Centennial by James A. Michener

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.