Six Thousand Feet and Forty Below

Cheyenne sits at about six thousand one hundred feet above sea level, which places it higher than most American cities and gives it a climate that surprises visitors who expect a prairie town to be mild. The summers are warm and short. Frontier Days arrives in July, when afternoons are warm, with afternoon thunderstorms that build over the Laramie Range to the west and arrive with little warning.

The winters are the ones that shaped this city's history. The winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighteen eighty-seven is the one that cattle ranchers on the northern plains still reference as a dividing line. Temperatures fell far below zero across the northern plains. Blizzards arrived in sequence, burying the open range under ice and compacted snow that cattle could not paw through to reach grass. There was no supplemental hay. The ranches were run on the assumption that the open range would always support a herd.

It did not that winter. Estimates of cattle losses across the region run between fifty and ninety percent. The great cattle fortunes assembled in Cheyenne's drawing rooms during the boom years evaporated in a matter of months.

What followed from that loss was a reckoning: the open range model was finished, the cattle barons were financially diminished, and the tensions with homesteaders who had survived more carefully were about to become violent. The weather had changed the political arithmetic before the gunmen arrived.