This Is the Life!

DECEMBER, 1928

BY ARCHER B. GILFILLAN

I

IN fairness to the reader it should be stated at the outset that there are two general theories about herding. Some hold that no man can herd for six months straight without going crazy, while others maintain that a man must have been mentally unbalanced for at least six months before he is in fit condition to entertain the thought of herding. Since these theories, taken together, hold out little hope for the steady herder, I ask the reader, in case he should notice any irrationality in the following pages, to impute it to environment rather than to heredity. It is easier on the family.

To a mind uncontaminated by the Higher Criticism, the herding profession, as personified in the second son of Adam, holds a very high and honorable rank in point of antiquity. It is significant that the first herder was killed by his brother. The prejudice against sheep is evidently as old as the profession itself.

And yet the herder, even to-day, has distant relatives — ninety-third cousins, as it were — in the higher ranks of life, for every pastor of a church is by his very name and profession a shepherd or herder. But, if it would not be presumptuous, it might be pointed out that the sheep herder has some advantages over even his wealthy and aristocratic kinsman. In the first place the herder can tell his black sheep at a glance, which is something no pastor can do. Furthermore the herder does n’t lie awake nights wondering how he can turn his black sheep white. He has sense enough to know that they will remain black to the end of the chapter. Nor does he worry for fear that his black sheep will smudge up some of the white ones, turning them a rich mulatto. Besides all this, the herder’s black sheep will average only about one to the hundred. Where is the pastor who can boast a score like that? Lastly, when the whole flock shows a tendency to go wrong, as it frequently does, the herder does n’t tearfully beg it to go right, and get in another herder to work over it a week or two. No, he addresses his flock in short, concise phrases. He alludes in passing to certain interesting facts about their ancestry, touches briefly on the present state of their morals, winds up with a reference to their hoped-for destination, and then sets the dog on them. The pastor has certain inhibitions of speech; the herder has none, unless he is tongue-tied, and few are. But after all the herder and the pastor speak much the same language, only differently arranged.

Copyright 1928, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

It is necessary, however, to differentiate between the sheep herder of fact and the shepherd of romance. The latter is a gay and poetic figure, the former anything but. The shepherd leads his flock with a song, the herder follows his with profanity. The shepherd reclines on a mossy bank beneath a green tree and carols a roundelay. The herder looks carefully about to make sure that he won’t sit on a cactus, eases his wearied limbs to the unshaded hillside, and gives his vocal organs a well-earned rest.

But, to descend from the shepherd of romance to the shepherd of fact, there is yet a great difference between him and the sheep herder—roughly speaking, about a thousand dollars a year. The shepherd, in modern life, is the man who has charge of a comparatively small band of pure-bred sheep. He tells the hired man what to give them and he tells the boss what to give him. The sheep herder is in charge of a large band of sheep, but he does n’t tell anybody anything. If he has anything to say, he tells it to the sheep.

There is another marked difference between the shepherd and the sheep herder. It is best told in the words of an old Scotch herder in Montana. He said that in the old country, when he drove his band of sheep down to the lower pastures at the approach of winter, people would exclaim, ‘Here comes the noble shepherd and his flock!’ Out here, on the other hand, when they saw him coming they would say, ‘Here comes that low-lived herder and his bunch of woolies!’

In Biblical times the owner of flocks was a nomad. He had his herdsmen, but he moved with them from place to place as the need for fresh grass dictated, taking with him his family and all he possessed. To-day the sheep owner is as stationary as any Corn Belt farmer, but the herder is still a nomad. A band of sheep will take all the feed within a reasonable distance in about a month or six weeks. Then the sheep must be moved to fresh pastures. Since the ranch buildings are usually situated near the centre of the sheepman’s range, and since the sheep swing around the edges of the range in the course of a year, the herder may be likened to a planet swinging around its central sun. All this necessitates a high degree of mobility for the herder and his belongings, and the answer to this is the sheep wagon, the most comfortable home a bachelor could desire.

But before describing this it ought to be said that not all herders have a wagon. In fact, there are many different kinds of herding. There is herding from the ranch, which means that the herder lives in the ranch buildings, takes the sheep out to graze during the day, and returns them to the corral at night. Most herders have a taste of this sometime during the year, usually during the winter. Some herders are on government reserves and have to bed their sheep in a different spot every night, and have a pack horse with which to carry their bed and provisions from place to place. In some parts of the country the herder has a team hobbled out near the wagon and does his own camp tending — that is, gets his own provisions, by the novel method of propping up the front end of his wagon, detaching the front half of the running gears, and jogging away comfortably to where his provisions await him. But in most places a herder caught trying to take the front wheels off his wagon would quickly receive free transportation to some state institution where he would be assigned to a small but well-upholstered room and given a toy wagon to take apart to his heart’s content.

Again, there is a great difference in the kind of country herded over. There is mountain herding and there is plains herding, and there is herding on wooded slopes. But to herders who cannot keep track of all their sheep on the open prairie it must ever remain a mystery how a herder can keep track of any of them in the woods, where he will not see the whole bunch together from one day’s end to the other.

But sheep nature is doubtless sheep nature the world over, and herders all over the West have much the same problems to solve, much the same life to live, whether they herd on the mountains or on the plains, or in the depths of the forest. And, wherever he is, the herder is the foundation stone of the sheep business or the bottom rung of the social ladder. It all depends on the point of view.

II

It has always been hard for me to understand why the big city newspapers publish daily weather reports and forecasts, for the city dweller can have only an academic interest in the weather at best. In the morning he leaves a warm, comfortable house, walks a block or two in whatever weather happens to exist, enters a street car or ‘L, ’ and is driven to the door of his place of business. In the evening he reverses the process, braving the weather for perhaps ten minutes before reaching the shelter of home. It may well be that the paper publishes an account of the weather simply as news, because the city man might never notice what the weather was unless it were called to his attention in this way.

The country dweller, however, being more a child of Nature, is more attentive to her moods. The farmer’s interest in the weather is proverbial; that of the farm hand is still more intense and personal; but the sheep herder’s interest in it eclipses them all. For him the weather is not an academic subject, but the most practical subject there is. It governs the actions of the sheep and his own comfort. It dictates his food and his clothing. In the midsummer he may go modestly clad in shoes, shirt, and overalls. In the winter he is still more modestly clad in two pairs of trousers and a heavy sweater, to say nothing of a sheep coat. From sunrise to sunset, every day in the year, he must take the weather, whatever it may be.

In fact the weather is such an allimportant factor in a herder’s life that herding through the four seasons of the year is almost like holding four different jobs in succession. Of course they shade into each other by imperceptible gradations, as day passes into night, but in their essence they differ almost as much as day and night. Some herders prefer one season, some another; but by unanimous consent the worst season of all is the verdant springtime.

Countless poets have expressed the emotions aroused in them by the sight of Nature putting on her mantle of green again. Countless herders have done the same, but here the resemblance ceases. From a herder’s standpoint the green grass is the villain of the piece. Imagine a child particularly fond of candy, who has been deprived of it for six months or so, and then picture him turned loose in a candy shop and told to help himself. You can easily figure out how much control you would have over him for the next half hour. After he had had his fill, he would be amenable to reason again. This is precisely what happens to the sheep. They have been on dry feed all winter, whether hay or grass cured on the ground, and then, with the coming of spring, they get the chance to eat tender green grass once more. No wonder they go wild. But the trouble is that the grass comes gradually, its growth still further retarded by cold spells and late frosts. The sheep, however, smell the green before it is fairly above the ground, and they run everywhere searching for a place where it is plentiful, naturally without finding it. Even when the grass is an inch or two high it seems impossible for them to get their fill of it. They crop a mouthful here, run a few steps, grab another mouthful, and run a few steps more. They always seem to think that the grass is plentiful just beyond them, and they lose no time in getting there. Ordinarily a ewe will graze first on one side of her, then on the other, and then move forward a step; but when hunger for green grass drives her on she will take four or five steps between each two bites. That carries the bunch forward at an unusual rate. The period of running lasts until green grass is so plentiful that the sheep can get their fill of it every day, the length of the period depending on how fast the grass grows and how many setbacks it has, which in turn depend wholly and exclusively on the weather.

If anyone thinks that a sheep can’t run, just let him try to head one off. When ‘running’ in spring, the entire bunch moves faster than the herder can walk. One herder told me of an experience he said he had with a bunch of antelope. His sheep passed them on the run, so just for an experiment he threw the antelope into the bunch as they loped past. The antelope kept up for a while, but the pace told on them and soon they were in distress. Their sides were heaving, their flanks dripped with sweat, and their tongues lolled out till they were in danger of being stepped on. Finally, the herder said, he was unable to stand the sight of their suffering any longer, so he cut them back and left them to throw themselves on the ground and recuperate. Like the rest of us, he had always believed that the antelope were the fastest things on the plains, but now, he said, he knew better. A footsore herder would listen to a story like this, and it is not necessary to vouch for its truth. But there can be little doubt that many a jack rabbit has been trampled to death through sheer inability to keep ahead of some old ewe looking for green grass.

It is not only the running, however, that makes sheep difficult to handle in the spring, but the fact that they spread out so quickly. At ordinary times, sheep have a very strong herd instinct. A small boy was asked by his teacher how many, out of five sheep in a field, would be left if one jumped over the fence. He answered correctly, ‘None.’ ‘Why, Johnny,’ remonstrated the teacher, ‘one from five leaves four.’ ‘Well,’ replied Johnny, ‘you may know arithmetic, but you don’t know sheep.’ Of course it is only this strong herd instinct that makes it possible for two or three thousand sheep to be handled by one man. In fact, certain breeds of sheep that do not have this instinct so strongly cannot be run on the open range at all, but must be kept in woven-wire pastures. However, when the green grass is coming, even the close-herding sheep seem to throw off their inhibitions temporarily, and it seems as if every ewe, forgetting the rest of the bunch, grazes straight out in front of her. The sheep spread out much faster than the herder can throw them together. Of course the dog can turn them, but even he has his limits and can be used only so much. It usually takes the assistance of a saddle horse in addition to keep the whole bunch in one county.

III

Besides the running, splitting, and spreading in spring, there are other factors that induce in the herder the belief that he has mistaken his vocation. The frost has come out of the ground, creek bottoms are soft, every low place is muddy, and some are boggy. The sheep are in the poorest physical condition of the entire year. They have stood the strain of the winter’s cold, the green grass has weakened them temporarily, they are heavy with lamb, and the muddy going is the proverbial last straw. Sheep get bogged down in muddy spots and wait patiently for death or the herder. They try to cross streams in deep places, their wool takes up water like a sponge, and they are unable to climb out on the other side. The really weak sheep will run themselves ragged when headed away from the wagon, and then, when they are turned toward it, they simply drop from exhaustion. It is no uncommon thing to find the weakest ewe in the bunch at the very tip of the lead, and quite often she finds that she has lost her return ticket.

One of the peculiar things about sheep is the extraordinary facility with which they take leave of life, and the great variety of ways in which they make their exits. You might almost accuse them of having a morbid strain.

It so happens that several methods of dying are in vogue during the spring months, and often the heaviest loss of the year occurs at this time. When the snow first softens, the draws or swales are filled with slush, which may have the appearance of snow; but when a ewe tries to cross, she finds herself in a medium where she can neither swim nor struggle through. I have seen four sheep drowned in slush within twenty feet of each other. They also get stuck in soft creek bottoms and either drown or chill to death. A weak ewe may be unable to make it back to the wagon, and the herder will throw the sheep that way next day to pick her up, only to find her missing or killed by coyotes. With the sheep running as they do at this time, a small bunch may cut off unseen by the herder and lose some of its number by coyotes before the remainder are picked up. At any time a coyote may sneak up a draw and kill a ewe before his presence is discovered. In addition there are certain weeds that are deadly poison to sheep, and even wet grass after a rain may occasionally bloat one. Sometimes a number may be killed by licking too much alkali along the creeks. Besides this they are subject to all the diseases of the organs, as other creatures are, with a few peculiar to themselves thrown in for good measure. There are so many ways in which sheep can and do die that it is a wonder any of them are left alive.

The most peculiar method of all is that called ‘dying on their backs.’ When horses or dogs roll, they either roll all the way over or roll back to the position from which they started; they are unable to balance themselves on their spine, as it were. But when a sheep rolls and reaches a position with its legs pointing upward, it is often unable to complete the turn, especially if it has a heavy coat of wool, as is the case in spring. The reason for this is that a sheep’s legs, being very thin, are not able to exert any pull to one side or the other and thus aid the sheep in righting itself. A horse’s legs, being long and heavy, can exert a powerful leverage on his body and turn it, but when a sheep is on its back its centre of gravity lies wholly within it, and there is no leverage it can bring to bear. Its only chance is to twist itself violently, in the hope that some movement may turn it on its side. If unsuccessful in this, the unnatural position for some reason causes gas to collect in its body and it begins to bloat. Finally the pressure of this gas on its heart and lungs becomes so terrific that these organs cease to function. If the ewe is found at any time before life is extinct and is turned over on her stomach, she will get up, stagger off, and deflate, looking meanwhile like a misshapen balloon.

There is a great variation in the time it takes a sheep to die on her back. She may be dead in fifteen minutes, then again she may be alive at the end of an hour or more; it all depends on how full her stomach was to start with. But die she will, unless discovered and turned right side up. Sheep are especially apt to roll when the sun comes out warm after a rain. The herder may turn over half a dozen sheep in a day, when conditions are such as to make them roll, and he has to be eternally on the lookout for them. The price of their lives is his vigilance.

Finally, to fill the herder’s cup of woe to overflowing, the days in spring are interminably long. They approach in length the farmer’s eight-hour day — eight hours before dinner and eight hours after. This has one single advantage. It gives the herder time mentally to reshape his future life, so that he will never under any circumstances herd through another spring.

IV

At the latter end of spring comes lambing, and after that shearing. Continuing now with the herding year, we come to summer, a season differing radically from the other three as regards herding. All the rest of the year the herder leaves the wagon in the morning, carrying a lunch, and does not return to it until evening. His evening meal is apt to be the principal one of the day, and he does most of his cooking then. But in summer every day is really broken into two working days. The reason for this is that the sheep will not graze during the intense heat of a summer’s midday, but will run to the nearest water and lie beside it till late in the afternoon. Consequently in summer the wagon is placed beside a stream or water hole, and the day’s schedule is somewhat as follows: —

The sheep leave the bed ground about five o’clock, or shortly after sunrise, and go out to graze, usually working against the wind. The herder snatches a hasty breakfast and overtakes them with the aid of his saddle horse. The band grazes until the sun gets uncomfortably hot, and then some of them start for water. They do not all go at once, but fall gradually into long lines. Usually they follow deep dusty paths already made by thirsty stock, and the long lines of sheep smoking down to water on a hot summer’s day are as characteristic of a sheep country as the sheep themselves.

When the sheep reach water, they drink and then huddle together in large groups, usually with their heads beneath one another’s sides. That is, as you look at the bunch you can see only their backs, their heads being down near the cool wet sand, where there is protection also from the mosquitoes and flies. A few may lie down, but most of them stand huddled together right at the water’s edge. Occasionally a lamb or so may stand in the water for the sake of coolness, but a grown sheep almost never. If there are any banks close by to cast a shadow, this patch of shade will be packed as full of sheep as it can hold.

The sheep will probably all be on water by eleven o’clock, and from then on till three or four in the afternoon the herder is free to do as he pleases. This does not mean that he can make a practice of visiting away from the wagon, because there is always the chance that a stray coyote may drop in for dinner. But since the wagon overlooks the sheep as they lie on water, the herder has four or five hours in which to cook, eat dinner, read, write, or otherwise recreate himself.

About three or four o’clock the sheep begin to leave water. They straggle off one by one, grazing into the wind, and it will perhaps be an hour before the last one leaves. The herder does not have to follow until they are pretty well out, and occasionally he does not have to leave the wagon in the afternoon at all. The sheep do not travel as fast or as far as they do in the morning, and their grazing time is shorter. They reach the bed ground about dark, the herder going in ahead of them to prepare his evening meal.

The result of this schedule is that the noon meal becomes the principal one of the day, because there is then plenty of time to cook, while there is little time to spare for either of the other meals. This is a pity, because it forces the herder to hover over his stove during the hottest part of the day and to convert his wagon into a little inferno. But even at that the heat of a Dakota sun at noon is such as to tempt the herder to crawl into his oven to cool off. It reminds you of the Arizona man being cremated in Chicago, who, after spending an hour in the furnace, sat up in his coffin and cursed the attendant for opening the door and letting in a draft. It takes an inland country like the Great Northwest or Siberia to produce extremes of heat and cold.

As stated before, the wagon without a fire in it is very comfortable even on a hot day, since it is open at both ends. It does not take a wood fire long to die down, and as soon as the stove cools off the herder is as comfortable as may be. Since he does not have to leave the wagon till the cool of the day approaches, he really does not suffer with the heat, and does not have to stand nearly so much of it as the farm hand does. Often he prepares a cold supper to avoid heating up the wagon again before he goes to bed. Summer herding, then, means early rising and consequently early retiring, but it provides several hours of freedom in the middle of the day.

There are times in the year, notably in spring, when the herder may envy the ranch hand, but as the herder lies on his bed through the heat of a summer’s day and through the door of the wagon watches the distant ranch hand sweating up and down the corn rows, or pitching hay or doing some such other work requiring a strong back and a weak mind, then the herder is apt to be pharisaically thankful that he is not as one of these.

One real drawback to summer is the flies. They are not bad at first, but from the beginning of August they become a pest and a torment. Since the door and the window of the wagon both open out, it is impossible to screen against the flies. The only way is to fight them as they come in. I have killed, by actual count, six hundred flies with a swatter in one afternoon. I might add that I did little else during that time. The best way seems to be to let them accumulate for a day or two and then shut the wagon up and give them a dose of some good insecticide. That wipes the slate clean and gives a chance for a fresh start.

V

Time and tide, they say, wait for no man. Gradually the days become shorter, the heat moderates, and the sheep lie on water a shorter time each day. The first really cool day they do not stop on water at all, but merely drink and go on, or perhaps they do not go down to water at all. And about this time, as summer is slipping into fall, comes ‘shipping.’ The bunch is taken in to the ranch. The wether lambs — that is, the males — are first cut out and penned by themselves. Then all the ewes that show signs of age are cut out and put in a separate pen. The sheepman then examines the mouths of these old ones to see which have teeth enough to carry them through another winter. The ‘gummers’ — that is, those that have lost all their teeth—and the ‘broken mouths,’ those that have some teeth missing, are cut out and put in with the wethers, and the rest are returned to the bunch. A sheep’s age can be accurately told by the number and state of its teeth. A yearling has two teeth, a two-yearold four, a three-year-old six, and a four-year-old eight, or a full mouth, as it is called. At five a ewe’s teeth are apt to begin to spread and to be worn down. From then on individuals differ somewhat, some losing their teeth quickly and some keeping them for a year or two longer. Ordinarily it does not pay a man who runs sheep on the range to keep his ewes after their mouths begin to break. They will be all right for a year or two, where they have plenty of hay and some grain, but range conditions are too hard for them. Consequently the sheepman culls out his gummers and broken mouths each fall at the time he markets his lambs, and thus gets his bunch in shape for the coming winter.

Then begins the journey to the railroad with the lambs, and often the regular herder makes the trip for the sake of a change. From the region where we are it is fifty-five miles to the railroad on the north and seventy-five miles if we go south. This trip takes from six to eight days. It is always an interesting event, even though it is harder than the herder’s regular work. Often two or three sheepmen throw in together; and, as the lambs are all freshly branded when they start, they can be easily sorted out at the shipping point.

If there are even a few old ewes in the bunch, it is not difficult to get the band ‘trail-broke’; but if it is a straight bunch of lambs the first few days are lively ones. Someone has said that ‘a ewe has just sense enough to be ornery.’ But a lamb does n’t know even that much. A band of ewes will keep a certain direction without much bother, but direction means less than nothing to a lamb. A rabbit, a Russian thistle, or any little thing at all is sufficient to change his previous intentions, if any. He is afraid of running water and of everything else but a fence. He is always glad to see a fence and always suspects that there is a ripe grain field on the other side of it, and he is a great one to act on his suspicions. But by degrees he steadies down, learns to keep direction fairly well, and by the time he reaches the railroad he is as easy to handle as a ewe would be at the start.

Two men go with each bunch of lambs on the trail. One drives the lambs, and the other the wagon or truck that carries the camp outfit. The second man also makes and breaks camp, does the cooking and dishwashing, and helps the other fellow at a pinch. It is right here that the chance for trouble comes in. It is natural for the one driving the sheep to want all the help he can get, and it is just as natural for the other to fail to recognize the pinch when it arrives. Each is apt to think that the other is putting the burden on him, and it is a tradition that, of the dozens of pairs of men who start with the lambs, few arrive at the railroad on the same cordial terms with which they started.

But with good weather the trip can be a very pleasant one. Old friendships are renewed along the road and new ones made. There are sheep ahead and behind, and there is visiting back and forth among the trailsmen. There is always the discussion of what happened at this or that point last year. There is news of the progress of the other bands in line, news spread by trucks or cars that traverse the whole route every day on their way to and from the railroad. Finally there is the sight of a real town and of the railroad once more, the crowded stock pens, the dusty job of cutting the bunch again and again as each man’s sheep are sorted from the rest, the crowding of the sheep on to the scales, the cutting into carload lots, and the prodding of the sheep up the runways into the double-decked cars. Then comes the ride up to the hotel, the removal of at least a portion of the corral dust, the good dinner on clean tables served by pretty waitresses (they all look pretty after a summer spent in the exclusive society of the sheep), and the hours spent lounging around town afterward. Last of all there is the trip home, covering in hours the route that took days on the up trip; then back to the wagon and the sheep again.

VI

It is n’t cold for South Dakota, either. But when the mercury sinks until it drops out of the bottom of the thermometer and rolls around on the floor, and then freezes up so that the baby can play marbles with it, that’s cold!

There is locally, however, a difference of opinion regarding South Dakota climate. Some claim that it is nine months winter, three months wind, and the rest summer. Others maintain that it is nine months winter and three months late in the fall. Both sides agree on the length of the winter and both probably would on the quality of the cold. No less an authority than Stefansson has made the statement that it gets colder in the State of Montana than it does within the Arctic Circle. Our region lies just east of the Montana border, and there is evidence to show that temperature is no respecter of state lines.

Some years ago a member of the fraternity of ‘sob-brothers,’ writing about a certain class of workers, asked our tears for them because they worked in a room so chilly that they had to exercise to keep warm. What would he have said had he known that hundreds of herders regularly get wringing wet with sweat legging out bucks and then immediately go out and herd all day in sub-zero weather? If the sobbrother had known that, he would have had the floors of Congress awash with tears, and the senators would have had to go out to the cloakrooms in boats.

There is a difference of opinion among herders as to whether winter or summer herding is preferable. The majority of them seem to favor winter on account of its shorter days; but personally I take the other side. Many a December 21 has seemed longer to me than the longest day summer ever saw. As I pointed out before, it is possible for a herder to keep reasonably cool through even the hottest summer, but there is many a winter day when it is impossible for him to keep warm.

The great problem for the herder is to wear clothes enough to keep him fairly warm during long periods of inactivity and at the same time to dress lightly enough not to perspire too much when he walks. But, as in the case of the man who aimed so as to hit it if it was a deer and miss it if it was a cow, this can’t be done. The herder must choose one or the other, and his choice will depend on his temperament. Although I choose the heavy dressing for myself, I must admit that one of the most disagreeable of sensations is to have your face fairly stinging with cold and your body bathed in perspiration. It seems as if Nature were attacking you two ways at once.

The sheep do not travel nearly so far in winter as in summer. The deeper the snow, the less inclined they are to ramble. But if a thaw happens to clear the snow off they make up for lost time and run as they always do in spring. It seems as if they were rejoicing at getting the free use of their legs again. Thaws, and even total disappearance of snow, are not uncommon in winter. In fact, South Dakota weather is as much of a gamble as the radio is. You set the dial and you hear some worldfamous pianist in New York thundering out a masterpiece, and then another touch of the knob and your ears are soothed with the refined strains of the ‘Jackass Blues.’

Sheep, like horses, paw snow to graze beneath it. Cattle do not; they eat only what sticks above the snow or what they can nuzzle down to when the snow is soft. Sheep go to work systematically and methodically. They paw four or five times with one front foot, getting down to the grass, and then paw somewhat crosswise to this with the other front foot. Where the two lines cross there is quite a bit of grass exposed, and after cleaning this up they move a step or two and paw again. They are seemingly tireless and bottomless. When the snow is slightly crusted, sheep are still able to paw through it, but when the crust is hard, or when, as often happens, there are two or three crusts, the band must be fed. They do not need water as long as they can get snow. It is all the better if they have access to open water, but when snow is on the ground they can get along without it. This enables the sheepman to get the grass on the high and dry ridges during the winter. On the other hand, in summer the sheep must be where they can water every day; while in spring and fall if they have water every other day they can get along.

VII

One product of this region has gained nation-wide if not world-wide fame — the Dakota blizzard. Whatever the weather does in this part of the country, it does with intense and single-minded earnestness. The force, not to say violence, of the wind may be judged by the fact that when it is due east or west the transcontinental trains often blow through our railroad towns as much as a day and a half ahead of schedule. When the country decides to go dry and stay dry — that is, in a strictly aqueous sense—the fishes have their choice of migrating downstream in their native element or of sticking by the country and playing around in the dust for a while. When it decides to rain, the culverts come up out of the road for a look around and the bridges play tag with one another down the streams. When the weather decides to be hot, the natives fry their eggs on their doorsteps; and when it decides to be as ornery as it can be, it produces its masterpiece, the blizzard.

Seven years ago there occurred a blizzard which is still referred to as ‘the March storm.’ While it was a storm of unusual violence, it was the same sort of storm that occurs every winter, and usually several times a winter. This particular storm began on a Sunday evening with a light snow and some wind. By daylight the blizzard was in full blast. It raged all that day with unabated fury, and all that night and until about ten o’clock Tuesday morning — thirty-six hours in all. During that time the wagon, although in a comparatively sheltered spot, rocked back and forth like a boat on a rough sea. The air was so full of wet snow that it was almost impossible to face the wind and draw a breath. The weather was not cold, and this is characteristic of blizzards, but the violence of the wind was such that the sting of the wet snow and sleet on the face and hands was unbearable. No beast would face it, and no human being did who could possibly avoid it.

The sheep were in a winter bed ground — that is, where the lie of the land afforded some shelter; but from such a storm as this there was really no protection. Although we went around the sheep, huddled under the bank, every fifteen or twenty minutes during the day, and even up to midnight, yet sometimes during the storm the wind whipped two or three hundred head out of the top of the draw and drove them before it into other shelters. We found them after the storm, a few here and a few there, gathered under banks and in low places. The rest were huddled behind the wagon, beside a large drift that had formed during the storm, some of them half buried in it. When we began to pull these out, we noticed steam rising from little holes in the snow near them, and as we dug we found a ewe at the bottom of each of these holes, the steam having been made by her warm breath striking the upper air.

Then we set out to dig the snow bank systematically. All that day and parts of the next two we dug sheep out of that bank, some alive and some dead. The third day we dug out a ewe that was so much alive that it took a saddle horse to run her down, when she found she was at liberty once more. Each ewe as we found her was lying in a hollow place about twice her size, where the warmth of her body had melted the surrounding snow. There were many sheep that we missed on account of their being in unexplored parts of the drift; but altogether that snow bank yielded up thirty-four dead sheep and probably as many live ones. They had huddled close under the bank to be out of the wind; the outside ones had refused to move, and the inner ones had been gradually drifted under.

But our loss, heavy as it was, was surpassed by that of others. One sheepman lost nine hundred head out of twelve hundred. The wind had driven them into a swampy place, where they bogged down and chilled to death. Another man, a small farmer, owned twenty-seven head of cattle and a water hole; but when the storm was over he had neither water hole nor cattle. The water hole had happened to be in the southeast corner of his pasture, and the storm had piled the cattle into it and drowned them. In some places the barbs of the wire fences were matted with the bloody hair and flesh of horses, where a bunch of them had been ground along the wires by the force of the wind, the outside horses pressing those inside against the barbs.

In counting up the loss from such a storm as this, you must include not only those that die during the storm, but the many others who are so weakened by it that they succumb later. Storms like this, however, are simply one of the factors that must be reckoned with by the inhabitants of this region. All sections of the country have their drawbacks, with the exception of California. Poets have written voluminously about the beauties of winter, but occasionally the thought will obtrude that the bathing beauties of Southern California have a slight edge on the somewhat more frigid beauties of ice and snow. Still, we cannot all lie on the sand and lie about the climate, and dwellers in our region simply accept snow, cold, and blizzards as inescapable accompaniments of winter in the Great Northwest, where for weeks on end the hired man has to thaw out the cow’s bag with a blowtorch and milk with his mittens on.

(The story of the author’s dozen years as a sheep herder will be continued in a second paper, ’The Herding Day’)