History of Montana's Grasslands 

 — What Happened to the Prairie? 



Most of the scars are covered now by 

 stands of wheat or grasses that were 

 planted by farmers and ranchers, but in 

 the drought years from 1933 to 1940, 

 great stretches of Montana prairie re- 

 sembled a desert. Fences were almost 

 drifted under with light sandy soil. Aban- 

 doned houses and barns slumped into the 

 endless wind. What had been advertised as 

 the last frontier now had little grass, no 

 cattle, and few people left. 



How could the rich, thick, prairie 

 grassland have disappeared so quickly? 

 Early day cattlemen and farmers evidently 

 gave little thought to the results when they^ 

 put thousands of animals on what seemed 

 like limitless prairie. They had a few hard 

 lessons to learn before they began to 

 manage the land properly. One such lesson 

 came in the winter of 1886-87. During that 

 winter Montana artist Charlie Russell sent 

 a postcard to some eastern cattle investors 

 with a sketch of a starving steer. He wrote 

 on the card, "The Last of Ten Thousand, or 

 Waiting for a Chinook." 



After buffalo hunters had cleared the 

 prairies in the years from 1872-74, invest- 

 ments in cattle were popular among east- 

 ern businessmen. English, Scotch, and 



European noblemen who had hunted on 

 the western plains joined in the cattle rush. 

 The prairies were soon crowded with lean 

 Texas longhorns that had never seen snow. 



That winter of 1886-87 turned out to be 

 the worst that anyone could remember. 

 Blizzard followed blizzard; ice coated the 

 drifts and the cattle couldn't dig through to 

 grass. Hundreds of thousands of cattle, in 

 poor condition after long trail drives, died. 

 Fortunes were lost, and men began to real- 

 ize that cattle couldn't survive on the open 

 range without winter feed. For the first 

 time, western stockmen fenced pastures 

 and fed their animals; the rancher became 

 a farmer, too. He put some of his land into 

 hay production and kept his animals close 

 to the home ranch so they could be fed 

 during the cold months. That was the be- 

 ginning of the stock-raising business as we 

 know it now in Montana. 



Although one lesson had been learned, 

 more followed. Sheep had been in Montana 

 since 1857, but their numbers reached 

 100,000 by 1880. They survived the 

 "Hard Winter" far better than cattle did. 

 By 1890, 1 1/2 million sheep grazed the 

 high plains and mountain valleys of 

 Montana (figure 6). Before the national 

 forests were established, overgrazing dam- 

 aged many of those areas that couldn't 

 withstand heavy use. 





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6. Sheepherder with Flock 



Montana Historical Society 



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