A recent interest of mine is reading about the winter of 1886-87. A succession of blizzards raged through the west and resulted in bringing about the freezing and starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands of cattle that were fending for themselves on the open range. No restrictions stopped ranchers from overloading the grasslands which soon became overgrazed. Still, investors kept sending eastern cattle onto the ranges because of the promise of quick, easy profits. The scene was set for what was called by one source as "The Great Die-Up." Another source said that in wintering cattle on the open range without supplemental feed, even in a mild winter, was "nothing less than slow starvation."
Omens were present if anyone wanted to heed them. Summer fires had burned much of the grass, the dry summer did not produce much grass growth, beavers and muskrats built their walls thicker, ducks and geese headed south earlier than usual, and white snowy owls - rarely seen in that area - swooped and flew in great numbers.
Only one hundred and twenty years have passed since this winter event. I say only because it illustrates how sparsely settled this part of the country was at that time. My trip to the Heritage Center at the state capital yielded no news sources west of Bismarck for that time. Much of the reporting had come from east or south of here. In-depth tales of the blizzards came from books written years later by participants in the drama. A poignant depiction of the whole affair said that in the end, the only men who made much money on the northern ranges that spring were scavengers gathering bones to sell to fertilizer companies.
