The Children's Blizzard (5 page)
After borrowing seventy-five dollars from Ole’s sister, the Rollags had enough money, just, for the essential outfit of the pioneer—a yoke of oxen, a wagon, and a couple of cows. “Everyone warned us against going west because the grasshoppers were so bad,” Gro wrote years later. “But we went anyway.” It took the party three weeks to cover the 260 miles of prairie land between Decorah and Rock County. They had almost arrived when they saw the first signs of grasshopper devastation around Jackson on the Minnesota side of the Des Moines River. “They sat thick in the trees by the river,” wrote Gro. “Many farmplaces along the way were abandoned, and we came to one hut where the people said, ‘Next year you’ll go back.’ That was hardly encouraging, but we went on toward the goal of our journey, Rock County, and arrived there in June." Most of the land in Rock County was taken as well, but the Rollags managed to secure a homestead in section 13. “So we had to begin to become farmers,” wrote Gro. “It didn’t look very good.
Only prairie all around and nothing to begin with.” They dug a cellar and laid some boards over one corner to shelter their bed. For cooking they had a small stove that they had purchased in the nearby town of Worthington—“so small that we could bake only three loaves of bread in it,” recalled Gro, “and when we had to use hay for fuel it looked dismal enough.” Ole spent the first summer breaking sod. In the fall Nils helped them build a sod house; they roofed it with some four-by-fours on which they piled more sod to serve as shingles. That first year they lived on a dirt floor.
Osten and Kari came out to join them the following March. Like Gro and Ole, Osten and Kari had spent their first years in America with relatives and then moved farther west when they found out how expensive the land was in the settled parts of the Midwest. Osten wrote in his memoirs that he and his mother journeyed out to Rock County by train, arriving at Worthington on March 2, 1875: “Worthington was then a very lively place, with new houses being built everywhere and the sound of hammering was heard from many places. . . . You could see a forest of ox-carts everywhere.” Ole came to meet the newcomers in town with his team of oxen, Spot and Dick, and an empty wagon that they could fill with their purchases—lumber, stove, beds, kitchen utensils. It was at the lumberyard that the brothers-in-law ran into a spot of trouble. Ole brought the oxen to a halt on a patch of gravel that had been scraped clean of snow, and the men loaded the wagon. But once it was loaded, “the oxen could not get off the spot and remained stuck,” wrote Osten. “And then the train came. It came from the east. You can believe that the oxen became lively because they certainly had not seen a train before. They made a big hop and got out of the gravel and went at a run through the streets and we ran after them as best we could. It was fun for the townsfolk who saw and enjoyed the foot-race. We had to go back to the hotel to get Mother but the oxen were not willing to turn around so we had a hard time in getting them to do so." Things went a bit more smoothly once they got the oxen out of town. Gro and Ole’s homestead was almost fifty miles from Worthington, and it was a long trudge in early March with the prairie still deep in snow. Finally, well after dark on the night of March 9, they arrived at the couple’s sod house—“14x16 feet with a dirt floor and straw roof,” Osten remembered, “but it was good and warm.” The next day a terrific snowstorm blew in and raged for four days over the open prairie.
If Osten and Kari were discouraged by their first taste of pioneering, Osten made no mention of it in his memoirs. Nor did Gro in her recollections permit herself more than a mild grumble: “We were young,” she wrote, “and didn’t lose courage because everything looked so gloomy.” The country was “pretty wild and desolate when we arrived,” wrote Osten. “No trees were to be seen for many miles. Everywhere we saw small sodhouses which were the first dwellings people had. Large groups of Indians passed through, but they did us no harm. We were 49 English miles to the nearest railroad, and it took four days with oxen to go there and return." The Rollags were born to be pioneers. Ole was strong and strapping, big and loud and booming with optimism. Gro, despite her penchant for reading, was a good manager who kept a level head in times of danger. Still, they quailed before the extremes of weather on the prairie, especially the blizzards that swept down from the northwest with unbelievable speed. Norway had cold winters and plenty of snow, but nothing like the American heartland. The Rollags and the Norwegian families who settled near them were not prepared for the severity of prairie winters. No one was.
Johann Friedrich Schlesselmer left his village near Hannover, Germany, in the late 1870s to start over in America, settled in Nebraska, and promptly lost his pittance prospecting for coal south of Seward. He was still a young man when he died of smallpox in 1882, a year after he was naturalized, leaving his wife, Wilhelmine, to manage alone with a house full of children. The Schlesselmers’ five-year-old daughter Lena contracted smallpox at the same time as her father. She survived, though the disease left her face permanently scarred. Hard luck plagued the family, especially the little girl. Over the next five years Lena’s mother, Wilhelmine, remarried twice, bearing children with each husband (eventually there would be eleven children, eight of whom survived). It was shortly after the third marriage, to a fellow German named Wilhelm Dorgeloh, that Wilhelmine decided—or agreed—to farm Lena out to a new home.
The Dorgeloh household out on the prairie near Milford, south of Seward, was crowded with Wilhelmine’s latest crop of babies, and naturally Wilhelm Dorgeloh preferred his own children to those from the previous marriages. Lena was large for her age, strong and quiet. With those smallpox scars she would be unlikely to marry early, if at all. Lena must go.
And so, in August 1887, Wilhelmine took her eleven-year-old daughter to live in a hilly section south of Seward with Wilhelm and Catherina Woebbecke, relatives from her native village of Herkensen in Germany. It was an odd stretch of country—the one place for miles around where the grassland was crumpled into slopes and deep ravines choked with wild plum and willow. Townspeople in Seward (a growing prairie town that boasted three rivers, two rail lines, and a flour mill) had taken to calling this district the Bohemian Alps because of all the Czech and German immigrants who were moving in and buying up the irregular terrain that no one else wanted. The Woebbecke house was small—only one room for the family and a second room used as a woodshed—and they had three little children of their own underfoot. But Wilhelm and Catherina agreed to take Lena in because they needed help with the farm chores and Lena was built like a worker. From then on she was known as Lena Woebbecke. Lena milked and herded the cows and carried water and minded the children when Catherina was busy.
After the harvest was done, she started school.
The district 71 schoolhouse was only half a mile away, the minimum distance between just about everything on the prairie, but the brush in the ravines and the steep hill beyond hid it from the Woebbecke place. In fact, the land was so deeply creased here that you had to be practically upon the hip-roofed frame school building before you could see it. Since coming to live with the Woebbeckes in August, Lena had rarely laid eyes on the school. The German Lutheran church they attended was in the other direction, and aside from church on Sunday morning, Lena never went anywhere except where the cows strayed. The district 71 schoolhouse might have been in another country.
Before the fall term started, Wilhelm and Catherina warned Lena that no German could be spoken in school. Only English.
Sometimes children were beaten if they spoke a foreign language.
The teacher might even change her name. Woebbecke might be too hard for Stella Badger to say.
Lena walked to school alone each morning and back to the Woebbecke house alone each afternoon. Wilhelm had shown her the quickest route—behind the barn, up the hill, down into the ravine, and then up again to the crest where the schoolhouse sat at the edge of a plowed field. Rain or shine, she carried a pail with her lunch. She was always careful to bring the pail back to the Woebbecke place every afternoon. She knew there would be words if she forgot it.
Lena was shy and silent around the strangers. No one paid much attention to her. No one worried about her cutting through the ravines by herself. All day long in school she seldom spoke. As fall dwindled down to winter, she had still made little progress in English. When the bitter cold weather set in, Lena went to school less and less often. Even a light snowfall filled the ravines with drifts and made them impassable. It was rough country for a child to be walking through alone.
It was unfortunate that the Schweizer families arrived on the prairie too late in the year to plant a crop. It was the end of September, nearly autumn, and the nights were already frosty. In any case, there was no time for plowing or planting. It was all they could do to tear enough sod off the prairie to make shelters for themselves. It took half an acre of Dakota sod for a decent-sized sod house. The soddies leaked when it rained (“I would wake up with dirty water running through my hair,” wrote one pioneer), gophers and snakes sometimes popped from the walls, dirt got ground into clothes, skin, and food, but they kept the families alive and relatively warm when winter arrived—which happened far earlier and far more sav-agely than any of the Schweizers had anticipated.
Because of the way the homestead laws worked, the families had to spread out in 160-acre squares checkerboarded over the land rather than live next door to each other in villages with long narrow fields radiating out around their houses, as they had done in the Ukraine. But whenever possible, friends and relatives took adjoining claims. This is how Anna and Johann Kaufmann and Anna’s father, Johann Schrag, and her two unmarried sisters came to live on adjoining sections in a township of Turner County with the hopeful name of Rosefield. Freni Graber, who had grown up in Waldheim where Johann Schrag preached in the Schweizer church, and her husband, Peter, took a claim nearby, as did Johann and Maria Albrecht—near enough to see each other’s houses, once they were finally able to afford the wood to build houses; near enough to send their children to the same school, once they had the time and money to build a one-room schoolhouse more or less equidistant from their homes at the western edge of section 26.
Peter and Freni Graber were old to be starting over in Dakota with a house full of children—Peter was forty-four and Freni thirty-six when they emigrated with their seven children. Their oldest, seventeen-year-old Joseph, was big enough to plow and plant and would soon marry and start his own family; Anna and Freni, the two oldest daughters at twelve and ten, respectively, looked after three-year-old Peter and baby Johann, not yet two, when their mother needed help. But still it was rough for the Grabers to make a life in this new land. That first winter was long and bitter, with many days below zero and only twisted hay for fuel. For days at a time, the Grabers—the nine of them packed into their sod hut—could not get outside because snow had drifted over their door.
When the cold overwhelmed the feeble heat that came from their stove, they stayed in bed all day, children and parents pressed against each other for warmth. Food was scarce, often just corn bread and melted snow to drink.
Freni Graber must have stinted herself that winter in order to keep her children alive. She died in the spring, on May 25, 1875.
Peter was married again three weeks later, to Susanna Gering. Susanna was twenty-four years old, only seven years older than her oldest stepson Joseph. Little Peter, now four, would soon have a slew of new half brothers and sisters, eight in all, born every other year or so. The Grabers prized all their children as a gift from God, even when they barely had enough to feed them.
The first Dakota winter took its toll on Anna and Johann Kaufmann as well. All winter long as the supply of food dwindled away, Anna looked at her son, Johann, her only child, grow thinner and more transparent. There were many days when they got by on burnt flour soup—flour scorched in a pan and then mixed with water, salt, and pepper. A poor diet for a growing child. A poor diet for a baby, if they had a baby to feed. Even had Peter survived the crossing to New York, he surely would have perished that first terrible winter. Would it have been worse to chisel a grave for the child in the frozen ground under the sod than see his body tossed into the sea?
Anna had been raised by her father to thank God for the bless-ings of life and never to complain. Somehow she and her husband and their son endured the Dakota winter and the boy Johann lived to celebrate his fourth birthday in 1875. That same year, their first full year in America, Anna gave birth to another son. They chose the name Jacob from the Old Testament. But the infant died before the year was out, as the two Peters had died before him. Four births now, and still Anna and her husband, Johann, had but the one child to protect and somehow feed through yet another winter.
Johann and Maria Albrecht felt blessed that their baby son, Johann, the child born on board the
City of Richmond,
survived that first cruel winter—and blessed again that all three of them somehow lived through the even crueler first spring. By the time the snow was melting off the prairie grass in April 1875, the Albrechts and their fellow Schweizers were close to starvation. They were only saved by a donation from the Mennonite Committee of Relief, funded by earlier Mennonite settlements back east, that enabled the Schweizers to buy two thousand sacks of flour. But at least they had the land. With land they could plant and harvest and finally have food of their own. But when it came time to plow in April, Johann discovered that his oxen were too weak to break the thick prairie sod—they, too, had nearly starved to death that winter. So Johann and a neighbor had to team up and hitch their four oxen to a single plow, taking turns breaking each other’s fields. By working every daylight hour they managed to plow up half an acre a day, perhaps three-quarters on a good day. Geese stood unperturbed a few yards away and watched the men work. Johann seeded by hand, scattering fistfuls of wheat every two to three steps as he walked his field. He planted rye in the next field, and buried cut-up potatoes in the black earth. Like his neighbors, he put his faith in God and the bounty of the land.