The second significant thing he did had consequences more far-reaching. By the middle of May in that first season, when it became apparent that the land was good for vegetables, he was in the store one afternoon when the latest contingent of miners came through, eager to buy food, and they spoke so much of impending civil war that Brumbaugh had a sudden vision of what would probably happen. “Levi,” he said when the men were gone, “there’s gonna be a war east of Mississippi and precious little food will trickle out here. If you sell me more river land, I can slip in an extra crop. I’ll grow twice as much, and you’ll make a fortune selling it.”
“I have no spare river land,” Levi said regretfully.
Brumbaugh, a compact, determined man, sat hunched over the end of a box, drawing designs with his finger. “They tell me,” he said cautiously, “that you have thousands of acres you haven’t mentioned.”
“I do,” Levi replied frankly. “Over at Chalk Cliff. So dry it won’t even grow weeds.”
“How’d you get it?”
“From the Indians. My wife’s father ...” He decided not to go into that intricate web. “You can have land up there if you want, but you won’t grow anything on it.”
“And you say your river land’s all gone?”
“Mine is. The Indians still have some.”
“Oh, no! If I have to work as hard as I work, I want to own the land. And I want title to it. I got robbed once.”
“You’ll get title when we become a legal territory.”
Brumbaugh was not listening. With a dirty finger he had drawn on the box the outlines of the Platte River and the projection of his land lying along it, and as the lines squiggled through the dust they assumed a reality, as happens when men who love land look at maps. This was the river, this was his land, and slowly within the evening darkness the top of the box became alive, and on it there was water and grass and growing vegetables, and it was then that Potato Brumbaugh glimpsed the miracle, the whole marvelous design that could turn The Great American Desert into a rich harvestland.
Next morning he got up before dawn, scouted the reach of the Platte River as it ran past his land and satisfied himself that it could be done. But to make sure, he marked a spot high in a cottonwood tree which stood at the eastern end, then retreated to the far western end and watched it as he walked slowly along the riverbank. Yes! The river did drop perceptibly in its journey past the Brumbaugh land. His daring plan was practical. So he ran to his shack, grabbed his shovel and pickax and went to work.
Starting at the extreme western tip, he began to dig a channel which would bring water from the Platte, not onto his low-lying land, which was already well watered, but onto the first bench, which was arid. He would lead this small man-made arm of the river down the middle of that bench, thus trebling the size of his arable farm, and at the eastern end he would allow the unused water to find its way back to the Platte.
So Brumbaugh harnessed the river and nourished the land. And in the hot summer of 1860 he produced an enormous crop of vegetables, which were sold mainly in Denver. The once-arid land on the bench proved exceptionally fertile as soon as water was brought to it, and Potato Brumbaugh’s farm became the wonder of Jefferson Territory. As he had foreseen that wintry night on Pikes Peak, it was the farmer, bringing unlikely acreages into cultivation by shrewd devices, who would account for the wealth of the future state.
When Brumbaugh drew water off the Platte, he unwittingly established himself as the first man to tap this river for irrigation purposes, so that even a century later when judges of the supreme court of Colorado, or even the Supreme Court of the nation, were called upon to adjudicate water rights relating to the river-rights of indescribable value—they had to come back to one basic consideration:
Priority in the use of water deriving from the Platte River dates to Hans Brumbaugh, who first constructed an irrigation ditch in the year 1859. His rights to this water and the rights of all owners of his land into the endless future must be respected, and all later claims are hereby declared subservient to his.
At the end of the 1860 growing season Potato Brumbaugh came to the trading post and plopped two hundred dollars on the counter. “Levi, can you forward this to St. Louis and have the bank there send it along to my wife in Illinois? I want her to join me.”
When his wife and children stood at the western end of the holding, near the spot where he had dug the ditch, they were overwhelmed by the size of the farm he pointed out. It seemed bigger than a county in Illinois, and as they stepped onto it for the first time, it was fortunate that they could not envisage the incredible obstacles they would face in trying to hold on to it.
The relationship of a man to his land is never easy. It is perhaps the noblest relationship in the world, after the family, and certainly the most rewarding. But the land must be won, it must be revered, it must be defended.
On the afternoon of 1868 when John Skimmerhorn delivered his twenty-nine hundred and thirty-six head of cattle to the emerging Venneford Ranch, he happened to look across the milling longhorns and see young Jim Lloyd, still riding drag, but now more like a man than a gangling boy, and it occurred to Skimmerhorn that if he was given control of the Crown Vee cattle, he would require some tested young fellow to look after the far reaches of the ranch.
Accordingly, he spurred his horse and rode to where Oliver Seccombe was eying his new longhorns. “Mr. Seccombe,” Skimmerhorn said, “if you acquire the land ...”
“I’ve already acquired a good deal of it. I haven’t been idle while you were on the trail.”
“Does it extend as far as you proposed?”
“Farther.”
“Then you’ll need some trustworthy hands, and there’s none better than the boy who came north with us.” Skimmerhorn signaled for Jim to join them, and Seccombe was surprised at his youth. “You’re still a kid!” he protested.
“If you, drive cattle from Jacksborough across the Llano,” Skimmerhorn said, “you’re no longer a kid.”
Seccombe shook his head and was about to dismiss the idea, when Skimmerhorn added, “This boy has fought off Kansas outlaws and killed a Comanche chief.”
“He has?” Seccombe asked in disbelief. “Hell, he can’t be more than fourteen.”
“He can be anything from fourteen to fifty,” Skimmerhorn said. “Part of the reason your cattle got here, sir, was the courage of this boy.”
“He’s hired,” Seccombe said.
Jim Lloyd’s first ride across the vast domain with which he would be associated for the remainder of his life was an exploration in grandeur, for on the morning when he and Skimmerhorn set forth to position the line camps, they started by riding westward. A hawk flew before them, uttering a wild “Scree, scree” very high in the heavens and flying in three distinct ways: motionless soaring, hovering to inspect the land below, and then the awful swift dive when any small victim was spotted. No birds on earth, not even the eagle or the falcon, were more majestic than these hawks of the west, ranging endlessly over the prairie.
Skimmerhorn had decided that to manage the ranch properly, five line camps would be needed, each with a rude but sleeping six men, plus a stone barn for horses, and he wanted to number them from east to west. Selecting a bleak and lonely spot north of Chalk Cliff, he said, “Here’s Camp Five.” Its back was to the mountains and it overlooked an immense stretch of empty land. He staked out a protected site, to which Jim would later return with the construction crew. “You’ll be able to find it,” Skimmerhorn said. “Just keep your eye on that little stone beaver climbing the face of the tallest mountain.”
Skimmerhorn wanted Line Camp Four convenient to the new Union Pacific Railroad, and this required that they expand into Wyoming Territory. At first the new land was much like the old, completely empty, but toward dusk one day they saw to the east that low piñon trees had somehow established themselves in spite of wind and drought; they dotted the land with attractive specks of dark green. Their shapes were twisted and t
hey did not grow high, nor were there enough of them to form a forest, but they did create a scene of great natural beauty.
“This’ll be a fine spot,” Jim said approvingly, but Skimmerhorn delayed decision, for as the sun set he caught a glimpse of something farther east that attracted him. Before dawn he was in the saddle, and as the sun came up he and Jim entered one of the notable areas on the ranch—a hillside covered with piñon trees and marked by wind-eroded pinnacles that looked like gnomes marching from the pages of a German fairy tale. On a southern exposure, protected from the wind and overlooking an infinite expanse of prairie, Skimmerhorn located his camp.
“All the cowboys’ll be wanting duty up here,” he predicted. “But not because it’s beautiful.” As he spoke, the whistle from a train on the Union Pacific sounded to the north, and he laughed. “When we build this camp, Jim, we’ll have hell keeping the men out of Cheyenne,” and that night when they spread their sleeping bags Jim could see in the west the lights of that hell-raising railhead city.
They left the piñons and rode toward Rattlesnake Buttes, west of which they located Line Camp Three. It would be a favorite of those cowboys, for here they could scale the red buttes and generally enjoy themselves in one of the rugged areas of the west.
But it was on the eastern reaches, when they were searching for sites from which immense prairies could be controlled, that Jim caught once more that feeling of Colorado’s dormant grandeur. He had first experienced this sensation on the morning after the fight with the Kansas outlaws, when the immensity of the prairie exploded before him. Then the emptiness was a new sensation; now it was home. And as soon as he rode east and reached those limitless horizons, with not a tree or a trail in sight, he sensed that he had found his universe, and said, “Mr. Skimmerhorn, when you give the men their jobs, I’d like to work out here.” Skimmerhorn laughed. “You like this?”
“This is good country,” Jim said.
They located Line Camp Two about halfway to the Nebraska line, and Line Camp One at the mouth of a canyon in an area so bleak and forbidding that only someone like Jim could appreciate it. “We’ll put our strongest cattle out here and let them fend for themselves,” he suggested, but Skimmerhorn, kneeling to inspect the sturdy grass that covered the area, said, “No, this grass is so rich it’ll do wonders for our weakest cattle. As soon as we get back to headquarters, Jim, I want you to ride into Denver and file for a homestead on this site. Mark off your boundaries now.”
And Jim did, using piles of stones to approximate the corners of the hundred-and-sixty-acre plot to which he could gain title if he successfully lied about his age. A considerable joy welled up as he placed the final corner. “This is to be my land!” he cried, and Mr. Skimmerhorn said, “Not exactly. You homestead it, but when the patent comes through, you sell to the ranch.”
“I don’t want the money!” Jim protested. “I want this canyon.
“The rule is,” Skimmerhorn explained, with some coughing, “that our cowboys file on the critical homesteads, then deed them back to the company.
“I’ve always wanted my own land,” Jim said stubbornly.
“So have I,” Skimmerhorn confessed. “In the years when my father drifted from one place to another ...”
“You have yours.”
“Half an acre,” Skimmerhorn said contemptuously. “I wanted land like this.” And he swept his right arm through a far reach, then dropped it. “Fellows like you and me, Jim, we’ll get our land by managing it for others.”
They rode home by following the Platte, and for the first time Jim came to appreciate this extraordinary river. In some places it reminded him of the Pecos, and he told Skimmerhorn, “Old Rags could jump this,” but at other times he saw its power and its tattered magnificence. “Just as you think you see it,” he said, “it changes completely. It must be the only river in the world that’s more islands than water.”
On one of the islands Jim found the bird which, even more than the soaring hawk, would epitomize for him this strange new land. It was a frail thing, walking delicately through marshes on slim yellow legs. It was attractively colored, with touches of yellow and brown and flecked gray, but what distinguished it was its remarkable bill, a long thing which turned up sharply at the end. Jim had never seen a bird like this and he laughed with pleasure as it tiptoed along the shore of the river, dipping its curved beak into wormholes.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Avocet.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It patrols the river,” Skimmerhorn said, and they watched the antics of the bird until night fell.
One morning Jim rose early and looked west to the mountains, and the day was so unsullied that they could see the Rockies from a distance which Skimmerhorn calculated to be a hundred and fifty miles. “That’s what’s good about this territory,” Skimmerhorn said. “You don’t find air like this in St. Louis.”
So Jim Lloyd returned to Zendt’s Farm and homesteaded his quarter section at the mouth of the canyon where Line Camp One was to be, but when he reached the land office he found three other Venneford cowboys going through the paper work to acquire other choice sites, and he asked them, “You takin’ out the land for the ranch?” and the men whispered, “Ssssh! Don’t let anyone hear you say that. It’s illegal.” Jim knew the whole arrangement was illegal, but like the others, he needed the job.
From the moment of his arrival in Colorado, Oliver Seccombe had worked fifteen and eighteen hours a day, piecing together a ranch whose Crown Vee brand would be respected throughout the west. During the six months that Skimmerhorn had been absent, Seccombe had assembled the crucial holdings, and now, with a relatively small outlay of British capital, he had his empire consolidated. (See Map 09 – Acquisition of the Land 1870)
It had required a good many more than the seventeen sites he had confidently assumed would do the trick, and it had taken more money than he had anticipated to buy up abandoned holdings, but his cowboys had homesteaded some of the choicest sites for him, and there was that stroke of luck in Elmwood, Illinois.
In 1871 he had gone back to Illinois to buy some good British bulls, Shorthorns and Angus, and had persuaded two of the farmers to come west with their animals, bringing them by railroad as far as Cheyenne. While they were in the area, he conceived the idea of asking them to homestead two quarter sections for him. They saw no harm in this and agreed to sell him the homesteads once they were proved up. When they had signed the papers—they never saw the land they were acquiring—he had the further idea of proposing that as a gesture of good will to their friends and relatives in Elmwood, they get sixty or seventy of them to take the train trip west, at Seccombe’s expense, with each taking up a homestead for the benefit of the Venneford Ranch. The good people of Elmwood, eager to see the west, flocked out for a few days and then flocked right back home, but not before filing claims in Denver. In this unorthodox way Seccombe picked up an additional sixty-nine strategic holdings.
By 1872 the Venneford empire was fairly well completed—there were a few farms along the Platte it still needed—and it stretched a hundred and fifty miles from east to west, fifty miles from north to south, for a total of 5,760,000 acres. But it should never be said that the Venneford Ranch owned so much land; its actual holdings were rather modest:
17 parcels purchased outright3,100 acres
37 cowboy homesteads,
beneficially controlled5,920 acres
69 Elmwood, Illinois homesteads,
beneficially controlled11,040 acres
Total ownership, real and beneficial20,060 acres
This meant that of the open range referred to by the Venneford cowboys as “our land,” Seccombe and his absentee masters actually owned, by one device or another, less than one half of one percent. Nor was there any permanence to their control. Each railroad that entered the territory would gobble up its share of the range; any town established in the area would eat up more; homesteaders would nibble away at th
e edges. Each year the total would diminish, until by the end of the century the ranch would be whittled down to reasonable size, say three-quarters of a million acres. Seccombe was right when he said, “We’re borrowing the land.”
Who owned this borrowed land? It belonged to the United States government, and until it was claimed by some adventurous homesteader, it was free for anyone to use. Even in this year of 1873 when the Venneford Ranch was operating at maximum efficiency, if you came out from Iowa and announced that you intended to run two thousand head of longhorns on their open range, you were absolutely free to do so, with two if’s.
If you could get your cattle to water along one of the creeks, which would prove impossible, since all the good watering spots were preempted by the Venneford people. And if you could escape being shot. No one ever knew who did the shooting; certainly it was not Mr. Seccombe, and for sure, not Mr. Skimmerhorn, who raised hell with Seccombe about the things that were going on.
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