For accounts of the winter, Maurice Frink, Cow Country Cavalcade.
Maurice Frink, Cow Country Cavalcade (Denver: Old West Publishing Company, 1954), 57-61.
The losses in Crook, Carbon, and Albany counties in Wyoming were closer to these regions than to the rest of Wyoming. For a good account of Montana, see Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O'Connor, As Big as the West.
Frink, Cow Country Cavalcade, 58-59.
Larson, "Winter of 1886-1887," 17.
Clay, My Life on the Range, 179, 220-21.
W. Turrentine Jackson, "The Wyoming Stock Growers Association: Its Years of Temporary Decline, 1886-1890," Agricultural History 22 (Oct. 1948): 265.
If all livestock were cattle (which they clearly were not) and there were two steers per ton, the Northern Pacific at a maximum carried 168,588 cattle in 1885-86 and 165,738 the next year. These figures are, however, far too high, since in 1884 the total number of cattle shipped by the Northern Pacific from Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas was supposedly only 76,560 head. Reports to the Dakota Railroad Commission of livestock transported within or through Dakota Territory showed a much more marked decline of 25 percent, from 71,433 tons in 1885-86 to 52,899 in 1886-87.
John Clay remembered that by the spring of 1888 there was plenty of water and that reduced cattle numbers meant that "[i]t was a virgin range we had to stock up."
Clay, My Life on the Range, 92-98, 146.
Clays account of resurrecting the Dickey Cattle Company on the Little Missouri gives some support for an increase in cattle shipments to the West. Although restocking took place, the timing and details in Clay are far from clear.