The Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana were mostly mile after mile after mile of frontier and wide open range. In the beginning, there were only a few settlements along the rivers and major streams. Later, more and more folks came west. There were even a few courageous pioneers who were brave enough to settle out on the prairie with no one living nearby.
A large number of those who came out from the east (including none other than Theodore Roosevelt, that imposing adventurer and pioneer who became President in 1901) came because of the cattle business. The open range with no fences meant that vast tracts of grazing land was available upon which cattle could graze year-around.
This resulted in massive herds of cattle being driven north from Texas to be fattened on the lush short-grass prairie of the northern plains. It has been reported that during the nineteen year period between 1866 and 1885, about 5.7 million cattle were driven to market or the northern range.
During the later 1870s and until the end of 1885, cool summers and mild winters meant that grass and feed was plentiful and easy to find for the cattle on the open range. However, everything completely changed during the disastrous winter of 1886 – 1887.
The blazing hot and dry summer of 1886 scorched the northern plains and the daytime sky was dark with the smoke from numerous prairie fires. Soon, even the water sources dried up.
Cowboys noticed that the birds began flying south earlier than usual and where there were beaver, they began collecting more wood than previously. Even some of the cattle grew thicker and shaggier coats. When the snow started falling in early November, many of the cattle on the open prairie were already starving and ill equipped for a hard winter.
That fall, the snow began to fall earlier than normal in November. Some residents reported that this early snow was the worst in memory. On January 9, 1887, conditions became catastrophic. A fierce and raging blizzard hit the Great Plains with more than sixteen inches of snow. The wind blew continuously and the temperatures dropped to 50 below zero.
The extreme cold killed both cattle and those who cared for them. Some cowboys froze to death near their front door. The California West Coast even received snow on February 5, 1887. Down town San Francisco received 3.7 inches of the white stuff, setting an all-time record!
Very few of the ranchers had any hay stored for their cattle for feed during the winter months when the range was buried in snow. Because of the extreme drought the previous summer, no grass was available for harvesting that fall. Many of the cows that didn’t die because of the frigid temperatures soon died of starvation.
When spring finally arrived in late April of 1887, millions of dead cattle were found scatted across the northern plains. Ninety percent of the open range’s cattle were rotting where they fell.
The ranchers and cowboys reported carcasses as far as the eye could see. They clogged the rivers and streams and polluted the drinking water. Many went bankrupt and others just quit and left the area.
They referred to this disaster as “The Great Die-Up,” an appalling play on the term “round-up.” It was also called “The Winter of White Death” and “Death’s Cattle Round-Up.” Laura Ingalls Wilder called it “The Long Winter” which was the sixth volume in her “Little House on the Prairie” series which was published in 1940.
She weathered this blizzard as a teenager in South Dakota with her family near DeSmet. She described how her father would make numerous trips to the barn to chip the ice off the noses of the cattle where their breath quickly froze. To find his way back into the house, he had tied a rope from the back door of the house to the barn.
The November 19, 1886, issue of the (Yankton) Press and Dakotaian reported: “A Rapid City telegram of the 16th reports a heavy snow fall, which had lasted thirty hours and was still in progress. Fourteen inches had fallen and it was announced as the worst storm since the settlement of the Black Hills country.”
Those storms of 1886 – 87 were numerous and ferocious. The cowboys rode all day in the blinding snow with the temperature at 50 to 60 below zero. The wind chill was a warm -800 and there was no hot coffee served regularly during the day. Don’t even think about eating a nice hot dinner at noon in a warm kitchen and then taking a short 30-minute nap on the floor!
Because of the heavy crust on the snow, the horses’ feet were cut and bleeding. The cattle had the hair and hide wore off their legs up to their knees. They huddled in the draws or piled up against a downwind fence to die.
The 1886 – 87 season of blizzards changed the American frontier and ranching forever. The open-range was finished.
Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on July 20, 2022