Centennial (130 page)

“You’ve prospered, they say.”

“My farm was near water. Yours won’t be.”

Mervin Wendell called for the women to follow him, and the Grebes started to move away, but Brumbaugh caught Alice by the hand. “Go back home,” he warned her. “The land out there ... it’s fine for dogs and men. It’s hell on horses and women.”

“Over here!” Wendell called. “You, young lady. In this car.”

And it was from the rear seat of a fancy Buick that Alice Grebe first approached her new home. Mr. Wendell, at the wheel of his own car, drove east on Prairie, then north past Little Mexico, where adobe hovels astonished the newcomers, and then northeast toward the proposed village of Line Camp. When the caravan crossed Mud Creek and entered the great plains, several women gasped at the total emptiness, for not one living thing could be seen except grass, not one sign of human occupancy except the winding road.

“My God, this is desolate!” Vesta Volkema cried.

“Not when it has barns and windmills and lovely homes dotted across the horizon,” Wendell said brightly. And now it became clear why he had crowded all the wives into separate automobiles; he did not want their disappointment to contaminate their husbands. The men would be looking at the soil, trying to estimate its worth, and if left alone, would reach favorable conclusions ... or at least not negative ones. And later they would persuade their womenfolk to accept the decision.

“Wait till you see Line Camp!” he said enthusiastically.

“What’s it like?” Vesta asked.

“A paradise!” he assured her.

He had purchased a section of land—640 acres—from the Venneford people for the establishment of a new town centered upon old Line Camp Three, long abandoned. With the land, he acquired the stone barn and the low-built one-story stone house which had been used by generations of cowboys when they worked the Venneford cattle. The buildings were the best part of the purchase, and with them as a focus, the surveyors had platted a western town, centered upon the intersection of State 8 and Weld 33.

A newcomer to Line Camp had three choices. He could buy land and live in town, or close to it. He could homestead for three years and get a half-section, 320 acres, free. Or he could start to homestead and after fourteen months buy the land from the government for $1.25 an acre.

Mervin Wendell encouraged as many people as possible to do the last, for as soon as they got legal title to the land, they were free to sell it, and he was prepared to buy as much as possible from them at $1.75 an acre, intending to sell it to later arrivals at $7.00 or $8.00. It was to his interest that as many as possible of the newcomers occupy their land for fourteen months and then quit, for in their failure lay his success.

With this first drylands group he was doubly sure that many would lose heart. The tall girl who had been talking with Brumbaugh—she wouldn’t stay long. Nor the minister’s wife, nor the young woman with two children. He had often bought homesteads from such defeated people for 25¢ an acre, and he would do so again.

So his tactic would be to encourage the families as fulsomely as possible while they were signing up for their free land, then to commiserate with them when they wanted to flee the area. He would work principally on the women, reassuring them at first, sympathizing with them when the bad years struck. And in this manner he would acquire huge holdings in the area, hovering always like a jackal about the edges of a camp, picking up the strays.

With horns blowing, the rented automobiles drove into the space between the two stone buildings, and Mervin Wendell climbed atop a wooden box to explain procedures: “This will be your new town. That stone barn is being converted into a first-class general store, where you will be able to purchase almost anything you could in Chicago. That round thing over there will climb ninety feet into the air and serve as the elevator where you will store your vast crops of wheat. Down there is where the railroad station will be. And this low building houses the land commissioner, who is going to give you all the acres you require. The free land extends in every direction, but I’ll tell you frankly, if I was choosing, I’d take one of those half-sections in the northeast sector, up beyond Rattlesnake Buttes.” Here he broke into an easy laugh, explaining to the women. “When Indians lived here, the Buttes had rattlers. Today no Indians, no rattlers. Today mostly Baptists, and they’re trouble enough.” At this joke the wives laughed nervously.

“The automobiles will sally forth in various directions, and you are free to inspect the land for as long as you like. When you’ve made your choice, you come back here and speak to my good friend Walter Bellamy.” From the interior of the building. he summoned the land commissioner, and a curious young man appeared, thin as a reed, red-haired, awkward and with a green shade protecting his pale-blue eyes from the incessant sun. He was twenty-four years old, a college graduate from Grinnell in Iowa. He was shy and deprecatory of his ability; he had come west to find escape from family pressures, and he loved the quiet job he had stumbled into as land commissioner. To watch people day after day, choosing and settling upon new land would be exciting.

“Show them the maps,” Wendell said unctuously, and the surveys were unrolled: Township 10 North, Range 60 West, with the town of Line Camp occupying Section 22, and with Sections 16 and 36 reserved for the school district.
(
See Map 13 – Line Camp 1911-1939
)

The farmers could see that most of the half-sections in this township were spoken for; what they could not detect was that most of them belonged to Mervin Wendell, who was ready to sell them at a profit. The free land lay farther out, and for some reason he could not have explained, Earl Grebe focused on land which lay to the northwest, and when he discussed this with the group, he found that another family, the Larsens, had done the same, so they procured one of the cars and drove along country trails to that section of the free land, but when Earl bored in with his earth auger, he brought up a very dry sample that showed a tillable depth of less than six inches.

“This isn’t for me,” he announced, and he went off on his own, and at the northeast corner, of the township he found a half-section that had everything he required: rolling land for good drainage when the rains did come, a topsoil fourteen inches deep, fairly good moisture already in the soil and a view of the two red buttes to the south, with absolutely nothing but low hills visible in any other direction. He saw this as a majestic land, worthy of a man’s best efforts.

“Alice!” he shouted to his wife. “Look at this!” And he showed her the dimensions of the land the government would be giving them. It seemed a vast holding, 320 acres, with enough to leave a large part fallow year after year, and a protected hillside behind which a house could be sheltered.

Alice stood by her husband, staring at the huge land they were about to occupy. and whether it was a chill or her pregnancy or a foreboding of what the years might contain, she began shivering, for this seemed to her the bleakest land that God had ever given His children to plow. Earl, sensing her fright, placed his arm about her and promised, “It’s our task to subdue this land and make it ours.”

He handed her his notebook and asked her to jot down the designation of their new home: “Township 10 North, Range 60 West, Section 11, the south 320.” When the figures were written, Alice found in them a sense of reality, and her apprehension abated somewhat. Bending down, for she was slightly taller than her husband, she kissed him on the cheek and said, “I’m all right. The place is so empty, it seems filled with ghosts.” To Earl such a statement was incomprehensible, and he made no reply.

The Larsens found a good piece of land in Township 11, a little farther north, but the Volkemas located a fine half-section to the southeast and staked out two additional half-sections to which they were not entitled. When the group reassembled outside the land commissioner’s office, Alice asked, “What are you going to do with the extra sections?” and Vesta said, “Don’t worry about that, I have the chalk.” This reply made no sense at all, so Alice turned and asked Mrs. Larsen, “What does she mean?” and Mrs. Larsen said, “She looks as if she knows what she’s doing.”

With the others watching, Mrs. Volkema directed her son, aged seventeen, and her daughter, eighteen, to take off their shoes. With her chalk she wrote on the inner sole of each shoe: “Age 21.” Then the two children put their shoes back on and accompanied Vesta into the land office, where Commissioner Bellamy waited with his maps.

“Have you located the land you prefer?” he asked formally.

“We have,” Earl Grebe replied, and he proceeded to designate what he and Alice had chosen. Papers were signed, and Bellamy said, “You have staked your claim as of this date. Within six months you must give me proof that you have taken up actual residence on your land. If you fail to do so, you forfeit your claim. On the other hand, if you pitch a tent today and take up residence, three years from this date the land is yours, fee simple. Are these terms understood?”

“How do we inform you that we’ve taken residence?” Grebe asked.

“You come in here and tell me so. You put your hand on that Bible and swear to your occupancy, and that’s good enough for the government, because we know you’re all Christian persons.” And in this simple manner Earl and Alice filed their intention of homesteading.

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.