The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  While the slip of tissue paper with Lieutenant Woodruff ’s indications for January 12, 1888, sat on a countertop at the Saint Paul Western Union at 113 East Fourth Street waiting to be translated into Morse code and sent out along the wires to newspapers and Signal Corps offices, one of these ferocious cold fronts was dropping southeast through Montana at around 45 miles an hour. With the advance of the cold front, all of the elements of the storm suddenly began to feed off each other, bloating up hugely with every bite. As the contrasting air masses slammed together, they caused the upper-level winds to strengthen, which served to strengthen the low. As the low deepened, the surface winds increased, causing the temperature differences between the air masses to spike. The greater the temperature difference, the faster the low deepened. The deeper the low, the stronger the front. It was a self-reinforcing and accelerating cycle.

  When a storm becomes organized gradually, high wispy cirrus clouds usually appear a day or two ahead of the cold front, followed by a solid low bank of stratus cloud stealing across the sky. But by the first hours of January 12, this storm was spinning up so quickly that there was no time for an atmospheric herald. The cold front was now so strong and so well defined that it was like a curtain of ice separating two radically different climates, a curtain that was hurtling in two directions simultaneously—down from the sky and horizontally across the surface of the earth. At the same time that the curtain swept down from the north, a warm spongy mass of air was ascending from the opposite direction. The intensifying low forced the two air masses to converge with ever increasing speeds. When they collided, the atmosphere erupted.

  The warm air slid up and over the curtain, rising about three feet every second. As soon as it hit an altitude of about 5,000 to 7,000 feet, the air instantly surrendered its vapor into infinitesimal droplets of supercooled water—liquid specks colder than freezing but prevented from turning to ice by the surface tension of their “skin.” As many as a billion cloud droplets swarmed around every cubic meter inside the ballooning clouds. Even smaller particles of airborne debris roiled alongside the cloud droplets—pollen, dust, salt crystals, shredded spiderwebs—and these particles in their billions served as the nuclei around which the supercooled cloud droplets coalesced and turned to ice. The instant the cloud droplets froze, they began to grow exponentially by fixing other droplets onto their crystalline facets.

  Behind the front, where the air was much colder, ice production inside the clouds happened at significantly lower altitudes, as low as 3,000 feet, and the condensing vapor spat out a different kind of crystal. It was too cold to form the lacy star-patterned crystals known as dendrites—the pretty snowflakes of Christmas cards. Too cold for the little pellets of graupel that accrete as ice crystals glue on layer after layer of supercooled droplets. Instead, what was being manufactured inside these frigid clouds was a myriad of nearly microscopic hexagonal plates and hollow columns and needles—hard slick-surfaced crystals that bounced off each other as they swirled around.

  The snow that fell when these plates and columns grew heavy enough was hard as rock and fine as dust. Actually “fell” gives the wrong idea. The plates and needles and columns billowed out of the bases of the clouds in huge streaming horizontal veils, as if the bank of icy clouds had descended to earth and burst apart in the gale. The newly manufactured snow crystals, smashed and ground into infinitesimal fragments within seconds of their creation, mixed with older crystals that had settled at the surface after previous storms. In the gale the crystals of different vintages became indistinguishable.

  New snow is not necessary to boost a winter storm into the category of blizzard. All that’s required is wind of at least 35 miles an hour, airborne crystals, and temperatures of 20 degrees or colder (the National Weather Service recently dropped the temperature requirement). The January 12 storm qualified easily.

  The disturbance rippled southeast on precisely the path Woodruff had expected, the path taken by 54.14 percent of the cold waves he had studied. By midnight, the leading edge of cold air had reached Poplar River in northeastern Montana. By 2 A.M., it had engulfed Medora in western Dakota, where Teddy Roosevelt had lost so many cattle to blizzards the previous winter. By 4 A.M., January 12, the cold front was poised just west of Bismarck.

  At six o’clock in the morning Central time, when the telegrams bearing Lieutenant Woodruff ’s midnight indications began to arrive on the desks of weather observers and newspaper editors, the temperature at North Platte, Nebraska, stood at 28, fully 30 degrees warmer than the previous day; while in Helena, 670 miles to the northwest, observer E. J. Hobbs, who had stayed up all night, noted that the mercury had fallen 49.5 degrees in the past four and a half hours, from 40.5 above to 9 below zero. Omaha was 23 above and so was Yankton in southern Dakota. The report from Huron, northwest of Yankton, was late—but eventually this bit of data got entered on the map: 19 above at 6 A.M. Central time, nearly 40 degrees warmer than the previous day.

  More fuel for the approaching storm.

  Of course, nobody in Nebraska or Dakota saw it that way. The tragedy of that day was that the fuel came disguised as welcome relief from the weeks of bitter cold, as a spell of softness and relative ease in lives that had too little of either, as an invitation to get outside and work or walk or simply breathe before the weather closed in again.

  In the event, word reached the settlements of southern Dakota not from the Signal Office, but from telegrams sent over the railroad lines. In Codington County in eastern Dakota, just two hundred miles west of Saint Paul, a station agent named Brown received a telegram from Bismarck around 8 A.M. reporting “rapidly falling temperatures and an arctic gale which was steadily increasing in violence.” There was a schoolhouse near his station, and when Brown saw the children walking past he rushed out at them and stood in the middle of the crossing. He shouted at the kids that “the worst blizzard of the season would be there in two hours.” Many children went back home. All of those who continued on to school regretted it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Explosion

  An hour after station agent Brown received the telegram from Bismarck warning of the storm, Lieutenant Woodruff arrived at his office in downtown Saint Paul. Sergeant Lyons reported smartly that it was the warmest morning of the week—2 below at the 6 A.M. observation, fully 23 degrees warmer than the day before. Woodruff and McAdie got to work immediately on the morning indications. They had an hour and a half to go through the stacks of telegrams from the outlying stations, draw the five maps, prepare the cyclostyle—the same routine as the day before, the same as the day after.

  Woodruff was gratified to see that his indications from the previous night had “verified,” particularly in the northwest. Temperatures had indeed risen in advance of the low, just as he anticipated. And behind the low, up in Montana, cold air was spilling out of Canada—2 below zero at Fort Assinniboine with winds blowing out of the north at 28 miles an hour. Eight below and snowing in Helena.

  There was no question now in Woodruff ’s mind: a cold wave warning was warranted for Dakota and for Nebraska later in the day. It would blow hard and the snow would drift heavily and then the temperature would fall, in a long arc sweeping from northwest to southeast, the classic path for an advancing cold wave. By nightfall, western Dakota would be scoured by arctic winds. Woodruff knew what it felt like when that blade of cold penetrated. He had not forgotten his winters at Fort Keogh.

  Woodruff took a fresh sheet of tissue paper and quickly covered it with black ink:

  Signal Office War Department

  Saint Paul Minnesota

  January 12, 1888, 10:30 AM

  Indications for 24 hours commencing at 3 PM today:

  For Saint Paul, Minneapolis and vicinity: warmer weather with snow; fresh easterly winds.

  For Minnesota: snow warmer followed in northern part by colder fresh to high variable winds becoming northerly

  For Dakota: Snow warmer followed by colder with a cold wave, fresh to high n
ortherly winds

  A cold wave is indicated for Dakota and Nebraska tonight and tomorrow; the snow will drift heavily today and tomorrow in Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  The words cold wave in the indications triggered a set of special procedures. The instructions were clear and exact in the military way. Newspapers and the Associated Press wire service received the daily indications as a matter of course, but now extra telegrams must go out to the Signal Service stations in Minnesota, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Chicago, some twenty-two stations in all, as well as to the principal railroads serving the region. Professor William Payne had also arranged with Woodruff to have cold wave telegrams sent to the sixty “flag stations” that he had set up through his Minnesota State Weather Service; although, as Payne noted sourly, “the service as rendered by the Western Union Telegraph Company, in many instances is very poor,” with the result that his volunteer flag displaymen frequently did not receive Woodruff ’s indications or received them late.

  In any case, when and if the messages arrived, displaymen at the flag stations and observers at the Signal Corps observation stations were immediately to hoist the black and white cold wave flags—six-by-eight-foot white rectangular sheets with a two-foot black square centered in the middle—and keep them flying until Woodruff instructed them to take them down.

  That was the procedure and on January 12 it worked as well as it was expected to. The forecast was substantially correct. The messages were coded and transmitted and duly received. The orders were obeyed. Word went out—the official word as sanctioned by the Signal Office of the War Department.

  But by the time the procedure went into effect, it was too late to matter.

  In the central Dakota boom town of Huron on the frozen James River, Signal Corps observer Sergeant Samuel W. Glenn was violently ill that morning—so ill that he was late getting the 7 A.M. observations off to Woodruff in Saint Paul and Greely in Washington. This was a most unusual occurrence. Sergeant Glenn was not one of those slipshod, shady observers who pawned the barometer to pay off poker debts or shook down local businessmen for cash in exchange for weather data. Far from it. For Glenn monitoring the weather was both a career and a mission, and rare was the occasion when he failed to perform his duty as the observer in charge of the Huron Signal Corps station punctually and precisely.

  To the extent that a town as young and raw as Huron could have institutions, Sergeant Glenn was one of them. It was he who inaugurated the downtown office on Third Street near the opera house six and a half years before, taking his first observation at 5:35 A.M. on July 1, 1881, when the town, in the words of one settler, was nothing but “long lines of weather beaten square-fronted stores, tar-paper covered shacks with one way roofs, sod houses, tents, wagon camps, saloons galore, no churches or schools, and streets hub deep in mud most of the time.” Since the Signal Corps building was then still under construction, Sergeant Glenn had to climb a ladder to get up to his office. Now, some 118,500 observations later, Glenn was still at it—five observations a day (the three standard Signal Corps readings, plus two more for local records) taken with his four thermometers, two barometers, one anemometer with a self-registering attachment, one anemoscope, rain gauge, telescope, and field glass. Sergeant Glenn kept his arsenal of instruments in perfect order, wrote meticulously and faithfully in the station’s journal of any unusual local meteorological phenomena, and received the highest praise from the Corps inspectors dispatched each year from Washington. In fact, Lieutenant John C. Walshe had inspected the Huron station on November 26 and 27, shortly before meeting with Woodruff at the Indications Office in Saint Paul, and pronounced it exemplary.

  Glenn’s lapse on the morning of January 12 actually had less to do with his illness than the cure. As he noted in the station journal, he been sick on and off since January 3 with an undisclosed ailment and had been receiving “medical advice and medicine from Dr. Alford.” Before dawn on January 12, Glenn had unwisely taken too much of Dr. Alford’s medicine on an empty stomach—alcohol may well have been the primary ingredient—and the reaction was swift and terrible. While Glenn languished in bed, somebody, presumably the station assistant, dragged to the office at 6 A.M. Central time to check the thermometers and rain gauge outdoors and the barometers and anemometer register mounted on the station wall. The observations, though sent late, do exist, and Glenn was far too upstanding an observer to have fabricated them. Atmospheric pressure 28.21 inches of mercury and falling; temperature 19 degrees; wind out of the south at 24 miles an hour. Though Glenn was an hour late getting the telegrams off, not a single reading was missing. (He later supplied headquarters with a certificate signed by Dr. Alford attesting to his illness.)

  By midmorning, the effects of Glenn’s medicine had worn off sufficiently for him to climb out on the roof of the Huron station. Having noted the rapid fall in the barometric pressure, Glenn concluded that the region was in for a gale. Before it hit he wanted to inspect the anemometer to make sure the wires connecting it to the register inside were in good order. He also, frankly, wanted to see the storm blow in, always a spectacle out on the prairie. And so at 11:42 A.M. Central time Sergeant Glenn went out on the roof to have a look around.

  Sixty seconds later, he came within a whisker of getting blown off.

  Glenn must have had his pocket watch open in his hand because he recorded to the minute in the station’s journal what occurred in the atmosphere in the moments that followed: “The air, for about one (1) minute, was perfectly calm, and voices and noises on the street below appeared as though emanating from great depths. A peculiar ‘hush’ prevailed over everything. In the next minute the sky was completely overcast by a heavy black cloud, which had in a few minutes previously hung suspended along the western and northwestern horizon, and the wind veered to the west (by the southwest quadrant) with such violence as to render the observer’s position very unsafe. The air was immediately filled with snow as fine as sifted flour. The wind veered to the northeast, then backed to the northwest, in a gale which in three minutes attained a velocity of forty (40) miles per hour. In five minutes after the wind changed the outlines of objects fifteen (15) feet away were not discernible.”

  The Signal Office in Washington supplied observers like Sergeant Glenn with thick volumes of lined blank pages in which to keep the station journals. Months of the year and days of the month were preprinted on the quarto pages, three days per page with about three inches of blank space for each day. Sergeant Glenn wrote “disastrous storm” in the margin next to the three inches allotted to January 12, 1888, filled the blank space to overflowing, and then, at his own initiative, pasted into the journal nine additional handwritten pages. It is an invaluable account of the violence that tore the atmosphere over Huron starting at 11:42 A.M. that day and the suffering that living creatures on the ground endured for weeks afterward.

  Sergeant Glenn had his two barometers to alert him that something powerful was coming his way. But out on the prairie and in the one-room country schoolhouses and along the flimsy, flammable main streets of the quick-built railroad towns, the blizzard took people utterly by surprise.

  To those standing outside, it looked like the northwest corner of the sky was suddenly filling and bulging and ripping open. In account after account there runs the same thread, often the same words: There had never been anything like it. Settlers who had lived through the blizzards of 1873 and the recurring storms of the Snow Winter of 1880-81 and the vicious blizzards that had killed so many cattle just the previous winter—none of them had ever seen a storm come up so quickly or burst so violently.

  “My brother and I were out snowballing on a bank,” remembered Allie Green, a fifteen-year-old boy in Clark County in eastern Dakota Territory. “We could see the blizzard coming across Spirit Lake. It was just as still as could be. We saw it cut off the trees like it was a white roll coming. It hit with a 60 mile an hour wind. It had snowed the night before about two or three inches. It
just sucked up that snow into the air and nearly smothered you.”

  It was like a “gray wall,” said H. G. Purcell, a schoolboy in neighboring Codington County, who stood in awe on a ball field at the edge of town as the storm bore down from the northwest.

  “We were all out playing in our shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens,” remembered a South Dakota schoolboy. “Suddenly we looked up and saw something coming rolling toward us with great fury from the northwest, and making a loud noise. It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver, and then all tied together with great silvery ropes. The broad front of these cotton bales looked to be about twenty-five feet high; above them it was perfectly clear. The phenomenon was so unusual that it scared us children, and several of us ran into the schoolhouse and screamed to the teacher to come out quickly and see what was happening.” When the storm reached the schoolhouse a few moments later, it hit “with such force that it nearly moved it off its cobble-stone foundation. And the roar of the wind was indescribable.”

  “The sky was inky,” wrote a teacher at the Rosebud Indian Agency in Dakota, just north of the Nebraska line. “Lilia [another teacher] ventured a few yards out of the front door at its beginning, and was near not getting back. The wind struck her with such violence as to bring her head down to her knees, and take away her breath. She said she was near falling on her face, and she knew that if she fell she would not get up again.”

  Norris E. Williams, a schoolteacher in Jerauld County, west of Sioux Falls, was standing in front of his schoolhouse with a group of students during the late-morning recess when the storm descended: “I was just saying that I ought to dismiss school and go to Woonsocket for coal when a sudden whiff of cold air caused us all to turn and look toward the north, where we saw what appeared to be a huge cloud rolling over and over along the ground, blotting out the view of the nearby hills and covering everything in that direction as with a blanket. There was scarcely time to exclaim at the unusual appearance when the cloud struck us with awful violence and in an instant the warm and quiet day was changed into a howling pandemonium of ice and snow.”