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w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m
A week later, Owen noted that "cattle & horses dying
in groups of from 3 to 10 Every day." Not only domes-
ticated creatures died, but presumably also deer and
elk, and other wildlife, during those horrific months in
the tributary valleys of the Clark Fork and throughout
the region. On the Columbia Plateau, some five hun-
dred horses perished in a little valley where they had
sought shelter. Tightly huddled together, "a sheet of
one mile square would have covered all of them, fro-
zen fast where they tried to paw and stand, with little
to be seen of them in the deep icy snow." Weather on
the buffalo plains east of the Continental Divide was
no better. Granville Stuart reported that the Salish had
"suffered terribly" while hunting across the moun-
tains. "They lost most of their horses and were unable
to kill many buffalo, consequently, they were without
meat and were in a starving condition."
By the spring equinox, Owen summed up the winter
as "one of unprecedented severity…" Francis Lomprey
(Lumpré), a French trapper and interpreter, visited
that winter. He had been in the area for some two de-
cades and he told Owen "he never Saw the like."
Perhaps old Lomprey had forgotten the similarly harsh
winter of 1846-47, when even bison died from the cold.
Near what is now Phillipsburg, more than one hundred
of the shaggy beasts froze to death, stranded in deep
drifts of the upper Rock Creek country. That same
winter, Jesuit missionary Nicholas Point endured ter-
rible conditions while in the country of the Blackfeet.
He wrote about it in his journal, published as a cof-
Blackfeet Country
