How Cowboys survived Freezing Winter Nights | History for Sleep

In the winter of 1885, two cowboys spent the long January nights in a small log cabin in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. It was a line camp: an outpost on the edge of the cattle range, one of a chain of cabins fifteen or twenty miles apart. Every morning each man rode out until he met the cowboy from the next camp. And on the long nights, with almost nothing to read, cowboys learned the labels on their tin cans by heart, and held contests: a nickel for every mistake in the commas, a dime for every wrong word. Tonight, ride home through the snow at sundown, feed the horses, burn coal dug from the hillside, eat sourdough biscuits and beans by lamplight, grind the Arbuckles' coffee for the peppermint stick, dream over the mail-order catalogue, sing Home on the Range to a mouth organ, and climb under a mountain of quilts and buffalo robes while the stars blaze over the Badlands. Dim the lights, get comfortable, and let the lantern keep watch while you sleep. Nothing frightening happens tonight. After the story, twenty-five minutes of fire and wind carry you the rest of the way. CHAPTERS 0:00 Riding In at Sundown 6:30 The Line Camp 14:25 Horses First 20:30 Coal from the Hillside 27:45 Supper in the Cabin 34:46 A Day on the Line 42:24 Reading the Labels 49:22 The Wish Book 55:42 Songs and a Mouth Organ 1:01:50 Mending and Braiding 1:08:25 Making the Bunks 1:15:54 A Still Night in the Badlands 1:23:54 Deep Night in the Line Camp 1:31:54 Dawn on the Little Missouri 1:39:18 Fire and Wind for Deep Sleep ABOUT THIS STORY The two cowboys are composites, built from Theodore Roosevelt's account of the winter line camps on his Badlands ranches (Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, 1888), Philip Ashton Rollins's The Cowboy (1922), and the records of the National Park Service; the history around them is real. Every scene is an AI-generated illustration, and the narration voice is AI-generated. The research and writing are original to this channel. SOURCES Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (1888), Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ranchlife... Philip Ashton Rollins, The Cowboy (1922), Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/cowboyhis... National Park Service — Maltese Cross Cabin: https://www.nps.gov/thro/historycultu... National Park Service — Marquis de Morès: https://www.nps.gov/thro/historycultu... National Park Service — Coal Vein Trail: https://www.nps.gov/thro/planyourvisi... North Dakota Geological Survey — Clinker: https://www.dmr.nd.gov/dmr/ndgs/clinker Kansas Historical Society — Home on the Range: https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansape... Kansas Historical Society — Cowboys: https://www.kansashistory.gov/kansape... Oklahoma Historical Society — The Cowboy: https://www.okhistory.org/historycent... Cowboy State Daily — Arbuckles' coffee: https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/03/... Farm Collector — Montgomery Ward catalogs: https://www.farmcollector.com/farm-li... Western Folklife Center — Braided, Twisted and Tied: https://www.westernfolklife.org/braid... SOUND Campfire: "campfire deer camp 21 minutes - wind - snow - sleet - part 5" by Ambient-X, https://freesound.org/s/660300/, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.... Filtered, looped and mixed under the narration. #historyforsleep #sleephistory #bedtimehistory #cowboys #oldwest