It was a wonderful experience, and when toward evening we reached the railroad we were thrilled and triumphant over our accomplishment. The night was spent in the little four-room “hotel,” we saw Louise safely on board the eastbound express the next morning, then returned to the ranch.
To be out after a blizzard is one thing, to be out in one is quite another, and we always grew apprehensive when the sky became suddenly overcast and the snow began to fall from leaden clouds. What if the storm should catch the herders and the sheep too far away from the camp?
They were all warned to range their sheep to the North if it threatened to storm, as most of the blizzards came from that direction and the sheep would go before the wind back to camp and safety. But they will not face it and, if unmindful of his orders, the herder took them South and a sudden storm came, he could not turn his sheep back to the camp; they would drift on and on before the wind, sometimes plunging over a bank to be buried beneath the drifting snow or piling up and smothering each other.
One winter just as Owen and I were starting home from California we received a telegram from Steve saying that during a blizzard the buck herd had been lost. Owen had some very important business which detained him when we reached Denver, so he asked me to go on to the ranch, have Steve organize the men into searching parties and look through every gulch in the vicinity for any discolored holes on the top of the drifts which would be caused by the breath of the sheep if they were under the snow. For two days the men searched and finally came to a deep bank of snow on the top of which were found the discolored holes they sought; they dug down and discovered the bucks. A few had been smothered, but most of them were taken out alive after having been buried for ten days! During the storm the herder had left them and the poor distracted things had drifted over an embankment and were entombed under the snow.
When anyone speaks of “good-for-nothing Mexicans” I think of Fidel, a mere lad, who had taken his sheep South on a clear morning, but was overtaken by a storm before he could get them back to the corrals. He and his dog did everything they could do to turn them, but they drifted farther and farther away. Fidel stayed with them, guiding them away from the gulches until they reached a railway cut. There Steve found them twenty-four hours later when we feared that Fidel had perished with his sheep. Facing death alone in the freezing wind and blinding, smothering snow, hour after hour he had kept his sheep from piling up. He not only saved them all, but they were in better condition than many in the corrals at the camps. Not for a moment had he left them. His hands and feet were frozen; he barely escaped freezing to death and on that day we learned the true meaning of “Fidelity.”
Then once more Fate took a hand in our affairs and a blizzard changed the whole course of our lives.
We owned our land and no one could encroach upon us, but after a few years we began to notice forlorn little shacks built here and there on the open range by the poor home-seekers who, attracted by the prospect of free land, had begun “homesteading.” They built flimsy little houses, scratched up the surface of the prairie for a few inches and raised pitiful, straggling crops. The settlers were coming in! The opening wedge of that great onrush had been thrust deep into the heart of the prairie. In the undisputed possession of our own land we were not disturbed. While we knew that it meant the occupation of the free range and the passing of the large ranches, eventually, we scarcely realized how soon it would come and were not prepared to receive an offer from an Eastern syndicate to buy the entire ranch—to cut it into small units to be sold as farms.
The era of “dry-farming” had just begun, when by scientific methods, deep ploughing and the conservation of all moisture, dry land might be successfully cultivated without irrigation. It was a dream of the future of the prairie region, impossible to visualize, and I laughed in my ignorance, as Owen read me the letter.
“How perfectly absurd. Imagine trying to farm out here; the grangers would starve to death in a year unless they had stock of some sort. Surely you would never think of selling out?”