Part 6 (1/2)

'We want you to tell us,' she said.

It must have been obvious that I was captivated by Centennial and its environs, because at lunch we began to pinpoint my commission, and I said, 'By the way, n.o.body has told me who wrote the story I'm supposed to fortify.'

'Don't you know?'

'Obviously not.'

'I did.'

'You did?'

'Yes. I researched this story on the scene for five months.'

'I knew ...' I was confused. 'Of course, I realized that the people here knew you. But I thought you'd been ...'

'Helping someone else? Helping someone important?'

She asked these questions with such a cutting edge that I thought we'd better get down to cases. 'Miss Endermann,' I said, 'you'll forgive me, but your magazine is asking me to spend a lot of time on this project. May I ask what your credentials are? Do you mind a few questions?'

'Not at all,' she said frankly. 'I'd expect them. I know this is important to you.'

'What do you think of Frank Gilbert Roe?'

Without batting an eye, she said, On horses, terrific. On bison, I prefer McHugh.'

This was a sophisticated response, so I proceeded: 'What's your reaction to the Lamanite theory?'

'A despicable aberration of Mormonism.' She stopped and asked apologetically, 'You're not Mormon, are you?' And before I could answer, she said, 'Even if you are, I'm sure you agree with me.'

'I respect the Mormons,' I said, 'but I think their Lamanite theory asinine.'

'I'm so glad,' she said. 'I don't think I could work with someone who took that sort of bull seriously.'

'What was your reaction to the Treaty of 1851?'

'Ah,' she said reflectively. 'Its heart was in the right place. But the government in Was.h.i.+ngton had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of Missouri that there was no chance-none ever-that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given. If it hadn't been gold, it would have been something else. Stupidity. Stupidity.'

This young woman knew something. I asked her, 'What is your judgment on the Skimmerhorn ma.s.sacre?'

'Oh, no!' she protested. 'It's your job to tell us what you think about that. But I will confess this. I've studied the Skimmerhorn papers at Boulder and the court-martial records in Was.h.i.+ngton, and I've interviewed the Skimmerhorns in Minnesota and Illinois. I know what I think. Six months from now I want to know what you think.'

I had one final question, and this would prove the depth of her investigation. 'Have you done any work on the reports of Maxwell Mercy?'

She burst into laughter and astonished me by rising and kissing me on the cheek. 'You're a real dear,' she said. 'I did my master's thesis under Allan Nevins at Columbia on some unpublished letters I'd found of Captain Mercy. On my bedroom wall at home I have an old photograph of him taken by Jackson at Fort Laramie, and for your personal information I got d.a.m.ned near straight A's at Illinois and honors at the University of Chicago, where I took my doctorate.'

'Then what in h.e.l.l are you doing knocking around with Cisco Calendar till four o'clock this morning?'

'Because he sends me, you old prude. He sends me.'

Next morning I drove her to Denver, where she caught the plane back to New York. At the ramp she told me, 'Stay the rest of the week. You'll fall in love with this place. I did.' When I wished her luck at the office, she said, 'I'll be working on maps.' Then, impulsively, she grabbed my hands. 'We really need you ... to make the thing hum. Call us Friday night, saying you're signing on.'

I drove back by way of the university at Boulder because I wanted to consult my old friend, Gerald Lambrook of their history department, and he said, 'I can't see any pitfalls in the arrangement, Lewis. Granted, you're not writing the article and you lose some control, but they're a good outfit and if they say they're going to give it first-cla.s.s presentation, they will. What it amounts to, they're paying you to do your own basic research.'

Lambrook was an old-style professor, with a book-lined study, sheaves of term papers, which he still insisted on, and even a tweed jacket and a pipe. I worked in a turtleneck and it was sort of nice to know that the old Columbia-Minnesota-Stanford types were around. I had known him at Minnesota and it was easy to renew our old friends.h.i.+p.

'But I'm interested, historically speaking,' he said, 'in the fact that you haven't mentioned the thing for which Centennial is most famous. The area, I mean.'

I asked him what that was, and he said, 'The old Zendt place.'

'I know about it. Saw it yesterday. The fellow from Pennsylvania who wouldn't build a fort but did build a farm.'

'I don't mean the farm. I mean Chalk Cliff, on his first place.'

'Never heard of it.'

'That's where the first American dinosaur was found.'

'The h.e.l.l it was!'

'That great big one. Went to Berlin, and how we wish we had it back. And then, not far from there, but still on the original farm, the Clovis-point dig. Say, if you're free, I think I could get one of the young fellows from geology to run us up there.' He started making phone calls, between which he told me, 'The university's doing some work up there, I think.' Finally he located an instructor who was taking his students on a field trip to the Zendt dig during the coming week, and he said he'd enjoy refres.h.i.+ng his memory, so off we went, Lambrook and I in my car and young Dr. Elmo Kennedy in his.

We drove north along the foothills of the Rockies, past Estes Park on the west and Fort Collins on the east, till we came to what might have been called badlands. Dr. Kennedy pulled up to inform me, 'We're now entering the historic Venneford spread, and Chalk Cliff lies just ahead. I'll open the gates, you close them.'

We proceeded through three barbed-wire fences behind which white-faced Herefords grazed, and came at last to an imposing cliff, running north and south, forty feet high and chalky white. 'Part of an old fault,' Kennedy explained. 'Pennsylvanian period, if you're interested. At the foot of the cliff, in 1875, down here in the Morrisonian Formation, Professor Wright of Harvard dug out the great dinosaur that can be seen in Berlin.'

'I never knew that,' I confessed. 'I knew the dinosaur, but not its provenance.'

'And two miles up, at the other end of the cliff, is where they found-1935, I think it was-that excellent site with the Clovis points.'

'I have heard about that,' I said, 'but not that it was located near Chalk Cliff.'

We spent the rest of the morning there, inspecting this historic site, after which Lambrook and Kennedy drove back to Boulder. 'Be sure to close the gates,' they warned. That left me some time to inspect the brooding cliff, and as I kicked at the chalky limestone I came upon a fossilized sea sh.e.l.l, a frail, delicate thing now transformed into stone, indubitable proof that this cliff and the land around it had once lain at the bottom of some sea and now stood over five thousand feet above sea level. I tried to visualize the t.i.tanic force that must have been involved in such a rearrangement of the earth's surface, and I think it was then I began to see my little object-town Centennial in a rather larger dimension than the editors back in New York saw it.

By back roads I drove east to Line Camp, seeing that desolate spot from a new angle, and was even more fascinated by the compression of history one observed there: Indian campground, cattle station, sheep ranch, dry-land farming, dust bowl, and then abandonment as a site no longer fit for human concern. The place attracted me like a magnet and I wished that I were writing of it and not Centennial, which at this point seemed pretty ordinary to me, but as I drove south, it occurred to me that I must be following the old Skimmerhorn Trail, and when I came to the low bluffs that marked the delineation between the river bottom and the prairie and I was able to look down into Centennial and its paltry railroad, with cottonwoods outlining the south side of the Platte, I had a suspicion that perhaps it too had had its moments of historic significance. What they were, I could not antic.i.p.ate, but if I took the job I would soon find out.

I was eating lunch at Flor de Mejico-sandwiches, not enchiladas-when I heard a man's voice inquiring, 'Manolo, you have a man from Georgia eating here?' Marquez replied, 'Right over here, Paul,' and he brought a tall, well-dressed rancher-type to my table.

'I'm Paul Garrett,' he said, extending his hand. 'Mind if I sit down?'

I asked him to do so, and he said, 'Heard you were in town. When Miss Endermann was here before we did a lot of work together. And I wondered if you'd like to take a little orientation spin in my plane.'

'Very much!' I said. 'I understand things better when I see the geographical layout. But I'm leaving Friday.'

'I meant right now.'

'I'm free.'

He drove me out to an airstrip east of Beaver Creek, where his pilot waited with a six-seater Beechcraft, and we piled in. Within minutes we were high over the Platte, and for the first time I saw the meanders of this incredible river from aloft. 'The braided river,' one expert had called it with justification, for the strands of the river were so numerous and the islands so interspersed, it did seem as if giant hands had braided the river so that it now hung like a lovely pigtail from the head of the mountains.

Several times we flew up and down the Platte, and I appreciated better how it dominated the area, where it overflowed its banks, where it deposited huge thicknesses of gravel, and how men had siphoned off much of its water into irrigation ditches. It became an intricate system rather than an isolated stretch.