A VERY BRADY CHRISTMAS
Death was often a close companion on the high plains of the 19th-century West. Christmastime could be an especially dangerous time for travelers, as storms unexpectedly blew down from the Rocky Mountains across the short grass prairies in deadly ground blizzards that blinded man and beast alike. Such was the case for a lone Nebraska cowboy sometime during the 1880s.
As the cold orange globe of the winter sun ascended over the rolling plains, a two-horse sleigh glided atop the snow on Christmas Day following a fierce blizzard the night before. A small family had left their home to visit ranching friends east of an unnamed town. Sighting an incongruous speck of color on the stark white prairie, the driver reined in the horses and halted the sleigh. Stepping down, he trudged through drifts to a gully in which he discovered the frozen corpses of a young Nebraska cowboy and his Appaloosa. Apparently, the young man had been heading east toward home. Tightly clasped in his frozen arms was a burlap sack containing a few Christmas packages, the bright tissue paper wrappings torn by the victorious wind. Lashed across the saddle horn atop the horse’s corpse was a miserable branch of a scrub pine tree.
This melancholy tale is one of several Christmas stories written by prolific Western author the Rev. Cyrus Townsend Brady, an itinerant missionary on the high plains of Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas during the last two decades of the 19th century. Brady published more than 100 books on a score of subjects, but he is best known to Old West aficionados as the author of , still in print. Brady is undoubtedly the writer who coined the famous ironic misquote of ill-fated U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman and in serial form in in 1904, four decades after Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors wiped out Fetterman’s 80-man command outside Wyoming’s Fort Phil Kearny. Garrison commander Colonel Henry B. Carrington spent several months with the author, relating his often biased recollections of the Fetterman Fight (aka Fetterman Massacre).
