Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Italians. Russians, Germans, Japanese and numerous Mexicans attended his funeral, all of them indebted to him for instructions and mortgages. Jim Lloyd, as the old man’s best friend, took charge of the burial and was deeply moved when the young minister said, “At such moments we find consolation not only in the Bible—but also in the words of our great poets, and never has the passing of an energetic man like Hans Brumbaugh been better summarized than in these beautiful words of Swinburne:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives forever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  Today we can visualize our tireless old fighter safe at rest.”

  During the celebrations which filled the last weeks of 1918, when, as the Clarion put it, “American victory over the German hordes was confirmed and the honor of Europe salvaged by our brave doughboys,” Mervin Wendell experienced his first premonition of death.

  For some months he had not been in good health, for his efforts during the war years had been titanic. As War Bond chairman for northern Colorado, he had appeared on platforms in places as distant as Omaha and Salt Lake City. He wore a modified uniform of his own design, featuring leather puttees and a Teddy Roosevelt hat, and spoke on such subjects as “Our Daring Adventure at the Somme” and “We Are Strong Because We Are United.”

  At the Wendell mansion on Eighth Avenue he and Maude entertained most of the dignitaries who visited Colorado—Secretary of War Baker, General Pershing’s relatives from Wyoming, General Barker of the British army, whose father had run the big cattle ranch at Horse Creek—and he had often sat up late talking with them about strategy and the ultimate triumph of Allied arms.

  He retained his old-time gift of mimicry; on tour his accent was principally Oxonian. With his dashing uniform, most of his listeners considered him an officer in the British Royal Dragoons, of whom he spoke frequently and with a certain intimacy ever since he had spent a long evening with a colonel of that regiment reviewing tactics. He collected a great deal of money for the war effort, and Maude Wendell, as the gracious chairlady for the Red Cross, supervised the rolling of interminable lengths of bandage.

  But his principal effort was reserved for the manipulation of his extensive land holdings, which now totaled more than fifty-five thousand acres of better-than-average land scattered about forty-three farms and ranches which he had acquired at panic prices. All his holdings in Line Camp were now sold and he had pioneered a new community to the north. It was named McKinley, “after our martyred leader,” he invariably explained with a quiver in his voice. He had seen McKinley once in Chicago and considered him our greatest President.

  He had made a real killing on his McKinley operation, having learned from his experience at Line Camp not to sell too quickly but to hold on till the town became established and its future assured. He had spent most of 1917 hauling prospective buyers to the northern settlement, and since wheat was then at $2.29 a bushel, he had little trouble peddling really sizable acreages to farmers from the east.

  His pamphlet on McKinley outdid anything he had previously offered, for the photographs and text were downright shameless. One group of pictures featured the steady progress of Farmer Earl Grebe, from Ottumwa, Iowa, who had come to Line Camp penniless in 1911 and who had recently picked up another half-section, making 1280 acres in all:

  Notice the rural mansion in which Earl and his lovely wife Alice live ... all paid for by $2.00 wheat, 36 bushels to the acre. The small building to the left is the sod but in which the Grebes lived while they were getting started. Prudent custodians, they now use the “soddy,” our affectionate name for such memorials of the past, as a place to entertain admiring visitors from the east. The photographs on the opposite page show what Earl Grebe has grown on his farm, which is located less than twenty miles from the land you will be purchasing.

  The wheat shown was from the Grebe farm, but the large melons. apples and sugar beets had all been photographed on irrigated land along the Platte.

  In late 1918 Mervin Wendell was expended. Everything he had put his hand to had prospered and he was the richest man in Centennial or any town north to the Wyoming border. He now had only one concern: to live past his seventieth birthday. And he took every possible precaution to see that he did so.

  His heart had weakened, so he canceled all speaking engagements, but he did appear on the platform at victory celebrations. He also drove up to McKinley when the new school was dedicated, and he showed up at his office in town occasionally, directing his son Philip, now a stable married man of forty, in the intricacies of real estate. For the rest, he guarded his health, halting smoking altogether and drinking only occasionally.

  He was delighted when the New Year came and passed, for he considered this a major milestone. “I’d have hated dying in 1918. when so many other things were happening,” he told Maude who seemed to grow younger with the passing years. She laughed at such a statement and assured him he would see 1920. “That’s a nice-sounding year,” he said. “I should like to welcome a new decade.”

  It was not to be. During the second week of January he fell seriously ill, a complication of heart trouble and mild pneumonia. It was precisely the kind of terminal illness he would have chosen for himself, for it allowed him to lie in bed, unscarred and unafflicted by any loathsome disease. Each afternoon he held a kind of court in his bedroom, expatiating on all sort of subjects.

  “Those frail-hearted persons who fear we have over-cultivated the plains will live to see ten farms where one is today. Mark my words, they’ll live to see three-dollar wheat ...

  “The nation has suffered enormously from the prattering of Woodrow Wilson. At the Ludlow troubles he should have sent in twice as many troops and shot down twice as many miners. Colorado would have been much the better for it ...

  “The theater will never die. Mark my words, it will never die. I remember when the great Edwin Booth came to Centennial in 1891. The Union Pacific deposited his red-and-gold private car where the grain silos stand now, and it rested there for three days while he regaled us with Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. The car contained two baths—complete bathtubs I mean—and a library that would have done justice to an emperor. The Union Pacific brought in tubs of oysters in ice and gave a public dinner for three dozen. I was invited, of course, being of the theater ...

  “I have the greatest respect for the rancher. He made Colorado what it is, a great free state. If I have been at odds with him from time to time, over land policy, it was only because he was endeavoring vainly to keep land from the people. The people, sir, that’s where the strength of a nation lies. But we all owe the rancher the respect Mr. Lamson at the bank accords him. He said to me not long ago, ‘Wendell,’ he said, ‘when I look out of my office door and see four men waiting for me, it’s easy to decide who to see first. The rancher, for he is nature’s nobleman. Then the irrigation farmer, for he is a long-time citizen and to be trusted, even if he is apt to be Russian. Then the dry-land farmer, because you never know where he came from nor how long he’s going to be around. And if the fourth man happens to be a Mexican, I tell him, “We already have a janitor.” ’ ”

  On the evening of January 16 he grew quite weak, but he assured his family, “I feel confident I’ll make it,” and on the seventeenth he admitted a large number of well-wishers to his bedroom, regaling them with stories of when he had toured in the Dakotas with the lovely Maude De Lisle, who finally consented to be his wife and who had been his helpmeet during all these years. He went off into a flowery oration about the joys of conjugal bliss, during which his son left the room.

  “It’s a passage from a play we gave in Minnesota,” Philip told his wife. “He’ll be doing the balcony scene from Romeo next,” and sure enough, toward five in the
afternoon Mervin told the group how once in South Dakota he had looked up and had been so overcome by his wife’s beauty that he forgot his lines. He then recited the whole scene, Juliet’s lines as well as his own.

  He died on the nineteenth, and all the Colorado newspapers carried obituaries recalling his unique contributions to the state. His funeral was a triumph, with dignitaries from varied walks of life paying tribute to his capacity for progress and his love of humanity. Many persons whom he had helped volunteered stories of his generosity, and the day was topped by the announcement of a delegation from McKinley that this new community wished to change its name to Wendell.

  In Line Camp there was some feeling that the honor should be theirs, because the odd dual name was not liked by the residents, and a considerable movement got under way to effect a legal change before McKinley could do so, but in the end the northern community won out, and McKinley became Wendell, with the approval of the editorial writer of the Clarion:

  It is proper that northern Colorado have a town named after its most illustrious son, for he did much to develop this section of the state. His vision in sponsoring the radical concepts of Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey when others insisted that dryland farming could never succeed came to fruition during the late unpleasantness when the region north of Centennial became the “breadbasket of the world,” in his happy phrase. On Tuesday next there will be a celebration in McKinley as the name is changed officially to Wendell, and all of us who profited from the leadership of this great man should pay him tribute by being in attendance. We are assured that Governor Gunter will be there to honor the man who served as his statewide chairman in a previous election.

  Colorado’s retiring governor, Julius Gunter, did attend and so did the Grebes, for they of course believed that Mervin Wendell was largely responsible for their good fortune. He had met them at the train that first day in the fall of 1911 when they arrived to try their luck at dry-land farming, and he had cooperated whenever they sought to buy more land. He had contributed a free plot for a library and another for a Sunday School.

  The Grebes invited Vesta and Magnes Volkema to join them at the inauguration of the new town, but Vesta said, “That windbag? He stole the land he gave us for the library, and he stole the land he sold you, and the only reason he didn’t steal our homestead was that I was too goddamned smart for him. This crazy husband of mine came within one hour of selling us out.”

  Alice said, “I thought you wanted to sell ... and move to California.”

  “Still do,” Vesta said. “But not for twenty-five cents an acre. And not to that oily son-of-a-bitch Wendell.”

  Such language did not please Alice Grebe, who felt that hard work on the farm was coarsening Vesta, and at the ceremonies, when a mixed quartet sang “Whispering Hope” in honor of Mervin Wendell, she wept.

  Potato Brumbaugh had had every intention of providing for Tranquilino Marquez and his family. He did give the Takemotos eighty acres of good irrigated land and would have done the same for Tranquilino if the Mexican had been at hand during his final days. Unfortunately, Tranquilino was chasing across northern Mexico with Pancho Villa and did not get back to Centennial until 1917, when Brumbaugh was long since dead.

  Tranquilino returned to a miserable situation; there could be no other word for it. With Brumbaugh gone, he had no regular job at the farm and no settled place to live. He had to take his wife and two children and find such seasonal work as he could, which meant that his family had to live in one hovel or another. His wages were so low that he could save no money; when November 15 came, and the beet checks were distributed, he received so little that it was impossible to take his family to Denver, where there was at least a congenial Mexican community in whose warmth they could lose themselves during the bitter winter months.

  Instead, each November, when they were licked off the beet farm on which they had been working, they would take what money they had and move into one of the disgraceful shacks that had grown up at the northern extremity of Centennial. Little Mexico, the area was called contemptuously, as sad and filthy a collection of dwellings as had ever been allowed to exist in the west. Here the unwanted workers hid themselves during the winter. How they existed during blizzards no one could explain, for the walls were made of slats, with gaping cracks where the wood had warped, and the floors were of mud which froze when water seeped in from the edges. There were no health facilities, no paved roads, no schools, no amenities of any kind and no plans for any.

  The farmers of Colorado, having come to depend on Mexican labor, considered it not only natural but right that these illiterate people should toil from March through November at rip-gut wages, then shift for themselves through the cold months, with inadequate food, inadequate heat, polluted water and festering social conditions. The merchants of Centennial, depending upon the Mexicans for the agricultural stability of the region and welcoming whatever surplus coins they had, saw nothing immoral in condemning this labor to a rural ghetto where they were expected to say nothing and make no demands. And if a Mexican sought to enter a barbershop, a restaurant or a store where fine clothes were sold, he might be chastised. Even the churches condoned this brutal system, for not even a mission was maintained. Protestant churches could perhaps be excused for this indifference, for as their elders said, “The Mexicans don’t belong to us,” but the attitude of the Catholics was less understandable, because the workers were members of that church. Of course, a so-called “Mexican Mass” was held each Sunday, but it convened at six in the morning, when upper-class Catholics would not have to mingle with Mexicans. Even this was restricted to domestic workers who served the better families, and had a mere beet worker wandered in, the priest would have been astounded, for in Centennial a field worker was considered little better than an animal.

  They were an outcast tribe, with a strange language and even stranger customs. “They name their sons Jesus,” the children of Centennial giggled, and that alone was sufficient to disqualify them.

  And it was not only the townspeople. Every rancher whose spread lay to the north had to pass Little Mexico on his way in to town. Every complacent ranch wife from Line Camp or Wendell had to see this ghetto, and no one cared.

  It wasn’t that Little Mexico was ignored. The police were there a good deal, settling fights between residents, and Sheriff Bogardus considered it his major responsibility to keep the place in order during the winter so that field workers would be in good shape when spring planting commenced. In fact, a prime requisite for a Centennial law officer was that he be able to handle Mexicans and keep them from irritating their employers. The little settlement also came in for repetitious comment in the Clarion, where every reporter tried his hand at composing items intended to be amusing:

  On Friday night as usual there were two stabbings in Little Mexico, but nobody died. Sheriff Bogardus arrested four participants but saw no reason to incarcerate them, since our courts are already clogged with problems emanating from that metropolis.

  There was one man who might have served as spokesman for the Mexican community, an itinerant priest named Father Vigil—Veeheel—but unfortunately, he came from New Mexico, where he had been corrupted by the Penitente movement, that strange, John-the-Baptist-type of desert fanaticism in which devout members pierced their backs with cactus thorns to display their penitence, and when he sponsored such carryings-on, the respectable Christians of northern Colorado made it clear that they would not tolerate such behavior. There were proper ways to worship God, and penitential exhibitionism was not one of them.

  It therefore fell upon Sheriff Bogardus to break up such demonstrations, because if the Mexicans coalesced around this inflammatory religion, next thing they would be forming a labor union, and the massacre of the coal miners at Ludlow had shown what could be expected then. So one of the most compelling cries that could be uttered in the police station was: “The goddamned Penitentes are out again!”

  Then the sheriff and his deputies would leap into thei
r cars and roar out to the fields north of Little Mexico, where ecstatic worshippers with thorns through their flesh were dancing and moaning and establishing relationships with God. Clubs would swing, and hoarse-voiced men would shout, “You can’t do that on Colorado property,” and sooner or later frail Father Vigil would move in to protest and some officer would belt him across the mouth and he would fall to earth, bleeding.

  “Why can’t they worship like everyone else?” Sheriff Bogardus asked one Sunday after the Penitentes had given him a passel of trouble. “Why can’t they be Baptists or regular Catholics?”

  It was curious that a state so advanced in all other directions should have been so permanently blind in its understanding of Mexicans. Colorado was where sensible labor relations were first worked out, where old-age pensions would be developed, where education was generously supported, where colleges proliferated and churches abounded. Colorado was a state where good ideas flourished, yet on this great basic question of human rights it remained purblind. It could never admit that for farmers to use labor for personal gain and then to dismiss that labor with no acceptance of responsibility was immoral. And any Anglo brave enough to raise the question ran the risk of having his teeth kicked in.