aign 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. Hundreds of young
steers were wandering aimlessly around on hoofless stumps, while their
tails cracked and broke like icicles. In angles and nooks of the
fence, hundreds had perished against the wire, their bodies forming
a scaling ladder, permitting late arrivals to walk over the dead and
dying as they passed on with the fury of the storm. I had been a
soldier and seen sad sights, but nothing to compare to this; the
moaning of the cattle freezing to death would have melted a heart of
adamant. All we could do was to cut the fences and let them drift, for
to halt was to die; and when the storm abated one could have walked
for miles on the bodies of dead animals. No pen could describe the
harrowing details of that winter; and for years afterward, or until
their remains had a commercial value, a wayfarer could have traced
the south-line fences by the bleaching bones that lay in windrows,
glistening in the sun like snowdrifts, to remind us of the closing
chapter in the history of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Cattle Company.

CHAPTER XXII

IN CONCLUSION