Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [69]
The great white winter of 1886 came first. The jet stream drove northward, grazed the Arctic Circle, then dipped sharply southward, a parabolic curve rushing frigid air into the plains. Through December of 1886, the temperature in South Dakota barely struggled above zero. A brief thaw intervened in January, followed by a succession of monstrous Arctic storms. Week after week, the temperature fell to bottomless depths; in the Dakotas, the windchill factor approached a hundred below. Trapped for weeks, even for months, in a warp of frozen treeless prairie, thousands of pioneers literally lost their minds. As the last of the chairs were being chopped and burned, settlers contemplated a desperate hike to the nearest town, unable to decide whether it was crazier to stay or to leave. No one knows how many lost their lives, but when the spring thaw finally came, whole families were discovered clutching their last potatoes or each other, ice encrusted on their staring, vacant eyes.
But the settlers’ suffering was merciful compared to that of their cows. On the woodless plains, barns were rare. Cattle were turned out into blizzards to survive by their wits, which they don’t have, and which wouldn’t have done them much good anyway. They were found piled by the hundreds at the corners of fenced quarter sections, all facing southeast; even when a storm abated, the survivors were too traumatized to turn around, and they died a night or two later under a listless winter’s moon. It was a winter not just of horrendous cold but of gigantic snows, horizontal broadsides that reduced visibility to zero and stung the cattle like showers of needles. Twenty-foot drifts filled the valleys and swales, covering whatever frozen grass was left to eat. At night families would lie awake listening to their cows’ dreadful bawls, afraid to go out and have the wind steal their last resources of warmth. Anyway, there was nothing they could do.
The toll was never officially recorded. Most estimates put the loss of cattle at around 35 percent, but in some regions it may have been nearer 75 percent. In sheer numbers, enough cows died to feed the nation for a couple of years. Much of the plains’ cattle industry was in financial ruin. The bankrupt cattle barons dismissed thousands of hired hands, who were forced to find new careers. When the snows of 1886 melted, Robert Leroy Parker, a young drover, cattle rustler, and part-time bank robber with a reputation, had more recruits on his hands than he knew what to do with. He organized them into a gang known as the Wild Bunch and called himself Butch Cassidy. The Wild Bunch and the scores of outlaw bands like them worked the banks, the railroads, and the Pinkerton agents into a murderous froth. To others, however, they were a moral weight on the mind. Many of the outlaws had been “good boys,” former ranch hands and farmers, occupations that everyone hoped would domesticate the West and cure it of its cyclical agonies of boom and bust. But weather was the ultimate arbiter in the American West. Unless there was some way to control it, or at least minimize its effects, a good third of the nation might remain uninhabitable forever.
As if to confirm such a prophecy, the decade following the great white winter was a decade when the western half of the continent decided to dry up. Like most droughts, this one came gradually, building up force, nibbling away at the settlers’ fortunes as inexorably as their cattle nibbled away the dying grass. The sun, to which the settlers had so recently offered prayerful thanks, turned into a despotic orb; as Hamlin Garland wrote, “The sky began to scare us with its light.” In July of 1888, at Bennett, Colorado, the temperature rose to 118, a record that has never since been equaled in the state. It was the same throughout the West, as an immense high-pressure zone sat immobile across the plains. Orographic clouds promising rain