Sometimes I think Texas is a showoff. Drought and heat? Watch this! Do you want some rain? A blizzard? Wildfire? Well. A few weeks ago I highlighted some of the adventures of Texas Ranger and early Brownwood settler C.M. Grady in the old days, as recorded in Frontier Times magazine. Grady had a knack for description, so I want to go back to that article to pick up a Texas weather tale about what Texana writer J. Frank Dobie described as a Blue Norther. The incident took place during a buffalo hunt in the winter of 1875, northwest of Brownwood. Grady’s description is as follows:

“Will got three or four [buffalo] so that was plenty, and we had another hard day’s work, caring for our meat. About midnight that night we heard a rumbling noise to the north in the direction of Table Mountains, and the earth seemed to tremble. It was perfectly still, and the noise grew louder all the time. Clark and Carter says, “Indians, boys, Indians,” but I said there were not enough Indians on earth to make that much noise. I thought it might be a stampede of buffalo but we all got our guns ready for battle, while the noise kept coming nearer and growing louder. Suddenly, we were enveloped in a roaring, shrieking blizzard from the north, freezing as it hit, and how cold it was on that bleak prairie! We ran for cover like a hunch of prairie dogs. We had plenty of bedding and plenty of fresh buffalo hides, which we piled on top of our beds with their hair down. The dogs all came whimpering and piled on top of us. It surely it was a sweat box, and we could not sleep, but we did not freeze.

Next morning we could not build a fire because of high wind, so we put on all our clothes, piled our bedding and hides on the loaded wagons, and started east to Post Oak Springs in the mountains, where we could have plenty of wood and protection. We thought we would freeze, but made the 15 miles without mishap, and reached our camping place late in the afternoon. We were all starved, having had not even a cup of coffee all day, but we did at last reach the Post Oaks, where we made a roaring fire, thawed out, and soon had a wash pot full of meat cooking with plenty of coffee . After getting thoroughly warm and well filled up, we were happy as larks, and were soon singing old songs, playing pranks like the carefree boys which we were. Next day we started home, which we reached without further incident. We had a winter’s supply of good meat, had seen many wonderful new sights, experiences never to be forgotten.”

Dobie tells a tale about a man fishing on a Texas riverbank in late summer, his shoes off, his pole dangling in the water. Along came what they used to call a Blue Norther, hitting so fast and hard that his pole froze in the ice that formed on the creek before he could get into his shoes. While Grady and his fellow hunters returned unharmed from the Texas cold front experience, there is an infamous story (I can’t recall where I read this) of a family in Abilene that set off for an after church picnic on a fine sunny day, only to become lost in a blizzard on the way home, never to return. Witnesses from Fort Phantom Hill (a U.S. Military frontier outpost near Abilene) also recorded a disastrous encounter, in November of 1851, with a norther that took out most of their supply column, freezing to death many animals and a teamster who became separated from the group. I don’t know if Texas has any plans to show off this fall, after all the summer was quite a display, but I do think it’s a good idea to stick a jacket in the car, just in case!

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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns and articles appear periodically on BrownwoodNews.com