with it.” Incidentally, do not think of the Eskimo as using the bridge. They got here very late, long after the last glaciation, when there could have been no bridge. No matter. They could get from Asia to Alaska simply by canoeing for fifty-six miles, which is what they did.
Amphibians? Although every text agrees that the sauropods, the family to which diplodocus belonged, were amphibians, the exact significance of this description is uncertain. Some experts like G. Edward Lewis argue that animals as enormous as brontosaurus and diplodocus could not have supported their weight on dry land, considering their crude joints; they must have lived in swamps and lagoons where water buoyed them up. Others point out that the legs, awkward though they were, did persist through millions upon millions of years, whereas unused appendages, like the human tail, atrophied and vanished. Of seventeen illustrations I was able to find of diplodocus, all showed her on land, but Lewis explains that this cannot be accepted as evidence; the artists merely wished to display her total conformation.
Origins of the horse. Some readers may, with scientific backing, object to a Colorado origin for the horse. They argue that the missing “paleohippus” of which I write could just as properly have originated in Europe, since there was a well-known European equivalent to the second-generation eohippus. In Europe the little creature was given the totally erroneous name hyracotherium, because his discoverers could not imagine him to be related in any way to the horse; they classified him as a forebear of the hyrax, a small shrew-like animal, the cony of the Old Testament. Such experts believe our horse originated in Europe from the hyracotherium. I think not. That eohippus died away into forms with no aptitude for survival. The horse as we know it developed where and as I said. The Arabian, the Percheron, the Clydesdale—all had their beginnings not far from Rattlesnake Buttes. Crazy idea, isn’t it?
Appaloosa. I would advise you not to get involved over the origins of this most beautiful of horses. A group of new scholars is pushing the line that the ancestors of our horse developed in America only as far as mesohippus, which then emigrated to Asia, where it developed into the horse proper, in the form of the Appaloosa, which thus becomes the great ancestor of subsequent breeds. This theory is most ardently voiced, as you might suspect, by Appaloosa owners, but is rejected by others. The Appaloosa is a distinguished animal, one of the great breeds of the world and possibly the most ancient. It has solid-color front quarters, mottled rear, skimpy tail and mane and curiously streaked hoofs. The Nez Percé Indians of western Idaho were responsible for cultivating the strain in North America, and from them a few passed into the hands of western ranchers, who in 1938 banded together to reestablish the breed. They’ve done a good job, and later on well see the effect on a town like Centennial.
Origins of the beaver. You may get some flak regarding the beaver. Some experts have argued that he originated in Europe, or perhaps Egypt, and immigrated to North America rather late. But the greater scholars like Stout and Schultz, both of Nebraska, believe that he originated from American stock dating far back and that he emigrated over the land bridge to Asia to develop collaterally there.
Definitions. It’s difficult to find a precise definition of butte. A vast upland area is a plateau. When bounded on all four sides by cliffs, it’s a mesa. When the boundaries of the mesa erode to a point at which the height is greater than the width, it’s a butte. If it continues eroding, it becomes in succession a monument, a chimney, a spire, a needle, and finally, a memory.
Eagle-serpent. This enmity is celebrated in many folklores. The pre-eminent visual depiction appears, of course, in the Mexican flag, where a serpent held in the talons of an eagle perched on a cactus serves as the national insignia. Traditionally the eagle (manly virtue) kills the snake (guile and venality) ; the account I send you, in which the rattlesnake triumphs, is an invention of the western plains, where it occurs in various oral versions.
Chapter 4
THE MANY COUPS OF LAME BEAVER
Man was tardy in reaching Colorado, and precisely when he arrived, we do not know. The great land bridge leading from Asia to Alaska was open 40,000 years ago, after which it closed when the glaciers melted and their captured water returned to the sea. It was open again about 28,000 years ago, and for the last time, about 13,000 years ago, closing about 10,000 years ago.
When the bridge was open, perhaps a thousand miles wide, well-developed human beings then living in eastern Siberia could have followed mammoths and other large game from Asia into Alaska. And when the tips of the glaciers began to melt, broad avenues opened, leading in a southeasterly direction, with mountains to the west and broad plains to the east, down which the animals could move, pursued by the men who hunted them.
It is sheer speculation to assume that 40,000 years ago Mongoloid men crossed the bridge and came down the avenues. But it is a certainty that when the bridge opened 13,000 years ago men came down—or were already here—to start the earliest recorded occupation of America. In time their descendants would become known as Indians. Finally, we have good records of a late migration around 6,000 B.C. which did not require any land bridge; these incomers used boats to cross the fifty-six mile gap of ocean that separates Alaska from Siberia. Today their descendants are known as Eskimo, markedly different from the earlier groups that became Indians.
As yet we have no secure evidence that men actually arrived 40,000 years ago; we have found neither their homes, nor their tools, nor their skeletons. All we have are tantalizing intimations of their occupancy—a carved caribou leg bone in the Yukon, a circle of stones in California, a possible dwelling in Pueblo—but one of these days, perhaps before the end of this century, definitive proof may be forthcoming.
Nor do we have proof that the bridge 28,000 years ago brought us men, although it almost certainly did. As of today, all we can be sure of is that man was indubitably here 12,000 y
ears ago, because we have the hard-proof records of his occupancy.
We know where he lived, what time of year he hunted, how he made his spear, where he encountered a great mammoth, and how he killed the animal before the feast began. We are as certain of this hunt as we are that Daniel Boone once shot deer in Kentucky; all we lack is the mammoth’s skeleton.
In the year 9268 B.C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains. He was a flint-knapper, and his practiced eye assured him that this was the kind he needed, a hard, flinty, gray-brown rock with one facet fairly smooth. It was about the size of a man’s head, and most of the memorable rocks he had worked with in the past, those he remembered with affection because of the superb points he had struck from them, had looked like this. He breathed deeply and felt there was a good chance this one might prove productive too.
But he was also apprehensive, for the hunters of his clan had gone almost two months without having made a major kill, and food supplies were low. Scouts had spotted a small group of mammoths, those formidable beasts that stood twice as tall as a man and weighed a hundred times more, but to kill such an adversary required the stoutest spears, tipped with the sharpest point, and it was this flint-knapper’s task to provide the latter, for upon his skill depended the security of his clan.
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