Centennial

by James A. Michener

  So the notable skeleton was shipped off to Berlin, which led a Denver politician who had graduated from Yale to ask, “What else would you expect from a Harvard man?”

  The next summer, at Rattlesnake Buttes, Horrible Horace uncovered a striking set of titanothere bones, accompanied by complete skeletons of camels, mammoths and dire wolves. But what gained greatest attention, especially from ranchers in the west, was his discovery in subsequent years of handsome skeletons of four of the progenitors of the horse: eohippus, mesohippus, miohippus and the crucial, determinative merychippus.

  When this learned tyrant ended his excavations, men knew that in ages past the land of Colorado had been shared by gigantic dinosaurs beyond their imagining, and bison with unbelievable horns, and titanotheres and animals not yet visualized, and men became aware of the fact that the earth which they had been assuming was theirs had always belonged to other creatures, too.

  Perhaps the most lasting local effect of Professor Wright’s frenetic invasion came in something he casually said to Jim Lloyd as he was packing up after his dig at Rattlesnake Buttes. He had found a little treasure, an articulated skeleton of eohippus, the tiny creature who had grown into the horse, and as he contemplated it he said, “In their day they must have been as common as rabbits.”

  Jim repeated this to men at the ranch, and sometimes when they saw a jackrabbit tearing across the brown grass, they thought of older days and other grasses, when tiny horses were as common as rabbits.

  What Jim Lloyd hopefully referred to as his “love affair with Clemma Zendt” was not going well. It had never gone well. From the start it had been a ridiculous thing, scarcely involved with love at all. To speak accurately, it had been nothing but a fatuous obsession, but each year it deepened.

  It had begun that July day in 1868 when Mr. Seccombe had accepted Jim as one of his new cowboys. As Jim rode out of Zendt’s Farm that morning to finish the drive, he carried with him a vision of this ravishing Indian girl, and he knew that he needed her. The punishing ride north from Texas, the gunfights that had changed him from a boy to a man and the suspicion that he might never see his mother again made him hunger for friendship, so as soon as he had delivered the longhorns to Venneford, he rode back to the village, presenting himself at the store.

  “Name’s Jim Lloyd,” he said with becoming embarrassment. “I wondered ...”

  He could not finish the sentence. He couldn’t come out and say, “I’d like permission to meet your daughter,” and he became additionally flustered when her older brother banged his way through the store, asking brusquely, “What do you want, sonny?”

  Mrs. Zendt, an understanding woman with dark skin and laughing eyes, had observed the encounter that morning and could guess what Jim’s mission was, so to rescue him from further embarrassment ‘she asked, “Did you wish to open a charge account?”

  “That’s it!” Jim cried, and she explained how she would set aside a page in her store ledger for him, and the solemn attention he paid to her instructions made her realize how old this apparent child really was. “Fourteen going on fifty,” Skimmerhorn had said.

  Knowing that he wanted to see Clemma, she said casually, “Would you care to have a cup of coffee ... in the kitchen ... with my daughter?”

  “Yes!” he blurted, and for the first time he met with Clemma.

  What a delectable child she was that year, thirteen and blossoming, with red in her cheeks and a sly grin. When she had detected him smiling at her as the longhorns forded the Platte, she knew that he would seek her out; she also knew intuitively what tricks to use if she wanted him to return. So, affecting to have no interest in him, she positioned herself so that he could not keep his eyes away from her. And when he did look, she twisted her head in such a flirtatious way that his mouth fell open in amazement at her charm.

  Mr. Skimmerhorn had told him, “She’s part Indian,” and now he saw that this fact showed in her high cheekbones and squarish chin. Her eyes were quite dark and her black hair hung in braids through which were intertwined porcupine quills, in the old fashion. But there was something else, indefinable, that said she was Indian: the total ease with which she moved.

  What he could not see was that she also had the Indian woman’s sense of humor, a mocking view of life which she acquired from her mother and which she now directed at her first suitor. She would make Jim’s life miserable, but also refulgent.

  During the next two years whenever he was in town he tried to talk with her seriously, but she rebuffed him, for she could see him only as an awkward cowboy with few graces, and she was already beginning to set her heart on something more polished and congenial. She studied the strangers who stopped by the store on their way from Omaha to Denver and derived from them her definition of what a gentleman ought to be. As a consequence, she thought of Jim as a child much younger than herself.

  At sixteen Jim decided to do something that would convince her of his seriousness. He chose a Sunday, and in his best clothes rode into the village and tied his horse to the railing in front of the store. There he waited till the Zendts returned from church, and when he saw Levi he walked boldly up to him and asked, “Could I speak to you, Mr. Zendt?” and when the storekeeper nodded, Jim followed him into the parlor. Clutching his hands behind him, he said, “Mr. Zendt, I wish to court your daughter.”

  Levi did not smile. After all, he had married Elly when she was but little older than Clemma, so the idea of formal courtship was not preposterous. He treated Jim with dignity, but pointed out, “James, I see no evidence that Clemma is eager to be courted by you or anyone else. Have you settled the problem with her?”

  “No, but I will.”

  “In such matters, James, it’s best to arrange things first with the girl.”

  “I thought that out of respect for you and Mrs. Zendt ...”

  “We appreciate your good manners, and Clemma will, too.”

  But when he sent Jim to her, she laughed at him. “Who’d be thinking about such things?” she teased, refusing to take him seriously, so that he fled from the store in confusion.

  During the next three years Jim returned often, waiting hungrily for a glimpse of Clemma, but she persisted in ignoring him. This in no way diminished his ardor; his obsession intensified, and when through sheer boredom she allowed him to walk with her one day through the cottonwoods and actually kiss her, he became dizzy. For months thereafter he could remember that kiss; it had burned its way into his mind. He became convinced that Clemma Zendt had been created for him, that only she could fill the other half of his life.

  The other cowboys, a robust crowd, found his behavior mulish and told him, “You better forget that Indian gal and do yourself some good in Cheyenne,” but the idea repelled him, and they began to think he might be effeminate. Then R. J. Poteet came back up the trail with another consignment of longhorns and with him came Bufe Coker, who had decided to try his luck in Colorado.

  “Don’t you underestimate Jim Lloyd,” he told the Venneford hands. “He killed his man at age fourteen.” And the cowboys treated the moonstruck young man with more respect.

  In 1873, when Jim was nineteen, he decided it was time to propose formally. He had a good job, some savings and quarters at the ranch in which to house a family. Again he chose a Sunday, and again he dressed in his best suit, but this time when the Zendts returned from church he ignored Levi and Clemma and went directly to Mrs. Zendt.

  “I truly believe that Clemma’s happiness depends upon marrying me,” he said gravely.

  “That could well be, Jim.”

  “Won’t you reason with her, Mrs. Zendt?”

  “Jim, if she doesn’t ...”

  “Can’t you people see I’m a responsible person?”

  “Of course, Jim. You’d make a wonderful husband ...”

  “Then please speak to her.”

  Mrs. Zendt was embarrassed, not only by Jim’s awkward proposal but by what she was forced to tell him. In decency, Clemma should have brok
en the news, but she had never taken Jim seriously and it had not occurred to her that she owed him this courtesy. So the task was left to her mother.

  “Jim, marriage right now is impossible. Clemma’s going to St. Louis.”

  Jim sat silent. His eyes seemed to lose focus, as if someone had clubbed him over the head with the butt of a rifle. Then, as if from a distance, he heard the words again: “She’s going to St. Louis the way I did when I was her age. For an education. To make a lady of herself. And like me, she’ll come back.”

  And that’s the way it was. Miss Clemma Zendt, age eighteen, held a parasol over her head as they rode in Jim’s wagon to Cheyenne, where she took the Union Pacific to St. Louis. There she boarded with her cousin, Cyprian Pasquinel, the elderly white-haired congressman, who enrolled her in the convent school her mother had attended back in 1845. Her letters home were infrequent.

  After she had been away two months, Jim arrived at the store with a solemn proposition: “If Clemma’s getting this good education in St. Louis, and if I’m going to marry her some day, don’t you think I’d better educate myself right here?” Levi and Lucinda thought this a first-rate idea and proposed that he take lessons from Miss Keller, the middle-aged schoolteacher. So three nights a week, when he was not obliged to be out at Line Camp One or Two, Jim would ride over to the Stumper Farm, where Miss Keller boarded, and do his lessons.

  He learned American history and mathematics and some poetry, and most especially, a sense of the continuity of man and his limitless potential. Miss Keller, a New England woman in her thirties, did not suffer from limited horizons; to her the lessons of Rome and London were as pertinent as those of New York and Chicago, and she believed that by and large those men and women who were openly committed to some worthy goal achieved more than those who were reluctant to associate themselves with anything.

  It was from her that Jim first became aware of the gross injustices under which the west suffered. “It’s like this, Jim. At the end of the Civil War my father bought a farm in Kansas for nine thousand dollars. He paid five in cash, got four in a mortgage. At that time there were x number of dollars in circulation.”

  “What do you mean by x?”

  “From algebra. You remember. An arbitrary unknown.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, every year since then the population in America has increased, but the number of dollars has remained at x. Do you comprehend what this means?”

  “That to pay back his mortgage, your father has less and less chance to get any of those dollars.”

  “Exactly! The system makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

  She spoke also of the railroads. They got this fantastic amount of land from the government, from the west really, from you and me, and when they had their monopoly, they charged us anything they wished. Did you know that it costs an Illinois farmer two dollars to ship his steer a thousand miles? It costs a Colorado farmer four dollars. Same with wheat, same with lumber, same with trade goods coming this way. We are crucified by the railroads, who ought to be our servants.”

  She spoke especially of silver, which Jim had never thought of. “Do you know why this nation is collapsing in panic? Right now? Because the people holding gold dollars won’t allow silver dollars to be cast. They don’t want you and me to be able to buy a silver dollar from the government with one hundred pennies of work. They want to force us into buying gold dollars from them at one hundred and seventy pennies of our work. This nation is staggering to its knees because no money is circulating.”

  Sometimes she became enraged when spelling out an injustice: “Do you know why Englishmen own the ranch you work on? And those other big ranches in Wyoming? Because there’s not enough cash circulating in the United States. Americans like you and my father can’t get your hands on money to buy land and run cattle. My father would just love to own Venneford Ranch ... if he could borrow the money from Chicago bankers the way Englishmen borrow from their London banks.”

  So Jim studied the books she provided, books he could never have stumbled upon by himself: Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man; Alfred Russel Wallace’s Natural Selection; Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Mark Twain’s Roughing It.

  With such guidance Jim made of himself an educated man with a grasp of what was happening not only in New York and Washington but also at Venneford and Line Camp Three.

  The news he got from St. Louis was not good. Travelers returning to Denver sometimes stopped off in Zendt’s Farm to report on how Clemma Zendt was capturing the heart of the gateway city: “She’s attending dances every night, it seemed to us. Very popular with the young officers.”

  One night after class Jim stopped at the store and told the Zendts, “I’m worried. She doesn’t answer my letters ...”

  “Jim!” Lucinda said, pouring coffee and arranging a plate of doughnuts. “I was the same way! Ask Levi.” She laughed and kissed her husband. “I’m sure he must have thought I’d never come back to a little town like this ... after having known St. Louis.”

  A delightful smile came over her face as she recalled those days, and she reached for her husband’s hand. “So many young men,” she mused, “but I came back to my dear little Dutchman.”

  Clemma also came back, in the summer of 1874, a tall slim girl with her black hair coiled on top of her head, and except for high cheekbones, no evidence that she was part Indian. She was a lady now, nineteen years old and beautiful in a new way. She had a certain languor and seemed ill-at-ease in her father’s store. Gratuitously she dropped hints of having been to Chicago and of a visit to New York to see the family of a young officer serving in the forts south of St. Louis.

  She found Jim Lloyd ridiculously stiff and not much fun to be with, for he either spent their time together proposing or airing his newly acquired knowledge of things that did not interest her. She asked him once if he drank, and he did not realize that she was intimating that she wanted a whiskey. Instead, he said with awkward firmness, “Bufe Coker drinks a good deal, but he’s a southerner.”

  When the time came for her to return to St. Louis for her final year she made no pretense of concern for Jim’s feelings and did not even volunteer a kiss, but seeing the despair in his eyes, she leaned from the train window, took his hand and said gaily, “Don’t look so glum, Jim. I’ll be back.”

  On this small shred of hope Jim lived for three months, but at Christmas he could no longer deceive himself. Sitting in the Zendt kitchen, he confided that Clemma had not once written to him, whereupon Mrs. Zendt broke into tears.

  “She wrote to us!” she said bitterly, showing the letter to Jim. And there it was:

  Mom,

  Lt. Jack Ferguson and I were married on December 10. He lives in New York and is very nice. I am going to have a baby soon.

  Clemma

  There was another letter, from Cyprian Pasquinel, and it was brutally frank, the letter of a relative who could not comprehend what had happened under the roof of his hospitality:

  Of all the young men who courted her in our home, she chose with unerring instinct the weakest officer the United States Army has ever stationed in this district. If he stays with her a month after the baby is born, I’ll be the most amazed man in Missouri.

  When this harsh estimate was shown Jim, he sat silently in the Zendt kitchen, drumming his fingers on the table. Twice he tried to speak, but there were tears in his eyes and he seemed afraid lest his voice break. Finally he pushed back his chair and said something the senior Zendts would never forget: “She’ll need me. I must go find her.” He withdrew what money he had in the bank and late that afternoon returned to the ranch, where he saddled his horse, riding all night to reach Cheyenne in time to catch the morning train for St. Louis, where he sought out Cyprian Pasquinel.

  “Turn away from that girl, young man,” the congressman advised.

  “You say that only because she’s an Indian,” Jim countered, willing to grasp at any straw.
/>   Pasquinel laughed at him. “That’s unworthy, and you know it. Her mother is a member of our family. So is Clemma. Simple fact is, she’s inherited all the weaknesses of her uncles. And you know what happened to them.”

  “That’s cruel!” Jim protested, but the congressman stuck to his guns.

  “Forget that wild Indian girl,” he counseled. It was to no avail. Jim spent more than a week searching St. Louis for her, wandering through all parts of the city, hoping to pick up a trace of her—along the waterfront, in the hotels, through the mean streets. But he did not find her.

  The winter of 1875 passed, and no one in Zendt’s Farm could even guess where Clemma might be, or whether her baby was safely born, or whether it was a boy or girl. The Zendts wrote letters to friends in Chicago and New York, and Cyprian Pasquinel made inquiries at the War Department in Washington. All that he discovered was that Lieutenant Ferguson had been dismissed from the service for embezzling government funds. He had taken his discharge in New Orleans and had not been heard from since.

  And then in the spring of that year an army officer was dispatched to Denver to check on the western forts, and one afternoon he stopped by the store to tell Lucinda, “I knew your daughter in St. Louis. She was lucky to get shed of that Ferguson.”