Centennial (135 page)

“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 ph
rase
. 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 their 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.

For more than half a century this condition prevailed. No church, no crusading newspaper, no band of women sought to correct this basic evil, and across Colorado, Anglo children who once had been raised to believe that Indians were not human were now raised to think that Mexicans were even less so. As one popular children’s book stated: “By the time Billy the Kid was twenty-one years old, be had killed one man for each year of his life, not counting Indians or Mexicans.”

It was to this kind of Little Mexico that Tranquilino Marquez moved permanently in late November 1921, with his wife, Serafina, his hot-headed son Triunfador and his lovely daughter Soledad, now thirteen years old. They found a shack of unbelievable decrepitude and filth, which they proceeded to clean up. Serafina performed miracles with scissors and needle; she would have done even better had a sewing machine been available. And Triunfador obtained, in a way that his father thought best not to inquire about, some lumber for shoring up the falling sides of the building. When they were through, the place could not have been called a house, for it offered practically no protection from either rain or wind, but it was a shelter, and there the family settled down.

They were not the kind of people to attract attention, so they had no reason to fear raids by Sheriff Bogardus, nor was Tranquilino disposed toward the Penitente movement, so there was no danger of his being clubbed by the deputies. The trouble lay with Triunfador, tall and sinewy, like his father; hard as iron, like his mother. He was now twenty and well instructed in the methods of sugar-beet cultivation. He was not able to read or write, but he had an unusual ingenuity and a determination to better himself.

Trouble started when he found an abandoned shack close to State 8, the rural highway leading from Centennial to Line Camp. Without seeking permission from the authorities, he took it over and installed a phonograph, three tables and some chairs. He made it a congenial place for the unemployed laborers to congregate and soon he was selling candy bars and soda pop.

It did not take the farmers of Centennial long to discover that in La Cantina, as it was called, lay the seeds of rebellion. “You let them damned Mexicans start congregating like that,” a Russian beet farmer warned Sheriff Bogardus, “and first thing you know, we got labor unions and all sorts of trouble.” When a second complaint was filed, Bogardus saw his duty.

Looming in the doorway, his pistols protruding from his holster, he announced, “This place is closed.” Saying no more, he withdrew, confident that no Mexican would defy such a clear-cut order.

Triunfador did not intend to close down, for he saw in La Cantina a nucleus around which a better way of life could be obtained for his people. “La Raza,” he said when speaking of his fellow Mexicans. The race, the whole Spanish race, both those from New Mexico, like Father Vigil, and the peons from Old Mexico, like his father. They must not live like animals, the members of La Raza, hibernating in their winter hovels like rattlesnakes. They must devise something better, something finer even than the back streets of Denver. He would not close.