Centennial (154 page)

“Yes, but you must explain them to the citizens. For example, if we continue to steal water away from our farms, onions will have to cost ten dollars apiece.”

On the drive home, a much-sobered Garrett reflected on his new job as protector of resources: “I thought the task was to provide the people of Colorado with good air to breathe. Now I’ve got to see that they have water to drink. And when the soil experts get through their indoctrination, I suspect my principal job will be to ensure that we have earth to till. This nation is running out of everything. We forgot the fact that we’ve always existed in a precarious balance, and now if we don’t protect all the components, we’ll collapse. I never knew my great-grandfather, Jim Lloyd—he died before my time. But I’ve heard my Grandfather Beeley tell how Lloyd loved the earth and never wanted to do anything to disturb its balance. He wouldn’t allow one extra steer to graze on a field that might be damaged by close cropping. We’ve got to get back to that sense of responsibility toward the earth. When I think that the people of this state didn’t give a damn when Floyd Calendar shot eagles and bears and turkeys—just for the hell of it, just to titillate some eastern sportsmen ...”

On Tuesday, November 20, it was the farmers and the financiers who had to bite the bullet. The climactic meeting of Central Beet was held in Denver, with Paul Garrett and Harvey Brumbaugh present as board members, and they sat in silence as the dismal figures were paraded.

“The beet industry,” droned the chairman, “has fallen on evil times. So many people covet our land for so many new purposes that the farmer can’t afford to reserve it for beets. He’s got to sell to the subdividers, who build new towns for people from the east. And even if he did hold on to his land, he couldn’t find anyone to work his fields or harvest the crop in the fall.” He continued his painful litany until he reached the obvious conclusion: “And so, gentlemen, we have no alternative but to close down our plant at Centennial. We won’t lose money, because a real estate developer from Chicago has made us a most attractive offer. He wants to build ninety-seven Colonial-type houses.”

Harvey Brumbaugh was the first to react. As the owner of a large feed lot where young steers were assembled for fattening, he had relied on sugar-beet pulp and molasses as a convenient source of feed. Now he would have to look elsewhere and absorb the cost of shipping.

The chairman listened to this complaint, then said, “The time may be at hand when the cattle industry will be forced to quit Colorado. Our state is so beautiful, and so many people want to live here, that I suspect ranchers like Paul Garrett will no longer be able to run their cattle economically. A whole pattern of life is vanishing, gentlemen. We’re just the first to feel the pinch.”

The chairman did not say so, but all present realized that in some forthcoming meeting, say within three years, the first topic on the agenda would be: “Shall we dissolve the company altogether?”

It was incomprehensible to Garrett that this great institution, which had once dominated life in Colorado—“We live and breathe as Central Beet directs,” the farmers had said—should be on the verge of collapse. Even when he was a boy, as late as 1936, Central Beet had dictated to banks and school boards and sheriffs’ offices. For thousands of farmers and small-town businessmen, Central Beet was Colorado, and to watch it fall from that high estate was painful.

“What went wrong?” Garrett asked Brumbaugh as they rode home together.

“We didn’t pay enough attention to the relationship of land and people,” Brumbaugh said. “I glimpsed something of the problem when I developed the feed-lot concept. Take the young cattle off the land, herd them in lots and stuff them with feed for market. Well, that idea seems to have run its course. You know what I’m thinking right now?”

Garrett turned to look at the man who rode beside him. Harvey, like his great-grandfather, Potato, had a far-ranging mind, one that was ever willing to investigate new potentials. Now Brumbaugh said, “I have a suspicion that before long we’ll be raising cattle the way they raise those new-style chickens. Never touch the earth. Live in sanitized pens from birth to death. Cowboys will be city fellers with college degrees, dressed in white aprons. They’ll ship manure away in desiccated pellets.”

Excited by his vision of the future, even though it entailed hardship for him, Brumbaugh continued: “Time’s got to come when we can no longer afford to keep cows in Colorado. First they’ll move to Wyoming and Montana, but land prices are rising there too. Know what’s going to happen?”

Garrett had been thinking, for some time, that ranching in Colorado was doomed, but he had not deduced where the business would go, and he listened with fascination as Brumbaugh said, “Within a few years we’ll be raising most of our cattle on cheap land back in states like Indiana ... close to the feed supply. On the other hand, I’ve heard some good reports on cottonseed cake as feed for Herefords. I may move my whole operation to Georgia ... or maybe Alabama.”

Garrett was impressed by the facility with which Brumbaugh could leap from one alternative to the next, without allowing sentiment to intrude where it could serve no useful purpose. He wasn’t able to do that. If the time came when he could no longer afford to run Hereford cattle, a large part of his life would be shattered, and with these gloomy thoughts of change and the flow of life he dropped Brumbaugh at the feed lot and drove north.

On Wednesday Paul faced an ugly necessity, one he had been postponing for some weeks. Now he must meet the people concerned and report the bad news.

When it was announced that he would be chairman of the Centennial Commission, a delegation from Blue Valley in the heart of the Rockies visited him with an elaborate plan for making that historic area a focus for the celebration. When he first studied the proposal he had been offended by its garishness and its pandering to every base item in Colorado’s history, but as the days passed and he heard further details, he was downright revolted. The men and women of Blue Valley did not seem to know that in 1976 a great state and a greater nation would be celebrating their birthdays and that what was required was a rededication to the principles that had made them outstanding in the first place. In Blue Valley they wanted a carnival.

With reluctance he drove into the high mountains to visit the ugliest town in America. As he reached the top of the steep ascent and looked down into the valley he felt compelled to record his thoughts:

This used to be one of the loveliest spots in North America. That stream was crystal, filled with beaver. Those bare flanks were covered with trees. Deer and elk abounded, and the mountains stood like sentinels protecting it. My ancestors discovered the place, and that old Indian I told you about found gold here.

Well, no spot anywhere in the world, no matter how lovely, can withstand the discovery of gold ... or oil. Look at this abhorrent thing
—
no trees, a fouled stream, no wildlife except dogs left to die by summer visitors. The old opera house rotting, the railroad trestle falling in
—
and those goddamned neon signs.

Before the first open sewer had been laid down the middle of Main Street, the town of Blue Valley had been a disgrace. For sheer destruction of nature, it took the prize in a state which had so often defiled its finest treasures. Not a single redeeming feature had been built into the town, and those that remained stood as memorials to man’s greed and insensitivity.

“The whole damned thing should be burned to the ground,” Garrett mumbled as he drove into town. But then he slammed on the brakes and studied the problem anew, spotting here and there some old building which might be restored for travelers to gawk at:

The mind of man is provoked to speculation by ruins, and the paintings of Hubert Robert that show the desolation of Rome, or the dark, powerful etchings of Piranesi showing the
ruins of those somber castles excite us. Maybe the committee
’s
right. Maybe we could
salv
age something that would remind the city traveler of the past.

He looked disconsolately at the awful modern excrescences that monopolized the town-the hot-dog stands built like hot dogs, the Moorish motels, the towering neon signs, the trash in the gutter, the preposterous architecture, and everywhere the assault on taste and judgment. Even the ski slope, built at enormous expense, was contaminated. In winter, candy-bar wrappers lay frozen in the snow. In summer, they mingled with beer cans and broken bottles:

It
’s
beyond redemption. Everything about it is wrong. Look at how the highway stupidly crosses and recrosses the stream which can no longer be seen. The only possible salvation for this place would be to hire gigantic helicopters with huge dredges to fly over it, day after day, and fill the whole valley with earth and hope that within a couple of hundred years the eroding stream might create something lovely again.

The worst awaited him in the town itself, where a group of men representing saloons and motels had gathered to outline their ideas for the centennial.

“What we have in mind,” the spokesman said, “is the recreation of scenes which will inspire the visitor and give him a feel of the old west. We’re gonna take that building on Main Street and false-front it into a Wells Fargo station. Every day at noon a band of outlaws—we can hire eight cowboys at a price we can afford—will hold up the stage, and a big gun battle will last for about five minutes. Jeff, tell him about the hangin’.”

“Well, we figure that for less than a hundred dollars we can erect a gallows over there, where we have lots of parkin’, and at three each afternoon we’ll enact the hangin’ of Dirty Louie and Belle Beagle Now, we know that the actual execution took place about four miles up the stream—charge was claim jumpin’ and her bein’ a whore and all that—but we figure no one’ll complain if we move it into town.

“The highlight comes at seven o’clock each night. We’re gonna rename the saloon ‘The Bucket of Blood’ and come sundown we’re gonna reenact the shootin’ of the Pettis boys. We’ve contacted Floyd Calendar and he’s agreed to play the part of his grandfather-Amos Calendar, the one who gunned them down—”

“Say,” a motelkeeper asked Garrett, “wasn’t one of your kinfolk involved in that shootin’?”

“Yes. And so was Harvey Brumbaugh’s.”

“Do you think that on the actual anniversary we could get you and Brumbaugh to join Calendar and come down the Main Street blazin’ away? We could have television and it’d make every station in the country.”

The dismal plans went on and on—the whores, the dry-gulching, the bank robbery, the runaway stagecoach. As Garrett listened he wondered if these men had any comprehension of western history. Did they think it was all murder and mayhem? Didn’t they know that ordinary men and women also settled the west, and that most of them had deplored the very excesses this committee wanted to celebrate. Jim Lloyd had left a brief memento of his foray into the mountains in search of the Pettis boys:

From that moment on I have never handled a gun. I have found even the shooting of a rattlesnake abhorrent, and I recommend to all my descendants that they keep away from firearms, for I have found that they do far more damage to good men than to e
vil.

At lunch the committee presented its one good idea. The chairman said, “We’ve saved this till last, because we know you’ll like it. What we’re going to do is put a big billboard on every major road leading into the state. We’ll tell the tourists, ‘Come to Blue Valley and Eat Like the Pioneers Ate.’ ” With this he snapped his fingers, and the cooks brought out the sourdough bread, the beans and onions, the johnnycake and the elk meat.

It was an imaginative concept, and Garrett was loath to discourage the men. Such a meal, served on red-checked oilcloth in a rough surrounding, might prove popular with tourists. The other proposals were offensive, and Garrett wanted nothing to do with them, but he had to concede that these men would do no worse damage to the valley than their predecessors had already done.

Grudgingly he told them, “If you can scrape up forty or fifty thousand dollars to clean this town up ... and build some false fronts ...”

“Then you’ll play your grandfather in the big shoot-out?”

He smiled. “As chairman of the statewide committee, I mustn’t show any partiality.”

“Of course. We’re gonna call our show ‘Ghost Town Lives Again.’ ”

“I wasn’t aware you’d ever been a ghost town.”

“Well, we fudge the history ... a little, here and there.”

On Thursday, November 22, Garrett took Harvey Brumbaugh aside before the beginning of the committee hearing and told him, “Blue Valley has made us an offer we can’t refuse. We’re to wear revolvers, stalk down Main Street, and gun down the Pettis boys again.”

“I can hardly wait,” Brumbaugh said, brushing aside the levity. “Let’s get your lynching party over with.” He sat erect in the chair reserved for him, placed both hands on the table and said, “I suppose you gentlemen have reached a conclusion?”

“We have,” the chairman said. “Harvey, much as it pains me ... well, the health problem ... the smell ... the future plans for Centennial ... We’ve studied everything and we can reach only one conclusion.”

“You want me to move my feed lot out of here?”

“We do,” the chairman said placatingly. “Now, we don’t want you to move too far. Ten, fifteen miles maybe. The workers at the lot want to stay with you.”

“How soon?” Brumbaugh asked coldly.

“We’re not going to rush you. Eight ... nine months.”