The Children's Blizzard (9 page)
Suddenly ranchers had names like Teddy Roosevelt, Randolph Churchill, and Antoine de Vallombrosa, the Marquis de Mores.
Polo ponies were stabled next to working ranch horses; castles and chateaux rose on the range; chefs and valets were imported from Europe. The biggest spreads were larger than Eastern states. Everything in the Cattle Kingdom was on an enormous scale—the land, the herds, the flow of capital, the dreams, the disasters. When the inevitable bust came, it was an epic bust.
The prairie fires of the hot, dry summer of 1886 lit the fuse.
Huge swaths of short brittle grass went up in flames during July and August. “The fires have devastated a large amount of grazing,” reported an eastern Montana newspaper on August 1, “and, as is usual, the very best of that.” Going into the winter, the cattle were stressed and stringy when they should have been sleek and fat.
Even a mild winter would have taken a toll, but the winter of 1886-87 was not a kind one. The bitter weather started before Thanksgiving. A storm blew through on November 22 and continued for days. Then, in early December, temperatures moderated for almost two weeks, thawing the drifts to a heavy slush. But when this warm spell ended, the temperature did not rise above freezing again for months. An impenetrable crust formed on top of the refrozen slush. Cattle desperate for food cut their muzzles on the shards of ice that covered the sparse grass. Steers bled to death when the crust gave way beneath them and the ice sliced open their legs. By January, the winter storms were coming in earnest. Every five days or so, the cycle repeated: two days of blizzard, three days of glittering blowing chill, then a few hours of smoky calm, and then another blizzard.
The worst storm came on January 28, 1887, with seventy-two hours of fiercely blowing snow and arctic temperatures. The storm left millions of cattle dying or dead on the range. Cattle had drifted hundreds of miles before they froze to death or died of exhaustion or suffocated from the ice plugging their nostrils. Some herds were never found; some were found in riverbeds or ravines, heaped up like slag; some were so badly frostbitten that ranchers were reduced to salvaging their hides.
Come spring, when the snow finally melted, flooded rivers carried the carcasses of thousands of cattle that had frozen to death during the winter—raging torrents choked with dead animals wedged between ice floes. Teddy Roosevelt’s ranch foreman, Bill Merrifield, reported that “the first day I rode out, I never saw a live animal.” Contemporary reports put the death toll at ten to twelve million head of cattle—losses of 80 percent in some regions. "About seventy-five percent of the ‘she’ stuff died,” rancher Charles H. Rowe from Mandan, North Dakota, wrote in his diary. “Anything that would live through that winter would live through Hell.” “Well, we have had a perfect smashup all through the cattle country of the northwest,” Roosevelt wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge when he finally traveled out to Dakota to assess the situation for himself. “The losses are crippling. For the first time I have been utterly unable to enjoy a visit to my ranch." The relentless blizzards and freezes of the Winter of Blue Snow proved that the “open range” system—running cattle on the western prairie without supplemental food or winter shelter—was just another foolish American dream, like the fantasy that rain follows the plow. Scores of the big ranches went under. Blue-blooded investors pulled out or declared bankruptcy, and lots of ordinary ranchers with a few dozen head were clamoring to sell, cut, and run. Roosevelt hung on for a few years, though with much smaller herds. He never recouped his initial investment of $85,000.
The next winter, the winter of 1887–88, was another bad one, especially in the wheat and rye and potato country east of the 100th meridian where families like the Kaufmanns and the Rollags were finally beginning to get on their feet. “Two months of zero weather,” was the way H. G. Purcell, a schoolboy in the eastern part of Dakota Territory, remembered the start of that winter. In Jerauld County, farther west, the storms began in November and intensified as the winter advanced, with the snow getting deeper and the cold more intense, week after week, through December and early January. George W. Kingsbury, author of the first comprehensive history of the Dakotas, published in 1915, pronounced that winter “unusually rigorous,” with frequent heavy snows that “blockaded” the railroads and drifts that “rendered the [wagon roads] almost impassable.” “There must have been considerable suffering in the newer settlements,” wrote Kingsbury, “where the recent settlers had not prepared for a season of such extreme severity, and these newer settlements were in large number for Dakota had gained many thousands in population during the season preceding.” Kingsbury need not have been so tentative. Nobody, not even the legendary oldest settler, was ever really prepared for the extreme severity of these seasons.
The coldest weather came, as it usually does, in December and hung on through January. Just before the New Year, a flow of arctic air pooled over the Upper Midwest and settled in like fog in a river valley. The Minnesota State Weather observer at Pine River Dam recorded a minimum temperature of 46 below on December 29; observers at Pokegama Falls and Leech Lake Dam were unable to take temperature readings that day because the mercury inside their government-issued thermometers froze solid. It’s hard to find vocabulary for weather this cold. The senses become first sharp and then dulled. Objects etch themselves with hyperclarity on the dense air, but it’s hard to keep your eyes open to look at them steadily. When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast of 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs lining your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens. If the wind is calm and if your body, head, and hands are covered, you feel preternaturally alert and focused. At first. A dozen paces from the door, your throat begins to feel raw, your lips dry and crack, tears sting the corners of your eyes. The cold becomes at once a knife and, paradoxically, a flame, cutting and scorching exposed skin.
Temperatures in the prairie states fell even lower in January. A run of record-breaking cold commenced on the eighth and continued but for a single day’s hiatus until the twenty-second. “This is an exceptionally long period for such extreme cold weather to prevail even in this climate,” noted William W. Payne, the Carleton College astronomy professor who founded and ran the Minnesota State Weather Service, “and at most stations it is unparalleled by any previous record." On Wednesday, January 11, the citizens of Aberdeen in Dakota Territory marveled at the beautiful display of sun dogs blazing in the pale blue sky—three brightly colored spots following the sun.
Though beautiful to behold, the longtime residents knew that this did not augur anything good. Local lore had it that sun dogs are a sign of approaching cold: the brighter the dogs, the colder the weather. Supposedly, when Indians saw sun dogs in the sky, they piled more wood on the fire and sealed the skin tight over the tepee door.
It was 20 below zero at dawn in most of Dakota that morning.
How much colder could it get?
Two solid weeks of iron weather—except for one day, January 12. "That morning was the most beautiful morning I had ever seen,” wrote Josephine Buchmillar Leber, the daughter of German immigrants, recalling that Thursday morning in Turner County, Dakota, when she was twelve years old and begging her father to let her set out for school. “Sun shone bright. It had snowed the night before. The snow flakes layed [
sic
] loosely on drifts, just like loose feathers, and as I remember it seemed the sun shining on the snow, caused a golden reflection on the snow.” Another settler remarked on the “almost mysteriously velvety” quality of the air that morning. People came out of their houses and sod huts to gaze, blinking in awe, at the eerie “copper” color of the morning sky. Thomas Pirnie, a youth in Buffalo County in central South Dakota, remembered that when he awoke at daybreak on the twelfth “the air was like that of an April morning, with just a breath of breeze coming out of the southwest. I happened to be the first one of our family to go out. I quickly returned inside and called out so all could hear me, ‘Oh come folks and see what a beautiful morning it is. It is 32 above. We’re going to have a January thaw.’ Cousin Hugh and myself took a shovel and a pan of chicken feed to the barn, expecting to soon dig our way into the sod barn of which only the roof pole were visible above the great snowdrifts that almost filled the deep ravine." Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the “great waves” of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun. The one aspect they all agreed on was the sudden, welcome rise of temperature. Even allowing for the distortions of memory, which are especially acute with weather, there is an urgency and vividness to these accounts. These are the mental snapshots of the
moments before
—the last kind hours. Historian N. J. Dunham lingers over these hours of deceptive mildness in his
History of Jerauld County.
On the morning of Thursday, the 12th of January, the wind had fallen and become quite warm. The snow was melting a little. Great banks of fog fifteen to twenty miles wide rested across the prairies from the vicinity of the Black Hills eastward into Minnesota. Between these banks of fog were stretches of country from thirty to forty miles in width where the sun shone brightly. One of these fog banks ran east and west along the C & N. W. Ry. [Chicago and NorthWestern Railway], through the central part of Beadle, Hand and Hyde counties. Over all of Jerauld county the morning was warm and bright.
Farmers took advantage of the pleasant weather to go to town or to go to fetch hay from the prairie. All felt a relief from the rigorous wintry weather that had preceded. In Jerauld county at that time were 1025 children of school age.
Owing to the balmy conditions of the air, probably a greater percentage of those children went to school that day than on any previous day for weeks.
All through the region, from the Black Hills to the homesteads of eastern Minnesota, a kind of undeclared civic holiday was being celebrated—a celebration of ordinary daily life. From nearly every home, someone set out for town on foot or by horse to replenish supplies. Farmers turned their animals out of their barns to stretch their legs, drink at watering holes, browse the piles of hay the farmers had forked together in the fall. For the first time in weeks people could be outside without being in pain. That was reason enough to celebrate. Many were convinced it was the January thaw—the start of a week or more of mild weather—though a few weatherwise old-timers and farmers with a sixth sense about the atmosphere sniffed the suddenly balmy air suspiciously. Almost a 40-degree rise in twenty-four hours—it didn’t sit right somehow.
Certainly not to John Buchmillar, who decided to keep his daughter Josephine home from school that morning despite her hot tears and wails of protest. “I feel there is something in the air,” Josephine overheard her father tell a neighbor solemnly at about eleven o’clock that morning.
Maria Albrecht also had a bad feeling that morning. The day dawned dull and cloudy over the Schweizer farms in Rosefield Township, and there was fresh snow on the ground from snow showers that had blown through the previous day. Like everyone else in the region, Maria noticed the unaccustomed mildness—but something about the look of the sky bothered her. She couldn’t name it or explain it, but there it was. From the moment she had gotten up she could barely keep from crying. And so, while her husband Johann was out in the barn tending to the animals and her children were getting their breakfast in the dim morning light, Maria made up her mind. The boys would not be going to school that day. And anyway, it was her husband’s forty-first birthday.
That was reason enough to keep the boys home.
Of all the neighborhood families, the Albrechts lived farthest from the one-room schoolhouse—the English school, as they called it—that the Schweizers had built a few years ago at the “middle fence” (the midpoint) of the western side of section 26. For the Kaufmann boys the walk was nothing—half a mile and they were there. And the Grabers with their crowd of children practically had the school in their yard. Seven children Peter and Susanna Graber had had since they married in 1875—with seven others from Peter’s first marriage. Fourteen young Grabers, while Maria and Johann only had five—Johann, the boy who had been born on board the
City of Richmond,
who was now thirteen; nine-year-old Peter; Anna, six; and two little ones, Jacob and Julius. Even Anna Kaufmann, who had endured so many losses, now had more children than Maria—six living children. Her Johann still attended school, even though he was a young man of sixteen. His brother Heinrich, ten, and Elias, seven, walked to school with him when the weather wasn’t too bad. And there were three other Kaufmanns still at home—six-year-old Julius, three-year-old Jonathan, and Emma, who had celebrated her first birthday on New Year’s Eve 1887, just twelve days before.
The Albrechts, with fewer children than the other families, had agreed to house and feed the schoolteacher, Mr. James P. Cotton. It was a difficult arrangement because Mr. Cotton spoke no German and the Albrecht parents spoke little English. Maria put up with it because having the teacher around made her feel a little easier about sending the boys off across the prairie. But not that morning.
This was not a day for them to leave the house, she was sure of it.
There was a quarrel as the two older boys were getting ready for school. Maria insisted they stay home. Johann insisted just as adamantly that they must attend—Mr. Cotton had expressly told them not to miss that day. Maria called her husband in from the barn to lay down the law. But Johann Sr., who was used to these disputes, took the boys’ side. What would it hurt if they went to school on such a warm morning if that’s what they wanted to do?