Centennial (19 page)

Land bridge
. I must also warn you concerning two facts about the land bridge. Its existence cannot be challenged, but it may not have been as vital as my notes make it out to be. A very good geologist told me the other day, “There is no need to posit this famous land bridge of yours. For much of the time when the exchange of animal life was under way the Asian plate and the North American were in contact and the two continents were undifferentiated. The so-called bridge must have then been two or three thousand miles wide, and glaciers had absolutely nothing to do with it.” Incidentally, do not think of the Eskimo as using the bridge. They got here very late, long after the last glaciation, when there could have been no bridge. No matter. They could get from Asia to Alaska simply by canoeing for fifty-six miles, which is what they did.

Amphibians?
Although every text agrees that the sauropods, the family to which diplodocus belonged, were amphibians, the exact significance of this description is uncertain. Some experts like G. Edward Lewis argue that animals as enormous as brontosaurus and diplodocus could not have supported their weight on dry land, considering their crude joints; they must have lived in swamps and lagoons where water buoyed them up. Others point out that the legs, awkward though they were, did persist through millions upon millions of years, whereas unused appendages, like the human tail, atrophied and vanished. Of seventeen illustrations I was able to find of diplodocus, all showed her on land, but Lewis explains that this cannot be accepted as evidence; the artists merely wished to display her total conformation.

Origins o
f
the horse
. Some readers may, with scientific backing, object to a Colorado origin for the horse. They argue that the missing “paleohippus” of which I write could just as properly have originated in Europe, since there was a well-known European equivalent to the second-generation eohippus. In Europe the little creature was given the totally erroneous name
hyracotherium
, because his discoverers could not imagine him to be related in any way to the horse; they classified him as a forebear of the hyrax, a small shrew-like animal, the cony of the Old Testament. Such experts believe our horse originated in Europe from the hyracotherium. I think not. That eohippus died away into forms with no aptitude for survival. The horse as we know it developed where and as I said. The Arabian, the Percheron, the Clydesdale—all had their beginnings not far from Rattlesnake Buttes. Crazy idea, isn’t it?

Appaloosa
. I would advise you not to get involved over the origins of this most beautiful of horses. A group of new scholars is pushing the line that the ancestors of our horse developed in America only as far as mesohippus, which then emigrated to Asia, where it developed into the horse proper, in the form of the Appaloosa, which thus becomes the great ancestor of subsequent breeds. This theory is most ardently voiced, as you might suspect, by Appaloosa owners, but is rejected by others. The Appaloosa is a distinguished animal, one of the great breeds of the world and possibly the most ancient. It has solid-color front quarters, mottled rear, skimpy tail and mane and curiously streaked hoofs. The Nez Percé Indians of western Idaho were responsible for cultivating the strain in North America, and from them a few passed into the hands of western ranchers, who in 1938 banded together to reestablish the breed. They’ve done a good job, and later on well see the effect on a town like Centennial.

Origins o
f
the beaver
. You may get some flak regarding the beaver. Some experts have argued that he originated in Europe, or perhaps Egypt, and immigrated to North America rather late. But the greater scholars like Stout and Schultz, both of Nebraska, believe that he originated from American stock dating far back and that he emigrated over the land bridge to Asia to develop collaterally there.

Definitions
. It’s difficult to find a precise definition of
butte
. A vast upland area is a
plateau
. When bounded on all four sides by cliffs, it’s a
mesa
. When the boundaries of the mesa erode to a point at which the height is greater than the width, it’s a
butte
. If it continues eroding, it becomes in succession a
monument
, a
chimney
, a
spire
, a
needle
, and finally, a memory.

Eagle-serpent
. This enmity is celebrated in many folklores. The pre-eminent visual depiction appears, of course, in the Mexican flag, where a serpent held in the talons of an eagle perched on a cactus serves as the national insignia. Traditionally the eagle (manly virtue) kills the snake (guile and venality) ; the account I send you, in which the rattlesnake triumphs, is an invention of the western plains, where it occurs in various oral versions.

Man was tardy in reaching Colorado, and precisely when he arrived, we do not know. The great land bridge leading from Asia to Alaska was open 40,000 years ago, after which it closed when the glaciers melted and their captured water returned to the sea. It was open again about 28,000 years ago, and for the last time, about 13,000 years ago, closing about 10,000 years ago.

When the bridge was open, perhaps a thousand miles wide, well-developed human beings then living in eastern Siberia could have followed mammoths and other large game from Asia into Alaska. And when the tips of the glaciers began to melt, broad avenues opened, leading in a southeasterly direction, with mountains to the west and broad plains to the east, down which the animals could move, pursued by the men who hunted them.

It is sheer speculation to assume that 40,000 years ago Mongoloid men crossed the bridge and came down the avenues. But it is a certainty that when the bridge opened 13,000 years ago men came down—or were already here—to start the earliest recorded occupation of America. In time their descendants would become known as Indians. Finally, we have good records of a late migration around 6,000 B.C. which did not require any land bridge; these incomers used boats to cross the fifty-six mile gap of ocean that separates Alaska from Siberia. Today their descendants are known as Eskimo, markedly different from the earlier groups that became Indians.

As yet we have no secure evidence that men actually arrived 40,000 years ago; we have found neither their homes, nor their tools, nor their skeletons. All we have are tantalizing intimations of their occupancy—a carved caribou leg bone in the Yukon, a circle of stones in California, a possible dwelling in Pueblo—but one of these days, perhaps before the end of this century, definitive proof may be forthcoming.

Nor do we have proof that the bridge 28,000 years ago brought us men, although it almost certainly did. As of today, all we can be sure of is that man was indubitably here 12,000 years ago, because we have the hard-proof records of his occupancy.

We know where he lived, what time of year he hunted, how he made his spear, where he encountered a great mammoth, and how he killed the animal before the feast began. We are as certain of this hunt as we are that Daniel Boone once shot deer in Kentucky; all we lack is the mammoth’s skeleton.

In the year 9268 B.C. at the chalk cliffs west of Rattlesnake Buttes a human being twenty-seven years old, and therefore ancient and about to die, studied a chunk of rock which a younger man had quarried from the mountains. He was a flint-knapper, and his practiced eye assured him that this was the kind he needed, a hard, flinty, gray-brown rock with one facet fairly smooth. It was about the size of a man’s head, and most of the memorable rocks he had worked with in the past, those he remembered with affection because of the superb points he had struck from them, had looked like this. He breathed deeply and felt there was a good chance this one might prove productive too.

But he was also apprehensive, for the hunters of his clan had gone almost two months without having made a major kill, and food supplies were low. Scouts had spotted a small group of mammoths, those formidable beasts that stood twice as tall as a man and weighed a hundred times more, but to kill such an adversary required the stoutest spears, tipped with the sharpest point, and it was this flint-knapper’s task to provide the latter, for upon his skill depended the security of his clan.

Before he risked breaking into the secret of the rock, he purified himself, for he knew that no man could succeed in a venture of great moment without the aid of gods. Leaving his work space—a flat area at the foot of the chalk cliff—he went to an opening between the trees and there turned his face upward and his body to each of the four compass points, ending with the east, from which the sun came. He engaged in no complicated ritual and uttered no incantation; he merely wished to inform the gods that he was about to engage in a project of importance to his clan, and he solicited their attention. He did not grovel for assistance, because in that large area there was no better knapper than he, but he did want the gods to be aware of his undertaking and to refrain from interfering.

He then went to the running stream that came out of the mountains to the west of the cliff and washed his hands, applying some of the water to his face. He was now ready.

As he walked back to his work area he was indistinguishable, except for his dress, from other men who would occupy this land ten thousand years later. He walked erect, with no apelike bending at the waist. His arms did not dangle and his head was not massive in proportion to the rest of his body. There was no conspicuous ledge of bone above his eyes and his hands were, as we shall see, beautifully articulated.

His eyes had a slight slant, an evidence of his Asian ancestry. His face was somewhat heavier than those of later men, his cheekbones more pronounced, his skin several shades lighter than that which was to come later; it inclined, perhaps, more toward red than yellow, and in this respect was quite similar to the men who would follow.

He had a working vocabulary of twelve or thirteen hundred words, few of which would be intelligible even a short time after his death, for in language swift change was in process. He had considerable powers of thought, could plan ahead, could devise tactics for hunting which required cooperative movements carried out at spaced intervals, and he knew a good deal about animals, the nature of differences between women and men, how to rear children, how to lay by enough food in good periods so that he would have something to eat in time of famine. He worked hard and understood that if he got ahead in his production he would have time for his own enjoyment.

He did not take himself too seriously; he was not lugubrious even when talking to his gods. Often he burst into laughter when his children did something ridiculous. From time to time, in making the projectile points on which his clan depended for their existence, he felt pride in being an artisan, a man trained to accomplish, and such a feeling came over him now.

“If I get a good start,” he told his apprentice, who must soon be making the points himself, “I can strike ...” and here he held his ten fingers aloft twice.

What a tremendous statement to have come from the mouth of a primitive man! How totally compelling in its complex range of thought! A man at the dawn of history who could utter such a complicated concept could produce children for whom anything would be possible.

If
is a word of infinite intellectual significance, for it indicates actions not yet completed but with the possibility of alternate outcomes. To
get a good start
implies memory of bad starts and how they differed from the good; it implies also that there will be consequences stemming from the good start and that they will be consistent with such consequences in the past. The incompleted
I can strike
... is the sum of man’s experience on earth, the promise of completed action in accordance with known desires. And the ten fingers held aloft twice is an advance in mathematics so profound—an abstract number without a name—that all subsequent analytical thought will be based upon it. To visualize twenty points as being obtainable from a roundish chunk of rock, and to have a number for them and to recognize that that number goes beyond the digits of the hand, is an accomplishment of such magnitude that it must have required man most of the two million years he had so far lived on earth to assemble the experience that would justify such a conclusion.

The knapper who prepared to strike the rock that day had all the innate opacities that future men would have; the only additional component required to produce a complicated society would be a sufficient passage of time and the patient accumulation of memory. But this man had something else which would always be precious in whatever epochs followed: he had an innate sense of proportion, design and beauty, and the degree to which he had these qualities would never be surpassed by any men who followed him on this spot.

Coughing twice, rubbing his fingertips on his chest, he lifted the heavy rock and studied it for the last time. It met his specifications, for it was vitreous, totally homogeneous, without any tendency to fracture along a predetermined plane, and of the same construction along all axes, which would permit it to fracture equally well in all directions.

Making a finished point required four quite different steps, each performed with a different tool. First he must transform the amorphous rock into a truncated cone. Now, obviously the knapper could not possibly have known the mathematical properties of a cone, nor the physical principles governing it, but he had learned from experience that if his rock did not assume a conical shape, it would not yield the flakes he sought, but if it did approximate a cone segment, the flakes would fly off in dazzling sequence.

His first tool was a smallish, rounded rock with curious characteristics. It was ovoid and of a grainy texture, with a certain amount of yield. It was the possession he prized most in his life, for a responsive hammerstone was almost irreplaceable. One morning he had advised his assistant, who was seeking such a stone for himself, “You must find one that talks back.”

With his hammerstone he knocked away unwanted portions of the flint and coaxed it into conical form. When it was prepared, he worked carefully with his hammer, building the right kind of edge around the top surface. Then, after careful study, he struck one particular spot, and the force of his hammer radiated downward but with a slight lateral effect, and a beautiful flake as long as his hand leaped from the surface of the core. Dropping his hammer, he held this flake to the light and satisfied himself that it contained no telltale lines of fracture. It was fearfully sharp along the edges and as it then stood could have been used for a knife, but he intended working on it later to form a projectile point.

What happened next astonished even his helper. Working rapidly, and revolving the core so that always a new face was exposed, he struck with his hammerstone almost as fast as a woodpecker pecks a dead limb, knocking off one perfect flake after another. Then he paused and worked slowly, building up the edge so that it would catch the hammer blows properly, and when this was done he resumed his woodpecker taps. Nineteen long flakes flew from the core, each sharp enough to butcher a mammoth. In his left hand lay the remnant, too small to be struck for further flakes, and this he tossed aside.

He dropped his hammerstone, threw back his head and winked at his helper: “Good, eh?” They gathered the flakes and the knapper inspected each one. Three he discarded as offering doubtful promise for future work. They would never make projectile points, but the remaining sixteen had obvious possibilities. Properly finished, they could become masterpieces. Arranging them in a line, he summoned the clan to witness the good luck he had had that day.

The hunters surveyed the potential points and assessed them approvingly. One man, a notable tracker whose spears had started the deaths of several mammoths, grabbed one blade and cried, “This one for me!” The knapper took it, studied it from various angles and said, “I’ll try.”

When the celebration of the flints was over, the artisan and his helper proceeded to the second step, the critical job of converting these sharp-edged flakes into workable projectiles. Taking a hand-sized piece of mammoth hide, he placed it in his left palm; this precaution was necessary, for otherwise the sharp flint slivers would slice his hand.

He laid aside his hammerstone and reached for his second tool, a clever device made from an antler. It was shaped like a small boomerang, except that at the angle where the two arms met, a knob protruded, about the size and shape of an egg. This was the hammer with which he would shape the flake.

Now, this knob must have contained about one thousand minute faces, indistinguishable one from the other to the untrained eye, but the task at hand was so intricate that the knapper had to swing his hammer with some force, over a fair distance, yet see to it that the precise point on the hammer struck the precise point on the edge of the flint. When it did, a curved piece of flint, reaching all the way around one face of the stone, would fly off. It was an act of incredible skill, of incredible engineering beauty.

He was now ready for the third process. The former flake was fairly close to the shape he wanted, but before it could be called a finished projectile, more precision work was required. Putting aside the hammer, he took an awl made from a single tine of elk horn, rounded on the end, like the tip of a little finger.

Holding the nearly finished point against the hide in his left palm, he applied the tine to minute projections along its edge, and by pressing with great but controlled force, he caused fragments of flint to crack free, and in this way, moving always from one calculated spot to the next, he put a scimitar-sharp edge around the entire point.

When he had worked for about fifteen minutes, pressing but never striking, he stopped and broke into a wide grin of satisfaction and handed the point to the waiting hunter, who showed it to his accomplices. It was superb, perfectly shaped, like a long, slim leaf, balanced, precisely flaked in all areas and with a keen cutting edge. Any huntsman tracking game in Africa or Asia during the preceding two million years would have cherished it.

But the knapper was not satisfied. Grabbing it roughly from the hunter, he prepared for the final process.

Cradling the point in the hide, he used his awl to form a tiny platform at the base, where it would ultimately be lashed by thongs to the haft. When this was leveled to his satisfaction, he took his fourth tool, a chest-punch, formed from the spreading antlers of the elk, with a curve that corresponded to his chest, but with one projecting tine in the middle. Holding the tool against his breast, he brought it to bear on the tiny platform, and with great pressure caused the flint to flake halfway down its length.