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to withstand the gale: they simply blew over and died. Others kept their footing, until their hoofs were locked in ice, and they froze like so many statues. Dogies from Texas and yearlings from Iowa, who had not yet experienced the savagery of a northern winter, perished almost without exception, as did bulls and cows heavy with calf. Older range steers, whose coats were shaggier and whose flesh was tougher, survived through February, but they became so mad with cold and hunger that they invaded the streets of Medora, and began to eat tar paper from the sides of the buildings.11 Townspeople had to nail planks across their windows to prevent desperate steers from thrusting their heads through the glass. Every night the streets echoed with agonized bellowing. There was nothing to do but watch the carcasses pile up in vacant lots, until the snow mercifully shrouded them from view.

At last, on 2 March, when it seemed the Badlands could not possibly hold any more snow, a balmy chinook stole in from the west. Sunshine burned away the haze, and revealed a sky whose bright blue color, coming after a hundred days of monochrome visibility, was a shock to the eyes. Within hours the white landscape began to twinkle with thaw. Rivulets trickled down the slopes, carving cracks in the ice, exposing bits of yellow earth. Gullies and washouts flowed into each other, then sought out the creeks leading down to the river. The air was filled with the sound of running water.12 About the middle of the month it became a roar. Lincoln Lang hurried to a vantage point near the river, and saw a sight which haunted him through life.

A flood-wave was hurtling down the valley, so full of heavy debris that it battered the cottonwoods like reeds. At first Lincoln could not make out what the debris was: then he understood. “Countless carcasses of cattle [were] going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the stiffened legs of a carcass would point skyward, as it turned under the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding ice-cakes. Now and then a carcass would become pinched between two ice-floes, and either go down entirely or else be forced out on top of the ice, to be rafted along … carcasses continuously seemed to be going down while others kept bobbing up at one point or another to replace them.”13

This river of death roared on for days, and still the carcasses jostled and spun. Ranchers estimated their numbers in the thousands, then tens of thousands, then gave up guessing in despair. When the last drifts of snow melted away, and the flood abated, cowboys went out onto the range to look for survivors. Bill Merrifield was among them. “The first day I rode out,” he reported, “I never saw a live animal.”14

In the wake of the cowboys trundled a ghoulish convoy of wagons, not seen in the Badlands since the buffalo massacre of 1883. The wagons were driven by bone pickers in the employ of fertilizer companies. For such men alone the winter had brought wealth. Patiently they began to sort and stack the skeletons of what had been one of the greatest range herds in the world.15

CHAPTER 15

The Literary Feller

Sing me a song divine

With a sword in every line!

ON 28 MARCH 1887, New York newspapers headlined the return of Theodore Roosevelt and his “charming young wife” to the United States, after a fifteen-week tour of England, France, and Italy.1 Every reporter commented on how well Roosevelt looked, in contrast to the drained and defeated mayoral candidate of last fall. His face was “bronzed,” even “handsome,” and he gave off “a rich glow of health” as he strode down the gangplank of the Etruria. A certain bearish heaviness was noticeable in his physique (he had put on considerable weight in European restaurants), and several friends were seen to wince as he exuberantly hugged them tight.2

Edith’s health was rather more delicate than her husband’s. In Paris, about halfway through their trip, she had begun to feel “the reverse of brightly,” and Theodore had hinted in his next letter home