In February 1887 the foreman of the OH Ranch in the Judith Basin had a letter to answer. Louis Kaufman, who with Louis Stadler owned some five thousand head of cattle wintering on the open range there, wrote from Helena to ask how they were doing. The winter of 1886-87 was the worst anyone on the northern range had seen, and the true answer was too bad to put down. The outfit's horse wrangler, a twenty-two-year-old from St. Louis named Charlie Russell, painted it instead: a small watercolor, about the size of a postcard, of a gaunt steer humped in the snow with its ribs showing and wolves waiting nearby. The foreman, Jesse Phelps, is supposed to have said the picture told the story better than he could write it, and he sent it.
Kaufman showed it around Helena, and the cattlemen who saw it gave up hope for their herds. By May the newspapers were writing about the cowboy artist, and the little painting, Waiting for a Chinook, also called The Last of 5000, had made Russell's name across the territory. A rancher who later owned it gave it to the Montana Stockgrowers Association in 1942, and the association still owns it; it hangs in turn at the Montana Historical Society in Helena and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls.
The snow eater
What the steer was waiting for was a chinook, the warm, dry wind that pours down the east face of the Rockies in winter. Air off the Pacific rises over the mountains, cools, and drops its moisture as rain and snow on the western slopes. Coming down the east side it is squeezed as it descends and warms quickly, about five and a half degrees for every thousand feet, and it reaches the plains as a roaring wind far warmer than the air it replaces. It does not so much melt the snow as take it straight into the dry air, which is why ranchers called it the snow eater. A long band of cloud over the mountains, the chinook arch, often shows it coming. The name, by most accounts, comes from the Chinook people of the lower Columbia, the direction the winds were said to blow from.
The Rocky Mountain Front, where the mountains rise straight off the plains with little in between, is chinook country, and Montana keeps the records to prove it. At Kipp on December 1, 1896, the temperature rose eighty degrees in about fifteen hours and took thirty inches of snow with it. At Fort Assinniboine on January 19, 1893, it rose forty-two degrees in fifteen minutes. On January 11, 1980, the thermometer at the Great Falls airport went from 32 below to 15 above in seven minutes, the fastest change on record in the United States.
A hundred and three degrees
The weather can run the other way too. On January 23 and 24, 1916, an arctic front hit Browning and dropped the temperature from 44 above to 56 below, a fall of a hundred degrees that still stands as the greatest recorded anywhere. Then there is Loma, a hamlet where the Teton River meets the Marias. At nine in the morning on January 14, 1972, Jim Wood, the town's volunteer weather observer for the National Weather Service and a former state legislator, read 54 below. A chinook came down off the Front that day, and at eight the next morning he read 49 above: a rise of 103 degrees in under twenty-four hours, the greatest temperature change in a day ever recorded on earth. Neither he nor the local weather office realized it, and the record went unrecognized for thirty years. NOAA's national climate extremes committee ratified the record on September 13, 2002.
For the cattle of 1886-87 the chinook came too late, and that winter hastened the end of the open range on the northern plains. The painting of the steer that waited for it is one of Russell's most reproduced works, and copies of it hang in ranch houses across the state.