by Larry H. Maxey, founder and superintendent, NAILE Fullblood
Our Pioneers — The “Big Die-Up,” and Snowy Owl Prophecy
You may recall a past edition for this series that profiled Theodore Roosevelt and his adventurous life as a cattleman. Although highly successful in virtually every other aspect of his remarkable life, his cattle ventures ended in abject failure. Mother Nature and the winter of 1886–87 saw to that. He wasn’t alone though. Some of the wealthiest people on the planet suffered the same fate. Bankruptcies were common.
In his book Cattle Kingdom, The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, by Christopher Knowlton, he described the many factors that contributed to the collapse of the western cattle industry in the late 1800s. The near extinction of the American bison, with estimated numbers as high as 60 million at the end of the 18th century, was a major factor. By the 1880s, their numbers had been reduced to a few hundred. The Great Plains of the American West, now devoid of bison that had roamed freely on this landscape for about 5,000 years, created a vacuum to be filled with cattle. A booming industry soon developed.
In July 1885, President Grover Cleveland signed an executive order that forced cattle herds to be removed from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian Reservation, part of what today is in Oklahoma. Comprising over 200,000 head of cattle, the cattlemen drove the majority of these cattle to the Northwestern ranges. Once there, they moved them from valley to valley in search of pasture. On these ranges veteran cattlemen had grown rich during the boom years. It was described as “the greatest agricultural expansion the country had ever seen.” But these veterans sensed that due to overexpansion and overleveraging, the good times were nearing an end. Some financial types calculated that total investment in the cattle industry exceeded the capitalization of the entire American banking system. Cheyenne, Wyoming, was the epicenter of the boom and had “the highest per capita income in the world.” The Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Flaglers, Whitneys, just to name a few of the richest families around, were highly invested. In the summer of 1886, the first sequence in the making of the “perfect storm” of events took place. Knowlton viewed these events as “puzzling natural occurrences.” Abnormally hot and dry weather spawned massive uncontrollable brushfires. In the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, a pale halo surrounded the sun. Grasshoppers soon appeared and rapidly consumed what little grass remained. John Clay managed the Cattle Ranch and Land Company in Wyoming. Inspecting his rangeland, he found grass was scarce and cattle thin. He said, “there was no market for young cattle, your aged steers were not fat, and your cows and calves were miserably poor.” He had a sickening sense of foreboding. In the Dakota Badlands, home to the Roosevelt herds, beavers were noticed “furiously at work on the walls of their lodges and piling up unusual quantities of saplings for winter food.” The moose and elk grew winter coats far earlier than usual and migratory birds and Canadian geese left six weeks earlier than they normally do. In Montana, E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, a veteran trail driver, and his boss, the cattle baron and former gold miner Granville Stewart, noticed snowy owls perched on fence posts. They had never seen this before. A local Native American tribal leader warned Stewart “that the birds were the ghostly harbingers of a harsh winter to come.”
Several years of declining cattle prices led to overstocking of the range. The influx of cattle from Oklahoma didn’t help matters. Yet, even under these circumstances, the speculators kept flooding the territory with new money, and larger cattle conglomerates were formed. Some early investors, alarmed at what they saw, liquidated their holdings early. Their Boston and New York investors were not pleased. Roosevelt recognized the impending doom potential as well. In the fall of 1886 he wrote an article for The Century Magazine noting the overcrowding: “it is merely a question of time as to when a winter will come that will understock the ranges by the summary process of killing off about half of all the cattle throughout the northwest.” Surely even he would not believe how low that estimate was and how soon it would occur. Within weeks, he was traveling by rail back to New York.
And then it began. The first snowstorm hit in November followed by a December blizzard lasting three days. In January, a chinook brought a warm spell that melted snow, forming an ice sheet. Soon, an unimaginable storm with bone-crushing cold winds arrived. The temperature kept falling. On January 15, it reached -60°F in South Dakota and stayed there for days. Fine snow blew sideways in the gale-force winds. There was no safe place for man nor beast. Cattle were buried in snow drifts where they suffocated. Many were frozen stiff on their feet. The cowboys were helpless. Conditions were the same in Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, and into Nebraska. “That winter on the northern ranges would be the coldest on record.” The onslaught continued into February.
As the weather tempered somewhat, what surviving cattle remained wandered into the towns searching for food. They were so desperate that they broke window glass, tried to push through doors, and were seen eating the tar paper from the sides of buildings. From their houses, ranchers could hear the “lowing of the cows,” and knew there was nothing that could be done to help them.
Knowlton characterized that winter as “almost biblical in its ferocity.” It seemed it was intended to “humble” and “shame” those who created the “great cattle boom”!
By April, the thaw was underway and the discoveries were “biblical” in their incomprehensively disastrous results. “Cowboys quickly coined the name for the debacle: “The Big Die-Up.” Roosevelt returned to the Badlands to assess the damage. Riding for three days across the range, he did not find a single living steer. He lost over two-thirds of his herd. It was estimated that over 1 million head of cattle perished in “The Big Die-Up.” The speculative cattle boom went bust and the “Snowy Owl Prophecy” proved sadly accurate. Taking note of what the animals try to tell us is wisdom as wise as the owl, and we should listen. .
Editor’s note: This is the forty-fourth in the series Our Pioneers.
Is there a Simmental pioneer who you would like to see profiled in this series? Reach out to Larry Maxey or the editor to submit your suggestions:
