Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “You’re home,” Poteet said abruptly. “We’re headin’ for Colorado.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “I don’t have no horse, Mr. Poteet.”

  “Put your saddle on Baldy.”

  Nate turned to study the horse, then said, “He looks strong,” and Poteet said, “He is. Get your bedroll.”

  And within minutes Nate Person had his roll, his pistol and his saddle. Lifting Dora Mae in his arms, he kissed his wife goodbye and said, “Tell the boys goodbye for me,” and he was off.

  The three men rode along Pinto Creek till they came to a homestead marked by a certain affluence; whoever occupied it understood ranching and had already established a good foothold. “Canby!” Poteet shouted, and Person said, “He’s yonder,” and across grassland came a cowboy astride a handsome gray.

  “Hello, Poteet,” he said gruffly. “Hear you’re buyin’ cattle like crazy.”

  “We leave for Colorado.”

  “Sort of figured you might need me. When?”

  “Now.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Canby jumped down from his horse, an agile, wiry man with bronzed face and stern jaw. Running awkwardly, as cowboys do, he cried, “Emmy, I’m off to Colorado,” but before she could appear, he turned back to Poteet and asked, “You want to buy my string of horses?”

  “If they’re any good.”

  “Look ’em over while I pack.”

  Poteet and Person went to the corral, where Canby had eleven strong mounts. “Come over here, Skimmerhorn,” Poteet called, and when the northerner reached the corral, Poteet said, “Canby’s from South Texas. Right on the Rio Grande, so don’t be surprised at how he dresses. He’s stubborn as a mule, but he knows horses and he’s got some beauties here. I’d recommend you buy the whole lot.”

  “He’ll charge,” Person warned. “He loves his horses.”

  “You won’t find animals like this in Jacksborough,” Poteet said, and before Skimmerhorn could reply, he added, “I’d like to use Canby at point. Along with Nate. We’d make him feel good at the start if we met his price.”

  “Point means?”

  “When you get the cattle strung out on the trail you want your two best men ridin’ up front, left and right of the lead steer and a little ahead. If somethin’ happens, you don’t have time to explain nothin’. Your points must take responsibility on their own. Nate here’s the best I ever seen. I trust Canby too.”

  “Well, let’s buy his horses, if his price isn’t robbery.”

  “It will be,” Nate predicted.

  Canby now appeared, an astonishing apparition. Because of his training along the Rio Grande, where mesquite thorns cut a man to shreds if he was carried into them by his horse, he believed that a cowboy should go dressed against that possibility. Accordingly, he wore heavy chaps and enormous tapaderos, those leather coverings for the stirrup which protect the feet and ankles from clawing brush; many a South Texas cowboy had saved a leg by the leather armor of chap and tapadero. But when a bowlegged man walked in heavy chaps, he looked comical, and Skimmerhorn had to bite his lip to avoid smiling as Canby came toward them.

  “How do you like my horses?” he asked.

  “The best,” Poteet said honestly. “How much?”

  “Ten dollars a horse.”

  Skimmerhorn was surprised that the price was so low, for in Colorado such horses would have brought thirty, but Poteet said, “You drive a hard bargain.” Canby replied, “Those horses have hard feet,” and Poteet said grudgingly, “I’ll give you eighty-five for the lot.” Canby, with a slight smile of satisfaction said, “A deal.” He then went to where Nate Persons sat his horse and shook hands. “You and me ridin’ point?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nate said.

  “Good.” And the four men started back to the Poteet ranch, but before they had gone far Canby said, “You need another good hand?” and Poteet said, “I need seven.” Canby suggested, “You oughta think about Mike Lasater,” and Poteet said, “Lasater stole horses. Forget him.” But Canby persisted, “That was a long time ago, Mr. Poteet, and you won’t find a better cowboy in Palo Pinto than Mike Lasater.”

  “I’m gettin’ the others in Jacksborough,” Poteet said flatly, and the conversation ended.

  When they reached the ranch they were met by a lanky man with a sour visage, two pistols, a bedroll and a stout pony. “Mornin’, Mr. Poteet. I’m Mike Lasater.”

  “I know who you are,” Poteet mumbled, irritated that this semi-outlaw should have imposed himself this way.

  “I want to ride with you.”

  “I need no hands.”

  “Yes, you do, Mr. Poteet. You need a good dozen and you only got four.”

  “Five,” Poteet snapped, pointing to where Nacho stood in the doorway, and as soon as he had done this he felt irritated with himself for having been drawn into argument with this renegade.

  “You need me, Mr. Poteet,” Lasater insisted. He was a thin, scrawny young man of indeterminate age, but he sat his horse confidently, and before Poteet could rebuff him again he said, “I’ll ride drag. You need a good man back there in the dust.”

  “Take him,” Canby said.

  “Come along,” Poteet said unhappily, but as he started toward the ranch house he suddenly wheeled his horse and faced Lasater again. “No gamblin’. No drinkin’,” he snapped. Lasater’s temper flared: “Goddammit, Poteet, if a man is startin’ over, he’s got to start somewheres. Now you accept me as I am, because I’m the best horseman you’ll have on your trail.”

  Poteet merely smiled. “If you’re a good horseman, Lasater,” he said quickly, “I’ll be proud to have you along,” and he extended his hand to clasp that of the younger man.

  They rode north that afternoon, six men more at ease in the saddle than on their feet, leading thirteen hundred longhorn cattle and ninety-one horses in the remuda de caballos, overseen for the moment by Nacho. At Jacksborough they would hire an experienced wrangler whose job would be looking after the horses for the next four months. They would also hire an additional half-dozen raw cowboys, and since the ones already hired were veterans, the new hands could be farm youths sixteen or seventeen years old eager for trail experience. By the time Poteet had his dozen men, he would have a flexible crew able to work eighteen hours a day, subsist on meager rations and operate as a unit, requiring few words and little exhortation. Their job would be simple: take some twenty-eight hundred fractious longhorns safely across thirteen hundred miles of the west’s most bruising country.

  Jacksborough in 1868 was a fascinating frontier town built around a spacious square. It was the crossroads of northern Texas, a spot where cattlemen convened from vast and lonely spaces to buy their staples, sell what produce their wives had grown, and make a deal for beef with the army at nearby Fort Richardson.

  It was a wild town, with no less than twenty-six establishments licensed to sell liquor, and its inhabitants were not leery of new ideas or radical approaches. For example, when R. J. Poteet entered the smithy of a wagonmaker and said, “What I want, Sanderson, is a special type of wagon,” Sanderson did not whine and say, “Well, I don’t know ...” And when Poteet explained, “At the rear end I’m thinkin’ of somethin’ like a desk—lot of drawers for keepin’ things in and a flat table that will fold out when we stop,” Sanderson studied the idea and said, “Sounds sensible.”

  “Start buildin’,” Poteet said.

  “You want the drawers to pull out and in, like this?”

  “Big drawers.”

  “Who said little ones? I ain’t no cabinetmaker.”

  “I’m gonna leave my Mexican here with you.”

  “I don’t need no help.”

  “He’s my cook. And this is gonna be his wagon.”

  “Oh! A cook wagon? Why in hell didn’t you say so? We could ...” He stopped, studied the imaginary wagon, drew it in the air and said enthusiastically, “We could hang hooks everywhere. You could carry ... hell, you co
uld carry ... He grabbed a piece of paper and started planning the wagon. “We got to have two barrels,” Nacho said, “one flour, one beans,” to which Sanderson replied, “You goddamned Mexicans couldn’t live without beans, could you?”

  Finding the rest of the cattle was easy, but choosing six more cowboys was difficult, because every farm boy in the area wanted to ride with them. They were a sorry lot, young fellows with pimples and scraggly blond hair, ill-at-ease with anything except a horse; shy, often unschooled and lost under their big hats.

  Skimmerhorn, coming upon a couple of dozen of them waiting in the square, told Nate Person, “I’d hate to go up the trail with that lot,” and Nate said, “We all looked that way at sixteen,” to which Skimmerhorn replied, “Maybe, but we weren’t trailing cattle,” and Nate replied quietly, “I was.” Later he added, “I guess our job is to take ’em as calves and turn ’em into strong young bulls.”

  Poteet did the choosing. He took four gangly boys—Calendar, Gompert, Ragland, Savage—and Skimmerhorn found it impossible to tell one from the other. They were even dressed alike: boots with high heels to prevent the foot from slipping through the stirrup, tight-fitting pants, leather belts with revolver holsters, white shirts, some kind of jacket, a blue or gray bandanna which could be used in a number of ways—over the face as a dust mask, as a sweat rag, a hobble for horses or a signal flag—and a broad brimmed hat to protect eyes and lips from the blistering sun. And of course, each had his own horse.

  The ten hands thus far assembled had the common characteristic of the cowboy: unmounted and walking about the town on foot they were awkward; their high-heeled boots and bowed legs made them almost comic creatures, accentuated by the holsters that banged at their sides, but once in the saddle they became proud lean men. Then their scrawny frames and hat-shaded faces assumed a mysteriousness which fitted exactly the landscape through which they moved. Cowboys were a silent breed, accustomed on the trail to communicate mainly by signals flashed when the trail boss or one of the points waved his hat in special ways. At work, they talked more with their hats than with their lips, and to their horses, which became in time a living part of them, they spoke with their knees, or not at all, for sometimes in crucial situations it was the horse who spoke to them by the way in which he moved and anticipated danger ahead. Then the wise cowboy heeded neither the trail boss nor the points nor even the man beside him, but only his horse, and many a cowboy returned to camp alive because in a moment of danger he had allowed his horse to take command.

  Therefore, each cowboy brought with him three personal possessions for which he remained responsible: his gun, his bedroll and his special horse. From the remuda paid for by the owner he would select his eleven work horses.

  To tend the remuda Poteet sought a practiced wrangler. Among the applicants, there was one who seemed to satisfy this requirement, so Poteet went back to Sanderson, who was working sixteen hours a day on the wagon, and was told, “Real good man with a remuda is Buck, if you can stand his smell.”

  When Poteet came within three yards of the wrangler he understood what Sanderson meant, for this unlovely man had worked around horses so much, and was so averse to water, that he smelled worse than a mare in heat. “He was sort of wonderful,” Poteet explained to Skimmerhorn later that day. “I figured that if we hired him, his smell alone would kill a rattlesnake downwind at a hundred yards.”

  Buck was an older man who had been up the Kansas trail twice. At an early age he had visualized himself as an outcast and now he expected nothing better in life. His extraordinary smell came not only from his habitual uncleanliness, but also from a nervous glandular disorder he could not control. He was an unlikable loner who knew only one-thing: horses. “I wouldn’t dare hire him,” Poteet explained, “except that his job will keep him off to one side, away from the other men.”

  “If he can handle horses, take him, smell and all,” Skimmerhorn said.

  Eleven men had now been chosen, and the twelfth chose himself. He sauntered into the square one evening, a young man twenty-one years old, extremely thin, wearing a Confederate uniform, a LeMat revolver and a Texas bat. In his left hand he lugged a McClellan saddle, as different from the standard Texas saddle as could be imagined. It was a northern invention, much used by General Grant’s cavalry but held in contempt by the south. How a southern veteran happened to have such a saddle was a mystery. It had no horn, a single cinch, practically no cantle, and to the horror of any Texan, was slit down the middle of the seat!

  “It’s to provide ventilation,” Canby explained to one of the astonished boys.

  “Looks like a ball-pincher to me,” the boy replied, amid general laughter.

  “Where’s the horn?” another asked

  “It ain’t a real saddle,” Canby said. A good Texas saddle had a horn stout enough for roping an elephant, and to think that a cowboy would ever use a McClellan wasn’t worth discussing.

  “M’name’s Coker,” the young man said. “Who’s boss?”

  “I am,” Poteet said. “Where you from?”

  “South Calinky,” the stranger said with obvious defiance, and when Poteet heard this pronunciation for South Carolina, first state to secede from the Union and foremost in heroic actions, he paid attention. Poteet had served in the Confederate cavalry and knew that no men equaled the South Carolinians, difficult, stubborn, sometimes even hateful, but always dependable. He had once moved with eighteen South Calinky boys, as they called themselves, youngsters barely sixteen, and they had assaulted a northern stronghold held by fifty. Such men. Of the eighteen, eleven had died, charging forward, and when the attack failed, as it had to, two of the survivors halted to run back into the face of terrible fire to toss grenades into the impregnable position. Had they lived, they would have been much like the man who now stood before him.

  “What’s your name?”

  Buford Coker. They call me Bufe.”

  “Where’d you get that saddle?”

  “Off’n a blue-coat officer.”

  “What’s that revolver, a LeMat?” Coker nodded. “Where’d you get a LeMat?”

  “Off’n a gray-coat officer.”

  “Your horse?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “You can ride?”

  “Would I have a saddle other?”

  “Why do you want to go north with us?”

  “I been movin’ for some time.”

  Desperately Poteet wanted to give this cantankerous young man a job, but he knew that the Confederate might be more trouble than he was worth. Then an idea struck him. “There might be a place ...” he began.

  “Man at the wagon shop said there was a place,” Coker interrupted. “You’re one hand short.”

  “There might be a place,” Poteet repeated without irritation, “if my top hand thought you’d fit.”

  “I’ll fit.”

  “Mr. Person.” Poteet waited till the black man rode up, then said formally, “Mr. Person, do you think you could work with this young man?”

  Nate studied him, knew that he could be difficult, knew from his Confederate uniform that he might present special problems. But he also knew, from his long acquaintance with Mr. Poteet, that the boss must want to hire the young man, if a justification could be found. So he stared straight into Coker’s eyes and said, “This trail could be just as dangerous as the war you were in, soldier,” and the Confederate replied slowly, without shifting his gaze, “Nothin’ scares me,” and Nate said, “I think he’s a good one, Mr. Poteet.”

  There was one more test. Poteet asked Coker directly, “You think you could work with Mr. Person?”

  “I worked with Colonel Biggerstaff, and if you can work with a bastard like that, you oughta be able to work with a gentleman like Mr. Person,” Coker replied, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Mr. Person will give you a horse,” Poteet said, but when the time came for Coker to select his mount, it became apparent to Person that the young man knew nothing of horses.


  “You ain’t never been on a horse!” the black man cried.

  “Don’t tell him,” Coker pleaded.

  “You’ll kill yourself,” Nate protested.

  “Pick me a good one, and I’ll ride ’im.”

  “Son, you’re playin’ with fire.”

  “Pick me a horse,” Coker begged, and Nate ran his judicious eye over the lot. Some were barely broken; they would be tamed by cowboys on the trail. Others were as good as they would ever be, which wasn’t much. A few, including the eleven purchased from Canby, were fine mounts, and Nate selected the best of these.

  “How do you put the saddle on?” Coker asked.

  “Always from the left. Then tighten the cinch.”

  “What’s a cinch?”

  Nate looked at the stubborn young man and said, “God have mercy on you, Buford, you got courage.”

  For two days, while Mr. Poteet and Nacho bought supplies for the wagon, Bufe Coker rode his horse through the fields around Jacksborough, falling off, regaining his saddle and lugging his aching bones to bed in a state of exhaustion. In the afternoon of the second day he went to Person and said, “Now I know how to ride. Pick me out a real tough one,” and Person said, “You ain’t ready for that, son,” and Coker said, “I got to learn some time.” So Person lassoed a mean chalk-eyed pinto, the kind cowboys detested, and for the first half hour Coker couldn’t even get him saddled. When he did, the pinto bucked him off repeatedly, but each time Coker climbed back on.