Powder River by S.K. Salzer

Author:S.K. Salzer [Salzer, S.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Billy Sun

I may not see a hundred

Before I cross the Styx,

But coal or ember, I’ll remember

Eighteen Eighty-six.

The stiff heaps in the coulee,

The dead eyes in the camp,

And the wind about, blowing fortunes out,

As a woman blows out a lamp

—Author unknown

* * *

A merciful chinook finally blew down from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, arriving well behind schedule and hard on the heels of the last blizzard of that cruel season. The people were grateful, now that the worst of the winter was over, but at the same time they knew the retreat of the ice and snow would reveal the true horror of that terrible time, which would be long remembered as the Winter of Death.

With mighty groans and shudders, the great rivers began to break up, the Rosebud, the Yellowstone, the Tongue and Powder, the Big Horn and Cheyenne, the Little Missouri, overflowing their banks and sending giant cakes of ice crashing and grinding downstream, leaving wreckage in their wake. Valleys and gulches that had been bone-dry the summer before now filled with rushing water that carried the corpses of countless cattle, tumbling and rolling over one another along with downed trees and other debris in the muddy, churning flood. Hapless ranchers and cowboys stood by to watch the deadly flow while the air throbbed with the water’s endless roar.

Though the extent of the devastation would never be fully known, it was immediately obvious the large ranchers had lost the most. Richard Faucett lost at least fifty percent of his stock and Moreton Dudley, eighty percent. Early in the roundup, a grim-faced Faucett surprised his men by occasionally riding with them, his face lengthening as they discovered piles of rotting corpses in the creek bottoms, gullies, and the other low places that had offered the miserable creatures false promise of shelter from the iron wind. The air stank of death.

The worst carnage was suffered by the unacclimated steers that were driven up from the south in the fall and dumped, already bony, onto the range. A Texas company that released fifty-five hundred head in August found only one hundred animals, barely alive, in the spring. The owners did not bother to claim them.

Though none emerged unscathed, the smaller operations, such as Jack Reshaw’s, lost less. Their cowboys were better able to manage the herds, moving them to sheltered places in the foothills where they could uncover enough grass to keep them alive and, if not, feeding hay—if they had it. In another cruel twist of fate, a legion of ravenous grasshoppers had descended on the range late in the fall, consuming all uncut hay.

The spring roundup was a bleak affair. In the Upper Powder region alone, the number of wagons dropped from twenty-seven, the fleet at the height of the beef bonanza, to only four. Grasslands that once supported ten thousand animals now accommodated only a few hundred. Cowboys would ride for hours, to find only a few bony steers, scarcely able to walk.

One by one that summer, many of the biggest companies started closing out.

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