Centennial

by James A. Michener

  With the Volkemas the routine was somewhat different, for after Peter and Vesta had filed for their 320 acres, they nudged their son to step forward. “I’m filing on the 320 north of my father’s,” the boy said, and Walter Bellamy’s jaw dropped a couple of inches, for the law required that a homesteader be twenty-one, and this downy-cheeked lad looked as if he were about eighteen.

  But before Bellamy could protest, the Volkema girl stepped forward, a slim child who could not possibly be over twenty-one, and she filed on the 320 south of her parents’.

  “Are you young people over age twenty-one?” Bellamy asked and they, knowing that they were standing above the “Age 21” written in their shoes, replied “Yes, sir.”

  This was too much for Bellamy, so he produced his Bible and made them place their hands on it, after which he asked in a funereal voice, “Do you solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God that you are over age twenty-one?”

  “I do,” the boy said.

  “I am,” the girl said.

  “Well, there’s nothing more I can do,” Bellamy shrugged, and he entered their claims. The Volkemas now had a grasp on 960 acres, and they intended acquiring much more.

  The Homestead Act of 1862 as amended in 1909 required a settler to erect a house at least twelve feet by fourteen feet, and this was customarily referred to as “a house twelve by fourteen.”

  The Volkemas, therefore, carved a little wooden house twelve inches by fourteen inches, and four weeks later when they appeared at Bellamy’s office to announce their occupancy of their land, they assured him that they had a house twelve by fourteen. So did their son. So did their daughter. And Bellamy had no alternative but to enter their proof of occupancy.

  The Larsens chose an alternate course. Some years before, Mervin Wendell had directed his carpenter to build the flimsiest possible kind of house, twelve by fourteen feet, on a sledge which could be hauled from one homestead to another. He rented it to newcomers—five dollars for twenty-four hours—and with it perched on their claim, they could swear that they had on their half-section a house twelve by fourteen. As soon as their assertion was recorded, the sledge could be hauled to the next homestead.

  The Grebes would not engage in such deception. For them to have sworn to a lie would have been inconceivable, for they believed that God inspected all they did and that only through His assistance could something like their present venture succeed. So they refused Mervin Wendell’s offer of the house-on-the-sledge and Vesta Volkemas kind gift of the carved house. Theirs they would build the honest way.

  Earl purchased two wooden doors, two door sills and three window frames. The carpenter delivered them to the half-section, where Grebe and two boys from the village were cutting sod for the walls and collecting flat stones for the floors. When the materials were assembled, Grebe and the boys rode into the low hills north of Rattlesnake Buttes to find lodge poles and rafters, and at the end of two months of arduous work, the Grebes had themselves a soddy.

  It was not a neat-looking house, for the earth was uneven in form and color, but it was surprisingly snug, a low, compact refuge which gave solid protection from the wind and such occasional rain as might fall. When the house was ready for occupancy they invited a clergyman from Centennial to bless it, and he appeared with Walter Bellamy in tow, and a solemn service was held.

  It was exciting, this launching of a new life, but that night Alice Grebe suffered the consequences of the heavy obligations she had undertaken. Toward evening she fell ill; and before anyone could be summoned from the neighboring ranches, she miscarried. Her husband was grief-stricken. He sat with her through the remainder of the night as the first winter wind whipped at the soddy, and when dawn broke he walked heartbroken across the plains to the Volkemas’.

  When they heard the sad news, Vesta went back with Earl. She assured him that Alice was a strong woman and would produce numerous future children. There were no complications that she was aware of, but consulting a doctor might be a prudent safeguard. The nearest one was in Centennial, and Walter Bellamy volunteered to take Alice in to town, and as Vesta had predicted, the doctor found nothing wrong, and that night Alice was back in the soddy.

  “You must see that she doesn’t fall into a depression,” Vesta had warned, but of this there was no fear, for Alice herself had foreseen that danger and now plunged directly into the tasks of making this soddy into a true Christian home.

  There was a library at the college in Greeley, and from it she procured books by Edith Wharton and Lincoln Steffens and a new treatise on dry-land farming by a Dr. Widtsoe. She studied this with care, in order to help her husband, and took much consolation in the portrait of Jethro Tull, a stout Englishman in a copious wig who had proved that a family could be successful on a dry-land farm.

  “It seems so strange,” she told her husband, “to be growing things I’d never heard of six months ago. What is milo?”

  “A sturdy type of sorghum.”

  “What’s sorghum?”

  “A sturdy type of sugar cane.”

  “We don’t make sugar.”

  “We plow it into the ground. Roughage. Aeration.”

  “And lucerne? Never heard of it before.”

  “That’s a sturdy form of alfalfa.”

  “Everything in this land must be sturdy,” she said. “I’ll be so, too.” And two months later she was pregnant again.

  When the spring crops of 1912 were well up, and a bountiful harvest seemed assured, she heard a strange rattling in the fields, a sound she could not identify, and she ran to the door of the soddy to behold a devastating hailstorm sweeping eastward from the mountains. The ice pellets were as large as hen’s eggs and they fell with such terrible force that she had to retreat from the door lest the hail strike her and endanger her child.

  In the eleven minutes the storm raged across the prairie, it knocked flat every growing thing. When it passed, the fields were desolate, and that night Earl Grebe wondered if he would make a crop at all. The Volkemas came by to see what damage the Grebes had suffered; by a trick of nature the storm had concentrated on a small path to the north of Line Camp, so that the Grebes were pretty well wiped out while the Volkemas were practically untouched.

  “I’ve had a lot of experience with hail,” Vesta said, “and thank God this storm came early. Tomorrow you’ll plow under the dead crops and still have time to grow summer wheat. The milo and the lucerne will fertilize the fields and all you’ve lost is some time and some seed.” She and her husband helped with the plowing, and whereas the summer crop was not as good as the winter one would have been, the Grebes did make some money that year.

  It was the sound of the coyotes that tormented Alice, and one lonely night in October when her baby was about to be born and Earl was helping out on another farm, she heard the ululating cries in the darkness, and they sounded to her like the voice of doom. She fell to violent trembling and was seized with a strong premonition that something fearful was about to happen, but she steeled herself against the night, and kneeling beside the bed, she prayed for strength to bring this pregnancy to its proper conclusion.

  “Oh, God, help me through this dark autumn. Help me to be strong.”

  When Earl reached home he found his wife on her knees beside the bed. “I’m having the baby early,” she whispered.

  “Right now?” Earl cried.

  “No. Maybe three hours ... four.”

  “I’ll fetch Vesta,” he said.

  When Magnes and Vesta reached the soddy, they found Alice so far advanced in labor that any thought of taking her to Centennial was vain. “Do you know what to do?” Earl asked Vesta, and she said, “It’s nothing,” and she produced her book of home medicine. With much fumbling and more mess than necessary, Alice Grebe was delivered of her baby, a boy whom she named Ethan, after a character in a novel by Mrs. Wharton.

  For Alice, the hardship of life in the soddy was relieved by the constant variations she saw in the prairie. “At first I thought
it was all emptiness,” she once told Vesta. “Then I started watching birds, and the hawks and the redwings became more beautiful than the flowers back home. I heard the meadowlarks and one day I watched the courtship performance of the sage grouse ... the males had their white chests all puffed out ... and I could see strange-looking yellow air sacs on their necks, while their tails were spread sort of like a peacock. It was something.”

  Near the Grebe soddy a town of prairie dogs had existed for more than three thousand years, and it accommodated itself easily to the arrival of human beings, the antics of the little animals providing much amusement for Alice. More dramatic things happened, too, like the sudden, heart-catching sight of antelope as they leaped mysteriously from the buttes, dashing past the soddy to disappear to the north, winged things, fragile and fleet.

  In October 1912 the last surviving buffalo in Colorado drifted into Blue Valley. It was an old cow that had been hiding in the hills back of the mining camp. How she had escaped wolves, hunters and starvation, no one knew, but she had struggled on, the last of the herd.

  She was a heavy beast and required much grass during the year. She would have preferred ranging the plains, as her ancestors had done, but with the coming of settlers and the establishment of towns like Line Camp, this was no longer possible. She therefore hid in the mountains, foraging on the lush vegetation which appeared in remote valleys.

  In summer she ate as much as she could; in winter she lived off her fat plus such dried grasses as she could uncover beneath the snows. In blizzards, she still used the ancient tactic: stand firm, lower the head and swing it back and forth like the bucket on a steam shovel until the grass was exposed.

  The winter of 1913 brought much snow, and she had worn herself out pushing it away, but when she got down to the grass, it was good, and she had survived nicely. A warm spring followed and a rich summer, and she was fat. She had not enjoyed foraging alone, for she had always been a gregarious creature, but during the recent years of loneliness she had grown accustomed to her lot.

  And then, by an unfortunate accident which might not have occurred had she been younger and able to detect the danger, she came over the crest of a hill at dawn to find herself in the backyard of a hunting lodge.

  “Jesus Christ!” Jake Calendar called back to his friends. “A buffalo!”

  He and four other men had come hunting the mountains—for deer or elk; if nothing better, antelope, with always the chance of a bear. Now, at Calendar’s cry, they all rushed to the window, and saw near the top of the hill behind the cabin a buffalo—and it was a big one.

  “Throw me my gun!” Jake said in a low, controlled voice. He stood watching as the old animal, sensing no danger, kept coming down the hill.

  Inside the cabin the four other hunters slipped into their shoes, not even bothering with pants, and within a few moments went outside, each with a loaded high-powered rifle. Silently the men lined up and took sight. “Take it slow,” Jake warned. “It ain’t easy to kill somethin’ that big.”

  “One ... two ... three!” Jackson Quimbish did the counting, and when his voice uttered the last number, the five men fired in unison.

  Quickly they reloaded and fired again.

  Reloading for the second time, they blazed away once more at the astonished old cow. At the first fusillade she had stopped, then stubbornly had plodded on, keeping her massive head directed toward the creatures she could not see.

  Since she was coming head-on, the hunters could not easily strike her in a vital spot, but the second five shots did some damage, and she stumbled, kicking up dust. Her eyes were blurred, but still she kept moving forward, an old, old cow, heavy in her knees. She was not afraid and showed no inclination to turn away from her adversaries, but she had no concept of how to cope with them. She merely kept moving forward.

  The last fusillade struck her from two sides and her legs began to cave in. She tried to take a deep breath, but something stuck in her lungs, and in desperation she started to fall forward. Now her whole massive body surrendered and she tumbled into the autumn dust, sliding sideways down the hill for a few feet, then coming to rest against rocks.

  When the sportsmen reached the body, five men in nightshirts and Jake Calendar barefooted as well, they judged that fifteen shots had struck the animal, but as Jake pointed out, “Six, seven must have hit her in the forehead, and hell, anyone knows that with all that matted hair and bone, you can’t kill no buffalo by hittin’ it straight on.”

  In 1914 the plowmen’s championship was held on a bright October day on a ranch some miles north of Little Mexico. Farmers convened from all parts of northern Colorado to compete, and Line Camp was represented by Earl Grebe, who stood a good chance of carrying off first prize.

  His four horses were in fine condition, their harnesses oiled and polished and their bellies filled with just the right amount of oats. Earl himself was well rested and prepared to do his best.

  There would be nineteen competitors, and the field they would plow was an eighth of a mile square, with enough gentle dips and swells to provide a good test. The ground had never been plowed before; it was virgin sod and would not turn easily. Rules required that the nose of the plow must cut at least seven inches into the soil, so that weak horses would be of little use, for it required four of the strongest to cut that deep into unbroken sod.

  The plowmen were required to demonstrate their skill with three farm implements: plow, disk, harrow. With the first the men had to cut to the proper depth, maintain an absolutely straight line and turn uniform furrows. With the disk they had to chop the sod. With the harrow they had to pulverize it and smooth it. Only experienced farmers could perform these various tasks, converting rough virgin earth into a tractable soil ready for the planting drill.

  The plowmen worked simultaneously, each on his assigned portion of the field, and time was a factor, although not the determinant one. If two men plowed equally well, the one who finished first won, but no points could be gained by galloping the horses through the tasks, for crooked furrows did not count.

  It was an exciting contest, one which drew several hundred spectators, many placing bets on their favorites. When the nineteen teams of horses were lined up behind the shining plows, with the disks and harrows waiting behind, one caught a sense of the prodigious undertaking the men of the west were engaged in: from Minnesota to Montana, from North Dakota to the plains of Texas, land that had never before felt the plow—not even the forked stick of the Indian—was being broken.

  At ten o’clock the men in charge called the contestants to order, and the nineteen stalwart farmers grasped the handles of their plows, the reins draped about their necks. “Men,” the starter shouted, “it don’t need me to tell you no rules. Plow deep, plow straight, and change your hitches to the disk and harrow as fast as possible. You’ve got to pull each piece of machinery back behind the line before you unhitch. Ready? Go!”

  It was difficult for the spectators to ascertain who was winning, because only the judges could allocate points, and they kept their conclusions to themselves, but from the lovely straightness of Earl Grebe’s furrows and their extraordinary uniformity, it was clear that he had a good chance.

  But at the far end of the line there was a Swede with almost no neck, a little rock of a man, and his ability to identify with his horses was uncanny; with them, he formed a team of five, sturdy, hard-working animals who knew what they were about, and it was a joy to watch them move up and down the furrows in unison. The man’s name was Swenson, and he could use the disk just as capably as he used the plow.

  But when it came to harrowing, no one could excel Earl Grebe. He was capable of putting a fine finish on the roughest terrain, and as the contest neared conclusion, the spectators knew that the winner would be Grebe or the little Swede.

  There was silence as the four judges walked back and forth along the plowed stretches, comparing the evenness of the earth and the uniformity of the topsoil. “I think Earl has it,” Vesta whi
spered as the judges convened, and Alice kept her fingers crossed as the chairman stepped forward.

  “The winner! Ole Swenson of Sterling.”

  Alice looked down at the ground to hide her disappointment, then felt this to be an unworthy escape. Looking up with a bright smile, she winked at Earl as the judges proclaimed him the runner-up. He won the affection of the crowd by stepping back and patting his horses, giving them all the credit for the good work.

  There was much cheering, and money prizes were handed out, and other farmers congregated about the two winners, congratulating them on jobs well done, and Walter Bellamy moved from one group to another, saying with obvious delight, “Wasn’t it splendid? A little town, Line Camp, winning second place? I’m really very proud.”

  Two witnesses to the contest were not impressed. When the others had departed, they remained behind, staring at the plowed strips, each covered with harrowed earth almost as fine as the grains from a river bottom.

  “It’s unnatural,” Potato Brumbaugh grumbled as he inspected the soil. “This land was intended for grass. If they abuse it this way, there’ll come a day of reckoning.”

  Jim Lloyd stooped down to compare the uncut sod with the plowed, and what he saw appalled him. “It’ll take five years for this to grow grass again,” he said angrily. “They must be insane.”