The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  “Can those be men?” the poet Walt Whitman wondered when he saw a group of Union soldiers returning from Belle Isle. “Those little livid brown ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarves?—are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses?”

  After nearly three months, Ben was released from Belle Isle, possibly in an exchange for Confederate prisoners. The wound in his leg would bother him for the rest of his life. During his final fifteen months of military service, Ben fought with General Sherman’s forces in the siege of Atlanta. He watched the city burn in November of 1864 and he marched with Sherman to the sea. On New Year’s Eve of 1864, Sergeant Shattuck’s term of service expired and he was mustered out of his regiment.

  Details of Ben’s life become sketchy once he left the Army. On March 1, 1866, he married Sarah Jane Targe—she was twenty-two years old, he thirty-one, old in those days to be starting a new life. Two years later, on April 8, 1868, the Shattucks’ first child was born—a girl they named Allie Etta and called Etta. Eventually the couple had six other children, two of whom died in childhood. It’s unclear when or why the Shattucks moved west to Nebraska and how many places they lived in before they settled near Seward, the county seat just west of Lincoln named for President Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward. There is a record of an Ohio-born Shattuck living in Iowa in the early 1870s, though this may have been a cousin. We know for certain Ben and Sarah Shattuck were living near Seward in November 1882, because that’s when they joined the town’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Whether the war injury made it difficult for Ben to work successfully in the fields, whether he was unlucky, unsteady, haunted by memories of Belle Isle, or just a poor farmer is uncertain—but it’s clear that Ben struggled and often failed to support his large family by farming, even though the soil around Seward is good and the climate favorable. Like many another hapless sod farmer, Ben Shattuck decided to pull up stakes and try his luck elsewhere—farther out on the prairie. On March 15, 1885, Ben and Sarah withdrew from the Seward Methodist church, and around that time the family moved north to Holt County, a bleak, flat, arid region on the edge of the Nebraska sand hills. “B. Shattuck” is listed in an 1886 census as a farmer in the town of Atkinson, Holt County, but once again he failed to raise a crop sufficient to feed his family.

  We know these details because, when disaster struck two years later, the Shattucks and their oldest daughter, Etta, briefly became celebrities. The newspapers that told of Etta Shattuck’s plight in excruciating detail for a few frigid weeks in January and February 1888 all mentioned that the girl, not quite twenty years old, was the sole support of her parents and four siblings. A Methodist “convert” like her father, a plain young woman with a full square face and brown hair that she parted in the middle, Etta kept the family going on the twenty-five dollars a month she earned teaching school at the one-room schoolhouse in the Bright Hope School District in Holt County. The newspapers loved it: a wounded Civil War veteran, a devout teenage schoolteacher, a terrible act of God. The story ran on front pages for weeks.

  Between Ben’s service in the Seventy-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the blizzard that took Etta, the record of the Shattuck family is dim. Only war and natural disaster have secured them a few lines in history.

  S. F. Huntley and his wife, Abi Townsend Huntley, ordained ministers both, came west to bring the word of God to the Dakota prairie. Abi was forty-one years old and eight and a half months pregnant with her fourth child when the family arrived in the town of Plankinton by train on April 5, 1883. A small straight-backed woman with a long, narrow mouth and sparse fair hair pulled back and tucked neatly behind her prominent ears, Abi brought with her a degree from the Whitestown Seminary in Oneida, New York, a steady devotion to the Quaker faith she had been raised in, crates of precious books both religious and secular, and very little else. At the Plankinton train station the Huntleys hired a young boy and a pair of old, tired horses to drag them, their children, and their few earthly possessions the score of miles to the new-fledged town of Wessington Springs. The horses were so broken down that a team of oxen passed them before evening drew in.

  The Reverend S. F. Huntley, though possessed of a sturdy upright frame, a prominent forehead, and a neat goatee, was a bit thin in the shoulders and broad around the middle for a pioneer. By the looks of him, he had more grooming than muscle. Certainly he had more education than most of the men swarming into Dakota in those years. S. F. Huntley prided himself on a degree from Cornell University and his service in the Civil War with Company B of the 152nd New York Volunteer Infantry. For a man of his quality and experience, this move to Dakota was to be viewed as something akin to missionary work. He and his wife intended to see church life established and rooted on the godless frontier. He would found a Congregational Church, she would start a Quaker meeting. Though members of different denominations, they traveled together with that joint mission. The earthly possessions they bore with them were few, but that didn’t matter. The Reverends S. F. and Abi Huntley carried their fortune in their heads—and their hearts. For the rest, God would provide.

  They arrived in Wessington Springs at night with no claim or kin—just the name of a fellow preacher who had advertised for a new colony. The preacher had no room to put them up, but he showed them the way to the house of a kind stranger. The Huntleys crossed a gully and ascended a series of low hills and finally, with night deep around them, they saw a light burning in the window. It was here, six days later, that Abi, far past her first youth and in an alien primitive country with no home to call her own, gave birth to another daughter. Three daughters and a son now, and all that they owned piled on a wagon.

  By June, S.F. claimed a quarter section by squatter’s rights, surveyed the land, and filed the papers. That summer the preacher managed to bust two acres of sod and put in a vegetable garden. He built his family a house, really not much more than a shack ten feet by twelve—too small for the six of them, so he cut sod for the walls and roof of an additional room and a shed for storing fuel. A couple of years later, the Huntleys homesteaded another quarter section nearby and built a proper frame house, but still they kept the soddie. When the coldest weather hit each winter, they moved back to the old sod house. Truth be told, for all the dirt and mess of walls made of prairie turf, it was easier to keep a soddie warm.

  Settlers came fast, many of them Quakers like Abi. When it was time to name their stretch of Jerauld County prairie, the Quakers prevailed and the name they settled on was Harmony Township. It was a blessing for Abi that a Quaker meeting was organized so soon and she did whatever she could to help. S.F. preached at the Congregational Church, and it pleased him that so many of their neighbors attended regularly every Sunday. A one-room schoolhouse was built not far from their home, less than a mile to the west, and the three older children—Mary, Ernest, and Mabelle—walked out there together when the weather permitted. Miss May Hunt was their teacher, an estimable young woman and, S.F. was pleased to note, a member in good standing of his church.

  It made Abi uneasy, this turning the children loose to walk the prairie, what with snakes in the tall grass in the warm weather, and standing water in the gullies, and fierce winds whipping up when you turned your back—not like the weather she was used to in the hilly woods of central New York State. But as her husband often said with pride, Abi Townsend Huntley was not one to fret or complain. Never had she uttered a word of discontent since they moved out. And anyway, it was a comfort to them both that there were so many other families in Harmony Township these days. The Reverend Huntley stood at their front door one morning and, gazing out to the north and east, counted eighty-three houses where four years ago there had been nothing but rolling grass and a couple of sod huts.

  Plenty of folks to look out for Mary, Ernest, and Mabelle Huntley as they walked back and forth to Miss Hunt’s school.

  William Clark Allen went west with his family in 1881—not to bust sod on a homestead or to build a church where they could worship as they pleased
or to escape hopeless poverty, but to try something new and large and clean in a town that barely existed until they got off the train and built it. The bearer of a proud Yankee name (family legend claims Ethan Allen as their ancestor—mistakenly, as it turns out), a man of enterprise and gumption with piercing blue eyes, wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a high round forehead, and the flowing walrus mustache of his era, William Clark Allen—W.C., as he styled himself—managed to be a man of both adventure and substance. He was born in 1845 in the Great Lakes town of Newcastle, across from Rochester on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario, moved west to Wisconsin as a young man, went to work as a lawyer (no need for law school in those freewheeling days), married, fathered two sons, lost his wife, married a schoolteacher named Edna Jewett whose family had emigrated to the Midwest from upstate New York, and moved again, west again, this time to Minneapolis. In November 1879, when W.C. was thirty-four and Edna twenty-eight, they had a child whom they named Walter, so now there were three boys—Hugh, who had a clubfoot, William, who turned ten that year, and Edna’s new baby.

  By all appearances the Allens were doing fine in the burgeoning, relatively civilized river town of Minneapolis. But they were restless. Though they had a house well stocked with children, books, furniture, and piano, W.C. and Edna decided that Minneapolis was not their fate. They must keep moving west, always west. They would resettle on the virgin prairie of Dakota Territory. For the “opportunities,” they said.

  And so in the summer of 1880, W.C. made a scouting trip. He got as far west as the winding, shallow James River—then called the Dakota River—that spools south through the prairie before joining the wide Missouri at Yankton and decided he had come far enough. W.C. claimed his homestead at an outpost known as Yorkville (prominent enough to house Brown County’s first post office before vanishing from the map), and then he had a look around a townsite a few miles east that officials of the Milwaukee Railroad had designated Groton. Nearby towns, or rather train stops that were expected to become towns, were called Aberdeen, Bath, Andover, Bristol, and Webster—every ten miles or so another reminder of the glorious Anglo-Saxon heritage. At Groton, W.C. bought a building lot for one hundred fifty dollars on what was destined to become Main Street, the first lot sold in town, and got to work. W.C. must have been a man of considerable energy and pluck because by the time he returned to Edna and the children in Minneapolis at the end of the summer of 1880, he had managed to construct a simple but ample three-room frame house of milled lumber, shingled roof, and glass windows—four tall windows running down the sides of the house and one by the front door looking out over the mud of Main Street. This was the first frame house in Groton.

  In July 1881, W.C. returned with his family and furniture to take possession. It was a memorable trip. The floods that resulted from the sudden late spring melting of the thirty-foot drifts that had accumulated during the long winter had turned the James River into a giant lake stretching across the breadth of what is now South Dakota, and it was touch and go whether the tracks would be clear in time for the Allen family exodus. In any event, the train they boarded in Minneapolis on July 14 was the maiden voyage of the H & D Division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad—“the Milwaukee,” as it was commonly called—bound for Groton, which was then (briefly) the end of the line. The Allens, like the Kaufmanns and their fellow Schweizers, traveled in an immigrant car—and they were just as dismayed at how crude and uncomfortable it was. Edna Allen recalled that a cow and team of horses were stabled at the front of the car, the family’s belongings (including their piano and one thousand carefully chosen books) were stacked at the rear, while she and her husband and the children occupied rough wooden seats at the center. It was “terrifically hot,” so they traveled with the side doors slid back for air. Walter, not yet two, was ill and fretful and had to be held in his mother’s arms the entire trip. Hugh and Will, though old enough to look after themselves, made their stepmother’s heart constrict whenever they got too close to an open door. The sea of waving grass outside was unbelievably green and tall and lush from the melting off of the deepest snows ever measured on the prairie.

  For some reason the train went only as far as Andover, a stop shy of Groton, and the Allens had to complete the final leg of their journey by horse cart. Arrival afforded them no rest. The town, though surrounded by miles of drowsing prairie, was feverish with activity. Every lot lining Main Street was a building site—there was so much construction going on that just the scrap wood lying around the new houses and stores supplied the Allens with all the fuel they needed for their cookstove. Practically overnight the prairie boomtown had a feed and coal store, a blacksmith shop, a building contractor, hotel, lumberyard, and a business mysteriously identified as a “purveyor of liquid hardware.” By September 1881, just weeks after its founding, Groton boasted two rival newspapers: the Mirror and the Groton News, which prided itself on beating the Mirror into print by two days.

  W.C. was right there in the thick of it all. Upon arrival he began practicing law out of his home, but he soon diversified into trade, local politics, and civil service. He teamed up with one Frank Stevens to open a hardware store and a lumber, harness, and tin emporium near the post office, which was also under his control, first as deputy and then head postmaster (Edna, meanwhile, ran the original Yorkville post office during the summer months). W.C. later went into the real estate business, became the town’s “police justice,” and, according to one of the local papers, “fixed up a court room at the rear of the post office,” where he handed out stiff fines to some of Groton’s leading citizens when they broke the town’s prohibition ordinance.

  He sounds a bit like the Wizard of Oz—a comparison that springs readily to mind since thirty-two-year-old L. Frank Baum took up residence in nearby Aberdeen (two stops west on the train) a few years later. Baum, who had not yet discovered that writing fiction was his true calling, spent his two-and-a-half-year stint in Dakota Territory bankrupting a variety store called Baum’s Bazaar and then alienating most of the readers and advertisers of a local newspaper he edited and published. When it became clear, as Baum said later, that “the sheriff wanted the paper more than I,” he and his devoted wife and children hightailed it to Chicago.

  Baum’s stint in Dakota was not a complete loss. When he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1899, Baum based his descriptions of the “great gray prairie” of Kansas (which he had never seen) on his memories of the landscape around Aberdeen in the hot dry summer of 1888: “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” Baum used the catchall prairie adjective flat advisedly, for this stretch of South Dakota was once the bottom of a shallow hundred-mile-long glacial lake that silted in gradually to form a broad sweep of exceptionally flat country.

  That one writer of standing should have turned up in Brown County in the 1880s is curious. That two literary lions should have stalked this sweep of prairie in the same decade seems downright bizarre, yet there was the young Hamlin Garland just a few years earlier, toiling away on his father’s claim not a dozen miles north of where Baum set up shop. Or perhaps not so bizarre since this was the decade of the Dakota Boom, what Garland called the “mighty spreading and shifting” that heaved hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the country and the world onto the Dakota prairie, the Garlands, the Baums, and the Allens among them. The ambitious and restless, the poor and desperate, the gullible, the land hungry, the exile from oppression, the start-over dreamer, the Go West! hothead, the get-rich-quick drifter—all were spellbound by the mystique of Dakota in the 1880s. The territory’s population nearly quadrupled during that decade, from 135,177 to 511,527, and the number of farms increased almost five-and-a-half-fold from 17,435 to 95,204.
At every train stop, towns popped up like mushrooms after rain. “Language cannot exaggerate the rapidity with which these communities are built up,” marveled one contemporary observer. “You may stand ankle deep in the short grass of the uninhabited wilderness; next month a mixed train will glide over the waste and stop at some point where the railroad has decided to locate a town. Men, women, and children will jump out of the cars, and their chattels will be tumbled out after them. From that moment the building begins.” Garland, whose parents homesteaded near the town of Ordway, north of Aberdeen, in the same year that the Allens moved out to Groton, wrote that the builders of these new prairie towns labored like zealots caught in the spell of a collective delusion: “The village itself [Ordway] was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of ‘corner lots’ and ‘boulevards’ and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers.”

  This was exactly the kind of carnival the Allen family got swept up in as soon as they arrived in Groton. With their piano and library and relatively comfortable house, they offered a small oasis of civilization on Main Street, and visitors flocked to them. Litigants dropped into W.C.’s office, teachers and prospective brides consulted with Edna, young shopkeepers or farmers stopped by for advice or medical care. When the beds and floor overflowed with overnight guests, Edna spread a blanket on the piano top. For the Allen boys it was bliss. The teenage Will and Hugh promptly went to work setting type for the local newspapers, and Will, who was especially enterprising, petitioned the City Council for permission to open a lemonade stand on Main Street—which his father, as police justice, denied. Young Walter, meanwhile, was collecting rattlesnake skins on the prairie (which rolled right up to the edge of their backyard), falling down badger holes, tumbling off roofs, messing about in the James River, and fooling around with guns. (When he was seven, Walter and a friend fired off a shell from a single-shot .22 rifle that grazed the forehead of one of their female neighbors, a fierce Prussian woman named Mrs. Messerschmidt, which landed them in W.C.’s “court.”) And of course, for a few months every fall and winter, there was school. Groton’s citizens organized a school district in February 1882, after the initial frenzy of construction died down, and by the following December, the town’s first schoolhouse was finished—a rather grand two-story four-room hip-roofed frame building set all by itself on the bald, bare prairie half a mile west of Main Street. The idea behind this remote location was that the town was expected to expand and engulf the school—but meanwhile, until that happened, the Groton school stood like a sentry at the edge of the great flat abyss. W.C. naturally took a place on the Groton board of education.