The Hard Winter and the End of the Open Range

The winter of eighteen eighty-six and eighty-seven killed the cattle industry in Montana as it had existed up to that point, and it did not do it gradually. Between November and March, a series of blizzards and extreme cold hit the northern plains with temperatures recorded at fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit and snowpack so deep that cattle could not reach the grass underneath it. The animals starved and froze in numbers that destroyed most of the large open-range herds operating in the territory.

The economic mechanism that produced the disaster was straightforward and was identified clearly afterward, though not clearly enough beforehand. The summer of eighteen eighty-six had been dry and overgrazed. Cattle barons from Chicago, Boston, and London had been pouring money into Montana range cattle through the eighteen eighties, encouraged by the profits of the preceding decade and by promotional literature that described the northern plains as virtually risk-free pasture. The ranges were stocked far beyond their carrying capacity going into the fall. The cattle that died in January and February were already weakened before the worst blizzards arrived.

Spring roundup revealed the scale of it. Cowboys found frozen carcasses piled in coulees and river bottoms across eastern Montana. Estimates of cattle losses across the territory range widely; the figure most cited by historians, approximately sixty percent of cattle on the open range, should be understood as an aggregate across ranges with very different outcomes. Individual outfits lost everything. Some lost ninety percent.

The industry that replaced it was smaller, fenced, and run by ranchers who understood the weather. The era of the open range, of cattle drives from Texas, of grazing land treated as essentially free, ended in the coulees of eastern Montana in the spring of eighteen eighty-seven. What survived became the ranching culture Montana still practices today. The precise total cattle mortality figures are estimates derived from spring roundup counts and vary substantially between historical sources.