The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Miss Badger and the man talked for a few minutes and the two of them looked the children over. All of the pupils but two—Lena and an older boy—lived south of the school, as did Miss Badger herself. The farmer promised that he’d see all of them home safely. He had brought blankets for the smaller children. It would be madness to spend the night in the classroom with no food. Even with the coal fire in the small stove, the drafty frame building was getting colder by the minute.

  But what about Lena? Miss Badger knew the German girl would never agree to accompany her to her boarding place or spend the night with one of the other children. Lena was stubborn. She would insist on getting back to the Woebbeckes. But how could Miss Badger send one girl out alone in the storm?

  The older boy who lived near the Woebbeckes came to her rescue. “I can see to her,” he said, pointing to Lena.

  And so it was settled. Miss Badger and the farmer would take all the children who lived south of the school. Lena and the older boy would go together the other way. The farmer was urging Miss Badger to get moving before the storm became worse. There really wasn’t time to think through the plan.

  The schoolhouse was set back just a few feet from the dirt road that ran along the section line and that’s where the two groups parted. Miss Badger was the last to disappear, her dark skirt wrapped around her legs, her body tilted back at a strange angle from her heels so that the wind didn’t blow her over onto her face.

  As soon as Lena and the boy were left alone they began to argue—or rather the boy argued and Lena pulled her thin cloak around her shoulders and looked at the ground. The wind was full in their faces on this exposed hillside. In the few minutes they stood there on the road Lena felt the floury snow work its way down her collar and up the cuffs of her sleeves. The air was moving so fast and was so dense with crystals she could hardly breathe. The boy screamed over the wind that he was taking the road—and he pointed down the hill. Lena stood her ground and shook her head. She would cut across the stubble field behind the school and take the ravine as she always did. The boy hollered and pointed again. And then he became exasperated and gave up. She could suit herself. He started down the hill on the straight road and instantly vanished. Within an hour he was safe at home.

  Being alone did not make anything worse for Lena—at first. She knew the way. She didn’t need the boy. She tightened her hands around the lunch pail and the reader that the Woebbeckes had given her and made her promise never to lose or leave at school, and she walked down the path she always took home. She could feel the ground descending beneath her feet, but with the snow frozen to her eyelashes she couldn’t see anything. Lena was about halfway home when she stopped. She knew instinctively that she had wandered off the usual path.

  Lost. The fact is usually irrevocable long before the brain produces the word. Lena was lost. She was seized by that rising panic when the chest goes hollow and the heart races in the ears and the body slicks itself in sweat. But her stolid temperament served her well. Lena was not flighty or hysterical. Ever since her father died she had looked after herself. Lena kept her wits about her. With her freezing fists still wrapped around the lunch pail and reader, she sensibly turned around and attempted to retrace her steps. Back to the school. Hadn’t Miss Badger said there was plenty of coal?

  Lena made it to within a hundred yards of the district 71 schoolhouse and then her strength gave out. She collapsed in a furrow of the stubble field adjoining the school. Her last conscious act was to cover herself with her cloak.

  Every object prominent enough to catch the wind already had a drift shadowing its lee. Haystacks, fence posts, houses, barns. When she fell on the side of the hill below the schoolhouse, Lena became one of those objects.

  Signal Corps observations taken simultaneously at 2 P.M. Central time:

  Fort Assinniboine, Montana: Pressure 27.49 and rising; temperature 22 below zero, north wind at 9 miles per hour.

  North Platte, Nebraska: Pressure 26.79; temperature 2 below zero (a fall of thirty degrees in the past eight hours); north wind 40 miles per hour.

  Huron, Dakota Territory: Pressure 28.29 and rising; temperature two below zero (a fall of twenty-one degrees in the past eight hours); northwest wind 44 miles per hour.

  Yankton, Dakota Territory: Pressure 28.16 and falling; temperature eighteen above zero; northwest wind 18 miles an hour.

  Omaha: Pressure 28.31 and falling; temperature 27 degrees above zero; southeast wind 9 miles per hour.

  The cold front was now so well defined that it looked like a giant comma dropping down from the northwest. In the course of the day the upper part of the comma had elongated and assumed a nearly vertical north-south orientation so that by 2 P.M. Central time, when the observers checked their thermometers and barometers and anemometers, the front sliced a clean line down the Minnesota-South Dakota border and then bent slightly southwest to lop the eastern triangle of Nebraska off from the rest of the state. Huron was already behind the front; Omaha would fall within the hour; Saint Paul not until after sunset.

  At the two o’clock observations the Rollag family farms in the extreme southwestern corner of Minnesota and just over the border in southern Dakota exactly straddled the leading edge of the front. Austin Rollag, his mother, Kari, Ann, his wife of five years, and their small children lived on the Dakota side. His sister, Gro, now known as Grace, and her husband, Ole Rollag, lived with their six children just east of the Minnesota state line in Beaver Creek. The storm hit the two farms within a matter of minutes, Austin’s place first, then Ole’s.

  Grace Rollag thanked God that at last she had a frame house after enduring the soddie for seven years. And a proper barn for the animals. It would have been impossible to live much longer in the sod hut with six children. Six American children, all born in Minnesota. Peter or Peder, Charley or Carl—it didn’t matter what they called themselves, they were Norwegian underneath. And of course the older they got, the more Norwegian they looked—Peter now thirteen and Charley ten, with their clear faces and high brows.

  Grace was alone at home with her four younger children—Nels, Clara, Susan, and Anna Marie—when the house went dark and the wind began to roar so loudly she couldn’t hear the children’s voices. Ole and the two older boys were outside working—Peter watering the cattle at a spring about two hundred yards north of the house, Ole and Charley bringing back a load of hay from a pasture in the bottomland about a mile southeast of the house. Grace had been on the prairie long enough to know what that roaring meant. She didn’t pause to think. In a matter of seconds she had pulled on a pair of spare boots, wrapped herself in a cloak and scarf, and told Nels, who was nine, that he must look after the baby. Her oldest son, Peter, was in trouble. Even with the wind at his back, Peter at thirteen was too small and too young to drive the cattle from the spring to the barn and get them all under shelter by himself. She must go out to find Peter and help him. As for Charley, he had his father to look after him. Ole would get the boy to safety—with God’s help. Grace must see to Peter.

  Before she opened the door and put her head down in the wind, Grace paused to collect her thoughts. She knew that once she got outside it would be impossible to see or to think and that even the smallest error in judgment could be fatal—for her, for her son. House, barn, spring: Grace fixed a picture in her mind of the layout of their property and then she set out to find her son.

  Ole and Charley had gotten the wagon loaded up with hay and were about half a mile from home when the storm overtook them. The wind came up so fast that it knocked the wagon over and spooked the horses. Ole shouted to the boy that they must unhitch the horses and get them home. The hay could wait. They would come back for the load after the storm. The thing to do was calm the horses down and find shelter.

  Ole Rollag was a big, burly, bearded man who was accustomed to imposing his will on the world around him by brute force—a true pioneer—so he figured on muscling his way through the storm. He’d grab one horse, the boy would take the
other. Ten was plenty old enough to lend a hand.

  The problem was that they’d been working southeast of the house. To get back they would have to walk straight into the wind. Even if Ole and Charley could have staggered that distance, the horses refused. Try as they might, they could not get the horses to walk with their faces into the wind. Buffalo will stand stock-still in a blizzard with their heads down and their thick hides going gray with snow and wait for the wind to blow itself out, but horses and cows tend to drift where the wind takes them, sometimes for miles, before they die of exhaustion or freeze to death or break their legs in gullies. Ole and Charley fought the horses for all they were worth, but the best they could do was to turn them northeast. Ole was well aware that this wouldn’t get them home—but it was better than doing nothing or losing the horses altogether.

  Austin and his wife, Ann, were also caught outside in the blizzard. Eager to use every minute of the good weather that morning, they had left the children at home in the care of Austin’s mother, Kari, and gone out to work in the barn. Since the morning was mild, they had turned their animals—a few horses, a foal, and some cows—into the pasture near the barn, while the two of them worked close by. “After noon, about 3:30, we heard a hideous roar in the air,” remembered Austin. “At first we thought that it was the Omaha train which had been blocked and was trying to open the track.” When he looked up at the sky, Austin saw the snow descend “as if it had slid out of a sack. A hurricane-like wind blew, so that the snow drifted high in the air, and it became terribly cold. Within a few minutes it was as dark as a cellar, and one could not see one’s hand in front of one’s face.”

  Like almost every farmer caught out that day, Austin and Ann’s first thought was the safety of their animals. Never mind that they had young children and an aged parent at home—they had to get the animals under shelter. The stock had not strayed far from the barn so it was relatively easy to drive them in. All except for a foal, which had gotten separated from the other horses. There was no way a horse that young could survive a prairie blizzard. Austin and Ann wouldn’t leave the farmyard until they had found the foal.

  Old-timers on the prairie will tell you that a lull often follows the first blast of a blizzard, a short pause before the storm really lets loose, and meteorologists confirm this observation. It’s like that sharp intake of breath between a baby’s initial scream and a full-fledged tantrum. The lull was what cleared the air enough for the younger Graber boys and Mr. Cotton to see the row of saplings and find their way to the farmhouse. This same lull saved the life of the Rollags’ foal—and probably their own. In that brief moment of calm Austin and Ann heard the foal whinny. They heard him and then they saw him. Now all the animals were safe.

  Only after the foal was shut up in the barn with the rest of the animals did it occur to Austin and Ann that they couldn’t see their house. Pioneer families always argued about where to put the barn: too close to the house and you’d get flies and the odor of the animals all summer; too far and you’d waste time walking back and forth and risk your life in storms like this one. Austin and Ann now realized that they had erred on the side of too far.

  It was Austin’s mother, Kari, who saved them. When she heard the storm come up, Kari somehow found an old cowbell inside the house and she grabbed it and stood just inside the door and rang it into the wind with everything she had. Austin and Ann heard the faint clangs over the keening of the wind and followed it home like a beacon.

  Grace Rollag may not have been the best housekeeper in Minnesota—she was too fond of reading to stay on top of every little chore—but she knew how to handle herself when life got rough. She was not one to get lost in a blizzard.

  Grace drew up her shawl as she stepped out of her house, bowed her head into the wind, and marched straight ahead to where she reckoned the barn was hidden behind the blowing snow. Fifteen years of farmwork and childbearing had thickened Grace’s body and coarsened her hands. The waist she was so proud of in the photograph taken on her wedding day in April 1873 was long gone and she’d never again put on that black dress with the white lace collar. Never mind. A willowy waist would not help her now.

  Grace reached the barn with no problem. By sheer luck Peter had found his way there just moments before. As Grace had predicted, he’d gotten the cattle up from the spring, but now he was having a hard time. It was the door to the barn—the snow had already drifted so high that Peter couldn’t get it open. Grace tried her best, but it was hopeless. Even if they shoveled it out fast enough to open it, they’d never get the door shut again. They’d have to drive the cattle around back by the horses’ stable and get them into the barn that way. The door here was sheltered from the wind, but it was narrow and gave on a tight passage between stalls—just wide enough for a single cow. Cows were always balky about entering tight spots, but there was no other choice.

  Somehow, with sticks and shouts and desperate brute force, Grace and her son forced the cows into the door to the horse stable and led them one by one down the passage through the stable and into the barn. Every last one was safe. Even in the cold Grace and Peter were sweating by the time they got the job done.

  Luck was also with Ole and Charley that afternoon. Blinded by the snow and staggering at the mercy of the wind, they might have ended up anywhere. By dead chance the wind deposited them at the neighboring farm, about a mile to the east. At first Ole couldn’t believe it since he was convinced they had been traveling northeast. But the northwest wind was so powerful that they had barely gone north at all.

  Once he had gotten out of his frozen clothes and thawed out enough to see straight, Ole was shocked by the condition of Charley’s face. The fair skin of the boy’s cheeks and forehead, which usually turned blotchy red in the cold, was cheesy white with frostbite. Ole knew the boy would also feel worse as he thawed.

  The neighbor’s wife took Charley in hand. She rubbed the frozen skin with snow so it would thaw gradually. She’d see that there would be no scars.

  When the boy was settled and a bit of color returned to his face, Ole made up his mind. Grace would be frantic if he didn’t get home that night—so frantic she might go out looking for them. She might be out looking now. It was a mile to home—a mile due west, not directly into the wind, but bad enough. No matter. He wouldn’t be wrestling with the horses—they could stay in the neighbors’ barn until the storm was over. And there was no question of taking Charley back out again. He would spend the night here. So Ole would be walking unencumbered. It would be easier this way. He would walk the mile to his home and find Grace and the other children. Before it got any darker, Ole set out by himself into the storm once more.

  The blizzard reached Lincoln, Nebraska’s capital, at 3 P.M. Snow had been falling on the city since the early morning, a dreamy Christmas kind of snow with large wet flakes coming straight down through the white windless air. Then, at three o’clock, the sky suddenly blackened and the wind veered from south to north. Four minutes later, it was impossible to see even the outlines of buildings across the street. All the city streetcars were immediately taken in and teamsters rushed to haul drays and wagons to cover. A few last straggling hackneys battled the rapidly mounting drifts. Pedestrians ran for their lives.

  At Lincoln’s Capital Hotel the assembled committeemen of the Nebraska Press Association descended anxiously on the front desk. Their convention was scheduled to convene at the hotel at eight o’clock that night, though few of the members had arrived. Association president Bushnell had reason to believe that some 125 esteemed Nebraska newsmen were either en route from other parts of the state or had yet to set out. Among the former was the association’s secretary, MacMurphy, who was at that very moment sitting on a stalled Lincoln-bound train enshrouded in sheets of snow. Bushnell inquired of the desk clerk whether he had any knowledge of when MacMurphy and his fellow Nebraska editors and reporters were likely to arrive at the Lincoln train station. Indeed he did. The clerk had it on the best authority that not a whee
l was turning on any of the ten railroads that served the capital. Those unfortunate enough to be traveling were therefore stranded without hope. Those who had not yet set out would have to wait for the storm to abate, which at the moment it showed not the slightest indication of doing.

  Ten minutes after it rolled over Lincoln, the storm was upon Crete, nineteen miles to the southwest. Signal Corps observer Private C. D. Burnley noted in the station journal that after the wind shifted “the temperature fell 18 degrees in less than three minutes. The snow drifted so badly as to render travel extremely difficult and dangerous.”

  An hour later the blast had reached Omaha. At the Signal Service station in the Custom House building at the corner of Dodger and First, Sergeant Chappel clocked the wind shift at 4:17 P.M. Central time. By 5:30 P.M. all streetcars in the city ceased to run because it was impossible to keep the tracks clear of drifts. No trains left Omaha that day.

  The storm overtook a large party of local citizens who were out celebrating the completion of a new bridge over the Missouri River between Omaha and Council Bluffs on the Iowa side. Some four hundred sleighs and cutters had paraded down Omaha’s Douglas Street earlier in the day and crossed to Iowa—not on the new bridge, but on the partially frozen river. The citizens’plan was to dine and dance in Council Bluffs, and then return to Omaha by starlight.

  The bridge was narrow. There were gaping holes in the ice on the river. There was no safe way to cross back to Omaha. As the blizzard raged, an urgent telegram arrived at the office of the Omaha Republican from a reporter who was with the group in Council Bluffs: “Turn the whole force loose on possible loss on the river.”