Significance. This is not a peripheral question. In the western states, from Texas to California, it is obligatory that citizens of all ancestry decide once and for all what they think about Mexicans, both in Mexico and in the United States. Spanish-speaking people will continue to form a significant minority in American life, and in a town like Centennial the misapprehensions as to what Mexicans are, what they signify and what they can become are an appalling mixture of misinformation and prejudice. As a beet farmer told me, “Our biggest problems are nematodes and Mexicans, and we know more about the former than the latter.”
Illustrations. Before you decide on any photographs for this period, please study the Union Pacific real estate pamphlets, for Centennial. The shot of Potato Brumbaugh standing in suspenders and belt beside his squash, with that delightful grin, tells the whole story. The contraption lower left is the portable canvas dam he used for irrigation.
The Platte. Had I been writing this report for pleasure, I would have chosen as my subject the Colorado, most dramatic of American rivers. Had I been primarily concerned with history, I’d have chosen the Missouri, jugular vein of American expansion. Instead, I was assigned the South Platte, but as I studied it I became aware of the majesty this mean, intemperate river can often assume. In 1973, just before I started work in Centennial, the Platte went into one of its periodic floods. It swept away bridges, flooded whole towns, laid the countryside waste and killed at least nine people. Once twenty-four inches of rain fell along its flank within one three-hour period. In 1965 Mud Creek, which is empty most of the year and which for the past half century has produced an average of 1.6 cusecs a year, threw into the Platte in one afternoon 466,000 cusecs! When you have seen the river in these manifestations, you remember it with respect.
Chapter 13
DRYLANDS
By the year 1911 northern Colorado had evolved a system of land use which had to be judged one of the most advantageous in the world. Had it been allowed to develop unimpeded from that time on, it would have converted this part of America into a preserve of beauty, ensuring a neat balance between the needs of man and the dictates of nature.
How appropriate it was. The vast plains were reserved for cattle, sixty or seventy acres to a cow-and-calf unit. It was true that barbed wire tended to enclose each man’s land, but since ranches ran to seventy and eighty thousand acres, an owner could ride many miles across his property without encountering a road, a house or a town. The range was shared by deer and antelope. but anchored the soil so that even the stiffest wind did little damage. Only thirteen inches of rain could be expected each year, barely enough to keep things going, and if a rancher allowed his stock to overgraze an area, it could take five or six years for the grass to recover.
Cowboys prospered on the plains and created their own culture. For example, Texas Red, one of the heroes of the 1887 blizzard, became so proficient with his lariat that the Crown Vee ranch issued challenges to the cowhands on neighboring spreads, and rustic competitions were held, often supplying contestants for the famous Cheyenne Frontier Days and those other rodeos which flourished throughout the west.
Crown Vee also produced Lightning, the notorious bucking horse that succeeded in keeping riders off his back for nine years. Texas Red, the man who came closest to staying aboard for the regulation ten seconds, said of this cantankerous beast, “Never was a horse that could sunfish the way he did. Straight in the air, then roll over with his belly up, then down with all four legs thrashing and his backbone in a knot.”
The best thing about the ranches, however, was the careful superintendence they gave the range. “All in this world we got to sell,” Jim Lloyd often instructed his men, “is grass. The Hereford, handsome though he may be, is just a machine for converting grass into beef. If you look out for the grass, I’ll look out for the Herefords.”
There was a built-in conservatism in the rancher. He wanted things left as they were, with him owning his eighty thousand acres and with the government intruding as little as possible. All he wanted from Washington was free use of public lands, high tariff on any meat coming in from Australia or Argentina, the building and maintenance of public roads, the control of predators, the provision of free education, a good mail service with free delivery to the ranch gate, and a strong sheriff’s department to arrest anyone who might think of intruding on the land. “I want no interference from government,” the rancher proclaimed, and he meant it. In return, he would look after his grass, share some of it with the wild animals and protect one of the greatest natural resources of the nation—the open range.
The rancher’s partner, although any rancher would have been offended if someone had suggested that a Russian or a Japanese was his companion, was the irrigation farmer who took the lands along the rivers and cleverly led water onto them, creating gardens out of deserts and multiplying fifty-fold the value of the land in one summer. These men used small amounts of land for which the rancher could not profitably compete, and with sugar beets they brought into the community an assured supply of cash which helped maintain the services which only towns and villages could provide.
It was a fruitful symbiosis: the rancher utilizing land which got little rain and the irrigator concentrating on those marginal lands where irrigation could be utilized. Neither trespassed upon the other and neither tried to lure away the workers employed by the other. No self-respecting cowboy would chop sugar beets, while the average beet worker was terrified by a steer.
Like the rancher, the irrigator was a conservative and despised any intervention from government. What he wanted principally from Washington was the maintenance of a very high tariff against cane sugar, Cuban especially. Had there been a free sugar market in these years, the cane growers of the Caribbean could have supplied all of America’s needs, and at a much lower price than Central Beet, using beets, could have matched. The sugar-beet industry was not really feasible, economically speaking, but it was close enough to the margin to warrant the protection given it, and the one requirement for being a senator from Colorado was to have the muscle to keep a high tariff on cane sugar. Integrity, hard work and statesmanship were desirable, but familiarity with the sugar beet was essential.
The irrigator expected a few other services: a constant supply of immigrant labor from Mexico, protection against labor unions, a very low tariff on cheap nitrates from Chile, good roads from farm to factory, low railroad rates and an ample supply of currency, but for the most part the irrigation farmer considered himself an independent man who faced the risks of agriculture alone, and the character of a society depends more upon what men think of themselves than upon what they really are.
The few towns that sprang up on the plains were geared to the needs of rancher and farmer. Banks, hardware stores, department stores and railroad stations adjusted to the cycle of the land. Each year, on November 13 and 14, the days prior to the issuance of sugar-beet checks, the community throbbed with excitement, and merchants totted up their account books to see what each farmer would owe when his check came through, and stores selling dresses redid their front windows. It was the same when one of the great ranches was shipping a trainload of cattle to Chicago; the whole railway system seemed to gird itself for that event, and men went to the station to see the stockcars loaded with steers.
This spacious way of life was possible only because the population of both the United States and Colorado was low. In 1910 the nation had 91,972,000 citizens, Colorado had 799,000, Denver had 213,000, Centennial had 1,037. A farmer could locate his beet field fifteen miles outside of Denver, and no one cared, because no one coveted his land. The Venneford Ranch was still allowed to keep hundreds of thousands of vacant acres, primarily because no one had visualized any better use for them than the running of cattle.
So for a few years around 1911, northern Colorado was as placid as it had ever been, and life in towns like Centennial was close to ideal. Then came Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey, and this agricultural stability was shattered.
Creevey was built like a duck, a round, chunky little man about five-feet-five with a large head and heavy glasses. He wore a suit which seemed too small and a vest whose two bottom buttons could not possibly fasten. He had unbelievable energy and an honesty which beamed from his animated face. Like most dedicated men, he had made one big discovery which consumed his life: he was a true believer, one who had seen the answer, and he had the power which such total dedication generates. Above all, he was a likable man whose enthusiasm infected his listeners. Men trusted Thomas Dole Creevey and were never abused in that trust. Of course, sometimes a farmer using his methods failed to duplicate his results, but even then they never charged him with fraud, because if they did, they knew that he could come onto their land and prove that what he had said was true.
He was a revolutionary, a man with a wildly disruptive idea, and when he put his plan into operation, the easy monopoly of rancher-irrigator would no longer exist. It was natural, therefore, that the men who had been monopolizing the land feared him, for his announced mission was to challenge them.
In the small Iowa town of Ottumwa, Dr. Creevey was about to enter into his peroration. He was addressing an assembly of farmers who had gathered in the school auditorium to hear the new apostle of the west, and as he looked down into this collection of intelligent faces, this gathering of men who wanted to know the facts behind the rumors, he felt inspired, and whenever this happened he spoke in a lower voice than usual, allowing the force of his ideas to take the place of rhetoric:
For the past hundred years they have lied to you. They have said, “Everything west of the Hundredth Meridian is a desert.” This is not true, and I have proved it. In a few minutes we will lower the lights and I will show you what a man can grow on that desert. I will show you tall spires of corn, and huge potatoes, and fields of wheat unmatched.
It was the great Jethro Tull working in the fields of England in the years 1720-1740 who made the discovery upon which your future and mine depends, that whereas many crops can be grown with forty to sixty inches of rain a year, equally fine crops—not always of the same plants—can be grown by careful procedures where the rainfall is only twelve inches a year.
Here he explained how Jethro Tull had worked this miracle, and his words were so persuasive that the Iowa farmers began to be convinced, and Earl Grebe leaned over to Magnes Volkema and whispered, “Do you think it can be done?” They listened intently as Creevey explained how Tull’s principles could be adapted to states like Kansas and Colorado, and they experienced a flush of excitement when the doctor stopped dramatically and called to the auditorium janitor, “Bring in the stereopticon!”
The machine was set up and the lamp lit. Then, as the janitor inserted the hand-colored slides, Dr. Creevey showed the Iowa men what he had accomplished on a fourteen-inch-rainfall farm in western Kansas. It was a startling exhibition, a demonstration of how man’s ingenuity and perseverance could triumph over obstacles. There were scenes of the land before Dr. Creevey took over, and several photographs of contiguous land untouched by Creevey which remained as empty at the end of the experiment as at the beginning. Best of all were the autumn shots of the harvest he had made on this bleak soil: corn, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes and rich fields of lucerne.
The steropticon was turned off and the lights turned up. In his final exhortation he addressed the farmers with honesty and common sense:
You saw the corn. I raised it with my own hands, but I must warn you that corn is not a good dry-land crop. If you are set in your ways and insist upon growing corn and feeding it to your hogs, do not move west. I doubt that potatoes are an appropriate crop, either. But if you want to raise wheat, for which there will always be an unlimited market of hungry humans, then the west is your destination. If you want milo for tilth, and lucerne for your neighbor’s cattle, then the free west is the place for you.
But, gentlemen, do not come west unless you want to work. Do not join me if you want to plow your field once and let it go at that. If ample rain has made you lazy, stay home. Because on those fields only the man who works from sunrise to sunset can make his fortune.
I said fortune, and I mean fortune. Every man in this room is entitled by law to 320 acres of God’s finest dry-land farm. All you have to do is go there, register your claim in the land office and go to work. I can hear you asking, “What’s in it for him?” and I’ll tell you what’s in it for me. I am employed by the railroad and by a consortium of real estate companies who own land in the west, and after you’ve taken your homestead and got your hands on some land, we will sell you additional land, the best in the area, for eight dollars an acre. What are you paying for land in Iowa? One hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and most of you can’t afford to own your own farms. Come west with me and for one-twentieth as much you’ll be twenty times wealthier.
He spoke with conviction, and when he came to his conclusion, many of his listeners leaned forward:
When I say “Come with me,” I mean it. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. With the assistance of the Rock Island Railroad, which wants to see the west developed as much as I do, I am going to invite two men from this audience to visit my demonstration farm to see for themselves what can be done. All they have to pay, and I mean all, is their meals on the train and in the hotel. And if their wives pack them a big enough lunch, they won’t even have to spend that. Now, whom do you nominate to come out with me and make the report?
Amid good-humored banter, Grebe and Volkema were selected, and were handed passes from Ottumwa, Iowa, to Goodland, Kansas. A few days later they disembarked into a forbidding wonderland When Dr. Creevey piled them, and one hundred and twenty-nine other visitors, into the railroad’s autobuses and drove northward, they were appalled by the bleak aspects of the land: no trees, no streams, no signs of rain.
In the bus Earl Grebe sat near Dr. Creevey, and found himself confused: on the one hand, he could see the arid quality of the area to be tilled and knew from his Iowa experience that only a miracle would permit wheat to be grown here; but on the other hand, he was subjected to the wild enthusiasm of the round little agriculturist: “When I see land like this, gentlemen, my heart explodes. What a challenge! What a promise! I assure you that I can take land exactly like this and make it produce twenty-six bushels of wheat to the acre.”
“Have you ever done it?” Grebe asked.
“Done it? I’m doing it now. That’s what I’m taking you to see.”
“On land like this?”
“Not as good as this. Gentlemen, within the hour you will see my miracle. You will see the Word of God come down to earth and made real. I started dry-land farming on that sacred Sunday morning when I was staring out the church door at the bleak and empty plains of my youth. Nothing grew on those plains, and I heard the minister reading from the Book of Genesis, ‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.’ And the word of God descended upon me at that moment, and I understood.”
Grebe was looking at Dr. Creevey as these words were spoken, and he observed the sincerity in the man’s face. Then Creevey added, “And subdue it! That is what God wants us to do with this land, and I shall show how each of you can go forth and subdue your portion.”
When the auto-buses drove into the yard of Dr. Creevey’s experimental farm, the visitors knew that they were in a special place, for the farm machinery was clean and the barns were in order. But the group did not linger there, for Dr. Creevey was eager for them to wander over his fields and see for themselves what could be accomplished with dry-land farming.
They walked several miles. Some fields were fallow, some were growing grains Grebe did not recognize, and some were about to be plowed. The pattern bore no relationship to what an Iowa farmer would be doing with his land in September, and Grebe quickly realized that if anyone were to dry-farm, he must listen to the experience of someone like Creevey, because this farm in western Kansas was flourishing. Much
more of it lay fallow than would be permitted in Iowa, but the fields that were working were performing miracles.
The other visitors were equally impressed, and all wanted to hear Dr. Creevey’s secrets. So after their inspection they assembled in one of the barns, where a blackboard was set up before rows of benches, and when they were settled, a representative from the Rock Island Railroad rose, and with a piece of chalk in his hand, said, “Gentlemen, I am going to place upon this board the one irrefutable fact about this wonderful farm you have just inspected.” With that he wrote a huge 14. “There it is, gentlemen, the basic fact you must remember as long as you are with us. On this land, only fourteen inches of rain falls a year. We have no irrigation, no tricks. Only the genius of this man, Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey.”
The little doctor walked to the board, his vest unbuttoned and his eyes flashing. “I affirm,” he said in his lowest voice, “that any man in this room who follows the principles I have delineated can move onto any land in the west, if it have topsoil and at least twelve inches of rainfall a year, and duplicate what you have just seen.”
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