The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [186]
That night the temperature fell below zero, and a sudden gale came down from Canada, blowing curtains of thicker snow before it. By morning the drifts were piling up six or seven feet deep, and the air was so charged with snow that the cattle coughed to breathe it. Some cows stupidly faced north until the blizzard plugged their noses and throats, asphyxiating them.3
The beavers, meanwhile, snuggled down philosophically in their burrows. Thanks to six weeks of overtime chewing, they had cut and stored enough willow-brush to last them several seasons. They could not hear the wind, but as the mud around them froze it resonated with the growling of ice in the river. When the growling stopped they knew that the Little Missouri had glaciated, and that wolves and lynxes were now patrolling it.4
“Their hoofs were locked in ice, and they froze like so many statues.”
Dying cow, December 1886. Painted by Charles Russell. (Illustration col.1)
All through November the snow continued to fall—whirling, sifting, billowing across the prairie as rhythmically as waves in the ocean. Lines of violet shadow separated each “roller” from the next. Ever afterward pioneers would call this the Winter of the Blue Snow,5 the worst in frontier history.
One day in mid-December there was a brief spell of Indian summer. The temperature jumped to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the snow to a depth of six inches. But then subzero weather returned, and the slush became a slabby crust of ice. Cattle hungry for buried grass had to gnaw through it until their muzzles were raw and swollen. Sometimes the crust would split beneath a very heavy steer, and he would drop through it on all fours, lacerating his legs and bleeding to death in the soft snow beneath.6
It grew colder and colder. On Christmas Day the mercury stood at minus 35 degrees; on New Year’s Day it was minus 41, and still sinking.7 The first month of the year is traditionally cruel in Dakota—local Indians call it “Moon of Cold-Exploding Trees”—and January 1887 proved to be the coldest in the memory of any man, white or red. Blustery storms alternated with periods of aching calm, but the snowfall rarely ceased. Soon the prairie was covered to a depth of three or four feet. While the lower snow compacted, the powdery flakes on top responded to the slightest breeze. They rolled across the flat country like fog, and on reaching the Badlands tumbled slowly down into cuts and coulees. There they settled in great drifts which piled up, a hundred feet or more, to prairie level, making the broken country seem as smooth as any plain. Ranches—especially the dugout variety—disappeared overnight, with their owners asleep inside them. Thousands of cattle were buried alive.8
Beasts nimble enough to escape suffocation emerged wild-eyed on the open range, and began to search for herbage in places where the wind had kept the snow fairly thin. But last summer’s drought, aggravated by overstocking, had reduced the grass to stubble. The starving cattle were forced to tear it out and eat the frozen, sandy roots. Then they browsed the bitter sagebrush, gnawing every shred of bark off until the twigs were naked, finally chomping the twigs themselves. When there was nothing left but stumps, the cattle huddled along the railroad, waiting for dropped garbage, and staring at every passing train as if about to stampede aboard.9
Then, on 28 January, a blizzard struck which made all previous storms that winter seem trivial. “For seventy-two hours,” wrote one survivor, “it seemed as if all the world’s ice from Time’s beginnings had come on a wind which howled and screamed with the fury of demons.”10 Children wandering out of doors froze to death within minutes, bent by the wind into the fetal position. Women in isolated ranches went mad; men shot themselves and each other. Many cattle exposed on the prairie were too weak