Most of them contained families.

Men had brought hither their wives and children--little children, sometimes babes, tender, needful of warmth and care.

For these stood guardian the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along breaks and _coulees_, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long, faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and cruelly wipe away.
Yet there was no snow.

There had been none the winter before.

The trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe.