The Big Die-Up: End of the Open Range

By Jim Jennings

The winter of 1886-87 was hard on ranchers from Montana and the Dakotas all the way south to Texas, but nowhere did it do the damage it did in the Texas Panhandle.

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, there were no fences across the high plains of the Texas Panhandle. The almost unbroken sea of grass was truly a cattleman’s paradise, and big ranchers were running cattle on the open range. However, they had a problem. Cattle from the ranches further north drifted south with the winter winds and onto land that the Panhandle ranchers claimed as their own. In the winter of 1880-81, thousands of cattle from the northern plains drifted into the Panhandle in search of shelter and grass. Those kinds of numbers, when added to what was already on the range, almost ruined the winter pastures of the local cattlemen. To combat the problem, the members of the Panhandle Stock Association, which had primarily been created to combat rustlers, voted to build a “drift fence” all the way across the Panhandle to stop those northern cattle.

Barbed wire had been invented in the 1870s, and an 1876 demonstration in San Antonio showed that the wire would contain cattle. Construction of the drift fence began in 1881, with most of the wire and staples hauled in wagons from Dodge City, Kansas. Fence posts were cut in the canyons along the Canadian River and in Palo Duro Canyon, and by 1885 a broken line of drift fences extended on level ground above the Canadian River for 200 miles across the Panhandle. 

The drift fences worked, only too well. The result is known today as the Big Die-Up, and it all began that first year after the fence was finished, in the winter of 1885. It was a colder than normal winter with lots of snow. When it was over, thousands of dead cattle were found stacked up against a four-strand barbed wire drift fence. The next winter was worse. A series of blizzards roared into the Texas Panhandle like a dozen freight trains out of control, driving the cattle until they reached the drift fence. When the cattle could go no farther, they began to stack up. It was said that in places, cattle piled up as far as 400 yards in front of the fence. Some smothered, some froze to death and some were trampled by the ones coming behind them. When it was over, one rancher said that he could have walked for miles on dead cattle without ever stepping on the ground. Cowboys on the LX Ranch reportedly skinned 250 carcasses a mile for 35 miles. The Panhandle Stockman’s Association asked ranchers to ship to Dodge City the hides of those animals skinned so they could get a reasonably accurate count as to the losses. By June 1, 1887, Dodge City had received 400,000 hides.

The Big Die-Up broke many of the ranchers. Their losses were too high to recover. But it also caused some changes to be made. Legislation was passed in 1889 that prohibited the fencing of public property, which is what most of the open range was at that time. It was owned by the State of Texas. However, it didn’t matter, the ranchers who did survive those terrible winters now realized they couldn’t take care of their cattle on the open range. They began to file homesteads and buy land, and started fencing their pastures. Parts of the drift fence were incorporated into some of the ranchers’ pasture fences, while most of the rest was torn down. It was the end of an era, and the beginning of ranching as we know it today.