blackfoot-valley

largest producer of wool, with six millon head in the state. One downside of sheep raising, however, is that those animals can be more destructive of the range than cattle if their numbers are not kept carefully within bounds. A more basic change wrought by the Hard Winter of 1886-87 was the rapid decline and demise of the open range system. Before the nineteenth century was out, grazing on open land had almost entirely been replaced by the closed range on land that was either bought or leased and marked off by barbed-wire fencing. (The latter being one of those technological inventions that seem almost too simple and obvious to take notice of, but which made mile after mile of fencing possible at such a low cost that it wreaked its own revolution.) The closed range system has prevailed ever since. In our own time, this kind of change can be seen as inevitable. The open range gave us the image of the cowboy as a romantic hero, the embodi- ment of free, virile manhood. Naturally, the drudgery and monotony of day- to-day cowboy life never got much press. But the wild aspects of the open range in any case could never have been more than fleeting. “Waiting for a Chinook” winter of 1886-1887 by Charles Russell 83