The Children's Blizzard (8 page)

Weather, the third of the prairie plagues, was in fact the root cause of all the other miseries. Fire, grasshoppers, bad harvests, disease, the deaths of children—whatever went wrong in their lives—ultimately came from bad weather. None of them, even the families who had relocated from other parts of the country, were accustomed to the pace and the scale of prairie weather. The ceaseless wind, the epic lightning storms, the abrupt irrevocable droughts.

The sky was so immense, the atmosphere so volatile that it only heightened the monotonous ences of the earth: ence of trees, landmarks, features, variety. But when a blizzard struck, the very ence was erased. “When the fierce winds swept the blinding snow over hill and valley, everything looked alike and it was almost impossible to find your way,” Norwegian immigrant Lars Stavig said of his new home in Day County, Dakota Territory. “Many a brave pioneer who came out here with great hopes and plans for a long, prosperous and happy life, in his own home with his family, was cut down in the prime of life. This cruel, treacherous enemy, the blizzard, spared no one.” A blizzard sent everything visible streaming sideways before their eyes; no sound could be heard but the rush of wind and sometimes at the edge of the mind a howl rising in the distance, then lost again in the blast. In a blizzard the essential conditions of their lives—their solitude, their exposure, the distances between their houses, the featurelessness of the landscape, the difficulty of communication—turned against them.

Only a few steps away from shelter, death was waiting, though plenty of settlers died inside, too, when the cold was too much for the piles of coal, twisted hay, dried animal droppings, or bones that they burned for fuel. If limitless space was the ultimate blessing of the prairie, a blizzard was the ultimate curse. It was the disaster that epitomized all the others.

And so every pioneer narrative from the prairie includes a reckoning of the worst blizzards. Rarely do they embellish or blur the facts with emotion. The assumption is that the reader will know what it feels like. But still there is the compulsion to set down the essentials—where they and family members were when the storm hit, how they got home or why they didn’t, what they burned to stay alive, how long the storm lasted, when and where the victims were found. Survivors’ stories.

The first bad blizzard came on January 7, 1873, and blew without cease for three days. Tilla Dahl, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Minnesota’s Blue Earth County, remembers that her mother was out visiting neighbors when the storm struck. Tilla’s father, Niels Dahl, concluded his wife was lost and decided he must go out in search of her. Before he left he filled the cookstove with wood, drew up three chairs a safe distance from the fire, and instructed his three daughters—Tilla, four, Caroline, six, and Nellie, eighteen months—to sit in the chairs, fold their hands in their laps, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer until he returned.

Under no circumstances were they to leave the chairs. Astonish-ingly, the children obeyed, and Niels found them just where he had left them when he returned safely with his frightened wife. Tilla wrote that at some point during the storm the temperature fell to 40 below zero.

Seventy people died in Minnesota during that January blizzard, some from families so poor that the bereaved could not attend the funerals because they didn’t have enough clothing to venture out.

The Minnesota legislature appropriated five thousand dollars for relief of storm victims, but the funds were not even sufficient to pay the doctors who cared for the frostbite victims.

Another three-day blizzard arrived two months later, in early March, after a thaw had melted some of the snow and muddied the fields. The wind came so suddenly that it sucked up mud from the fields and spat it into the blowing snow. On the Henjum farm between Wells and Blue Earth, Minnesota, drifts quickly covered the stables and shacks where the family kept their animals, and the chickens froze to death. When their fuel ran out, the Henjums stayed warm by cutting the tops off the saplings they had planted as a windbreak and feeding the green sticks into their stove. But it wasn’t all grim horror. Between the granary and the pigpen the wind spun a fantastic delicate white mountain. “The snow had whirled and piled up into a mountain 62 feet high, actual measure-ment,” recalled the Henjums’ daughter. “The mountain was a beautiful sight, reaching to a thin point at its uppermost peak." The next blizzard, which followed a few weeks later, in April, is still talked about in Yankton, South Dakota, because it came when George Armstrong Custer was quartered in town. Lieutenant Colonel Custer had been assigned to frontier duty in the Dakotas early in 1873, and he traveled west with a company of eight hundred officers and enlisted men from the Seventh Regiment of the United States Cavalry along with his devoted wife, Elizabeth, and forty government laundresses. Ill when the blizzard hit, Custer weathered the storm in the comparative comfort of a cabin attended by Elizabeth, while scores of his men wandered lost in the blast after their tents blew over. Winds at Yankton blew at an average velocity of 39 miles an hour for nearly a hundred hours, and for the entire twenty-four hours of April 15 the average wind speed exceeded 52 miles per hour. Townspeople rallied round and eventually gathered in the missing soldiers and laundresses, including one who had a newborn baby. Custer later officially commended the good people of Yankton for saving “the lives of a great number belonging to this command, besides saving the government the value of public animals amounting to many thousands of dollars.” Three years later, he was dead at the fiasco of Little Bighorn.

General Adolphus W. Greely, who was head of the nation’s weather forecasting service from 1887 to 1891, wrote in his 1888 book
American Weather
that “shortly after this storm the use of the word
blizzard
 became tolerably frequent in the northwestern parts of the United States, to indicate such cold anticyclone storms as are attended by drifting snow." They called the winter of 1880-81 the Snow Winter because the snowstorms started early and never let up. A three-day blizzard took the settlers of the Upper Midwest by surprise on October 15, and after that, snowstorms came at regular intervals through the winter and into the spring. In some places snow from that first October storm was still on the ground come May. Mary Paulson King, a child of immigrant Norwegian parents in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota, remembers opening the door on the morning of October 15 to a wall of snow that “just fell in the house.” Her father had to get up on a chair and make a hole in the snow in order to crawl out. After that the blizzards broke in waves—“almost one continued blizzard,” according to a Dakota pioneer. Children sled-ded from the peaks of their roofs all winter. Soddies and one-story shacks were entirely buried in snow, but even substantial two-story homes had snow up over their second-floor windows.

No one was prepared for deep snow so early in the season, and farmers all over the region were caught with crops to harvest and fuel supplies low. Like most, Johann and Anna Kaufmann had not yet milled their grain or dug out their potatoes when the first blizzard of the Snow Winter arrived. At first they were sure that the snow would melt and there would be time to haul the grain to the mill before winter really set in; but as the weeks passed and new storms kept piling the snow higher, they realized they were trapped with no prospect of grinding the wheat harvest into flour for bread.

What made it harder was now there were three children to feed. At last, after losing the three babies—one in the Ukraine, one on the voyage to America, and the third during that first bitter year in Dakota—Anna and Johann had three healthy sons. Johann, their oldest, was nine, old enough to help his father with the animals and maybe hold the plow come spring. Heinrich was three and their baby, Elias, would turn one that coming May.

By Christmas, starvation loomed again, just as it had those first two winters. Anna heard that some families were boiling their un-milled wheat kernels into a kind of mush, but she knew she could not keep her children alive on that diet. Without flour they would never survive the winter. Finally, when it was clear that the weather would not break, six Schweizer farmers decided to make the twenty-mile trip to the nearest mill together: Each farmer took a wagon loaded with grain sacks and a team of horses, and each team broke trail for half a mile or so until the animals were exhausted; then that team would drop to the rear and the next in line would break through the drifts for the next half mile. It was a long grueling trip, but the men returned with flour, and Anna was able to bake bread for her family.

The snow was so deep by January 1881 that train service was almost entirely suspended in the region. The railroads hired scores of men to dig out the tracks, but it was wasted effort. “As soon as they had finished shoveling a stretch of line,” wrote Osten Rollag, “a new snowstorm arrived, filling up the line and rendering their work useless.” The blizzard of February 2, “a terrible storm with thunder and lightning and very soft snow,” according to Osten, halted rail traffic to Sioux Falls completely. The trains did not run again until June 15—four and a half months later. As the Snow Winter wore on, the suffering of isolated farm families became acute. Without train service there was no food to be had in towns and the deep drifts made it impossible to haul wagonloads across the prairie.

Families who had neglected to get their milling done before the October 15 storm were reduced to grinding wheat in coffee mills—a tedious procedure that required almost continuous grinding to supply enough flour for a family. Many ground the seed grain intended for spring planting and lived on that, or tried to. Mary Paulson King recalled that her Norwegian parents became so desperate for coffee that they improvised a substitute called “knup." First they would cook potatoes, then mash them and mix in flour and graham. This mush was rolled out to the thickness of a piecrust, cut into tiny morsels about the size of coffee beans, and browned in the oven. Then the toasted bits were ground in the coffee mill and brewed into knup. The Rollags improvised coffee by scorching kernels of rye and wheat. “This they called coffee,” wrote Osten, “but ‘hu-tu-tu’ what coffee!" Civic disaster requires a hero. Minnesotans found or created one in a young storm survivor they christened “Minnesota’s Frozen Son.” Michael J. Dowling was fifteen when he came within an inch of freezing to death in one of the blizzards that winter. Dowling’s frostbite was so advanced that he lost both legs below the knees, his left arm below the elbow, and all the fingers and most of the thumb on his right hand. But Dowling was a fighter. He lived on to became a teacher, newspaper editor, and eventually speaker of the house of the Minnesota State Legislature. “It is what one has above the shoulders that counts,” he always told fellow amputees.

When the snow finally melted in the late spring of 1881, huge sections of the prairie were flooded. Children remember parents rowing boats to town over their corn and wheat fields. Most of the town of Yankton, in what is now South Dakota, was washed away when the Missouri River overflowed its banks, and downriver the town of Vermillion was also wiped out.

Laura Ingalls Wilder made the Snow Winter the subject of her novel
The Long Winter.
Every detail in the book matches up exactly with the memoirs of pioneers: the grinding of wheat in coffee mills, the endless hours of twisting prairie hay for fuel, the eerie gray twilight of the snowed-in houses, the agony of waiting and hoping that the trains would get through, the steady creep of starvation when they failed to yet again. By midwinter, Laura and her sisters had learned to scan the northwest horizon for
the cloud,
the single sooty cloud, that presaged another storm. Even the rare sunny days only heightened their anxiety. “No one knew how soon the blizzard would come again,” wrote Wilder. “At any moment the cloud might rise and come faster than any horses could run." Before the storms shut down her country school, Laura and two of her friends gathered to chat during recess. Like the prairie memoirists, Wilder was matter of fact about the vulnerability of these children. The Little House Books were made into a syrupy television series in the 1970s and 1980s, but the books themselves are spare and unsentimental. Wilder took it for granted that schoolgirls, don’t flinch when the conversation turns to death by exposure: "What would you do if you were caught in a blizzard, Mary?” Minnie Johnson was asking. "I guess I would just keep on walking. You wouldn’t freeze if you kept on walking,” Mary answered. "But you’d tire yourself out. You’d get so tired you’d die,” said Minnie. "Well, what would you do?” Mary Power asked her. "I’d dig into a snowbank and let the snow cover me up. I don’t think you’d freeze to death in a snowbank. Would you, Laura?" “I don’t know,” Laura said. "Well, what would you do, Laura, if you got caught in a blizzard?” Minnie insisted. "I wouldn’t get caught,” Laura answered.

Only the worst winters got named. After the Snow Winter of 1880–81, the next one worthy of christening was the winter of 1886–87: the Winter of Blue Snow. A beautiful name for a terrible season. It was the winter that killed the cattle kingdom that had flourished for nearly a decade on the western prairie. Or rather finished it off, for the seeds of devastation were sown the summer before. The weather turned unusually hot and dry early that year, and by the Fourth of July the grass was parched and brown and stubby.

The young Teddy Roosevelt, traveling through the north part of Dakota Territory on the way to his ranches near Medora, told a newspaper reporter in mid-July that “Between the drouth, the grasshoppers, and the late frosts, ice forming as late as June 10, there is not a green thing in all the region.” The drought was bad in the south as well, so all summer long, more and more cattle were shipped or herded from Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma onto the northern plains. Dakota and Montana were seriously overgrazed when the summer fires started.

Even by American standards, the transformation of the short-grass western prairie from Native American buffalo hunting ground to an internationally financed beef industry had happened extraordinarily quickly. The Teton Sioux tribes retreated to Wyoming reservations in 1878, and immediately afterward Texas ranching operations began expanding northward, running the notoriously rugged and ornery Texas longhorns by the thousands onto the plains of Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The “empire of grass” was the largest unfenced pasture in the world—free, seemingly endless, unbelievably productive. And potentially hugely profitable. Foreign investors, many of them “swells” from titled families in England and Scotland and blue-blooded merchant princes from the East Coast cities, pumped in millions. Books like General James S. Brisbin’s
The Beef Bonanza: or How to Get Rich on
the Plains
promised staggering surefire returns. The number of cattle run on the plains increased exponentially, especially once the buffalo herds were reduced to bands of stragglers in the mid-1880s.