I have
always deplored useless profanity, yet it was music to my ears to
hear the men arraign our enemies, high and low, for our present
predicament. When the last beeves were shipped, a final round-up was
made, and we started out with over fifty thousand cattle in charge of
twelve outfits. Storms struck us en route, but we weathered them, and
finally turned the herds loose in the face of a blizzard.
The removed cattle, strangers in a strange land, drifted to the fences
and were cut to the quick by the biting blasts. Early in January the
worst blizzard in the history of the plains swept down from the north,
and the poor wandering cattle were driven to the divides and frozen
to death against the line fences. Of all the appalling sights that an
ordinary lifetime on the range affords, there is nothing to compare
with the suffering and death that were daily witnessed during the
month of January in the winter of 1885-86. I remained on the range,
and left men at winter camps on every pasture in which we had stock,
yet we were powerless to relieve the drifting cattle. The morning
after the great storm, with others, I rode to a south string of fence
on a divide, and found thousands of our cattle huddled against it,
many frozen to death, partially through and hanging on the wire. We
cut the fences in order to allow them to drift on to shelter, but the
legs of many of them were so badly frozen that, when they moved, the
skin cracked open and their hoofs dropped off.
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