Ranch Life, Consolation

There were few sounds to break the stillness of summer. From the upper branches of the cottonwoods — whose shimmering, tremulous leaves if there was the least bit of wind rustled and quivered and sighed all day long — came now and then the cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seemed far away and expressed more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief. The cattle, that had strung down in long files from the hills, lay quietly on sand bars, except that some of the bulls kept traveling up and down, bellowing and giving vent to long, surly grumblings as they pawed the sand and tossed it up with their horns.

No life could be pleasanter than during the months of fall. The weather was cool and inviting. In the evenings and on the rare rainy days we were glad to sit by the great fireplace, with its roaring cottonwood logs. But on most days not a cloud dimmed the serene splendor of the sky. The fresh pure air was clear with the wonderful clearness of the high plains. We were in the saddle from morning until night. The fall was the time for riding. In the keen, frosty air neither man nor beast would tire, though out from the dawn until the shadows had again waxed long, warning all to push straight for home without drawing rein. Then deer-saddles and elk-haunches hung from the trees near the house, and one could always have good sport right on the sand of the river bed, for we always kept shotgun or rifle at hand to be ready for any prairie chickens or passing waterfowl that might light on the river.

When the days had dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seemed never-ending, then all the great northern plains were changed into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blew out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faced their unshackled anger. They roared in a thunderous bass as they swept across the prairie or whirled through the naked canyons. They shivered the great brittle cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that clustered in the gorges sang like the chords of an Aeolian harp. Again, in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind might stir. Then the still, merciless, terrible cold that brooded over the earth like the shadow of silent death seemed even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than in the lawless madness of the storms. All the land was like granite. The great rivers stood still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long nights there was no sound to break the lifeless silence. Under the ceaseless, shifting play of the Northern Lights, or lighted only by the wintry brilliance of the stars, the snow-clad plains stretched out into dead and endless wastes of glimmering white.

Then the great fireplace of the ranch house was choked with blazing logs, and at night we had to sleep under so many blankets that the weight was fairly oppressive. Outside, the shaggy ponies huddled together in the corral, while long icicles hung from their lips, and the hoarfrost whitened the hollow backs of the cattle.

A ride in midwinter was fascinating. The great white country wrapped in the powdery snow-drift seemed like another land. The familiar landmarks were so changed that a man must be careful lest he lose his way. When the sun was out of the glare from the endless white stretches dazzled the eyes. If the gray snowclouds hung low and only let a pale, wan light struggle through, the lonely wastes became fairly appalling in their desolation.

There were few moments more pleasant than the home coming, when, in the gathering darkness, after crossing the last chain of ice-covered buttes, or after coming round the last turn in the wind-swept valley, we saw, through the leafless trees, or across the frozen river, the red gleam of the firelight as it shone through the ranch windows and flickered over the trunks of the cottonwoods outside, warming a man’s blood by the mere hint of the warmth awaiting him within.

The long winter evenings were spent sitting round the hearthstone, while the logs roared and crackled, and the men played checkered or chess, in the firelight.

Rough board shelves held a number of books without which some of the evenings would have been long indeed. As for Irving, Hawthorne, Cooper, Lowell, and the other standbys, I suppose no man, East or West, would willingly be long without. For lighter reading there were dreamy Ik Marvel, Burroughs’ breezy pages, and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers — Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner. And when one was in the Bad Lands he felt as if they somehow looked just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems sounded.

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt had two ranches in North Dakota: Maltese Cross and Elkhorn. After his wife and mother both died on the same day, of unrelated illnesses, he wrote “the light has gone out of my life,” and retreated to the Badlands to for a period of strenuous self-direction he reference for the rest of his life.

I appreciate the gentleness of the description, and how he ends his portrait of a year on the frontier with a list of the authors who kept him company.