'The Wagon and the Elephant': Describes Levi Zendt's journey out of Pennsylvania in search of a new life in Oregon.'The Yellow Apron': The lives of the beaver trappers Pasquinel and Alexander McKeag.'The Many Coups of Lame Beaver': A biography of Lame Beaver, an Arapaho Native American.'The Inhabitants': A series of stories about animals that supposedly lived near what would become Centennial, from the dinosaur Diplodocus to the arrival of man.'The Land': The formation of the Earth, specifically the Rockies and the land directly around Centennial.'The Commission': The fictional preface for the book.The South Platte River did behave as described. Melchior Fordney, the master gunsmith, was murdered. Charles Goodnight, one of the great men of the west, did haul the corpse of his partner home in a lead box. Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill, did frequent the English ranches near Cheyenne. There was a great convocation in 1851 at Fort Laramie. On the other hand, certain background incidents and characters are real. There was no Lame Beaver, nor Skimmerhorn nor Zendt nor Grebe. None of the families depicted here were real, nor founded upon real precedents. There was no Venneford Ranch, no prairie town of Line Camp, no Skimmerhorn cattle drive of 1868, no Centennial. In explaining fact from fiction, Michener states in the text that: Other parts of the book are loosely based on a family from Sterling in Logan County. For example, 'The Massacre' is based on the Sand Creek Massacre which took place in Kiowa County, Colorado, in 1864. Many episodes in the book are loosely based on events in eastern Colorado and south-east Wyoming, which for novelistic reasons are brought to one locale. There is a city called Centennial, Colorado, but it did not exist until 2001 and its location and history are not like the town described in either the book or miniseries. This is roughly halfway between the Colorado towns of Greeley and Kersey, in central Weld County on the High Plains about 25 miles (40 km) east of the base of the Rockies. His description of the town's location places it at the junction of the South Platte River and the Cache la Poudre River. He used a variety of source material for his fictional town taken from various areas in eastern Colorado, and Centennial is not meant to represent a single settlement. Michener lived in Greeley during the late 1930s and was familiar with the area. NBC Universal released a six volume DVD set in 2008. Geographic details about the fictional town of Centennial and its surroundings indicate that the region is in modern Weld County.Ĭentennial was made into a popular twelve-part television miniseries, also titled Centennial, that was broadcast on NBC from October 1978 through February 1979 and was filmed in several parts of Colorado. It traces the history of the plains of north-east Colorado from prehistory until the mid-1970s. Centennial is a novel by American author James A.

Centennial michener