Matthew P. Mayo won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S
RECKONING. He tells me one of his favourite of his own novels is WINTER’S WAR. A characteristic of
Matthew’s work is a great opening, and WINTER’S
WAR certainly has one. Here Niall Winter, ranching in the Wyoming Rockies,
finds his ranch burned down and his wife kidnapped by an enemy from his past.
Niall goes in pursuit, even as a blizzard rages.
Life in
winter could be brutal on the cattle ranges of the 19th Century West,
particularly in mountain country and/or on the northern Great Plains. Indeed
one particularly severe winter, known as the ‘Great’ or ‘Big Die-up,’ more or
less destroyed the so-called ‘Open Range.’
The
Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming suffered a drought-stricken summer in 1886. Then November
became a month of relentless snowfall – it snowed every day. The ranchers had
neglected to stockpile feed. So when snow and blizzards hit, cattle had to use
their hooves to dig through the snow to uncover what meagre grasses they could
find. The already thin animals grew weak from hunger. After a brief reprieve
when a ‘Chinook’ blew in, temperatures plummeted again to -50F and the greatest
blizzard in living memory struck the northwest.
Starving livestock invaded the
outskirts of towns, eating whatever shrubs and bushes they could find. Over
half of the cattle alive in October, 1886 were dead by April, 1887, probably
about a million animals. Rotting carcasses were scattered all over the
landscape and dead animals fouled the creeks and streams.
Many ranchers went bankrupt, and the rest struggled to hang on. So ended the days of the ‘open’ unfenced range and a whole way of life.
A cowboy
rescues a calf from a blizzard
http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/disasters-great-die-up.html
A number
of western movies have snowbound and/or wintry backdrops, among them: ‘Track of
the Cat,’
‘Day of
the Outlaw,’
and ‘The Hateful Eight.’
Reviews
of WINTER’S WAR:
‘A fine
hardboiled revenge Western.’
‘Mayo's
skewed vision of the world … shows us the mythic West with the sharp, clear eye
of a realist looking through rippled glass.’
‘An
original voice.’
‘Gritty,
and peppered with enough fierce and spunky characters to populate two novels.’
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