Centennial

by James A. Michener

  In September of 1880 a group of young American ranchers, educated at Harvard and Yale, accompanied Claude Barker of Wolf Pass on a ride down from Cheyenne to visit with Oliver Seccombe on a matter of some importance. Venneford was now almost a village, with sturdy buildings erected by the ranch carpenters and stonemasons. There were barns and corrals, of course, and a long, low range of sheds in which boss hands like Skimmerhorn and Lloyd worked, but the center of activity was the three-story red-stone Gothic mansion erected by the Seccombes. It was an imposing residence, resembling a castle on the upper reaches of the Rhine, and it became famous throughout the west.

  Three rounded towers soared above the corners of the large house, with a four-sided battlement rising at the fourth corner. The roof contained eleven chimneys and was broken repeatedly by dormers. The ground floor was surrounded by a pillared veranda, while all doors leading into the house were made of heavy oak studded with brass fittings. It was possible to sleep eighteen guests in comfort, with four Negro servants to attend their needs.

  “What we have in mind,” Claude Barker told the Seccombes, “is a club ... a gentlemen’s club. We’ve selected a suitable corner in Cheyenne and we’ll keep the membership exclusive. All of us here, plus a few others with the right kind of background.”

  “What are you calling it?” Charlotte Seccombe asked.

  “The Cactus Club,” Barker said.

  “Oh, that’s delicious!” Charlotte cried, but her husband was more interested in the list of proposed members. They were all substantial cattlemen, except for the manager of the Union Pacific Railroad; of the initial twenty members, fourteen would be Americans, six British. Socially they were impeccable; in ranching, the most powerful.

  “Will only twenty families be able to support such a club?” Seccombe asked warily. He and Charlotte were sorely overextended by the building of their mansion; true, she had put up most of the money, but he had had to sell off more Crown Vee stock to scrape up his share, and he did not relish the idea of added expense right now.

  “We have a subsidiary list,” Bill Warsaw, one of the Americans said, and he showed Seccombe forty additional names, some less glittering socially than the original but all capable of putting up large sums of money.

  “These are great years for cattle,” Barker added enthusiastically. “Ranchers have money.”

  “If you enlarge the list to include this second category,” Seccombe said, “we’ll come in.”

  Papers of incorporation were filed on September 22, 1880, and the famous Cactus Club of Cheyenne was founded. It retained that name only briefly, for at an early meeting Seccombe proposed, “Cactus seems rather repelling. Let’s call it simply the Cheyenne Club,” and the change was made.

  Its rules were rigid. They were patterned after the fine clubs in London, to which most of the British members belonged, and their purpose was to create an ambience in which a conservative cattleman could feel at ease, protected from grubby merchants, importuning businessmen and small-time farmers. Fireplaces in the various rooms were decorated with blue-and-white tiles depicting scenes and quotations from Shakespeare, and the members who occupied these rooms were expected to conform to the highest standards of decorum. Offenses which called for immediate expulsion included:

  DRUNKENNESS IN THE PRECINCTS OF THE CLUB TO A

  DEGREE OFFENSIVE TO MEMBERS.

  CHEATING AT CARDS.

  THE COMMISSION OF AN ACT SO DISHONORABLE AS

  TO UNFIT THE GUILTY PERSON FOR THE SOCIETY

  OF GENTLEMEN.

  In addition to these major abhorrences, the rules decreed, perhaps optimistically, that no wager of any description be made in the public rooms of the club, nor any loud or boisterous noise on the premises. In view of the ebullient nature of the younger members, and the burgeoning and heady state of the cattle industry, both a blind eye and a deaf ear became the distinguishing marks of the Rules Committee. But upon any palpable breach of social etiquette, particularly one that might reflect upon a member’s behavior toward the fair sex, the board showed no hesitancy in cutting the hair that held the Damoclean sword.

  The cost of belonging to the Cheyenne Club was high, but membership ensured amenities. There were billiard rooms, games for cards, three tennis courts, access to a polo ground, a library stocked with books from Paris and London and an incomparable dining room supervised by chefs with international experience. The menus were extraordinary, and included the choicest viands and game from the region, fresh oysters from the Atlantic and fish from the Pacific, the finest cheeses and delectable fruits, a side table piled high with a Viennese pastry cook’s most mouth-watering confections, and a wine cellar that was to become the object of envy in many London clubs.

  But what gave the Cheyenne Club its real significance was that from its rooms the government of the territory was dictated. Here all decisions were made relating to land ownership, the rights of irrigation, the laws for branding cattle, the regulations for banks. Wyoming Territory was a democracy; its constitution said so and it had a legislature to prove it, but the members of the legislature who mattered were all members of the Cheyenne Club, and what they decided at private caucus within the club mattered much more than what they said in open meetings of the legislature. Wyoming was a splendid, unpopulated state admirably suited for the running of cattle, and the membership of the Cheyenne Club proposed keeping it that way.

  In protecting their interests they could be ruthless. Take the roundup law, for example. With nineteen-twentieths of the state an open range, cattle from one ranch could wander for a hundred miles without being detected, so when the cows had calves it was essential that some kind of general collection of animals be held, to enable each ranch to identify and brand its stock. Without this safeguard, a small-time rancher with a few cows and a flexible sense of property could round up cattle fifty or a hundred miles from any ranch headquarters and slap his iron on thirty or forty unbranded calves in no time, and after a few years of this he would wind up with a sizable herd, all reared by someone else.

  “What kind of cattle do you figure is best for Wyoming?” a rancher asked one day at the Cheyenne Club.

  “Without question, the Cravath breed.”

  “Don’t believe I know it.”

  “It was developed by Dan Cravath on his little place on the Laramie.”

  “What are its characteristics?”

  “Extreme fertility of the cow. Dan had only twelve cows bearing his brand, but every year they each had five calves. And this can be proved, because each year he branded sixty, sure as hell.” The members had to laugh over their wine and cigars, for all had been victimized by rustlers like Cravath.

  To halt the depredations of such men, the big ranchers bullied the Wyoming legislature into passing a law without parallel. Henceforth it would be illegal for anyone except owners of the big ranches to conduct a roundup. At their roundups any calves not specifically belonging to one of the big ranches would be thrown into a common lot and sold, the proceeds to go for the hiring of officers to enforce the law. Thus big cattlemen like Oliver Seccombe and Claude Barker were legally deputized to police the range, to their own enrichment.

  Now the little man like Dan Cravath, who had been running a few head on public property, would be squeezed out of business. Of course, Cravath was entitled to look on at the big roundups, but if his calves were not properly branded, they would be taken and sold. He would thus be paying the salaries of the officers whose job it was to drive him out of business, and the majesty of the state could be called upon by the big ranchers to toss him in jail if he protested.

  The members of the Cheyenne Club did not abuse their privilege. A few difficult mavericks like Dan Cravath and Simon Juggers north of Chugwater were shot, but everyone knew that they had been stealing calves and it was conceded that the range was better off without them.

  The members had a strong sense of stewardship where the range was concerned. They had opened it to cattle, cleared it of predators and
supervised it, and whereas a distant government in Washington claimed to own it, effective ownership resided in these tough-minded men. At one hearing before the United States Senate, R. J. Poteet, the prominent rancher from Jacksboro, testified as follows:

  LAMBERT: Tell us in your own words what a rancher means by the doctrine of contiguity.

  POTEET: We’ve always held in Texas, and throughout the west generally, that a rancher has the right to run his cattle on any part of the open range that lays contiguous to his holding.

  LAMBERT: Do you define contiguous as a matter of a mile or a hundred miles?

  POTEET: Well, east and west, I’ve seen my cattle wander a hundred and fifty miles. North and south, they’ve gone halfway to Kansas, that’s better’n a hundred and sixty miles. And they did so because the open range was contiguous to mine.

  LAMBERT: Aren’t you claiming, Mr. Poteet, that the range contiguous to your barn reaches from Canada to Mexico? (Prolonged laughter.)

  POTEET: You know, young man, I’d never thought of it that way, but you may be right. I remember in 18 and 69 when I trailed a bunch of cattle from Reynosa in Old Mexico, across the Rio Grande and up to Miles City, Montana. Using the western trail, we traveled getting on for two thousand miles, and in all that time we crossed only two roads, the Santa Fe Trail along the Arkansas and the Oregon Trail along the Platte. We saw no fences, no gates, no bridges. We swam our cattle across so many rivers that my left point, fellow named Lasater, said, “Them critters has swum so much water, they’s growin’ webbed feet.” I guess our contiguous range did reach from Canada to Mexico, and it would be a good thing for this nation if it did so again.

  Members of the Cheyenne Club quoted this testimony with approbation, for it represented their thinking.

  The glory of the club was the social life that centered upon it. Charlotte Seccombe exclaimed one night, “At dinner this evening we had four peers of the realm sharing oyster stew with us. You couldn’t better that in London!”

  And it wasn’t only Englishmen who graced the dining hall. The lovely Jerome sisters, daughters of a New York banker, came out from the east. Clara, the older, would marry Moreton Frewen, the Englishman who maintained his castle in northern Wyoming. Jennie, the younger, would marry Randolph Churchill and become the mother of the great Winston.

  Bankers from all parts of the United States flocked into Cheyenne to look into the cattle business, and as they dined at the club and heard what the enterprising Englishmen were accomplishing, they felt an irresistible urge to invest their own funds, so that Boston financiers began to appear on British boards, and millionaires from Baltimore and fiduciary agents from Philadelphia, and in due time each of the new investors had to be initiated, to his sorrow, into the meaning of that subtle phrase book count.

  Whenever John Skimmerhorn watched Oliver and Charlotte Seccombe hitch up their four bay mares for the drive to Cheyenne, he felt a pang of fear. “What’ll they buy this time?” he would mumble to himself. He did not begrudge the couple their mansion, although as an austere man he felt it pretentious, nor did he mind the extra work when delightful people like the Jerome sisters and their suitors stayed at the ranch. Indeed he told his wife, “It’s sort of fun to have dukes and earls on the place. Makes our cowboys spruce up a bit.”

  What did worry him was the fact that each year Seccombe sold off more of the ranch’s basic stock. Each year the discrepancy between actual count and book count widened.

  “Jim,” he asked Lloyd one autumn when the Seccombes were frolicking in Cheyenne, “how many breed cows do you estimate we have?”

  “No one can say. They’re scattered ...”

  “How many? You’re a damned shrewd man, Jim, and I know you have your guess.”

  “I’d say ...” Jim stopped. He was thirty years old and most satisfied with his job. It was precisely how he wanted to spend his life, and he could look forward to many more years of employment. As he had neither wife nor children, the Venneford Ranch occupied his whole attention, and he would do nothing to endanger his position.

  “You’re not puttin’ this down in a book somewheres, are you?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Nope.”

  “You’re not aimin’ to use it against Seccombe? Him spendin’ so much of the ranch’s money?”

  “I’m asking your opinion!” Skimmerhorn snapped. “You run the cattle. I have the right to know.”

  “Okay then,” Jim flashed. The two men were on tricky ground, and each knew it. As boss hand among the cowboys, Jim had to have a horseback opinion on everything, and he had one, but he did not want his information used to Seccombe’s disadvantage.

  “If I was in court, properly sworn, I’d say we have about twenty-nine thousand, countin’ everything.”

  “Book count says close to fifty-three thousand.”

  “The book is wrong.” He was angry, both with the questioning and with the facts. For some time he had known that the books were badly inflated, and he also knew that sooner or later someone from Bristol would discover that fact, and there would be hell to pay.

  “Jim, I’m on your side,” Skimmerhorn said placatingly.

  “You don’t sound it.”

  “What I think we should do is this. Every six months you and I will submit to Seccombe, in writing, our best guess as to the actual condition of the herd. Everything. New bulls, cows, calves, steers.”

  Jim nodded.

  “We’ll give them to Seccombe. What he does with them is his business. But I think we’re obligated—”

  “I’ve been doin’ it,” Jim broke in, and he went to his desk and produced a ledger with honest estimates. When Skimmerhorn studied it he had nothing to say. He thought some of the figures too pessimistic and with pen and ink altered them upward, initialing his estimates.

  When he was through he looked up at Jim and said, “Sometimes I think you were lucky, Jim, not to get married. She’s killing him, that one.”

  Jim flushed and looked away. It was clear to him that Oliver Seccombe was in way over his head, with the headquarters mansion a monstrous weight around his neck, but never once did Jim think that Seccombe would have been better off unmarried. When he watched Charlotte greet the boss with a kiss and when he saw how proud Seccombe was to introduce his wife to their guests, he knew that whatever cost the Englishman paid was worth it. He saw Charlotte as a high-spirited woman, never afraid of skittish horses, and God knows she spent a lot of money. But she was laughter and a bright breeze and the dip of a bird’s wing. And. to Jim Lloyd, without a woman of his own, these things were more important than book count.

  The reassuring success Potato Brumbaugh was having with his irrigated fields should have satisfied him, for his produce was bringing premium prices in Denver, but instead it exasperated him, for during every planting season and every harvest he compared the trivial portion of his irrigated land against the massive proportion of and land, which produced nothing, and the imbalance infuriated him.

  He made two experiments. First, he tried planting his arid land, but with a rainfall of less than fifteen inches a year, all he got was a luxuriant stand of foliage in May, when the last rains fell, and withered vegetables in September, when the land lay gasping in the sun. For three successive years he spent considerable money and effort, producing nothing except the hard-won conclusion that without irrigation his benchlands were useless, except to grow native grass for the grazing of cattle.

  His second experiment proved what irrigation could accomplish. Purchasing six galvanized buckets from Levi, he plowed up a small corner of his dry benchland, planted it with varied crops, then directed his wife and children to haul water all summer to keep the plants alive. It was hard work, but in September the family had melons and corn and half a dozen other things that had been waiting only for water.

  “The soil is even richer than down along the riverbed,” Brumbaugh said, and the idea that hundreds of acres of productive land were going idle grieved him, and he began to brood.

>   He stalked along the Platte, a stoop-shouldered man in his forties, powerful and with enormous energies. Catherine the Great had been wise to import such men to her wasteland along the Volga and the later Czars had been fools to let them go, for these were the kind of men who loved the soil, who lived close to earth, listening to its secrets and guessing at its next wants. It was inconceivable to Potato Brumbaugh that nature intended those superfertile lands to lie unused, and he tried to fathom ways to bring them under cultivation.

  “There’s lots of water,” he grumbled as he watched the Platte flow past. “I could pump it up.” But he had neither the pump nor the power. “We could carry it up,” but even that year’s small experiment had exhausted the resources of five strong people.

  He strode along the river for so long, and with such intensity, that he became the river. He moved with it, felt it in his bones. He sensed each nuance of the flow throughout the year and slowly he began to visualize this noble river as a unit, an exposed artery with channels flowing out and back in from all directions. It held the land together and made it viable.

  One day he developed an image of himself standing on dry land and pulling the river and all its tributaries up by the roots, and what was left was an empty canal, and from that conceit he began to formulate his concept of the Platte.