Centennial (1974) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Early Inhabitants of Colorado Territory: Diplodocus, allosaurus, triceratops, antecedents of the horse, Appaloosa, bison, beavers, rattlers
• Dr Lewis Venor: Commissioned to research the Platte River and Centennial, Colorado
• Lame Beaver: 'Our People' or Arapaho Indian Chief; son of Sun-at-Noon; Gray Wolf, surrogate father; friend to Red Nose and Cottonwood Knee; married to Blue Leaf; daughter: Clay Basket; defeated Never-Death (Comanche warrior)
• The Wendells: Maude De Lisle and Mervin Wendell, actors; son, Mervin Wendell, agriculturist; Philip & Morgan Wendell, unscrupulous real estate manipulators.
• Earl Venneford of Wye: British real estate and cattle investor; owner of Venneford Ranch
• The Garretts: Messmore Garrett--first sheep herder in Centennial; Beeley Garrett: husband to Pale Star; inherited Lloyd holdings; Beeley's son, Henry Garrett, married Soledad Marquez
• Levi Zendt: Shunned Mennonite who leaves his home in Lancaster with a girl from the local orphanage (Elly Zahm); becomes a recluse until he finds an Indian Girl (Lucinda) whom her marries; children: Clemma and Martin
• Hans 'Potato' Brumbaugh: German farmer who changes the way people farm; introduces irrigation to the territory; becomes owner of Central Beet Company in 1902; father to Kurt Brumbaugh
• Clay Basket: Daughter of Lame Beaver and Blue Leaf; first wife of Pasquinel; second wife to McKeag
• Pasquinel: Coureur de bois; French trader and beaver hunter; father to Jacques-Jake, Marcel-Mike and Lucinda (by Clay Basket) and Cyprian by Lise Bockweiss
• Alexander McKeag: Scottish interpreter; long-term partner with Pasquinel; aka Red Beard; married to Clay Basket
• Hermann Bockweiss: German silversmith in St Louis; father to Lise/Lisette and Grete
• Maxwell Mercy: Married to Lisette Bockweiss (Pasquinel's St Louis family); tried to uphold the Indian's broken treaties
• Oliver Seccombe: Oxford grad set on documenting the lost 'noble' Indians; cattleman; married younger Charlotte Buckland
• Sam Purchas: Guide who leads Zendts (plus Captain Mercy, the Fishers and Fraziers) to Fort Levenworth
• Cheyenne Chiefs: Broken Hand, Howling Wolf, Gray Beads, Bison Wallow, Broken Thumb, Bear's Feather, White Antelope, Little Chief, Rides-On-Clouds, Lean Bear
• Arapaho Chiefs: Eagle Head, Lost Eagle, White Crow, Cut Nose, Little Owl
• Frank Skimmerhorn: Minnesotan; Commander, Colorado militia; lead massacre at Rattlesnake Buttes
• Team to transport 2,936 Crown Vee cattle to Skimmerhorn in Colorado in 1868: R J Poteet (leader); Ignacio Gomez (Mexican cook); Nate Person (Black scout); Mule Canby (cattleman/storytelle)r; Mike Lasater; Bufe Coker (SC confederate)
• Jim Lloyd: Son of Tom and Emma; helped to defeat the outlaw Pettis brothers, Frank and Orvid; overseer of Line Camp One; first love of Clemma Zendt; second husband to Charlotte Buckland; daughter, Nancy
• Henry and Charlotte Buckland: Father and daughter; Hereford farmers on Veneford Ranch
• Finlay Perkin: Venneford Ranch accountant in Bristol, England
• Sheriff Axel Dumire: Tried to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Mr Soren Sorenson in 1889
• The Takemoto Family: Japanese beet farmers who worked Brumbaugh's beet fields
• General Luis Terrazas/Captain Mendoza/Captain Salcedo: Despots of Chihuahua, Mexico
• Tranquilino and Serafino Marquez: Oppressed Mexican farm family who migrate to Centennial to beet farm; sons: Victoriano, Triunfador (cantina owner); daughter, Soledad
• Earl & Alice Grebe and Magnes and Vesta Volkema: Trouble ridden farmers; followers of Dr Thomas Dole Creevey; children Ethan (heroic bus driver) and Victoria; surviving son, Tim Grebe
• Floyd Calendar: Sharp shooter and buffalo hunter; son, Cisco Calendar(guitarist)
• Paul Garrett: Rancher; Married to Flor Marquez; bicentennial planner; witnesses the demise of Centennial
• Captain Frijoles: Rode with Pancho Villa during Mexican revolution; "...wanted was one day off a week, no more than twelve hours' work in the mines each day, more food, and a doctor for women who were having babies'

Quotes edit see section history

• “But the government in Washington had such a perverted misunderstanding of the land west of the Missouri that there was no chance--none ever--that the Arapaho would be allowed to keep the land they were given.”

  Carol Endermann

• “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.”

  Author

• “If is a word of infinite intellectual significance, for it indicates actions not yet completed but with the possibility of alternative outcomes.”

  Author

• “... among the Cheyenne and Our People, never bothered with scalps. Collecting such grisly tokens was not a traditional part of Indian culture; it had been introduced a hundred years earlier by French and English military commanders who, before paying bounty, demanded proof from their Indian mercenaries that they had actually slain and enemy.”

  Author

• “Because Blue Leaf was no longer the wife of a warrior and co-head of a family, she had no right to a tipi of her own, and women from all parts of the camp now descended upon it to tear it apart for their own use... In the morning she was found frozen to death. In this practical manner, the Arapaho living in Rattlesnake Buttes were freed from the encumbrance of an old woman who had outlived her usefulness.”

  Author

• “Saint Louis would have a confused history, owned by France, then Spain, then France again, then America,”

  Author

• “... the boys stood halfway between the two worlds of white and Indian, uncertain as to which they would ultimately prefer... such children were called breeds and treated with contempt--half-breeds who had a rightful home in neither race.”

  Author

• “I think men like to be loved. Just loved. Just tell them they are more to you than anything else in the world.”

  Laura Lou

• “For every white man killed by an Indian, and there were almost none, fifty or sixty others killed themselves or their neighbors by accidental gunfire”

  Author

• “Long time ago the white men who came across our land were good people. They wanted to build homes. They had their children with them. There was some fighting, but never mind much, and there was respect. But in the last two years, a different king of men. Ketchum says ninety thousand came, and all they wanted was gold. Mean, angry men with no women, no children. They shoot our people for no reason, the way they shoot antelope. They burn our villages for no reason, the way they burn the nests of hornets. They are ugly men, who have only war in their hearts, and we shall give them war.”

  Broken Thumb

• “... 6400 Indians now owned in perpetuity some ninety thousand square miles, or more than fifty-seven acres. Thus each Indian received fourteen square miles, or about thirty-six thousand acres for a family of four... whites believed the plains to be a desert which could not be farmed; Indians were convinced they were useful only for the buffalo. As always, when the significance of a natural resource is misunderstood, any land settlement must end in disaster... When the treaty reached the United States Senate, that body, without consulting the Indians, arbitrarily reduced the payments from fifty years to ten, then contemptuously refused to ratify the whole. It was rejected before it ever went into effect, and the Indians were left with no secure title to their land.”

  Author

• “... one of the finest laws ever passed in the American Congress, the Homestead Act of 1862, whereby the western lands once owned by Indians but now owned by the united States government, were given away in one-hundred-and sixty-acre parcels to anyone who seriously intended living on the land and cultivating it. Proof of this intention was simple: a man had to build a habitation on his land, live in it for certain months each year, and farm forty of his acres for a period of five years. At the end of that time he got title, and the land was his in perpetuity.”

  Author

• “Three things no sensible man fools with: A rattlesnake, a skunk, and most of all, a cook.”

  Poteet

• “The control of any string of cattle lay with the left point, for when cattle stampede, in the northern hemisphere at least, they almost invariably veer clockwise.”

  Author

• “If a man gets sick or wounded, only two things he can decently do. Get well or die quick.”

  Cowboy saying

• “... the traditional antagonism of the prairies was launched: the rancher who wanted the range kept open against the farmer who required fenced land which he could control. It was a warfare as old as the first human family: 'And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground... and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him'”

  Author

• “... 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. The railroad received the old numbered sections, sixteen in each township, with the federal government retaining the even-numbered, except for 16 and 38, which the state could sell or lease to provide funds for area schools.”

  Author

• “These errors came about principally because managers made rough estimates of their calf crop: 'We have 1000 cows and it stands to reason 85 percent will drop calves, so next year we'll have 1850 critters.' On the open range the true calf drop figured no more than 70 percent, so each year the gap between actual count and book count widened.”

  Author

• “No domesticated cattle had ever had the capacity to generate love in a man's heart the way a string of Herefords could. They were clean beasts, easy to handle, responsive to good treatment and astonishingly able to fend for themselves in unfavorable conditions.”

  Author

• “Many bloodlines converged in them: in Mexico's colonial period the land contained about 15,000,000 Indians; among them came 300,000 Spaniards and 250,000 blacks from Africa, and out of this mix arose the Mexicans.”

  Author

• “... all the American families came from one small region in Minnesota, and they were treated so generously by Terrazas that they came to think of themselves as his chosen agents and fell into the habit of brutalizing the Mexican workmen almost as severely as did the rural police.”

  Author

• “... arrested Mexicans for even the most trivial offenses, and judges sentenced them harshly and without the semblance of a trial. Storekeepers charged them higher prices than they charged white customers, and there were many places like barbershops and restaurants into which a Mexican could not go. Their money was welcome, but they were not.”

  Author

• “New immigrants from Europe who did not wish to be trapped in city slums caught the train to Chicago and from there to the wheatfields of Dakota and Minnesota. Old residents of the Atlantic seaboard who sensed that this might be the last chance for a man to live more freely heard of unclaimed lands in Colorado and Montana and made the break.”

  Author

• “... if a man plowed not in one unbroken line--'Up hill and down dale.' as he phrased it--but in wavering lines which followed the contour of the land, leaving strips of unplowed land, more water would be trapped, there would be less likelihood of soil blowing if a high wind came and there would be much less erosion.”

• “Only the white Americans did this. The Arapaho always combined in large communal societies. Chinese railroad workers lived in colonies, and so did Chicano beet workers. The Japanese clung to their communities and so did the Russians. It took the American to build his ranch far from everything, his farm where no one else could see him. ... A predisposition for living alone became almost a requirement for survival in America.”

• “The universities were judged not on their libraries or their research centers or their courses in philosophy, but only on their capacity to buy a football team, most of whose members did not come from the home state or reside in it.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• US Forts: Fort Laramie; Fort Levenworth; Fort Kearney; Fort john
• Franklin, MO
• Independence, MO: Jacksborough, TX
• Denver, CO
• Jefferson Territory aka Colorado
• Saint Louis, MO
• Mexico towns: Chihuahua, Durango, Mexico City, Santa Ynez, Guerrero, Temchic

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• glottochronology: the science of dating origins by language attrition.
• Taos Lightning: Sold to the Indians, the world's crudest alcohol was mixed with caramel, a couple of camphor balls, copious amounts of water, pepper and a shredded plug of tobacco.
• Lapsang souchong: Cured Indian tea.
• Coureur de bois: Unlicensed petty trader in the backwoods who carried trinkets to Indians in exchange for pelts.
• tapaderos: Leather coverings for the stirrup which protected the feet and ankles from clawing brush.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by Watership Down.

Preceded by Advise and Consent, and followed by Scoop.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. James A. Michener (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( M ) › Michener, James
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Westerns
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary