was four feet deep.

November gave way to December, and December to January. The terrible
cold persisted, and over the length and breadth of the Bad Lands the
drifts grew monstrous, obliterating old landmarks and creating new, to
the bewilderment of the occasional wayfarer.

Blizzard followed blizzard. For the men and women on the scattered
ranches, it was a period of intense strain and privation; but for the
cattle, wandering over the wind-swept world of snow and ice, those
terrible months brought an affliction without parallel.

No element was lacking to make the horror of the ranges complete. The
country, as Roosevelt had pointed out in July, was over-stocked. Even
under favorable conditions there was not enough grass to feed the
cattle grazing in the Bad Lands. And conditions throughout the summer
of 1886 had been menacingly unfavorable. The drought had been intense.
A plague of grasshoppers had swept over the hills. Ranchmen, who were
accustomed to store large quantities of hay for use in winter,
harvested little or none, and were forced to turn all their cattle out
on the range to shift for themselves. The range itself was barren. The
stem-cured grass which generally furnished adequate nutriment had been
largely consumed by the grasshoppers. What there was of it was buried
deep under successive layers of snow. The new stock, the "yearlings,"
driven into the Bad Lands from Texas or Iowa or Minnesota, succumbed
first of all. In the coulees or the creek-beds, where they sought
refuge in droves from the stinging blasts of the driven snow, they
stood helpless and were literally snowed under, or imprisoned by the
accumulation of ice about their feet, and frozen to death where they
stood. The native stock, in their shaggier coats, faced the iron
desolation with more endurance, keeping astir and feeding on sagebrush
and the twigs of young cottonwoods. Gaunt and bony, they hung about
the ranches or drifted into Medora, eating the tar-paper from the
sides of the shacks, until at last they dropped and died. There was no
help that the most sympathetic humanitarian or the most agonized
cattle-owner could give them; for there was no fodder. There was
nothing that any one could do, except, with aching and apprehensive
heart, to watch them die.

They died by thousands and tens of thousands, piled one on the other
in coulees and wash-outs and hidden from sight by the snow which
seemed never to cease from falling. Only the wolv