Centennial (novel)

Centennial is a novel by American author James A. Michener, published in 1974. It traces the history of the plains of northeast Colorado from prehistory until the early 1970s. Geographic details about the fictional town of Centennial and its surroundings indicate that the region is in modern-day Weld County. 
"Centennial" was made into a popular twelve-part television miniseries, also titled "Centennial", that aired on NBC from October 1978 through February 1979, and was filmed in several parts of Colorado. NBC Universal released a six volume DVD set in 2008.
Overview.
Michener lived in Greeley during the late 1930s and was familiar with the area. 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. His description of the town's location places it at the junction of the South Platte River and the Cache la Poudre River. This is roughly halfway between the Colorado towns of Greeley and Kersey, in central Weld County on the High Plains about east of the base of the Rockies. There is a city called Centennial, Colorado, but it did not exist until 2001 and its location and history are not at all similar in any way to the town described in either the book or miniseries. 
Many episodes in the book are loosely based on actual historical events in eastern Colorado and southeast Wyoming, which for novelistic reasons are brought to a single locale. For example, "The Massacre" is based on the Sand Creek Massacre which took place in Kiowa County, Colorado, in 1864. Other parts of the book are loosely based on a family from Sterling in Logan County. In explaining fact from fiction, Michener states in the text that: This is a novel. Its characters and scenes are imaginary. There was no Venneford Ranch, no prairie town of Line Camp, no Skimmerhorn cattle drive of 1868, no Centennial. None of the families depicted here were real, nor founded upon real precedents. There was no Lame Beaver, nor Skimmerhorn nor Zendt nor Grebe. On the other hand, certain background incidents and characters are real. There was a great convocation in 1851 at Fort Laramie. There was a drought in 1931-5. Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill, did frequent the English ranches near Cheyenne. Charles Goodnight, one of the great men of the west, did haul the corpse of his partner home in a lead box. Melchior Fordney, the master gunsmith, was murdered. The South Platte River did behave as described. 
Characters.
Most of the primary characters of the novel are represented in the ancestry of Paul Garrett as follows: