Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Now Calendar was close to the leaders and he could discern which of them had to be shot first. Looking back to where Harker waited with his own Sharps, Calendar signaled that he was about to begin.

  Methodically he cocked his rifle, inserted the brass cartridge and listened as the block moved snugly back into position. He set the trigger, adjusted the monstrous gun in its tripod and aimed at the lungs of the lead animal. Stroking the front trigger lightly, he heard a whoosh, not the crack of the normal rifle but the heavy push of a cannon.

  The bullet sped accurately and with tremendous force. Striking the lead buffalo in the side, it penetrated both lungs, and the bewildered animal dropped to the ground. The rest of the herd began their invariable ritual of milling around, sniffing the fallen beast, then standing still as though waiting for a decision. During this time, which might last as long as forty minutes, the hunters had the herd at their mercy. A stand, it was called, and the trick was to pick off the waiting animals with a clean shot, ledged between the horn and the ear so as to produce immediate death, a swift sinking to the ground without even a muted bellow of pain. Despite the noise of the rifles, which somehow the buffalo never learned to heed, the animals remained unaware of danger.

  Working methodically, Harker and Calendar killed nineteen buffalo, reloading with care and shifting their tripods from time to time. But on the twentieth shot Harker had the bad luck to fire low, striking an old bull in the right rear leg and causing him to thrash about, dangling the useless leg and bellowing. This put the whole herd into a frenzy, and one cow, sensing the danger at last, started off at a gallop, taking the remaining animals with her. It was no use to shoot blindly at retreating buffalo; cartridges must not be wasted.

  Now the skinners moved in, men skilled with knives. They worked in pairs, throwing the carcass on its back and slitting the belly from tail to throat. Ropes were attached to the skin, and horses pulled the heavy robes loose. The carcass, of course, was left to rot, but a good robe with the flesh cleaned off might bring as much as three dollars. Properly tanned, it could go as high as twelve.

  “We nearly had ourselves a stand,” Harker said that night as he and Calendar made up the cartridges for the next day. “We would of had it, but I hit that damned bull in the leg.” He had aimed right, had fired right. “Musta been a light charge of powder,” he surmised. “Hell, in this business, anything can go wrong.

  “We’re doin’ God’s work, you could say,” he told the men. “I heard General Phil Sheridan in Austin, and there’s no man knows the west like General Phil. And he said that the west will not be worth a damn till every buffalo is killed. Every one.”

  “What was his thinkin’?” one of the skinners asked.

  “Hell, it’s clear. We wipe out the buffalo, the Indian has got to go on the reservation, where he belongs. When they start to starve, what choice do they have but to obey?”

  The buffalo men considered this for some time, and Harker explained, “When you face an enemy they’s two things you can do. Kill him or starve him. The ministers and the newspaper people and them damn fools in Washington won’t let us kill the Indians off, like we should, but by God, if we eliminate the buffalo, like we’re doin’, we can sure as hell starve ’em into submission.”

  The slaughter continued—twenty-three ... thirty ... sixteen, and on one memorable day, fifty-seven, killed in two lots, one in the morning and another in the late afternoon when everyone thought the day was finished.

  The line of carcasses alerted the Comanche to the fact that Texans had invaded their territory, and an assault was launched, with many Indians riding swiftly at the three wagons, but Harker had his men ready.

  He and Calendar, with their Sharps reloading in seconds, sat stolidly behind one of the wagons, resting their small cannon on the framework, and carefully picked off one Comanche after another. The same practical principle applied as in hunting buffalo: take it slow, pick off the leaders, throw the tribe into confusion.

  Whoosh! While Harker reloaded, Calendar drew a sight on a young brave who was shouting orders, and he fell in a heap.

  Whoosh! It was very much like a buffalo stand—resolute gunners working professionally and bringing down the enemy.

  When nine bodies lay scattered through the sage, the Comanche withdrew. In previous forays they had often encountered stubborn resistance from white men, but never this quiet, deadly fire.

  “We showed ’em!” Harker exulted that night. “A few more days like this and we’ll have this territory cleaned of buffalo and Indians both.”

  “They oughta give us a medal,” one of the skinners said.

  “General Sheridan suggested that,” Harker said. “I was talkin’ with him at his hotel and he told me, ‘Harker, they oughta cast gold medals for men like you. One side a buffalo, other side an Indian. You’re doin’ the work of civilization.’ What he meant, as I heard later, was that when we get through, the plains’ll be a decent place for proper settlers.”

  This observation was digested by the men, none of whom had much use for civilization, and after a while Calendar made one of the few comments he was to utter this summer: “Proper settlers is sometimes more of a pain in the ass than Indians ... or buffalo either.”

  As he said these words he was looking at the open prairie to the west, and on the next day, when he was far ahead of the wagons, he came upon his big chance and he knew exactly what to do about it.

  He was in Colorado Territory, north of the Arkansas, when some sixth sense warned him that buffalo might be grazing ahead. Dismounting, he crept over the brow of the hill and saw below him several hundred large animals, one of the last major remnants of the southern herd. For a moment he considered riding back to alert Harker, for it would take two guns to handle this herd properly, but some movement among the animals to the north warned him that he had no time to spare.

  He therefore crept back over the hill to get his rifle and tripod and four dozen cartridges. Crawling slowly to the buffalo, he positioned himself downwind but in a location from which he could knock down the leader. Adjusting his tripod, he sat behind it, his thin legs spread like a V, his eye at gun level.

  Patiently, and without visible excitement, he dropped the lead animal with a shot through the lungs and watched as the others began to mill around. Blowing into the breech, he reloaded and killed the first of the standing buffalo. Time after time he fired with sober calculation, killing his buffalo with precision. On the twenty-sixth kill he uttered his only words: “I think I got me a stand.”

  It looked as if he could fire at the animals forever, but there was a limitation and he knew it. If he fired any faster than once every forty seconds, the barrel of his rifle would accumulate so much heat it would expand, thick as it was, and it might not cool to its former accuracy.

  So he worked slowly, feeling the barrel after each shot. He wished to hell he had a canteen of water and more bullets. Thirty-two, thirty-nine, forty-three. The huge beasts fell in the dust and still the herd could not comprehend what was happening. Can’t be nothin’ stupider than a buffalo, Calendar thought. They deserve to die.

  And then, as he fired his forty-sixth shot, help came. Harker, hearing from a distance the slow, rhythmic firing, guessed that Calendar might have himself a stand, and now he came creeping over the hill with a canteen of water and five dozen more bullets. When Calendar saw him he was so delighted that tears of gratitude almost came to his eyes.

  “Jesus!” Harker whispered. “Have you got yourself a stand!” He gave Calendar the water and watched as the hunter cooled off his rifle. When Calendar, in sign language, asked if Harker wanted to go back for his own rifle and join the kill, the boss shook his head. “It’s your stand,” he whispered. “Let’s see what you can do.”

  So Calendar, still sitting with his legs at a V behind the tripod, methodically shot a fifth dozen, then a sixth, then a seventh. “Christ, you got eighty-five, eighty-six buffalo down there,” Harker said.

  “Eighty-four,�
� Calendar said, watering the barrel on the outside, pouring some down the inside and letting it flow through the open breech.

  Still the stupid buffalo made no move. Seven dozen of their mates lay dead and they were unable to adjust to that fact, because none of the dead had thrashed about or bellowed.

  “Eighty-five, eighty-six,” Harker counted. “Take it easy, and you got your hundred.”

  It was unlikely that the skinners could handle so many. The surplus would be left to rot with their hides on, but the gun was cool now and Calendar might as well try for a record. He killed two more of the big animals, then gunned down a medium-sized cow, but on his ninetieth shot the cartridge must have been defective, for it struck far short of the herd, ricocheted and hit a cow in the rump.

  She bellowed, shook her leg and started to gallop. Before Calendar could fire again, the herd was gone, leaving eighty-nine dead.

  The third hunt can be reported briefly. In the late summer of 1873 those few Arapaho still trying to survive on the cramped remnants of the reservation at Rattlesnake Buttes ran so short of food that they faced actual starvation. The government said it wanted to help and even sent messages of commiseration, but the financial panic restricted funds in the east and no money could be spared to feed Indians. Chief Lost Eagle, now an old man of sixty-three with breaking teeth, made one last appeal, sending a delegation to Major Mercy in Denver, and the major rode out to the reservation and cursed the deprivation he saw, but he had neither the power nor the money to alleviate it.

  So it was decided by the younger braves to try one last buffalo hunt, even though this would take them from the reservation and across lands on which settlers had begun to appear. Lost Eagle was too old to lead the foray, so command devolved to his son Red Wolf, and the remnants of the once-mighty Arapaho set forth.

  What a pitiful lot they were. Their horses were lank; if buffalo were sighted, the horses would scarcely be able to keep up with them, let alone overtake and ride them down. The braves were in worse condition—emaciated, sullen men who could not comprehend what was happening to them. No white man in the path of these Indians had much to fear; one rifle blast would scatter the lot.

  They went south, entering upon that land between the Platte and the Arkansas, and there they searched for buffalo. Each morning weary scouts rode to the four compass directions and saw much rolling land, all empty. Somewhere there had to be buffalo. They had heard reports of the train whose engineer had run into the middle of a herd. But they could find none.

  Two long weeks they spent in the saddle, chasing illusions and finding emptiness. They grew so weak from lack of food, they could scarcely ride, but still they searched, and in the end they might have perished, actually starved to death on their prairie, had they not stumbled upon an area north of the Arkansas where the carcasses of eighty-nine buffalo lay rotting in the sun.

  The men were so famished that one actually ate some decayed meat, but Red Wolf saw the folly of this and spurred his horse so that be stood between his men and the meat. Holding his right hand aloft, he gradually drove them back, and after a while the one who had eaten was gripped in dreadful pain, dying with foam on his lips, and the others acknowledged the wisdom of their chief.

  He took no consolation. Astride his horse he looked down at the slaughter, nearly a hundred buffalo slain and not even the tongues removed. Some hunter had killed so many that his skinners could not keep up, and twenty of the animals were left to rot with their hides untouched.

  “What kind of men are they?” Red Wolf cried in anguish. “That they kill the food we need and do not even eat?”

  And he suffered the ultimate indignity, the mortal shame of the leader: to lead a people and be unable to feed them.

  It was at that moment that his evil luck changed. An outfit came over the hill at the Arkansas, trailing cattle up the Skimmerhorn Trail to Wyoming, and the trail boss took pity on the starving Indians and gave them two old steers.

  Red Wolf allowed his braves to slaughter one of the longhorns, then exercised severe discipline as he made his ravenous braves save one to drive back for the women on the reservation. Revitalized by this accidental food, the hunters scoured the prairie, convinced they must encounter buffalo, but none were to be found; between the Platte and the Arkansas, there were no more buffalo.

  Red Wolf, sitting beside his horse on the last night of the hunt, told his men, “The old days have passed. We shall hunt no more forever.” The younger men asked what they would do instead, and Red Wolf said, “Through hunger the Great White Father has made us submit to his command. We must leave the buttes and go to some smaller reservation, as he directs.”

  The young braves protested: “This is our land. It was given to us for as long as the waters flow and the birds fly.”

  “The White Father wants it, and we must go.” He never deviated from this harsh decision and as soon as he returned to Rattlesnake Buttes, bringing back from the hunt the drying meat from one old Texas steer, he advised his father, “Lost Eagle, now we must go,” and that old chief fingered his Buchanan and agreed.

  They sent a messenger to Denver to inform Major Mercy that they were now prepared to surrender their lands forever, and he sent a telegram to Washington, and a commissioner was sent out who held long powwows, assuring the Arapaho they were making the right decision and that in their new home, far to the north in Dakota, there would be ample food and a secure home “for as long as the grass shall grow and the eagle fly.”

  So in late summer the last group of Arapaho departed. They rode north on spavined horses, wrapped in tattered blankets. The gaily painted buffalo hides that recalled the history of their people were gone; the garments of elk and porcupine quill were gone; the young braves riding ahead to scout for buffalo were no more. The ancient ways were lost.

  As they reached the crest of the white hills which marked the northern border of their truncated reservation, Chief Lost Eagle, wearing his hat with the turkey feather, paused to look back upon the buttes and the Platte and the prairie, and there was no sadness in him: “Often in the past Our People were forced to make a new life in a new land, and always we had the courage to succeed. We were here at the buttes less than six generations and now we move to something different. This time I do believe the White Father will keep his promises. In Dakota we shall grow strong again.” He kicked his pony, and the Indians vanished forever from the spacious lands they loved so deeply and had protected so well.

  The Clarion could express no sorrow at their passing:

  Yesterday we went out to the buttes to witness the departure of Lo from our fair land. Good riddance. They left Colorado for the last time riding mangy ponies, most of them stolen, we feel sure, and wearing blankets which would have profited from a good washing. They were a miserable lot of flea-ridden, filthy, ignorant, disgusting animals, and our only regret at watching them go was that Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn could not have been here to see his prophecy fulfilled.

  We hear that on the other side of the mountain the Utes are kicking up trouble again. We warn them that if they stick their noses over this way, we will shoot them off. They’ll get far worse from us than they ever got from the Arapaho. Colorado will never merit statehood until we complete the job of exterminating these vermin.

  When Oliver Seccombe watched the Arapaho depart, he realized that this was the moment to appropriate the good grazing lands around Rattlesnake Buttes, and by the judicious acquisition of two key parcels of land, he secured the whole area for the Venneford Ranch. Ninety-nine hundredths of the former Indian lands were actually public property, open to everyone, but Seccombe and his men made sure that no one could get to them.

  That summer of 1873 was to be an exciting one for Oliver Seccombe. Henry Buckland was proving himself to be a shrewd and sensible businessman, and he required little instruction before grasping the essentials of any operation. After a visit to one line camp, he put his finger on the permanent problem: “Land, Seccombe! We must own our own grazing lan
d ... have it secure in our possession.”

  He was pleased with the devices Seccombe had used to acquire control of water, but even so, the total seemed inadequate. And then good fortune struck for the Englishmen. The Union Pacific Railroad volunteered to help them out.

  Back in 1862, when the United States government had determined that a railroad was needed to bind the nation together, Congress hit upon a clever device for financing such a major undertaking. The nation was too poor to pay for the road out of tax funds, but there was an ingenious way to finance it. From the center of the main track, reaching out ten miles on each side, the government would give the railroad land, with no charge of any kind. This land in its original barren condition would be worth about twenty cents an acre, but with a prosperous railroad running through it, it might become worth as much as four dollars an acre. By selling this land to would-be settlers, the railroad would earn back more than the cost of building the road. The western range would be settled; the nation would have a link to the Pacific; towns would appear—and all at no expense to the taxpayer. It was one of the sagest devices ever invented by Congress.