A month ago today, a clear, crisp December morning, I walked into Bismarck’s Medcenter One to have some routine surgery on a small disk in my lower back that was protruding a bit and needed some trimming at the hands of one of Bismarck’s finest neurosurgeons. In on Thursday, out in time to spend the weekend at home was the expectation. And then, Murphy’s law took over. Anything that could possibly go wrong, did.
To make a long story short, three surgeries and twenty nights in the hospital later, I am back at my computer, but not much else, recovering from a fusion of disks 4 and 5 in my lower spine. Angel/nurse/wife Lillian will now guide me through a couple more weeks of recovery as the residual pain fades and I can resume things like walking and driving.
Old, out-of-shape, overweight bodies react differently to things like surgery than they used to. I can’t do much about the old, except to act younger, but I can, and will, do something about the other two. Starting now.
Well, then. While I was captive in Room 471 of Medcenter, Christmas and New Year’s and Brett Favre came and went, we got a new Governor and Senator and Congressman, the Legislature came to town, and winter arrived in all its glory. I am pleased about some of those things.
I shall have a good bit of time to read for the next few weeks, so I dragged out my old copy of “Ranching With Roosevelt,” by Lincoln Lang, which includes, as I told you a couple months ago, some of the Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota. Lang devotes 40 or so pages to the winter of 1886-87, the “Winter of the Blue Snow” as it came to be known later. Here’s an excerpt, with a carefully crafted conservation lesson which, I suspect, may have had its beginnings in late night campfire conversations between Lang and the future 26th President of the United States.
In quick succession came more blizzards, so that by the middle of December travel had become practically impossible. Everywhere monstrous snowdrifts were in evidence, often packed solidly to a depth of a hundred feet or more beneath the faces of the bluffs bordering the river and creek valleys. Except for an occasional let-up, while the northern furies were concentrating for a new drive, it was always snowing, blowing, and intensely cold. When the sun came at all, it appeared as if viewed through lightly smoked glasses, always attended by the omni-present halo and sun dogs.
There were twelve of us at the ranch, all told, inclusive of my mother and sister. For all we could learn of what was going on outside, we might as well have been in the Arctic itself. Even our nearest neighbors could no more reach us than we could reach them. Of outdoor work there was but little we could do save to go around on foot, whenever possible, among the cattle ranging in our immediate vicinity and keep them moving. As we had no feed for (our cattle), they at first made a valiant attempt to rustle a living off the scant grasses exposed here and there between the drifts. Cleaning this up, they became reduced to such sage-brush they could find protruding above the snow. Soon—very soon—that, too, was gone. Then they lost heart. Bunching up in the more sheltered corners, they refused to be chased out. Refused to do anything save stand there and invite a quick release from their misery. As the snow piled up around them, many became drifted under and smothered. Others froze to death, often on their feet, to fall and receive celeritous snow burial.
As the winter advanced, darker and darker became the outlook. There could be no denying that, even if we were not admitting it, for we were never easily depressed. Perhaps conditions were not so bad elsewhere on the range, we thought. So, like many another, we lived in the vain hope that the bulk of our stock might pull through.
Hardest of all, perhaps, was the experience of the women folks. However, they had already learned to adapt themselves to the new country and the conditions as they found them. They always made the best of things as they came, finding occupation of one kind or another and maintaining a cheerful front, so that they pulled through as well as any of us.
But it is a long road that has no turning. In the latter part of March came the Chinook wind, harbinger of spring, releasing for the first time the iron grip that had been upon us. At last, it seemed, the wrath of Nature had been appeased. She had taught us our lesson. Had in part wiped out the herds that had been overrunning and destroying her preserves—the home of her wild kinsfolk. Now she would go about rehabilitating the land in her own fashion and would breathe upon it the soft breath of spring that would ever stand notable in the history of the Bad Lands and be one of phenomenal growth, which she would follow with a series of favorable seasons.
A few days later such a grim freshet was pouring down the river valley as no man had ever seen before or would ever again. For days on end, tearing down with the grinding ice cakes, went Death’s cattle roundup of the Little Missouri country. In countless valleys, gulches, washes and coulees, the animals had vainly sought shelter from the relentless “Northern furies” on their trail. Now, their carcasses were being spewed forth in untold thousands by the rushing waters, to be carried away on the crest of the foaming, turgid flood rushing down the valley.
With them went our hopes. One had only to stand by the river bank for a few minutes and watch the grim procession ceaselessly going down, to realize in full the depth of the tragedy that had been enacted within the past few months.
And watching it, too, in the mind of the man who knew, there was more than room for the thought “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The White Man had desecrated Nature’s preserves. Had saturated the earth with the blood of her wild kinfolk. Had replaced them with his herds. Nature had come back at him in full measure and had retaliated in her own peculiar way. Now she was sweeping out the carcasses as something obnoxious in her sight.
Hardly were we surprised when our tally sheet, succeeding the spring roundup, showed a loss of about 80 per cent. At that we were better off than many of our neighbors, it being estimated that 85 per cent of the vast herds roaming the Bad Lands in the fall of ’86 had been wiped out of existence. Becoming thoroughly discouraged after that, most of the ranchers sold out the remnant of their holdings and quit the business and the country.
Theodore Roosevelt, of course, was among those who cried “enough.” He absorbed his losses and afterward spent little time in the Bad Lands—vacations and hunting trips interrupting his political and writing careers, both of which were flourishing in New York City. The rest is history. Having read my way through the first two-thirds of Roosevelt’s life in the biographies by Edmund Morris, I am resolute to finish by spring the final piece of the Trilogy, “Colonel Roosevelt.” It sits beside my recliner now, a marker between pages 64 and 65—just under 700 pages to go. I’ll share some of it with you when I am done.
1 comment:
Bully!
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