The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  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? Johann shrugged off his wife’s pleas and went back to work. The fact that it was his forty-first birthday would not stop him from putting in a full day of work, especially on such a promising winter day.

  So thirteen-year-old Johann set off across the field alone. Peter, to please his mother, stayed home, though it made him miserable to miss a day of school. Years later, Peter recalled that he spent the morning sitting by the window staring glumly in the direction of the school. “My mother, who was observing me, sighed and said, ‘My child, my heart is going to break. I wish your brother were here with you.’ My father was busy working outside.”

  The Allens were asleep in their house on Main Street when the weather changed, so they never knew at what hour the winter westerlies flickered and finally died out altogether and the south wind rose in their stead. When they stirred on the morning of the twelfth, the temperature in Groton was pushing 20 degrees—positively balmy compared to the 20-below-zero reading of the previous day. You notice a rise in temperature like that when you wake up in the dark in a house with no fire. But the three Allen boys—the teenagers, William and Hugh, and their eight-year-old half brother, Walter—were comparatively lucky. Being town boys, they didn’t have to go out to the barn to feed the stock or chop through the ice on a frozen trough before they got their own breakfast. The boys could get up and dress and eat breakfast in the daylight. And for once it looked like a nice day.

  Unlike some boys, who had to be prodded and badgered out the door every morning, Walter Allen was always eager to get to school because he had a special job to do. In the Groton school, each row of desks was under the supervision of a “row monitor” who was in charge of the coats and overshoes for all the children in that row. As monitor of his row, Walter commanded the front seat, and whenever school was dismissed or recess called, he got to jump up before the other children, rush to the vestibule where the coats, caps, scarves, mittens, and overshoes were stowed, gather them up, and distribute them to the children in his row. (This strict segregation of children and clothing was enforced in order to keep the odor of wet wool, felt, and leather out of the classroom.) Walter was extremely proud that he had already mastered the tricky business of matching kids and clothes and even mentioned this accomplishment in his diary.

  So that Thursday morning, while W.C. Allen ducked out the door and went to his law office next door to attend to the multifarious affairs of running a boom town on the Dakota prairie, and W.C.’s two older sons, Hugh and Will, strolled down main street to their jobs at the Groton newspaper (reduced to one now), Walter Allen set out alone for school with all the brisk determination that an ambitious eight-year-old can muster.

  At some point during their first few years in Minnesota, the Rollags had quietly altered their names to make them sound more American. Gro became Grace, Osten became Austin, Gro and Ole’s oldest child, Peder, born in November 1874, just five months after they claimed their homestead, became Peter. Carl, Grace and Ole’s second son, born two and a half years later in the same sod house as Peter, became Charley. Though the boys went to English school and quickly learned to speak English with barely a trace of Norwegian accent, they continued to speak Norwegian at home. Thanks to their grandmother, Kari, they also had plenty of Norwegian books to read—indeed, Kari saw to it that they read Norwegian even before they started at the English school, which she didn’t think very highly of anyway. Kari also insisted that the children be confirmed in Norwegian, since she was dubious whether being confirmed in English would really “take.” Kari was one of those grandmothers who leave an indelible impression on her grandchildren. On winter evenings she mesmerized the boys with stories of the first years on the prairie when green-eyed wolves trailed after her whenever she ventured out after dark and Indians turned up at her door begging for food and snakes slithered out of the sod house walls in the early spring, coiling themselves on the roof and basking in the sun. Grace and Ole had finally replaced their soddie with a frame house after the Snow Winter. It had taken them seven years.

  Kari was sixty-five years old in the winter of 1887-88, her daughter Grace, thirty-six. Grace and Ole had had seven children by then, though only six were alive since they had lost a daughter, Anna Marie, at fourteen months in October 1885. Peter and Charley, the two oldest, were now thirteen and ten, both handsome boys, Peter blond and thin with close-set eyes, a narrow face, and long, delicate fingers for a farm boy, Charley dark-haired and clean-featured and bigger-boned than his brother.

  For some reason the boys did not go to school on the morning of January 12. Forty years later, when she wrote her “Recollections from the Old Days” in Norwegian, Grace recorded everything about that day except why the boys were not in school. Possibly the English school had already closed for the season. Or possibly Grace and Ole kept the boys home to work on the farm since it was the first day in weeks that they could get the cattle out to the springs and bring in the hay they had cut and stacked in the fall. By midday both parents and the two boys had been working outside for hours. Working fast. For Grace and Ole had been in this country long enough now to know that such weather would not last long. Not in January.

  The Shattucks lived in Holt County, Nebraska, for two years after leaving Seward behind, but they never really got used to it. For one thing, the people were different—Irish most of them, with names like O’Hara and Murphy and O’Donnel. A wild-eyed dreamer named John J. O’Neill—a captain of an African-American infantry unit in the Civil War and later the ringleader of the doomed Fenian invasion of Canada—had planted an Irish Catholic colony here on the Protestant prairie and named the principal town for himself: O’Neill, Nebraska. Even Emmet, the little railroad town north of Etta Shattuck’s school, was named for an Irishman, bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland, an early martyr in the struggle against England. The soil was different in Holt County, too—or what passed for soil. Sandy and porous, it hardly held what little rain fell. The prairie grass was shorter than that in Seward, the farms farther apart and poor and wind-bitten. Brown most of the year except in a good spring—brown and crusted white most of the winter.

  Considering the thin soil and the sparse summer rain, it’s not surprising that Ben Shattuck failed to make a go of his Holt County farm. The second summer he didn’t even plant a crop. The only money the family could look forward to was the twenty-five dollars a month that Etta brought in from teaching school, and that wasn’t enough to support the seven of them. So before the cold weather set in, Ben and Sarah Shattuck packed up and moved with their younger children back to Seward.

  Etta stayed on alone to teach her country school, district 141, the Bright Hope school district. She boarded with a local family and walked to the schoolhouse every morning. Etta could stand outside the schoolhouse and count the features on one hand. A couple of sod houses and barns silhouetted against the low horizon; a rounded pile of dry prairie grass by each house; and way off to the east the bare limbs of willows and cottonwoods outlining the bed of the Elkhorn River. Between school and the river, the frozen grass and snow extended flat as paper; to the west the ground undulated just perceptibly as it rose to meet the Sand Hills. That was the Bright Hope
school district.

  Usually seven or eight scholars showed up, never more than ten, most with Irish names. The families were large, but only one child or two from each family attended school because that’s how many pairs of shoes they had. Their parents referred to it as the Maring school because a farmer named Maring owned the land it was on—owned the entire section, all 640 acres. Ten acres or so he had in corn, another ten in oats for the livestock, a few acres of sorghum so they could make syrup and have something sweet to put on their corn bread. The rest was unbroken grazing land. Dreams of growing grain, maybe even a garden of vegetables, died hard and slowly in these parts, and Maring always talked wistfully about putting in more corn. But in most years there just wasn’t enough rain. Hay was the big thing in Holt County. They cut it in July or August and loaded it in the train cars at Emmet—in fact the native hay was the reason the Elkhorn Valley Branch of the Chicago and North-Western Railway stopped at Emmet. Prairie coal or poor man’s coal, they called it, and in the absence of real coal or wood or buffalo bones, it kept them warm through the winter, though the farmers and their wives and children cursed the endless task of twisting it and feeding it, hank after hank, into the hay burners on top of their stoves.

  Ten days into January, Etta decided to close school. The weather had turned so frigid that the parents worried their children would get frostbite or chilblains or even freeze to death on their way to school. Families couldn’t afford to lose a child to injury or death: Out on the frontier, working children made the difference between surviving and going under. Keeping children safe was more important than educating them. So Etta let it be known that the term was over. The school would open again in spring, but Etta wouldn’t be there to teach it. She was going back to live with her family in Seward. She, too, had had enough of Holt County.

  Before she left, Etta had one piece of business to attend to. In order to get paid for her last month of teaching, she had to have an order signed by the school district superintendent, which she would then present to the district treasurer. It seems absurd that in a district with ten students she had to go through the formality of obtaining a signed paper attesting that she had fulfilled her contractual agreement to teach “in a faithful and efficient manner…to keep the school-house in good repair, to provide the necessary fuel and supplies,” etc.—but rules were rules, even out on the frozen prairie. Without a signed order, the treasurer could not pay her.

  So on the morning of January 12, 1888, Etta Shattuck set out on foot for the house of J. M. Parkins to get the order signed. The next day, Friday the thirteenth, with her wages in her pocketbook, she would walk to O’Neill and get on a train and go back to her parents in Seward.

  Etta, like her father, was a devout Methodist. Her conversion experience had come at the age of seventeen, just before the Shattucks left Seward, and her pastor at the Seward Methodist Episcopal church affirmed that her faith was “sublime.” When she was alone, Etta was in the habit of singing hymns and praying silently or even out loud when the spirit moved her, so it’s likely that she was lost in song or prayer as she walked out to J. M. Parkins’s house that warm, breezy morning.

  Later, when the newspapers scrounged for every crumb they could find, it was reported that the father of the family with whom Etta boarded shouted after her when the wind suddenly shifted and the dark cloud raced out of the northwest. The dark cloud that heralded the blizzard. He shouted for a long time, he said, hoping against hope that Etta would hear him and turn around. He shouted as loud as he could into the rising wind and the suddenly seething air, but he didn’t dare venture out after her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Disturbance

  Though the convulsions of the atmosphere are often complex and multifaceted, extreme cold has a fairly simple formula. Diminish the duration and intensity of sunlight, deflect winds carrying milder currents, level the surface of the land, wait long enough—and you’re sure to end up with a pool of dense, calm, frigid air. Just to be sure, add a layer of clean white snow so that what light does reach the ground is reflected back into the atmosphere before the earth can absorb its warmth. If, on top of all this, you have clear skies above you, temperatures will plunge spectacularly at night as the atmosphere’s infrared energy radiates off into space. Of course, there are other recipes for outbreaks of cold weather, including the movement of fronts and pressure systems, but this is the easiest and surest. A week or so of these conditions and the cold will be fierce, unyielding, and deadly.

  All of these conditions came into alignment over the Canadian interior during the first days of January 1888. Take out a map of Canada and run your finger along the 60th parallel—the line that runs from the Gulf of Alaska to Hudson Bay, neatly separating the tops of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba from the bottoms of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. This is one of the world’s perfect breeding grounds for cold. At this latitude on the day of the winter solstice, the sun remains above the horizon for a total of 5.6 hours. For the other 18.4 hours of the day it’s either pitch dark or an eerie purplish twilight, depending on the state of the atmosphere. But calling those 5.6 hours “sunshine” is a bit misleading. Even if it rises into a perfectly clear sky, the winter solstice sun over Fort Smith, Fort Resolution, Fort Simpson, Fort Liard, and Watson Lake provides essentially no solar energy. There is light, but because the rays are so slanted in winter this far north, very little solar radiation is absorbed at the surface to heat the ground. Fort Simpson, which sits on the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories hundreds of miles and two mountain ranges away from the moderating influence of the Pacific Ocean, has an average daily temperature of 11 degrees below zero in December and slightly over 16 below in January.

  But at the start of January 1888, it was considerably colder than the average. With high pressure bearing down on western Canada, surface winds were light. Nothing disturbed the vast shallow pool of cold air that settled over the snow-covered plains and lakes. The longer the atmosphere stagnated, the colder it became. On January 3 the temperature hit 35 below zero east of Fort Simpson. Gradually, over the next few days, the cold air mass expanded and flowed southward like a glacier of sluggish gas. By Sunday, January 8, the lobes of cold had pushed as far south as Medicine Hat in Alberta, about 70 miles from the Montana border, and as far east as Qu’Appelle, due north of the Montana/North Dakota line. And there it sat, a pool of dry, stagnant, and exceedingly cold air, too heavy to rise into the warmer air above it, too inert to mix with the milder air masses around it. Imagine a blob of invisible subzero mercury sealed and quivering over a quarter of a continent.

  Stable is the word meteorologists use for an air mass of this sort—but nothing in the atmosphere is stable forever. A minor shift in the flow miles above the frozen surface, if conditions were ripe, would be enough to shatter the cold’s fierce grip. But it wasn’t going to go quietly.

  Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end. Contrasting temperatures try to balance out to one uniform temperature, pressure differences strive for resolution, winds blow in a vain attempt to finally calm down global tensions. All of this is enormously complicated by the ceaseless rotation of the planet. Weather is the steam the atmosphere lets off as it heaves itself again and again into a more comfortable position. Weather keeps happening because the equilibrium of the atmosphere keeps getting messed up.

  It doesn’t help that the planet itself is irregular, with crumpled solid chunks of land randomly interrupting the smooth liquid surface of the oceans. Equilibrium doesn’t stand a chance against all these complex interacting variables. There’s so much going on out there—and up there—that the very striving for equilibrium is erratic, chaotic. There are patterns, of course, repetitions and cycles, long stretches of monotony and eerie symmetries, but weather, by its very nature, lacks a fixed overall structure. It’s a stream that perpetually remakes the channel of its flow.


  Shortly after Christmas 1887, a ripple developed in the flow about six miles above the surface that would in time dislodge the frigid air massing over interior Canada. Today, accustomed as we are to the patter of televised weather forecasts, it’s easy to reduce the violent and deadly blizzard that resulted from this disturbance to a canned meteorological scenario—the low dropping down from Canada and tracking south and east across the Upper Midwest before swinging to the north, the blast of wind and snow that accompanied the passage of the cold front, the outbreak of arctic air that surged as far south as Texas. But in a way this description only trivializes what was really happening in the air and on the ground. A storm, any storm, involves the entire atmosphere. Meteorologists refer to the atmosphere as a “continuous fluid” or, in the words of chaos theorist Edward N. Lorenz, a “thermally driven rotating fluid system,” and the phrases are apt. In weather everything connects.

  Connects first of all to the sun. The uneven distribution of the sun’s radiation is what causes temperature differences in the first place. As areas of higher and lower pressure develop in response to these temperature differences, winds begin to kick up, blowing from high pressure to low pressure (an extreme example of this is a pressurized container like a can of hair spray: Think of how the small parcel of high-pressure air rushes out into the lower-pressure air around it when the valve is released). The ripple that shoved the cold air out of Canada was born of the interaction between air masses of contrasting temperature and pressure, and so, in a larger sense, was the upper-level flow of air that swept up the ripple and carried it down the spine of the continent. That upper-level flow, commonly known as the polar jet, circles the globe from west to east at altitudes of between six and nine miles. The jet stream is a natural boundary marker, an atmospheric river flowing between the region of warm subtropical air to the south and cold polar air to the north. The sharper the temperature contrast between those two regions, the faster the river flows. In winter, the course of the river drops south and its current stiffens—winter speeds of 75 mph are common, though it has been clocked at 200 mph. By January the vigorous winter jet is down around the 50th parallel—right over America’s northern tier of states.