Centennial (92 page)

He took no consolation. Astride his horse he looked down at the slaughter, nearly a hundred buffalo slain and not even the tongues removed. Some hunter had killed so many that his skinners could not keep up, and twenty of the animals were left to rot with their hides untouched.

“What kind of men are they?” Red Wolf cried in anguish. “That they kill the food we need and do not even eat?”

And he suffered the ultimate indignity, the mortal shame of the leader: to lead a people and be unable to feed them.

It was at that moment that his evil luck changed. An outfit came over the hill at the Arkansas, trailing cattle up the Skimmerhorn Trail to Wyoming, and the trail boss took pity on the starving Indians and gave them two old steers.

Red Wolf allowed his braves to slaughter one of the longhorns, then exercised severe discipline as he made his ravenous braves save one to drive back for the women on the reservation. Revitalized by this accidental food, the hunters scoured the prairie, convinced they must encounter buffalo, but none were to be found; between the Platte and the Arkansas, there were no more buffalo.

Red Wolf, sitting beside his horse on the last night of the hunt, told his men, “The old days have passed. We shall hunt no more forever.” The younger men asked what they would do instead, and Red Wolf said, “Through hunger the Great White Father has made us submit to his command. We must leave the buttes and go to some smaller reservation, as he directs.”

The young braves protested: “This is our land. It was given to us for as long as the waters flow and the birds fly.”

“The White Father wants it, and we must go.” He never deviated from this harsh decision and as soon as he returned to Rattlesnake Buttes, bringing back from the hunt the drying meat from one old Texas steer, he advised his father, “Lost Eagle, now we must go,” and that old chief fingered his Buchanan and agreed.

They sent a messenger to Denver to inform Major Mercy that they were now prepared to surrender their lands forever, and he sent a telegram to Washington, and a commissioner was sent out who held long powwows, assuring the Arapaho they were making the right decision and that in their new home, far to the north in Dakota, there would be ample food and a secure home “for as long as the grass shall grow and the eagle fly.”

So in late summer the last group of Arapaho departed. They rode north on spavined horses, wrapped in tattered blankets. The gaily painted buffalo hides that recalled the history of their people were gone; the garments of elk and porcupine quill were gone; the young braves riding ahead to scout for buffalo were no more. The ancient ways were lost.

As they reached the crest of the white hills which marked the northern border of their truncated reservation, Chief Lost Eagle, wearing his hat with the turkey feather, paused to look back upon the buttes and the Platte and the prairie, and there was no sadness in him: “Often in the past Our People were forced to make a new life in a new land, and always we had the courage to succeed. We were here at the buttes less than six generations and now we move to something different. This time I do believe the White Father will keep his promises. In Dakota we shall grow strong again.” He kicked his pony, and the Indians vanished forever from the spacious lands they loved so deeply and had protected so well.

The
Clarion
could express no sorrow at their passing:

Yesterday we went out to the buttes to witness the departure of Lo from our fair land. Good riddance. They left Colorado for the last time riding mangy ponies, most of them stolen, we feel sure, and wearing blankets which would have profited from a good washing. They were a miserable lot of flea-ridden, filthy, ignorant, disgusting animals, and our only regret at watching them go was that Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn could not have been here to see his prophecy fulfilled.

We hear that on the other side of the mountain the Utes are kicking up trouble again. We warn them that if they stick their noses over this way, we will shoot them off. They
’ll
get far worse from us than they ever got from the Arapaho. Colorado will never merit statehood until we complete the job of exterminating these vermin.

When Oliver Seccombe watched the Arapaho depart, he realized that this was the moment to appropriate the good grazing lands around Rattlesnake Buttes, and by the judicious acquisition of two key parcels of land, he secured the whole area for the Venneford Ranch. Ninety-nine hundredths of the former Indian lands were actually public property, open to everyone, but Seccombe and his men made sure that no one could get to them.

That summer of 1873 was to be an exciting one for Oliver Seccombe. Henry Buckland was proving himself to be a shrewd and sensible businessman, and he required little instruction before grasping the essentials of any operation. After a visit to one line camp, he put his finger on the permanent problem: “Land, Seccombe! We must own our own grazing land ... have it secure in our possession.”

He was pleased with the devices Seccombe had used to acquire control of water, but even so, the total seemed inadequate. And then good fortune struck for the Englishmen. The Union Pacific Railroad volunteered to help them out.

Back in 1862, when the United States government had determined that a railroad was needed to bind the nation together, Congress hit upon a clever device for financing such a major undertaking. The nation was too poor to pay for the road out of tax funds, but there was an ingenious way to finance it. From the center of the main track, reaching out ten miles on each side, the government would give the railroad land, with no charge of any kind. This land in its original barren condition would be worth about twenty cents an acre, but with a prosperous railroad running through it, it might become worth as much as four dollars an acre. By selling this land to would-be settlers, the railroad would earn back more than the cost of building the road. The western range would be settled; the nation would have a link to the Pacific; towns would appear—and all at no expense to the taxpayer. It was one of the sagest devices ever invented by Congress.

Furthermore, Congress added an adroit stipulation: the railroad would not receive all the land ten miles out from the track; it would get only every other section, with the nation holding on to the alternate sections, and thus sharing in whatever increased values might accrue. It was a happy solution, made more palatable by the rule that two sections in each township must be set aside for public education. In later years, when the Union Pacific gleaned a fortune on the sale of land the government had given it, jaundiced critics would cry, with some justification, “We gave our soul away to the railroad,” but in 1862 there had been no viable alternative, and in the long run, little harm was done.

It worked this way. Back in 1785 when the surveys of Ohio and Indiana were being conducted, it was provided that an American township be composed of thirty-six square miles, each called a section. They were numbered in a way which ensured that two sections with contiguous numbers would also have contiguous boundaries:

6
5
4
3
2
1

7
8
9
10
11
12

18
17
16
15
14
13

19
20
21
22
23
24

30
29
28
27
26
25

31
32
33
34
35
36

The railroad received the odd-numbered sections, sixteen in each township, with the federal government retaining the even-numbered, except for 16 and 36, which the state could sell or lease to provide funds for area schools.

Now, in 1873, the railroad was preparing to sell off a number of its odd-numbered sections, all the way from Omaha to Utah, and Henry Buckland, during his visits in New York and Chicago, had laid the groundwork for a massive purchase of these sections. He had till the end of August to decide whether his Bristol confreres wished to acquire sixty running miles of land on the south side of the railroad track, a stretch reaching from Line Camp Two to Cheyenne. Since the land was ten miles deep, six hundred square miles of range were involved. By purchasing only the odd-numbered sections, 192,000 acres in all, the Venneford people would acquire physical control of the even-numbered too, or nearly four hundred thousand secure acres. If the Bristol merchants could come up with the cash, the permanence of the cattle operation would be ensured for decades to come.

So Buckland held a series of tough, inquisitive reviews with Seccombe and Skimmerhorn. “We have an empire within our grasp,” he said. “Let’s see if we can afford it.”

The three men went over the maps and figures until they had the data memorized, and consistently . Skimmerhorn came back to one basic fact: “If we have our water safe on the Platte, and we do, and can get hold of this land up north, we control everything in between. We have to have it, no matter the cost.”

Buckland was distressed by the fact that proffered land did not reach all the way east to Line Camp One. “We’d be unprotected on that end,” he complained, and Skimmerhorn introduced him to the facts.

“We’re unprotected there right now. We’re unprotected over by the mountains. Within a short time, Mr. Buckland, homesteaders will begin claiming those lands. We have only a few years more of open range.”

“It’s our land!” Buckland protested.

“Only because we say so.”

“We run our cattle on it. We look after it.”

“But the time is coming, Mr. Buckland, when there won’t be open range. When I went back to Indiana for that last load of bulls, a man named Jacob Haish showed me something he’d invented. A fence.”

“Cattle will go right through a fence,” Buckland said.

“Not this fence,” Skimmerhorn said, and onto the table he tossed a piece of crude barbed wire, not the sophisticated product that would soon burst the market, but a primitive affair, with deadly spikes.

“Farmers like Potato Brumbaugh will soon fence their lands with wire like this,” Skimmerhorn predicted. “And homesteaders on the Nebraska end will fence theirs ...”

“And finally, we’ll have to fence Ours,” Buckland interrupted.

“If we own any,” Seccombe said.

“We must own it,” Buckland snapped. “As much as we can.”

And then his two managers became aware of a fact that would dominate the rest of their business lives. Venneford Ranch was not run by Oliver Seccombe or by John Skimmerhorn. Lord Venneford had little say in it, nor did prosperous men like Henry Buckland. It was run by a faceless clerk called Finlay Perkin, and until he gave permission for the American ranch to buy the railroad lands, they could not be bought.

“What’s he like?” Skimmerhorn asked, as Buckland prepared the message for Perkin.

“He’s a Scotsman.”

“That’s all we need,” Seccombe said. “A Scotsman running an English ranch.”

“They have a saying in Scotland,” Buckland explained. “If you have three sons, and one is especially brilliant and of good character, keep him in Edinburgh, for there the competition is fierce and he’ll need all the fiber he has. If your second son is brilliant, but lacking in character, send him to America, where anything goes. And if your third son has tremendous character but no brains, send him to England, where the lack will never be noticed. Finlay Perkin is a third son. He came to Bristol.”

The new transatlantic cable to England had become a fast link to home, and the three plotters took a good deal of time drafting their message so that it would seem enticing to a clerk in Bristol:

PERKIN VENNEFORDS BRISTOL

OPPORTUNITY PURCHASE UNIONPACIFIC TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES FREEHOLD GIVING EXCLUSIVE CONTROL EQUAL AMOUNT GOVERNMENT LAND ONE DOLLAR TWENTYFIVE AN ACRE STOP SECCOMBE SKIMMERHORN CONCUR STOP AUTHORIZE

BUC
K
LAND

Within a day Finlay Perkin answered. He said he had reason to believe that the railroad was not ready to sell now, but that an option could be had for ultimate sale at no more than sixty cents an acre.

“We can’t offer them less than half!” Seccombe protested, but when he and Buckland went to Omaha with an ironclad proposal—option money delivered in New York within two days, total sum in escrow in an Omaha, bank—the railroad signed at fifty-five cents an acre and seemed glad to be rid of the land.

On the way back to the ranch Seccombe asked, “How could Perkin, in Bristol, have known what American railroad men in Omaha were thinking?” and Buckland replied, “Perkin knows everything.”

Charlotte Buckland had accompanied her father to the negotiations in Omaha, and now as the train rolled westward, with fascinating people crowding the parlor cars, she felt more than ever that she belonged to this vibrant land where a man could buy two hundred thousand acres of land in an afternoon, and she began studying Oliver Seccombe with increased interest.

He was a handsome man, about the same age as her father but infinitely more vital. He obviously needed a wife. He was older than she and would not live forever, but there were other parts of the world she had not yet explored, and she was prepared to make some of those future journeys as a widow, if necessary.

Young Pasquinel Mercy had wooed her with some ardor, and she liked him, but he seemed much the same as the bright young men who filled the British army; his tales of Wyoming were their stories of India, and both were boring. What excited her was not barracks life but the full swing of a new world: Cheyenne, Denver, Salt Lake. The names entranced her, and by the time her train reached the borders of Wyoming she had” convinced herself that ranch life in the west was what she wanted. Looking at her father, paunchy and dozing in the sun, satisfied her that the one thing she did not want was to return to Bristol.