The Blizzard That Broke the West
By Trenten Kelley | The Broken Drum
Snow has fallen across northwest Colorado once again, dusting the fields, slowing the roads, and sending the familiar chill that reminds us who really calls the shots around here.
The season's first snow always stirs something ancient in the bones of the West. That primal awareness of how fragile our footing can be when the wind turns cold. But as ranchers toss another bale of hay and watch the sky gray over the Yampa, it's worth remembering a winter that nearly erased the frontier altogether.
The blizzard of 1886–87 was the one that broke the open range and changed the American West forever.
It began long before the snow. The summer of 1886 was cruel and dry across the Great Plains. Grass burned, rivers shrank, and pastures turned golden-brown. Yet optimism ran high among cattle barons who had flooded the plains with millions. They believed in mild winters, endless grass, and sheer luck. No hay was stacked for feed; no barns stood for shelter. The cattle were thin and scattered over land grazed bare. Then, in November the snow came and didn't leave.
By January, temperatures in Montana and the Dakotas hovered near sixty below. In Wyoming, horses froze where they stood, their manes stiff with ice. On January 9, 1887, the true killer arrived. A blizzard that raged for three straight days. Ranch hands later said you couldn't see fifty feet in any direction. Men who stepped off their horses sank waist-deep on flat ground. In towns across the northern plains, herds of starving cattle staggered down main streets, chewing fence posts and saplings, scavenging for anything edible.
The Chinook winds that usually brought brief reprieve did arrive for a day, melting the top crust of snow. But the cold that followed turned that melt into an impenetrable sheet of ice, sealing the grass, the cattle's only food, beneath it.
Temperatures plunged again, and the wind never stopped. Across the West, the range fell silent. When spring finally came, rivers clogged with carcasses, and the smell of rot carried for miles. Contemporary accounts described millions of cattle dead across the open range.
Ranchers and families who had built lives on the western frontier were wiped out overnight. The great Swan Land and Cattle Company of Scotland collapsed. Even Theodore Roosevelt, then a young rancher in the Dakota Badlands, lost most of his herd and much of his fortune. The open-range economy, once the pride of the frontier, died that winter.
In Colorado, the toll wasn't as catastrophic as in Montana or Wyoming, but it was far from merciful. Nearly a quarter of the cattle on the northern Front Range perished. Ranchers who survived changed their practices entirely: cutting hay, fencing land, and breeding smaller, hardier stock. The days of letting tens of thousands of cattle wander across unfenced prairie were over. The myth of open horizons and endless grass didn't survive the thaw.
By the next decade, the landscape of the West had transformed. Fences went up. Barns and windbreaks appeared where once there was only sky. The era of the open range was over, and the railroads, already expanding through Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, took over the West. Along with all the people who took advantage of the suffering it brought.