The winter of 1886–87 in the United States, also known as the Big Die-Up, refers to an extremely harsh bout of seasonal weather that struck the central United States in the winter of 1886/7. The summer of 1886 was unusually warm along the Great Plains in the Dakota Territory, Nebraska and south into Kansas and parts of Texas. This created a problem in so far as there was less fodder available come the start of the winter to feed the massive amount of cattle and other livestock that had become the cornerstone of the economy out on the Great Plains. To compound this issue, the winter was then brutally cold. Temperatures dropped to below -40 degrees Fahrenheit in places by late November. Heavy snowfalls also made it impossible for some of the millions of cows left to graze out on the plains without fodder to get to the grass buried under the snow and ice. As the blizzards continued through into January and February 1887 hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of heads of cattle died from eastern Montana and the Dakotas south through Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado and north-western Texas. The Great Die-Up bankrupted many ranchers and led to a fundamental reorientation of agriculture in the central United States away from the excessive reliance on open-range cattle herding. In tandem, the Great Die-Up had consequences for migration. It slowed the Dakota Boom of the 1870s and 1880s, while migration to states like Nebraska and Kansas came to a virtual standstill in the late 1880s and 1890s after decades of rapid growth. At the same time it fueled migration to the far northwest to places like Seattle at the end of the nineteenth century.[1]
The winter of 1886–87 chronology of eventsThe winter of 1886–87 chronology of events
The Dakota Territory and eastern Montana, and lands further south in Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas, had experienced huge waves of western migration in the US in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. Some of this had been fueled by gold and silver rushes such as the Black Hills Gold Rush in the Dakotas. Later it was simply people moving out west to become large cattle ranchers on the open plains after the defeat of Native American groups like the Dakota, Lakota and Sioux in the Dakota War of 1862 and the Great Sioux War of 1876 opened the frontier to western settlers of European extraction. For instance, the vast influx of people into the Dakota Territory and eastern Montana between around 1870 and 1886 is known as the Dakota Boom.[2] Hundreds of thousands of people had settled in these regions as a result, many taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862 and additional legislation through which the federal government basically offered them land for free if they agreed to go and live out on the western frontier for a period of at least five years. The influx was even greater further to the south. For instance, Kansas’ population passed one million at the start of the 1880s.[3]
The economy of these frontier regions in the Great Plains and further south towards Texas was built primarily around pastoral farming, that is the raising and maintenance of animals on pasture land instead of agrarian farming, the growing of crops. This was favored as the land was still open and unenclosed here, which was different to the species of field-divided agriculture practiced on the East Coast and back in Europe. Hence, the image of cowboys out on the western frontier leading hundreds of thousands of cattle between open pastures really did exist here at the time. Unwittingly this became the cause of a lot of the devastation of the winter of 1886/7.[4]
Cattle farming created great profits here in the 1870s and 1880s. This in turn pulled hundreds of thousands of additional settlers to the region. The problem was that not enough effort was being made to diversity the types of agriculture being practiced here. In particular, there was a lack of agrarian farming and even a lack of emphasis on producing fodder. This is the production of preserved food from grass and so forth to feed cows and other livestock in the winter months when grass does not grow out on the plain as much as it does in the spring and summer. The belief was that the conditions on the plains did not require large amounts of fodder, even for the millions of cattle and other animals that were being raised here.[5]
This rationale was tragically tested in 1886 and into 1887. Firstly, the summer of 1886 was extremely warm, which caused a lot of grass to be scorched and to dry up, limiting the amount of fodder that could be produced for the winter months. Then the winter proved to be the direct opposite of the summer. It was extremely cold in places like the Dakota Territory and eastern Montana south into Wyoming, Nebraska and beyond. Temperatures reached below -40 degrees Fahrenheit and were freezing across broad swathes of the central United States. When the snows and ice arrived there was no access to any grass or food on the ground for cattle in many places and with limited fodder available hundreds of thousands of cattle began to starve to death.[6]
The exact scale of the Great Die-Up, as it became known, is still debated. Lower estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of cattle were lost from the Dakotas to Texas, while upper estimates place the figure well above one million animals. Some large ranchers had their businesses destroyed in the worst impacted areas. Amongst them was the future 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who had been drawn out west by the romantic notion of being a frontier cattle rancher and hunting bison there. After the winter of 1886/7, during which his herd was wiped out, he made his way back eastwards and entered politics in New York.[7]
Changes in migration patterns after the Great Die-UpChanges in migration patterns after the Great Die-Up
The immediate impact of the disastrous winter of 1886–87 and the Great Die-Up was to seriously curb migration to the Dakota Territory and other states like in the central US. For instance, it is generally noted as marking the end of the Dakota Boom. The situation was even more severe further to the south. The population of Nebraska and Kansas had expanded exponentially in the quarter century from the start of the 1860s to the mid-1880s. Kansas, for instance, had gone from a settler population of just over 100,000 people in 1860 to a population of about one and a quarter million by the middle of the 1880s. That slowed enormously after the Great Die-Up and the population hardly grew at all in the 1890s as further periods of drought and blizzards continued in the late 1880s. A similar pattern prevailed in Nebraska. Thus, the winter of 1886–87, and the negative publicity it had created about the agricultural system in the central US, slowed migration to this part of the country for about twenty years.[8]
Demographic impact of the winter of 1886–87Demographic impact of the winter of 1886–87
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The main demographic impact was consequently the slowing of migration in the states and territories that were impacted. But at the same time, there was no let-up in the amount of people looking for new land and opportunities in the US as millions of people continued to arrive to the East Coast ports from Europe in the late 1880s, 1890s and 1900s. Consequently the geographical focus of settlement in the American West simply shifted because of the Great Die-Up to other parts of the country. In particular, states like Montana, Washington State, Idaho, Oregon and Colorado saw pronounced population growth in the quarter of a century after the Great Die-Up. The population of Montana was just touching on 40,000 in 1880. By 1910 there were 375,000 people recorded here.[9] Idaho’s population tripled from around 50,000 people in the mid-1880s to over 160,000 by 1900. Then it doubled to 325,000 by 1910.[10]
The greatest demographic impact of all, though, was in Washington State. There were around 75,000 people here at the time of 1880 census. Over half a million people were living in the state by 1900 and 1.14 million in 1910, while Seattle went from a small coastal town of a few thousand people to nearly quarter of a million people during that same thirty year spell between 1880 and 1910. Admittedly, there were other pull factors to the northwest like the various gold rushes of the region and western Canada in the 1890s and the completion of the Northern Pacific Railway, but the terrible conditions of the winter of 1886–87 in the central US and the Great Die-Up also served to hugely re-orientate migration patterns in the US between 1887 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Millions of Americans will have an ancestor whose settlement out west was plausibly influenced by the events of the winter of 1886/7.[11]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the winter of 1886–87 in the United StatesExplore more about the winter of 1886–87 in the United States
- 1880 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- 1890 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- 1900 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1791-1963 records collection on MyHeritage
- Names & Stories in Newspapers from OldNews.com (Colorado, Montana, Wyoming) records collection on MyHeritage
- Seattle, Washington Passenger Lists records collection on MyHeritage
- Washington Births records collection on MyHeritage
- Washington, County Marriages records collection on MyHeritage
- Washington, Spokane County Obituaries and Death Notices records collection on MyHeritage
- Western United States, Marriage Index, 1838-2016 records collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ David L. Wheeler, ‘The Blizzard of 1886 and Its Effect on the Range Cattle Industry in the Southern Plains’, in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 3 (January, 1991), pp. 415–434.
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/history-north-dakota
- ↑ https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1880/vol-01-population/1880_v1-03.pdf
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/earth-and-atmospheric-sciences/open-range
- ↑ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1887-blizzard-changed-american-frontier-forever-1-180953852/
- ↑ Wheeler, ‘The Blizzard of 1886’.
- ↑ https://www.nps.gov/thro/learn/historyculture/theodore-roosevelt-the-rancher.htm
- ↑ Gilbert C. Fite, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: The Late Nineteenth-Century Agricultural Frontiers’, in Agricultural History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (October, 1966), pp. 285–294.
- ↑ Paul Meadows, ‘The Montana Story’, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1948), pp. 20–25.
- ↑ https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1900/Population/03322287no1-60ch3.pdf
- ↑ Charles M. Gates, ‘A Historical Sketch of the Economic Development of Washington since Statehood’, in The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (July, 1948), pp. 214–232.