Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “And the McClellan saddle?”

  “About the same. A Yankee colonel lookin’ for glory, so we let him through and a Georgia man shot him and his horse fell practically in my lap, so I took the saddle.”

  “It’s a pitiful saddle,” Lasater said. “Damned hole down the middle.”

  “I ain’t had no trouble with it.”

  “That’s right,” Lasater said generously. “You sure rode down that Confederate and blew his head off.”

  “I did it in sorrow,” Coker said. “I thought he’d killed Old Jim.”

  Ragland broke into untimely laughter and the men turned toward him. He looked to check whether Mr. Poteet was listening, then confided, “Old R. J. thought hisself so smart, takin’ us acrost that desert to escape the Comanche and the Kansans. Hell, we run right into both. Might just as well have come straight north and saved ourselves the trouble.” But as Lasater pointed out, “Doin’ it your way, we face the Indians and the outlaws on their own land, where they’d have reinforcements. Doin’ it R. J.’s way, we got ’em at the end of their string,” and the others agreed.

  Only now did Jim begin to pay attention to the strangest man in the outfit. Calendar had ridden with the longhorns for over a thousand miles, yet no one really knew him, a silent, thin man of twenty who acted as if he were fifty. Twice Jim had shared night watches with him, and the man had not spoken a word. As he sang to the restless cattle, he did so in a voice so low they could hardly hear him, as if he were taking from them a reassurance he needed rather than the other way around:

  “The grass is green, the hills are brown.

  I’m gonna leave this goddamn town.

  The gals won’t pester me henceforth.

  I’m cuttin’ out, I’m headin’ north,”

  He sang in a whisper, and Jim, listening close to catch the words, asked, “Where’d you learn that song? I don’t know it.” But Calendar passed on without comment, singing softly to himself:

  “Got my rope and got my saddle,

  Think it best that I skedaddle.

  I don’t want no shotgun weddin’.

  Colorado’s where I’m headin’.”

  But now as they reached the bounteous plains of that territory, with deer and antelope plentiful, Calendar came into his own. He had a rifle made by Christian Sharps of Harper’s Ferry, a handsome blue-steel affair that laid a bullet accurately at two hundred yards. Six cowboys would ride out for deer, but only he, stalking silently in his own way, would come back with venison.

  “How do you do it?” Jim asked one day.

  “I look,” he said, and it was obvious that he wished no further questions.

  Buck the wrangler was an outcast because of his awful smell; he really had no choice. But Calendar ostracized himself deliberately because he preferred being alone. He wanted to be on the prairie with his Sharps rifle and a good horse, and that was all. He did nothing to offend the other cowboys, but he did avoid ordinary human contacts. The west contained hundreds like him, silent men who could shoot straight and survive anywhere.

  One morning as the cowboys were heading north onto that great empty plateau which fills the area between the Platte and the Arkansas, they saw a mass of low shapes on the horizon.

  “What’s that?” Poteet called to Person, and he shouted back, “It can’t be Indians.” Everyone brought his guns into position and watched as the shapes moved closer. They spread over a huge area, and finally Person galloped back, shouting, “Buffalo!” and soon a gigantic herd of black beasts bore down upon the cowboys.

  They were coming from the northwest and heading for the southeast, and the front of the column, if it could be called such, was about four miles across—four miles of milling buffalo. Behind the leaders the mighty herd covered the earth for a score of miles, a massive black-brown unit that seemed to move with a single purpose.

  “Hold the cattle!” Poteet shouted as the great beasts came down upon them.

  The buffalo were now less than a hundred yards away, coming at the men at an angle. The cattle, bemused by such a moving mass, seemed hypnotized, and slowly, without the men’s being aware of what was happening, the buffalo herd parted slightly, the leaders going north and south of the longhorns. The Texans, with all their herd and horses, were encapsulated in the midst of the buffalo.

  For hours this incredible movement of animals continued. At times Jim could reach out his hand and feel them passing beneath it, one by one, large hairy creatures with handsome bearded faces and dark, piercing eyes. The animals became familiar and then tedious. They were so docile that the men began tugging at their horns and patting their rumps as they went past, and still they came, the last remnant of that enormous herd of thirty million that had once roamed the land between the two rivers.

  “Ain’t they ever gonna pass?” Savage called.

  When the final straggler was gone, the Texans were silent, as if they had just come from church, until Mr. Poteet said, “I never saw anything like that before,” and Mr. Skimmerhorn said, “You may never see it again,” and Ragland said, “Why, you think they’re goin’ somewheres?” and Mr. Skimmerhorn said, “Yes, to their death.”

  No one could believe it. “Took four hours to pass,” Ragland said, and Savage asked, “How would you know, you ain’t got no watch,” and Ragland said, “I can tell.”

  Calendar suddenly spurred his horse, galloped onto a little hill, dismounted, dropped to one knee, and with great precision aimed his Sharps at a buffalo and sent a bullet into the spot where the neck joined the body. The stricken animal twisted to the right, tried to control its legs, then collapsed in a spasm. It was a perfect kill.

  “What in hell did you do that for?” Poteet raged when Calendar rode back, abandoning the carcass.

  “Man’s got to know how to use his gun,” Calendar said, and that’s all he would say. Jim rode guard with him that night and tried vainly to engage him in conversation. No use—the thin Texan attended his rounds, singing in his whispery voice:

  “She was bright and she was pretty,

  Sweetest gal in Kansas City.

  But her maw was a real terror.

  I’m headin’ north to hide my error.”

  The presence of the buffalo, so many for so long a time, and the firing of Calendar’s rifle, had baffled the longhorns, and they showed signs of unrest. Jim, as he circled them singing his own song, could see that they were going to be troublesome, and Mean Red, the steer who had turned back in the river, started once to head for open country, but Calendar anticipated the move and rode at him briskly, waving the Sharps in the steer’s face until the brute turned back.

  “Nice ridin’,” Jim said as they passed, but Calendar made no answer.

  They prevented trouble that night, but on the next the damnedest thing happened. Mr. Skimmerhorn, returning from his ten-to-twelve guard, dismounted and stepped smack in the middle of Coker’s McClellan saddle. His foot got trapped in the opening and he kicked to free himself, but the saddle could not be shaken off, and he stumbled into the fire, knocking over the coffeepot. Them was a sharp clatter—and the cattle were off.

  It is said that no man has ever seen the start of a stampede. He hears an unfamiliar noise, sees a blur, and within one second three thousand cattle who appeared to have been sleeping are on their feet, galloping.

  “Stampede!” Calendar shouted, just once. Then, tightlipped, he sped into the night.

  “Stampede!” flashed through the camp, and each man leaped out of his blankets, grabbed for the bridle of his night horse and set out automatically in the direction of the greatest noise.

  “Where’s my saddle?” Coker shouted in the darkness.

  “Get the damned thing off my foot,” Skimmerhorn yelled, and the two wrestled for a moment, finally freeing Skimmerhorn. Then each leaped for his horse, and only Nacho Gómez was left alone in the camp.

  This was a strange and wild stampede. Mercifully, the land was flat, so there was no danger of plunging down a sudden arroyo, b
ut being flat, it also encouraged the animals to run, and all that night they did so, not in one direction, but in a hundred.

  Each cowboy settled upon some fleeing group of longhorns, thinking that he was working the main body, but each fought with only a fragment. Lasater, riding like a ghost demented, turned a large bunch into a milling circle, effectively stopping them, only to find that as he did so, a much larger herd swept past, luring his group behind them.

  Gompert managed to intercept Mean Red and some six hundred of his followers, but this accomplished nothing, because they represented only a small portion of the herd, and besides, he had no one to help him hold them, and when another group roared past, their hoofs thundering on the hard earth, Mean Red and his longhorns joined them, and were seen no more that night.

  By two in the morning R. J. Poteet’s longhorns were scattered over a large portion of middle Colorado. There seemed no discernible order in the cowboys’ attempts to reassemble them; Poteet and Person, well schooled in such affairs, were as powerless as the novices, riding first here, then there, cursing the while.

  “Bring some discipline into this!” Poteet shouted at his black assistant, and Person, futilely trying to chase down several hundred cows and young bulls, called back, “Yessir!” All that night, to Poteet’s disgust, groups of cattle and cowboys rampaged across the flat prairie, and when dawn broke, the animals were scattered in at least fourteen different groups. Poteet, surveying the scene in the beautiful pale light that comes before sunrise, could only say, “Christ!”

  He then began to direct a sensible effort at bringing the far-flung cattle back to one spot. “Person! Get that bunch over on the horizon! Coker! Bring in those strays and get a center started.”

  It was noon before the exhausted cowboys succeeded in reassembling the herd, and when Poteet made a rough count, he concluded that some two hundred were missing. “Where can they be!” he asked the men, for the prairie was so flat that any rise could be seen for five or six miles, and after riding out in various directions, the cowboys reported, “No cattle anywhere,” and then Jim Lloyd, who was always gazing at the horizon in search of birds or antelope, cried, “Look!” and there on a distant hill the missing cattle were grazing, their black silhouettes showing against the first rays of the sun.

  Fetch ’em,” Poteet cried in disgust, and Jim and Calendar rode in silence for at least seven miles to bring back the docile creatures. When they approached camp, Mean Red, who had led them on their escapade, broke into a trot, delighted to rejoin the herd and ready for the next gallop.

  “That one we get rid of,” Poteet said, but before anyone could ask how, Nate Person rode back from a scouting trip to the north with the ominous news: “Indians.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Poteet said. “Not again!” And for the first time on this trip the cowboys saw R. J. wilt. For a moment his shoulders sagged, but just for a moment. “All right!. All right!” he shouted. “Form up.” And he placed his men at strategic positions from which they could repel the Indian attack. The preparation was unnecessary.

  Across the prairie came a file of bedraggled Indians on fleshless horses. They were led by an old chief, a dumpy little fellow wearing a tall-crowned hat with a single feather. “They ain’t Comanche,” Lasater whispered.

  They were Arapaho, emaciated and without spirit. “Food,” the old chief pleaded.

  “We got no food,” Ragland replied.

  “Food. We are starving,” the old man pleaded a second time.

  Mr. Poteet rode up and asked, “What’s he want, Gompert?”

  “Food. Says his tribe is starving.”

  “They look it.”

  Poteet left the Indians to talk with Skimmerhorn. “They’re your cattle,” he said. “Let’s give them one,” Skimmerhorn said, and Gompert, overhearing the decision, yelled, “Let’s give ’em Mean Red!” and the cowboys applauded, so Mr. Poteet rode back to the Indians and said, “Mr. Skimmerhorn here says ...”

  “Did you say Skimmerhorn?” the old man asked. “Yes,” Skimmerhorn replied.

  “I am Lost Eagle.”

  The two men sat their horses, uneasy, each looking directly into the eyes of the other, saying nothing, and after a while Mr. Skimmerhorn rode closer and extended his hand to the old man, and indicated three steers the Indians could have.

  “We are not beggars,” Lost Eagle said. “We are starving. There is no way left for us to feed ourselves,” and he rode to each of the cowboys, shaking his hand and thanking him for his generosity.

  That was how Mean Red left the herd. The nights were peaceful now and daytime work was kept to a minimum, for Mr. Poteet was in no hurry to cover the last two hundred miles. “He don’t fool me none,” Ragland told the men around the campfire. “He’s lollygaggin’ so’s them critters’ll put on weight.”

  In these last days Jim had his first good chance to study the plains of Colorado, and everything he saw pleased him: the golden-brown color, the gently rising sweeps, the hidden. swales, the rounded hills, the limitless horizon darkening at the edges, and day after day the cloudless sky, an arc of blue enclosing an untouched paradise. “If I ever saw land made for cattle,” he told Savage, “this is it.” He liked especially the crystal air, thinner than the humid atmosphere of Texas and infinitely cleaner. A man could breathe this air and feel each particle creeping into his lungs, bringing health.

  As trail’s end came closer, so did the men. Intense friendships sprang up where before there had been only courteous respect. “I got to say that for a nigger, Nate Person knows his horses,” Coker admitted, and Ragland, no great lover of Mexicans, paid a similar grudging tribute to Nacho Gómez: “He sure knows how to make crusty biscuits.”

  They spoke often of Mule Canby, and when they did, Jim felt remorse at not having paid Canby the ten dollars he owed him for the Army Colt’s. “How will he earn his livin’ with only one arm?” he asked.

  “Lotsa men with one arm make it,” Coker said. “You disqualify all the men with one arm or one leg, hell, you’d have to throw out half the men in South Calinky. We had a bad war.”

  “Speakin’ of one leg,” Lasater said, “they was this pretty little gal in San Antonio had only one leg. All the women felt sorry for her. ‘What’s Letitia gonna do with one leg?’ And you know, all the men felt sorry for her too, so as a result little Letitia got more ...”

  Here Mr. Poteet interrupted, indicating with a nod that Jim Lloyd was in the audience, and Lasater ended lamely, “She got more attention than most gals with two legs.” Jim felt he understood what Lasater was leading up to.

  There was a lot of joshing, too. Again and again cowboys recalled Old Rags “tryin’ to jump the Pecos and fallin’ flat on his ass,” and Ragland protested that if he had had a fair run at the river he could have jumped it ... “but you saw for yourself how the bank was slippy and downhill.”

  “Hell, on the best day you ever lived you couldn’t jump that river,” Savage responded. So a small wager was arranged, and Mr. Poteet and Mr. Skimmerhorn were given the job of stepping off eighteen feet, with a clean level approach, and a heavy starting line was drawn in the earth, and Savage said, “One inch over that line and you lose.”

  So Ragland backed way up, scrunched up his body, yelled, “Here we go!” and came tearing down the approach, arms and legs flying in all directions. As he approached the line, he gathered his strength in one mighty effort and sailed a good six inches beyond the far bank of the river.

  “My God! He done it!” Lasater shouted, and now the men entered their endless and tedious review: “It’s true that Old Rags fell in the Pecos when he tried it in Texas, but up here, with a fair chance to run ... hell, he cleared it and then some.”

  Jim, watching the cowboys in these final days, experienced a sadness he could not control. He saw things clearly. If this particular group could be held together, each man lending strength to his companion, they could build themselves a good life. Even Lasater might be kept in line, but when they broke up and e
ach had to fend for himself, troubles might well overtake them. Not Mr. Poteet or Nate Person. They were grown men, solidly constructed; you could trust them anywhere, and they’d get the job done.

  But Lasater? Wild, splendid Lasater who would risk anything. He was bound to run into trouble, for basically he was weak. Jim prayed that Mr. Poteet would allow Lasater to stay with him for the trip back to Texas.

  And Ragland, he was sure to get himself mixed up with women and make a mess of one affair after another ...

  Then he began to think of the animals left dead on this trail. His own cow, wandering bereft across the alkali flats ... Stonewall shot dead at the moment of triumph ... the cattle drowned at the crossing ... the dead buffalo ...

  God, he wished he could ride forever with these men. Just keep riding toward some distant horizon behind which the Comanche and the Kansans and the unfordable rivers lay. But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.