Centennial

by James A. Michener

  They were splendid people, hard workers, thrifty, intelligent. Ten minutes of instruction told them all they required about their new job, and when Brumbaugh saw them whisking down the rows, chopping out unwanted beets with one swipe, he knew he had solved his problem.

  Not quite. The Volgadeutsch yearned for land even more than the Germans, and within eighteen months each family had begun to pay installments on a farm of its own, and with sorrow in his big square face Potato Brumbaugh watched them pack up their few belongings and leave.

  He was cooperative. When Otto Emig informed him that he was buying the Stupple place, Brumbaugh said, “Karl, that farm’s too small to work profitably. You ought to pick up fifty more acres while you can.”

  “I have no money,” Emig said.

  “I’ll lend you some. I don’t want a good farmer like you to start on too small a plot.” In this way he helped some dozen of the Russians get their foothold, hardy men and women with large families who would lend much character to the northern plains. Strasser, Schmick, Wiebe, Grutzler—they all owed their mortgages to Potato Brumbaugh and they were grateful, but still Brumbaugh found himself with no one to block his beets.

  He imported Indians from the reservation and they were all right during the spring when they could work with horses, but when it came time to hoe, they vanished. He tried impoverished white men drifting westward from states like Missouri and Kansas, but they stole, got drunk and trampled the young plants, leaving six-inch gaps in one row, fifteen in the next. They seemed determined to prove why they had become derelicts and why they would remain so.

  “Get them out of here!” Brumbaugh thundered. “I’ll block the beets myself.” But when the useless drifters were gone and he attempted to farm the fields, he found that whereas he might be able to block a large field at the age of seventy-seven, he could certainly not take the next step and thin it too.

  Thinning was the brutal part, the stoop-work. It required a man to bend over hour after hour, demonstrating judgment, accuracy and the ability to endure prolonged discomfort. Again the trouble lay in the seed, for instead of a single seed, beets have a cluster of from three to five enclosed in a hard, rough shell. When planted, the cluster produces not one plant, but three or four or five. The shell is too hard to be broken and no way has been found to encourage one of the plants to grow and the others to die.

  “What you have to do,” Brumbaugh told his various workers, “is go down the row that’s been blocked and look at each of the bunches we’ve left standing. You’ll see that each bunch is really three or four or five plants. Each could produce a beet, but if they all did, none of the beets would be worth a nickel. So what I want you to do is leave the biggest plant and pull the others out. And be sure to get the root.”

  He could not avoid this imprecision: “Guess the good one and kill the others.” In the end, it had to be a matter of personal judgment. With his practiced eye he could pick the strong plant, and had he the strength to thin his entire acreage, he would produce the best crop in Colorado, but this crucial task he had to leave to others—to the guess-work of untrained hands. He used to shudder when he saw, them ripping out the good plant and leaving in its place another that could never produce a big beet.

  “Can’t you see which the good ones are?” he used to rail at the thinners in the early days. He stopped when he realized that they couldn’t see, that to them one plant looked pretty much like another, and he began to wonder if the sugar-beet industry could survive when it had to depend upon such unreliable labor.

  Yet he was gentle with his workers, for he knew that thinning beets was among the most miserable jobs on earth. Hour after hour, bent double, eyes close to the earth, back knotted with pain, knees scabbed where they dragged along the ground. He had great respect for a man, or more likely a child, who could thin beets properly, and he brooded about where he would find his next crop of workers.

  It was his son, Kurt, now in his prosperous forties, who solved the problem. Kurt had become Colorado’s leading legal expert on irrigation; in Washington he had defended the state before the Supreme Court and in Denver had helped draft the state laws governing the use of water. Because of his knowledge he had been the logical lawyer for the sugar-beet financiers to look to after they had collected the large amount of capital required to launch Central Beet, for they intended to construct a many-tentacled company, with factories in all areas. In time this combine would dominate the western states.

  A sugar beet was worthless until a sugar factory stood nearby. A mature beet was a heavy gray-brown lump of fiber hiding a liquid which with great difficulty could be made to yield crystallized sugar. In the late eighteenth century chemists in Germany, where there was no sugar cane, perfected an intricate method of making the beet surrender its sugar, but the industry had staggered along until Napoleon Bonaparte, faced by the loss of cane sugar due to the British blockade, decreed, “Let us have beet sugar!” and the French discovered how to provide it.

  Because the beets were so heavy, and transporting them so costly, it was obligatory that the factory be near at hand, and it fell to a committee of three men in Central Beet to determine where the factories should be located. An engineer, a soil expert and Kurt Brumbaugh, as the irrigation man skilled in finance, visited every likely area from Nebraska to California, choosing sites. They made some mistakes, and lost thousands of dollars in the process, but mostly they chose well, and never did they select a better site than on that day in the spring of 1901 when they announced, “Our biggest plant in northern Colorado will be erected this summer in Centennial. A plant capable of slicing nine hundred tons of beets per day. When finished, it will be able to handle the entire crop from this area.”

  The E. H. Dyer Construction Company of California moved in its skilled engineers and the Union Pacific started building a spur down which the beets would arrive and along which the bags of sugar would depart. It was a massive operation, located east of town on Beaver Creek, for the extraction process required much water.

  When the factory was completed in 1902, and the first wagonloads of Potato Brumbaugh’s beets were delivered, the slicing began, then the carbonation process, then the crystallization. Soon across Centennial drifted the rich, distinctive smell of wet-pulp fermentation. Some citizens thought it acrid or even putrescent, and after a couple of seasons of sugar-making they left town, unable to stand the new odors. But most found it to be the smell of progress, a decent, earthly aroma of beets turning themselves into gold.

  Messmore Garrett, who welcomed any scientific addition to the community, observed, “It’s an earthy smell ... organic ... crisp. I like it.” In time, most people living in Centennial grew to welcome the yearly arrival of the sugar smell. Charlotte Lloyd said, “It sort of cleans out the nose, like the smell of good manure. I feel better when the campaign starts.”

  Mature sugar beets were harvested during October and early November, for they had to be out of the ground before the heavy frosts of late November. This meant that they began arriving at the factory about the first of October, with the slicing under way every day till the middle of February. This period was known as the campaign, and it was an exciting time in the beet country, for not only did the rich smell permeate the countryside, but the top ten farmers of each district were announced, and to be one of the top ten in Centennial was a coveted accolade in American agriculture.

  Each farmer’s yield per acre was determined by taking the total weight of beets delivered to the factory, less the weight of dirt he had allowed to cling to his beets, less the weight of excess tops he had failed to chop off, divided by his total acreage. Toward the end of each year the officials at Central Beet announced their findings, after which the ten winners were photographed. Their pictures would appear in the Centennial paper, suitably captioned: “Our Top Ten, They Can’t Be Beet!” And then these leaders were feted at a large banquet in Denver.

  In 1904 it was suspected that the Centennial championship would go either to Po
tato Brumbaugh, who had won the two previous years, or to Otto Emig, who had some good acreage along the Platte east of town. Brumbaugh growled, “If Emig wants to win, he’s got to do better than seventeen and a half tons to the acre.” Some listeners considered this boastful, and Emil Wenzlaff challenged him: “You never made seventeen and a half, Potato, and you know it.”

  “Wait till you see the figures,” Brumbaugh said confidently. He was an old man now, and when he grinned at his competitors, his mouth was yellow and wrinkled at the corners. The other farmers could not believe that a man his age could have thinned so large a portion of his crop, for he was thick-set, and bending must have been painful. However, since he could find no competent help, he had had no choice but to tend the fields himself.

  As he compared notes with others who hoped for the championship, he invariably ended with one question: “What are we going to do about help?” He listened as the other farmers proposed various solutions: “More Germans, but this time get the dumb ones who don’t want to send their kids to school.” “Why not try the Indians again? They’re not doing anything up there on the reservation.” “What we need is someone who enjoys doing stoop-work and doesn’t want to buy his own farm.” But where to find such workers?

  Otto Emig, whose beets looked the best of the lot, argued, “Central Beet would never have spent so much money building that factory if they didn’t have a plan in mind. They’ll find us workers somewhere.” The solution to this problem was to come from a man not associated with the factory.

  Jim Lloyd, at Venneford, had been delighted with the arrival of the sugar factory, because it provided an alternative source of feed for his white-faced cattle. It was pulp that was important to him.

  “I love to smell that pulp come out the chute,” Jim said. “I like the way my Herefords go for it.”

  When the heavy sugar beet was sliced and pressed, and its precious liquid drained off, there remained a moist, grayish mass called pulp. It was an excellent fodder for cattle; especially when mixed with heavy black low-grade molasses, another by-product of the sugar process.

  “Pulp and molasses!” Jim Lloyd said admiringly. “Whenever I cart a load of that up to the feed yards, you can almost see the Herefords spreading the news. They’d walk miles for it.”

  Jim was therefore much concerned about keeping the Centennial factory operating, and he knew that without reliable help for the local farmers during the blocking and thinning seasons, the whole thing was going to go bust. Germans, Indians, Italians, Russians, poor white—none of them was a solution. “We’ve got to find someone who can be trusted to thin properly and who’ll stay on the job.” He decided to talk to Kurt Brumbaugh about an idea he had.

  In December heady news spread through Centennial. Otto Emig had apparently performed a miracle.

  As soon as it became apparent that some farmer stood a chance of winning the championship, experts from the factory went to that man’s farm with a steel chain to measure the exact number of acres he had harvested, and the results at Otto Emig’s farm indicated that he had set a new record: “Seventeen point seven tons to the acre!”

  Emil Wenzlaff carried the news to Brumbaugh. “That’s what he done, Potato.”

  “He’s a good farmer,” Brumbaugh admitted grudgingly. He could not believe that Emig had done so well on those bottom lands. He must have fertilized each plant by hand.

  Potato had enjoyed many successes in his life and it would have been generous of him to concede victory this year to Otto Emig, but he was a fearful competitor and at seventy-seven needed victory as keenly as he had at twenty-seven.

  And then the final figures were released! In a long article in the Clarion, with photographs, it was revealed that Potato Brumbaugh had set a new record! Seventeen point nine tons to the acre, a figure so high the other farmers could scarcely believe it.

  Of his victory Brumbaugh said, “The right soil, the right water, the right seed, this Platte Valley land can grow anything.”

  “And the right thinning,” Otto Emig said generously.

  “Where will we get our thinners next year?” Potato asked.

  In late February 1905 Kurt Brumbaugh sprang his surprise. He announced that following a suggestion provided by Jim Lloyd, and as a result of extensive investigation, Central Beet had come up with the ideal solution to the problem. Its field men had located the world’s best agriculturists, men and women—and children, too—who could grow fuzz on a billiard ball. One hundred and forty-three of them would arrive on March 11 prepared to make the Platte Valley hum.

  All the beet growers of the region were at the station when the train pulled in, and it was a day memorable in Colorado history. Down the iron steps leading from the cars came a timid, frightened group of men, women and children. They were small, thin, shy and dark. They were Japanese, and not one of them spoke a word of English, but the waiting farmers could see that they were a rugged people, with stout, bowed legs and hands like iron. If any people on God’s earth could thin sugar beets properly, these were the ones.

  A representative from the Japanese consulate in San Francisco stepped forward, a bright young man in dark suit and glasses, and he said in precise English, “Gentlemen of Centennial and surrounding terrain. These are all trusted farm families. You can rely on them to work. In consultation with Mr. Kurt Brumbaugh of Central Beet, we have assigned them as follows.”

  And he began to recite that extraordinary series of lyric four-syllable names: Kagohara, Sabusawa, Tomoseki, Yasunori, Nobutake, Moronaga. As he did so, the families stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder, and bowed low from the waist, even the smallest children. Each family was then assigned to one of the Russian farmers, a curiosity which the editor of the Clarion duly noted:

  Yesterday at the Union Pacific station a miracle happened, an amazing event which could have occurred only in the United States, where people of diverse races and religions live together in perfect harmony. A group of one hundred and forty-three sons and daughters of the Sun Goddess arrived in our fair city and were promptly assigned to work with our finest Russian farmers, and this at a time when Japan and Russia are locked in mortal combat on the other side of the world. Since the Japanese speak no English and no Russian, they have placed themselves in the hands of their worst enemies. But such is the miracle of America that no one present at the station yesterday had the slightest fear that the local Russians would in any way treat their Japanese workmen poorly or with injustice.

  The editor was right. This was a most happy union of Japanese who knew how to farm with Russians who loved the soil, and during that war-torn year, peace and amity reigned along the Platte, primarily because the Japanese were the best sugar-beet workers in the world.

  To Potato Brumbaugh were assigned the Takemotos: father aged twenty-seven, mother aged twenty-five and strong as a Hereford, daughter aged seven, son aged six, son aged three. They rose before sunrise, had a meal of rice plus whatever they could find to go with it, and went out into the beet fields with the wife carrying a small basket containing cold rice balls, each with a sour pickled plum in the center, and a bucket of cold tea. They worked till dusk with a tenacity that Brumbaugh had not seen before.

  Mother and father would take their hoes and start blocking, each to his own row. Behind Mr. Takemoto crawled his elder son, thinning the clumps. Behind Mrs. Takemoto crawled the seven-year-old girl, thinning her row. All day the baby watched the workers, pulling away any half-rooted plants they had missed. Since the parents could block a little faster than the children could thin, at the end of each row the elders would put down their hoes, drop to their knees and thin back down the row till they met their children. At each such meeting there would be a brief pause while the parents brushed away dirt from the round little faces or said something reassuring. Then it was back to the hoes and the thinning.

  From March through October, there was no spoken communication between Potato Brumbaugh and this remarkable family. In pantomime he would show them what he w
anted; after that they took charge, and by mid-September it was pretty clear that he stood a good chance of winning the championship again.

  He told his son, “Kurt, the best thing you ever did for Central Beet was to bring in the Takemotos. One of them is worth six Russians. No wonder Japan won the war.”

  And then he noticed two chilling things. The Takemotos were obviously acquiring money, and they were looking at land. How could they get hold of that much money? When Brumbaugh had allowed them a small plot by the river, he expected they would grow a few vegetables for their own use; instead, they had cultivated the land with extreme frugality, depositing on it all the Takemoto sewage, and were producing so many fine vegetables that Mrs. Takemoto was peddling the surplus through the village.

  Where did they find time to do this? From sunup to sundown they worked in Brumbaugh’s fields, but they rose an hour early and in the darkness tended their vegetables, and in the moments after sunset they did not sit around resting after that day’s work. All five of them were down by the river, watering and hoeing and cultivating. When Brumbaugh indicated in sign language, “In America we don’t use human manure,” Mr. Takemoto replied in excited gestures, “In Japan we do, long, long time.”