Centennial (87 page)

Cattle
. Even though I have used a cattle drive originating in Texas, and even though most novels and films have done the same, you must remember that the principal ranches of Wyoming, Montana and even Colorado received the major portion of their cattle not from Texas but from Oregon. The early emigrants traveling westward along the Oregon Trail took with them many first-rate British-bred cows and bulls, and on the Pacific Coast these animals proliferated. Consequently, the typical cattle drive of this period consisted not of scrawny longhorns coming north from Texas but of sleek, well-bred cattle heading east from Oregon.

Two of the most significant contributions to the use of land in Colorado were made in 1859 by a thirty-two-year-old Russian. He was a goldminer with the good German name of Hans Brumbaugh, and he happened to be a Russian because in the year 1764 his great-grandfather, a German farmer, listened when Catherine the Great, the German princess ruling Russia, issued one of the most enticing colonization promises in history: “Any German subject consenting to settle in my Russia will be given land practically free and will be insured freedom of worship, freedom from taxation, self-rule within your own German settlement, freedom to conduct education in your own language and perpetual freedom from military service.”

The Brumbaughs read this glowing invitation posted on the door of their little church in Hesse, where crops had failed for six years and war had ravaged the countryside for seven. They walked to the Baltic port of Lubeck, took ship to St. Petersburg, and sailed down the Volga River till they found a treasury of arable land at Saratov. The Volgadeutsch they were henceforth called, and for thirty-four years they enjoyed a prosperity and a freedom greater than they could have hoped for. They experienced the usual difficulties of all immigrants-learning Russian, mastering local systems of agriculture, preventing their daughters from marrying Russians-but they were happy, and few would have returned to Germany had they been given the opportunity.

But not even empresses live forever, and when Catherine finally died in 1796, her promises to her German settlements were forgotten, and in time the Volgadeutsch marched in Russian regiments just like other peasants, and their schools were nationalized and the old concordat became a scrap of paper. It was then that stubborn peasants like Hans Brumbaugh began to yearn for the freedom which had been stolen from them.

At age seventeen he started making himself a nuisance to the Russian authorities, so that his mother had to warn him, “Hans, be careful. The Czar’s men will hang you.” At nineteen he was with a group that attacked a military convoy, and that night he left the Volga and clawed his way out of Russia and back to Germany. At twenty-six he had the bad luck to buy a farm in Illinois from a man who did not own it, and when the rightful owner forced the sheriff to dispossess him, he decided to quit that state.

In January of 1859 he heard of the discovery of gold in Jefferson Territory, as Colorado was then calling itself, and he walked across Missouri and Nebraska, a husky, stoop-shouldered, obstinate man willing to face weather that would have killed an ordinary traveler. Like thousands of others, he stopped briefly at Zendt’s trading post to acquire provisions for the last stage of his journey to Pikes Peak. He was pleased to find in Levi a fellow German, and for the better part of two days they talked in that language; Levi’s long stay in Pennsylvania had corrupted his mother tongue as much as the Brumbaugh family’s exile in Russia had altered his. A purist would have shuddered at what they called
German
, but each made himself understood.

As they talked, Brumbaugh complained of the high prices Levi was charging, but Levi explained, “What I bring in from St. Louis has to be expensive. But what I grow here you will find to be cheap,” and Brumbaugh saw that this was true. During his last day at the post he inspected the land Levi was using along the Platte.

“Good land,” he said.

“Where there’s water,” Levi replied, and this remark caused Brumbaugh to examine the benches up from the riverbed, and he listened attentively when Levi said, “Nothin’s ever been grown up here, it bein’ so far from water, but if you could get water to it, I’m convinced it’s the same land as that fruitful stretch down by the river.”

Brumbaugh proceeded to the gold fields, lost himself in the frenzy of Pikes Peak and found not even one nugget. At the end of three months, his supplies gone, his stomach empty and his temper frayed, he developed the first of his significant ideas. He was seated with a group of eleven miners endeavoring to entertain each other with stories, and it occurred to him that they were talking so avidly in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they were starving.

They had money. They had energy. But there simply was no food other than flour at twenty-two dollars a barrel and bacon at six dollars a pound, and as one of the men gallantly opened a last can of beans, passing it out among the ravenous miners, Brumbaugh said to himself, Folly! Men more interested in gold than food. The real money is in the farm.

That night he left Pikes Peak, one of the dreariest spots he had ever seen, and three days later, passed the bend in the Platte where the city of Denver was burgeoning. On the fifth day he was back at Zendt’s, asking, “How can I get hold of some land?”

Levi said, “For a farm?”

“Yes.” And there followed those intricate maneuverings which were becoming common throughout the west.

Levi explained how things stood in 1859: “It’s impossible to say who owns the land. McKeag and I staked it out long ago, but we’re still not a legal territory. In law it still belongs to the Indians, so you can’t squat on it and say, ‘This land is mine,’ because it isn’t yours. It’s theirs.”

“You have land,” Brumbaugh pointed out.

“Correct. It was land owned by my wife’s mother. Full-blooded Arapaho. She gave me a paper, which I filed in St. Louis, showing that I had paid her for it.” Levi stopped to recall the solemn day when the transfer was made. Clay Basket had ridiculed the idea, but old Alexander McKeag, who couldn’t read or write, had a Scotsman’s reverence for legal documents, and he insisted that the paper be drawn, witnessed and filed, even though at that time there was no proper place for filing. He himself had carried it to St. Louis for deposit with an official of the Missouri government, witnessed by Cyprian Pasquinel, the congressman.

“So I claim about eight hundred acres,” Levi concluded, “and I have a legal paper proving it, but whether it’ll be recognized when things get straightened out, I don’t know.”

“What can I do?” Brumbaugh asked.

“You can squat on Indian land and hope that when law comes this way, title will pass to you, or you can buy some of my land and hope that the title I give you will some day be honored.”

“How much an acre?”

Levi considered this for some time, then said tentatively, “For good land along the river, where we know things will grow, ten dollars an acre. For barren land on the benches, two dollars.”

“What I’ll do,” Brumbaugh replied, “is buy twenty of your good acres at two hundred dollars and borrow the other forty from the Indians.”

In this way the farm of Hans Brumbaugh was started, and in the spring of 1859 he was planting vegetables, including a large crop of potatoes. Harvesting them as early as possible, he sold some to Levi Zendt and carted the rest to Denver, where he made more cash than he could have trying to find gold fields. Potato Brumbaugh he would be called henceforth, the canny Russian who had quit the gold fields to go where the real money was.

The second significant thing he did had consequences more far-reaching. By the middle of May in that first season, when it became apparent that the land was good for vegetables, he was in the store one afternoon when the latest contingent of miners came through, eager to buy food, and they spoke so much of impending civil war that Brumbaugh had a sudden vision of what would probably happen. “Levi,” he said when the men were gone, “there’s gonna be a war east of Mississippi and precious little food will trickle out here. If you sell me more river land, I can slip in an extra crop. I’ll grow twice as much, and you’ll make a fortune selling it.”

“I have no spare river land,” Levi said regretfully.

Brumbaugh, a compact, determined man, sat hunched over the end of a box, drawing designs with his finger. “They tell me,” he said cautiously, “that you have thousands of acres you haven’t mentioned.”

“I do,” Levi replied frankly. “Over at Chalk Cliff. So dry it won’t even grow weeds.”

“How’d you get it?”

“From the Indians. My wife’s father ...” He decided not to go into that intricate web. “You can have land up there if you want, but you won’t grow anything on it.”

“And you say your river land’s all gone?”

“Mine is. The Indians still have some.”

“Oh, no! If I have to work as hard as I work, I want to own the land. And I want title to it. I got robbed once.”

“You’ll get title when we become a legal territory.”

Brumbaugh was not listening. With a dirty finger he had drawn on the box the outlines of the Platte River and the projection of his land lying along it, and as the lines squiggled through the dust they assumed a reality, as happens when men who love land look at maps. This was the river, this was his land, and slowly within the evening darkness the top of the box became alive, and on it there was water and grass and growing vegetables, and it was then that Potato Brumbaugh glimpsed the miracle, the whole marvelous design that could turn The Great American Desert into a rich harvestland.

Next morning he got up before dawn, scouted the reach of the Platte River as it ran past his land and satisfied himself that it could be done. But to make sure, he marked a spot high in a cottonwood tree which stood at the eastern end, then retreated to the far western end and watched it as he walked slowly along the riverbank. Yes! The river did drop perceptibly in its journey past the Brumbaugh land. His daring plan was practical. So he ran to his shack, grabbed his shovel and pickax and went to work.

Starting at the extreme western tip, he began to dig a channel which would bring water from the Platte, not onto his low-lying land, which was already well watered, but onto the first bench, which was arid. He would lead this small man-made arm of the river down the middle of that bench, thus trebling the size of his arable farm, and at the eastern end he would allow the unused water to find its way back to the Platte.

So Brumbaugh harnessed the river and nourished the land. And in the hot summer of 1860 he produced an enormous crop of vegetables, which were sold mainly in Denver. The once-arid land on the bench proved exceptionally fertile as soon as water was brought to it, and Potato Brumbaugh’s farm became the wonder of Jefferson Territory. As he had foreseen that wintry night on Pikes Peak, it was the farmer, bringing unlikely acreages into cultivation by shrewd devices, who would account for the wealth of the future state.

When Brumbaugh drew water off the Platte, he unwittingly established himself as the first man to tap this river for irrigation purposes, so that even a century later when judges of the supreme court of Colorado, or even the Supreme Court of the nation, were called upon to adjudicate water rights relating to the river-rights of indescribable value—they had to come back to one basic consideration:

Priority in the use of water deriving from the Platte River dates to Hans Brumbaugh, who first constructed an irrigation ditch in the year 1859. His rights to this water and the rights of all owners of his land into the endless future must be respected, and all later claims are hereby declared subservient to his.

At the end of the 1860 growing season Potato Brumbaugh came to the trading post and plopped two hundred dollars on the counter. “Levi, can you forward this to St. Louis and have the bank there send it along to my wife in Illinois? I want her to join me.”

When his wife and children stood at the western end of the holding, near the spot where he had dug the ditch, they were overwhelmed by the size of the farm he pointed out. It seemed bigger than a county in Illinois, and as they stepped onto it for the first time, it was fortunate that they could not envisage the incredible obstacles they would face in trying to hold on to it.

The relationship of a man to his land is never easy. It is perhaps the noblest relationship in the world, after the family, and certainly the most rewarding. But the land must be won, it must be revered, it must be defended.

On the afternoon of 1868 when John Skimmerhorn delivered his twenty-nine hundred and thirty-six head of cattle to the emerging Venneford Ranch, he happened to look across the milling longhorns and see young Jim Lloyd, still riding drag, but now more like a man than a gangling boy, and it occurred to Skimmerhorn that if he was given control of the Crown Vee cattle, he would require some tested young fellow to look after the far reaches of the ranch.

Accordingly, he spurred his horse and rode to where Oliver Seccombe was eying his new longhorns. “Mr. Seccombe,” Skimmerhorn said, “if you acquire the land ...”

“I’ve already acquired a good deal of it. I haven’t been idle while you were on the trail.”

“Does it extend as far as you proposed?”

“Farther.”

“Then you’ll need some trustworthy hands, and there’s none better than the boy who came north with us.” Skimmerhorn signaled for Jim to join them, and Seccombe was surprised at his youth. “You’re still a kid!” he protested.

“If you, drive cattle from Jacksborough across the Llano,” Skimmerhorn said, “you’re no longer a kid.”

Seccombe shook his head and was about to dismiss the idea, when Skimmerhorn added, “This boy has fought off Kansas outlaws and killed a Comanche chief.”

“He has?” Seccombe asked in disbelief. “Hell, he can’t be more than fourteen.”

“He can be anything from fourteen to fifty,” Skimmerhorn said. “Part of the reason your cattle got here, sir, was the courage of this boy.”

“He’s hired,” Seccombe said.

Jim Lloyd’s first ride across the vast domain with which he would be associated for the remainder of his life was an exploration in grandeur, for on the morning when he and Skimmerhorn set forth to position the line camps, they started by riding westward. A hawk flew before them, uttering a wild “Scree, scree” very high in the heavens and flying in three distinct ways: motionless soaring, hovering to inspect the land below, and then the awful swift dive when any small victim was spotted. No birds on earth, not even the eagle or the falcon, were more majestic than these hawks of the west, ranging endlessly over the prairie.

Skimmerhorn had decided that to manage the ranch properly, five line camps would be needed, each with a rude but sleeping six men, plus a stone barn for horses, and he wanted to number them from east to west. Selecting a bleak and lonely spot north of Chalk Cliff, he said, “Here’s Camp Five.” Its back was to the mountains and it overlooked an immense stretch of empty land. He staked out a protected site, to which Jim would later return with the construction crew. “You’ll be able to find it,” Skimmerhorn said. “Just keep your eye on that little stone beaver climbing the face of the tallest mountain.”