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painting 'Waiting for a Chinook,' a grim portrait of a starving steer confronting a
pack of wolves in a bleak winter landscape.
The Great Plains homesteaders also suffered in the blizzard and drought, as
described by Wallace Stegner ( 1954 ) : 'In some of the shacks, after five days, a
week, two weeks, a month of inhuman weather, homesteaders would be burning
their benches and tables and weighing the chances of a desperate dash to town—
lonely, half-crazed Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, Americans, pioneers of the sod
house frontier. Sometimes they owned a team, a cow, a few chickens; just as often
they had nothing but a pair of hands, a willingness to borrow and lend, a tentative
equity in 160 acres of Uncle Sam's free soil, a shelf full or partly full or almost
empty of dried apples, prunes, sardines, crackers, coffee, flour, potatoes, with occa-
sionally a hoarded can of Copenhagen snus or a bag of sunflower seeds. More than
one of them slept with his spuds to keep them from freezing. More than one, come
spring, was found under his dirty blankets with his bearded grin pointed at the ceil-
ing, or halfway between house and cowshed where the blizzard had caught him'
(Stegner 1954 , p. 294). The drought, which began in 1886, 'was a slow starva-
tion for water, and it lasted through 1887, 1888, 1889, into the eighteen-nineties.
Homesteader hopes survived the first year; in fact, the speculative prices of land
in eastern Dakota continued to spiral upward, and the rush to Indian Territory took
place in the very heart of the dry years. By the second year the marginal settlers had
begun to suffer and fall away; by the third year the casualties were considerable. By
the fourth it was clear to everybody that this was a disaster, a continuing disaster.
What began in 1886 was a full decade of drouth, the cyclic drying-out that [John
Wesley] Powell had warned of in 1878' (Stegner 1954 , p. 296).
The drought of the 1880s and 1890s was part of a recurring pattern of surplus and
deficit moisture on the Great Plains that contributed to the waxing and waning of
nonirrigated farms in the uplands. To describe the social impacts of these recurrent
Great Plains droughts, Walter Prescott Webb ( 1931 , p. 343) quoted A.M. Simons:
'following the times of occasional rainy season, this line of social advance rose and
fell with rain and drought, like a mighty tide beating against the tremendous wall
of the Rockies. And every such wave left behind it a mass of human wreckage in
the shape of broken fortunes, deserted farms, and ruined homes.' The population
losses in the dry-farming margins of the Great Plains were extreme in the 1890s
(integrating the impacts of both the late 1880s through early 1890s and subsequent
dry years in the 1890s), when some regions lost 50-75% of their citizens (Bowden
et al. 1981 ) . As Stegner noted, Cyrus Thomas coined the phrase 'rain follows the
plow' in 1868, but 'by 1888 he knew better' (Stegner 1954 , p. 298).
The most severe and long-lasting tree-ring-reconstructed drought of the nine-
teenth century occurred with little relief from 1841 through 1865, closely following
the early nineteenth-century pluvial, one of the wettest periods in the past 500
years (Figs. 10.6 and 10.8 ) . The center and intensity of the mid-nineteenth-century
drought shifted over time and was interrupted by a few wet years (e.g., Woodhouse
et al. 2002 ) , but the western United States, Canada, and the borderlands of
northern Mexico are estimated to have averaged incipient drought or worse for the
entire 25-year period. This multidecadal drought appears to have been most extreme
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