Life’s always a struggle here.
Gene Hardee stayed with us as foreman for a few more years, as Lainie and me tried to make our own ranch work. Finally Hardee got a better offer, took over an operation on the Tongue River, till he got too stove up to work. Don’t know whatever became of him, or a lot of the other boys that rode for the Bar DD. Bitterroot Abbott got killed in Helena a year or two later. Not in a gunfight. No, nothing like that. Poor fellow got drunk, fell down some stairs in Helena, and broke his neck. Walter Butler? He’s a dentist, got a fancy office in Butte. Doing well, though he lives in Butte. Never cottoned to that town none.
There’s some who say that the hard winter wasn’t so bad, that not as many cattle died as all the newspapers and ranchers and ranch managers and boards of directors reported. We heard the same things down in Texas after that January blizzard, too. Oh, I suspect some folks killed off book counts and not actual herd counts, but it wasn’t no lie. Dead cattle were everywhere, worse than it had been in Texas. Thousands drifted to the frozen rivers, and got swallowed down the air holes. They’d get pushed into the water from behind, cattle being so stupid, and drown or freeze. Wolves got plenty, and the winter got plenty of wolves.
A lie? The Bar DD went under. Even Teddy Roosevelt had had enough, eventually gave up his Dakota ranch. Other ranches—even the big Swan Company in Wyoming—filed for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. Liquidation. Them’s big words. Lots of other ranchers just quit. They were beaten. Losses reached sixty percent, seventy-five percent, ninety percent.
Mrs. MacDunn and Lainie, though, had no quit in them. They were stayers, like Camdan Gow. Hadn’t been for Lainie and her ma, I would have likely drawn my time along with Busted Tooth Melvin, Old Man Woodruff, rode south.
Instead, spring found me where I’d been early in ’86, only not in Texas, but on the Sun River range, doing what no respectable cowboy would want to be caught dead doing.
When Tommy O’Hallahan loped up, I stepped away from the dead heifer I was skinning, wiped the mud and grime off my gloves, tried to shoo away the horde of flies. Tommy rode right up to me on Midnight Beauty, war bag looped around the horn, other possibles—including his books—strapped to his sougans behind the cantle.
For a moment, we just looked at each other, unable to speak. Finally I broke the silence.
“When did you get back from the line shack?”
“This morning.”
“Did you . . . ?” I couldn’t finish.
He shook his head. “No sign.”
“Maybe he made it,” I said hopefully. “You know what he always said. ‘A little snow ain’t gonna kill John Henry Kenton.’”
“You’re probably right. He’s in Canada by now. Where there’s no barbed wire.”
I smiled. ’Course, we both knew better.
“I’m leaving, Jim,” he said, and my stomach twisted in a knot. “Rode over to say good bye.”
“Lainie know your leaving?” I asked.
“She does.”
A warm wind blew, but I felt so cold.
Tommy cleared his throat. “I can never repay you for all you did for me, Jim. You saved my life up there. You didn’t have to do that. You’ve always been a man to ride the river with. You’ve always been a friend. I wish I’d been a better friend to you.”
I had to take a deep breath. It didn’t help none. Tears still welled in my eyes, and one rolled down Tommy’s cheek.
“Where you bound?” I made myself ask.
“I don’t know. Judith Basin maybe. Miles City. Dakota. I’m too much like . . .” He hesitated, had to cough again. “Too much like John Henry. Too set in my ways.”
“Too smart for your own good,” I joshed him.
“Not smart enough.” He smiled weakly. “You’re the smart one, Jim. You’ve always been smarter.”
He leaned down, we shook hands. His grip was firm. “See you when I see you,” I told him, and he pulled his hat low, and rode east.
I watched him ride. I knew I’d never see him again.
Never did. You remember last year when we went to Great Falls? Remember that artist we ran into? Charlie Russell? Yeah, he’s made a mighty big name for himself with his paintings, but he’s still a heathen cowboy like most of us. He told me he worked on the Judith that summer of ’87 with a young one-eyed cowhand, said he was a pretty good cowboy, and that must have been Tommy. The way I figure it, Tommy spent that season around Utica, then kept moving. Looking for what I knew, and expect he knew, too, that he’d never find.
Those days were over. The open range done for. But it wasn’t the end. I knew that as soon as Tommy rode off. For me, for most of us cowhands and stock growers in Montana, those of us who had the grit to stick it out, it was a new beginning.
Slogging through the mud, I made my way slowly to the coffee fire down the hillside, out of the wind, where Lainie and Mrs. MacDunn were fixing some chow for the boys. Lainie looked up at me, and I could tell she’d been crying, too, but she gave me her best smile, saying: “We’re going to be all right, Jim Hawkins.”
She handed me a cup of coffee, and, as I sipped it, I walked back up the hill, silently, and looked across the gently, rolling plains, walked a few yards away to the edge of a muddy coulée. Lainie was right, though maybe I didn’t know it then. Woman’s always right. On that April morning in 1887, I saw a coulée filled with dead cattle. Later, however, I’d see the spring turn wet, and the grass grow strong. I’d see a land so fresh, so alive, so rich.
And Lainie would see it with me.
THE END
Author’s Note
Two pieces of art I first saw as a high school student inspired this novel: W.H.D. Koerner’s “Hard Winter,” painted in 1932, and a drawing by a Montana cowboy named Charles Marion Russell. To answer a rancher’s question of how many cattle had been lost, Russell made a watercolor sketch on a piece of cardboard of a starving, dying steer and a hungry wolf. “Waiting for a Chinook” became synonymous with the disastrous winter of 1886–87.
Although almost all of the characters in this novel are fictitious, much of this novel is true. The events of the drift fence in Texas, the blizzard of January 7, 1886, and what Texas ranchers came to call “The Big Die-Up” are based on fact. Likewise are the natural challenges Montana stock raisers faced and fought over the following year: a harsh drought, overgrazing, grass fires, all of which led to the disastrous winter of 1886–87.
Cowboy “Teddy Blue” Abbott estimated that sixty percent of all cattle in Montana were dead by March 15, 1887. Only forty percent of Granville Stuart’s stock on the DHS Ranch survived, and other ranchers in Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas reported devastating losses. On the Tongue River range, the Kempton and Tusler Cattle Company reported a loss of about ninety percent. The sprawling Swan Land and Cattle Company in Wyoming, the Dickey Brothers Ranch in the Little Missouri River Valley, and the Niobrara Land and Cattle Company declared bankruptcy. Theodore Roosevelt said he lost approximately sixty percent of his cattle. By 1890, Roosevelt, now living full time in New York, abandoned his Elkhorn Ranch. Roosevelt’s 1886 appearance in Helena, Montana, by the way, is my own invention, although part of his speech regarding the future of the open range comes from an 1886 article in the Chicago Tribune that the Yellowstone Journal reprinted. By no means did the hard winter of 1886–87 end the cowboy way of life, but it certainly marked a closure to the open range era.
Happy Jack Feder put my son and me up for a few days at his cabin in Lewis & Clark National Forest—the location became the site of the Bar DD line camp at Sun River Cañon—while I was researching this novel in the summer of 2008. He also gave me a tour through the cowboy country of Augusta, Choteau (where Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist A.B. Guthrie Jr. called home), and Fort Shaw. I’m deeply thankful to Happy for his hospitality. My son thinks Happy’s one of the best marshmallow roasters on the Front Range.
Many thanks also go to Laura Rotegard, superintendent at the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Deer Lo
dge, Montana for granting me access to the archives, showing me around the ranch, answering all my questions, and, in general, putting up with a nuisance like me; Donnie Sexton at Travel Montana; Forrest Fenn of Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Santa Fe and Vista Grande public libraries; the Wyoming and New Mexico state archives; Montana Historical Society and its excellent museum in Helena; Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; and Devil’s Rope & Route 66 Museum in McLean, Texas.
I found much material from the following books: Alex Swan and the Swan Companies (Arthur H. Clark Company, 2006) by Lawrence M. Woods; Cattle-Raising on the Plains of North America (University of Oklahoma Press, 1964) by Walter Baron von Ritchofen; Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography (Platen Press, 1977) edited by Conrad Kohrs Warren; Cowboy Culture: A History of Five Centuries (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981) by David Dary; Forty Years on the Frontier (Arthur H. Clark, 1925) by Granville Stuart, edited by Paul C. Phillips; Montana: A History of Two Centuries, Revised Edition (University of Washington Press, 1991) by Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang; Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (Yale University Press, 1943) by Joseph Kinsey Howard; Reminiscences of a Ranchman (University of Nebraska Press, 1962) by Edgar Beecher Bronson; and We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher (University of Oklahoma Press, 1954) by E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott.
Those sources are great starting points to learn the true story of Montana’s Hard Winter of 1886–87.
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Mexico
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won six Spur Awards from Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life, New Mexico Magazine, Persimmon Hill, and True West. His website is www.johnnydboggs.com.
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