Centennial (18 page)

So the snake waited, and before too many minutes had passed, from one of the burrows a furry little head appeared. By chance its first glance was directly into the eyes of the snake, which startled it so, it gave one wild cry and disappeared down its hole, but before it had ceased trembling from fright, another dog from another hole came out to see if there really was a snake, and this one was not so fortunate as to look directly at the rattler. It turned first in the opposite direction and before it ever saw the snake, the fangs had sunk into its neck.

There were many burrows in this town, and sometimes the rattlesnakes, caught far from the buttes in bad weather or when the sun was dangerously hot—for a snake, like the great reptiles before him, would quickly perish if exposed too long to the direct rays of the sun—would crawl into the burrows, and even make them their home for extended periods, in which case the prairie dogs would simply leave by another exit.

Sand owls, which built their nests and raised their young underground, also liked to preempt the burrows rather than take the trouble to build their own, and it was not unusual to see within one town the prairie dogs inhabiting one set of burrows, the sand owls another, and the rattlesnakes a third, with each allowing the other to go pretty much his own way.

This rattlesnake had no intention of taking up residence in dog-town. It came only to feed, and when it had caught its prey and swallowed it, there were other areas to visit, down by the river, for example, where mice lived among the roots of the cottonwoods. A rattler would always prefer a mouse above any other food, but they were not easy to catch. There were also birds, especially the young, but catching them required unusual patience, and after his encounter with the eagle this rattler was not much attracted to birds.

As autumn approached, it was essential that each rattler fortify himself with a series of meals upon which he could draw in the months of hibernation, and the hunting became more intense. In those days he practically lived in the heart of dog-town, picking off whatever inquisitive little animals he could, but as the days shortened he felt an irresistible urge to seek protection at the buttes. It was no trivial thing to go to sleep for a series of months during which he would be vulnerable to any foe that came upon him; it was essential that he return to deep rocky crevices which had protected him in the past.

So he started the trek back to the buttes, and as he went he saw many other rattlesnakes on their way, too, and as they convened at familiar places they moved together and sometimes formed intertwined balls of writhing forms, a score of large rattlers twisted together. When men reached this area, as they soon would, they would sometimes in autumn stumble upon such a ball of writhing snakes—“they was as big as a watermillion”—and they would be horrified; memory of the sight would haunt them, and years later they would speak of it: “I was ridin’ a gray mustang, a very steady brute, and all at oncet he shies and like to throw me on my ass and thank God he didn’t because there by them red rocks at Rattlesnake Buttes was this ball of snakes all twisted up I like to died.”

Now as the snakes crawled down a path which they had often used before, the old rattler became aware of an unfamiliar creature blundering toward him from the opposite direction. Following his ancient custom, he coiled himself in the middle of the path and emitted a sharp rattle. The stranger, unfamiliar with this warning, ignored it, stumbling directly at the rattler, which made an even sharper sound.

At last the intruder took notice, almost too late.

The snake struck at the thing that stood close to its fangs, but this was to be a unique experience, for deftly the target leaped aside, and from aloft something descended, striking the rattler a heavy blow behind the head. Knocked out of its coil, the snake endeavored in bewilderment to adjust to this unprecedented assault. It formed a half-coil, preparing to strike anew at its assailant.

And then it looked up, and instead of seeing a buffalo or a sharp-hoofed deer, it saw a new creature, standing erect, bearing a heavy weapon not seen before, and the last sensation this rattler had was the sight of the weapon descending toward his head with tremendous force, and the strange cry of triumph from the standing figure, and sharp death.

Man had come to the plains. From the far northwest, from a distant origin, across strange bridges and down green corridors, the two-legged one had journeyed to the buttes, where before only the horse and the camel and the mammoth, the sloth and the beaver and the snake had lived. His first act was symbolic, the instinctive killing of the snake, and for as long as time endured, enmity between these two would continue.

At this watershed of history it might be prudent to look at the land as it then was, for we must remember our inheritance if we are to retain a vision of what it might once more be.

It was a cruel land, that year when man arrived. The New Rockies rose perhaps a millionth of an inch; certainly they did not stand still, for they never had and they never would. They were either rising in birth or falling in decay, and in time to come they might be higher than the Himalayas or lower than the Appalachians. In that year no man could have guessed what their destiny would be.

From the mountains great bodies of water and silt cascaded down onto the plains, as they had been doing for seventy million years. That year there was a flood which killed many bison and swept away all beaver lodges, but at the same time it deposited some of the silt and many of the minerals which would make the area unusually rich when time came for tillage.

The grass grew a little better than usual, making it one of the finest pasture areas in the world, and the bison increased in number, so that when the cows led the northern herd into the yearly convocation the count was at its maximum, around forty million, with thirty million in the southern herd. They darkened the earth in such great numbers, they could never be obliterated.

Beaver had a poor year. The floods killed many in their lodges, especially the kits and one-year-olds. The two-year-old beavers who were expelled from home that year had little trouble finding locations for their lodges, but a lot of trouble finding trees the right size for building their dams; the flood had uprooted too many and swept them downstream.

At Rattlesnake Buttes the animals lived in subtle and long-approved harmony. The little sand owls stole a burrow now and then from the prairie dogs, and occasionally they ate a young dog, but only one that was too weak to survive normally. They also kept the mice in check, but themselves provided food for hawks.

The main problem of the prairie dogs was not the loss of an occasional burrow to the owls, or even the constant depredations of the rattlesnakes, but the fact that in the summer the rutting bulls, frustrated as males often are by the problems of sex, insisted upon wallowing on top of the town where the earth was fine and dusty and then urinating on it; they did a lot of damage and it took time to rebuild a town after such treatment.

The pronged antelope and the wolverine and the sleek deer and gray wolves that watched everything lived together in delicate balance, each needing the other and each dependent upon the land and its abundant grass.

There was another factor which has not been mentioned but which would, in the years ahead, become increasingly important. This land was beautiful.

From the buttes at sunrise a man would be able to look east and see a hundred miles to unbroken horizons, stark meadow after meadow reaching beyond the human imagination. The colors were superb, but the uninitiated could look at them and not see them, for they were soft grays and delicate browns and azure purples.

The vast plains had a nobility that would never diminish, for they were a challenge, with their duststorms, their wild blizzards, their tornadoes and their endless promise, if men treated them with respect. They were a resource inexhaustible in their variety but demanding in their love. In the years ahead they would terrify easterners and Europeans afraid of loneliness, but they would be a haven for all who understood them, and they would be loved in contrary ways and with harsh curses. The great plains—illimitable in both challenge and fulfillment.

If a man looked northward from the buttes he could see the chalk cliffs of Nebraska, those extraordinary white rocks that had once lain at the bottom of some vanished sea. It was infuriating; he could be dying of thirst on the parched plains, yet know that the whole area had once been under water, and there the white cliffs were to prove it. If he poked among them he would find fossil fish and clams, and the only way such things could have been caught in the rocks was for everything to have been under water. Hell, in some places the rock was twenty thousand feet thick, and all of it made under water.

To the south were the cottonwoods, that thin line of useless trees, barely edible for beavers, who would eat any tree that grew. Yet when a traveler saw those trees, broken-branched and torn by storms, his heart skipped a beat, for they marked the South Platte, and wherever it ran, there was at least water, foul though it might be, and some chance that another human being could be in the vicinity, because he needed water too.

It was to the west, however, that the conspicuous grandeur lay, for there the mountains rose in such splendor that when men saw them they gasped. Row upon row the marvelous peaks marched north and south, so many and so varied that the eye could never tire of them. In winter they were white with snow and looked as if they had been pasted against the deep-blue sky. In spring they shone green in their lower reaches and granite-blue above the tree line. In all seasons they were glorious, reaching fourteen thousand feet into the air and visible for more than a hundred miles out in the prairie.

There was one peak visible from the buttes, the largest of all, which captured the affection of every man or woman who saw it from this area. It was a noble peak of itself and would have been outstanding even if it had no significant features, but up its eastern flank crawled a granite beaver. It was really the oddest thing, but when a man looked at this master-mountain, a thing of obvious majesty, all he remembered was that stone beaver trying to climb to the top. Travelers could see him from a long way off, and from the buttes he commanded attention. This peak should have been called Beaver Mountain, but unfortunately, men are sometimes not imaginative. Other peaks had poetic names like Never-Summer Range, Rabbit’s Ear, Medicine Bow, Sangre de Cristo, and one with a perpetual mark of snow in its crisscrossed ravines, the Mount of the Holy Cross. Even Pikes Peak had an alliterative ring, but the best mountain of them all, with a little beaver- crawling up its flank, was given the drabbest name of all—Longs Peak.

The Rockies had a characteristic not shared by other ranges of the west, and this both endeared them to people who lived in their shadow and infuriated those who came upon them as strangers. The air surrounding them was so pure that from a distance it was impossible to calculate how far away they were. Of course, the air was just as pure around the ranges to the north, but they were not faced by flat plains across which people traveled, so the phenomenon did not apply to them. If an immigrant came from a flat land like Illinois, he would wake up one morning after crossing the Missouri to see the Rockies as clear as a row of corn on his farm back home, and he would exult and cry, “Tonight we sleep in the mountains!”

But he could travel westward all the next day, and the mountains would still appear to be where they had been at dawn, and the next night they would be no closer, nor the next either. Distance could not be calculated, and occasionally a man and his wife would become mesmerized by the noble mountains; never had they seen anything so grand and so perplexing. The good part was that close up, these splendid ranges were just as impressive as they had been from a distance. They dominated the plains and served as a backdrop to extraordinary beauty.

It was at sunset that the mountains came into their own, for on some days clouds would rest over them like a light blanket and reflect the dying sun. Then the mountains would be bathed in splendor: gold and red and soft radiant browns and deep blues would color the underside of the clouds and frame the mountains in a celestial light, so that even the most stolid Indiana immigrant would have to halt his oxen and look in amazement at a setting so grand that it seemed to have been ordained solely for the stupefaction of mankind.

The loveliest moment came, however, when the sun had set and its flamboyant coloring had faded. Then, for about twenty minutes, the softest colors of the spectrum played about the crests of the mountains, and the little stone beaver crawled toward the summit to sleep, and many a traveler bit his lower lip and looked away, thinking of a home he would not see again.

Centennial, when it was founded, would stand at the spot where a man could look eastward and catch the full power of the prairie, or westward to see the Rockies. The history of the town would be a record of the way it responded to the impossible task of conciliating the demands of the mountains with the requirements of the prairie. Many would destroy themselves in this conflict, but those who survived, assimilating the best of these two contrasting worlds, would attain a largeness of soul that other men who chose easier paths would not discover.

CAUTION TO
US
EDITORS. Even as I was working on this section a group of leading geologists announced that in their opinion the Pleistocene epoch, which covers the period of the glaciers, should be considered to start not at one million years before the present but two to three million. At the same time another specialist suggested that North America did not experience the five periods of glaciation which I was taught—with five interglacial periods, the last being the one we are in now—but rather a recurring series of shorted-lived glaciers interspersed with many interglacial periods. I tend to agree with each of these opinions, because they are consistent with ideas I have expressed before, that we will probably push all dates back in time. We are older than we used to think. However, in my notes I have respected the established chronology. If your own researches incline you toward the newer dates, use them.