HISTORY: Big Snow of 1917, by Marie Templeton and the Rimrocker Historical Society

Picture Credits: Margaret Galley and Ken Bonner

I have always heard that the big snow came the day before Thanksgiving. Ernest Maupin was in his late 90s when this tape was made, so maybe he didn’t get the date just right and maybe he was talking about a different “big snow;” however I think the story is worth repeating.

Story from Ernest Maupin’s Oral History Tape

“I remember the year of the big snow, it was 1919. It came the day before Christmas, that snow did. It rained for a day or two, and then it started snowing. There was a bunch of us riding over on Twenty-five Mesa and I told them if this keeps up until morning, I am going to get my cattle out of here. I had the two kids with me; they was getting smart alecky, quarreled with everybody. The next morning it was still putting it down, snow was about to our knees, so we took off and took the cattle to our summer camp.

We got up to Jeff Dillard’s and he had a bunch of weaners in the pasture and I told him what I was going to do. He told me I was crazy and to wait until morning and he would throw his weaners in with mine and we could take them all to the valley.

I had my mind made up that I was going down to fall camp that night. We got the cattle and went down across Cottonwood Basin. It was after night, it had quit snowing and the moon was bright, so we went on over to fall camp, corralled the cattle and stayed overnight.

The next morning it looked like storm so I told the kids to take the cattle on down to the valley and put them in the pasture and I would go back up and get our horses. They was up in the summer pasture above Jeff’s. I pulled back to camp and the snow just got deeper and deeper. When I got up to our horse pasture, I could just see the top of the fence. That there fence was built up five poles high, at the corners the logs just cross another pole and make a worm fence. That snow plumb covered right up to my saddle and I had a good tall horse, too.

I laid the fence down and broke trail. I could hear my bell horse. Jeff was still up there, so I got my horses down to his camp. We throwed them a little hay and went to bed and the next morning we was just plumb stuck.”

(Author’s note: The tape ends here! I have always wondered just how they got out, but I guess they managed it, as Ern was still alive at the time of this interview. He was 103 when he died.)

Dec10. 2001