The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Farther east, in Des Moines, a parade was forming to honor the inauguration of Iowa’s governor, William Larrabee, just elected to his second term. Company B, Second Regiment of Davenport, was supposed to escort the Governor’s Guards from Kirkwood House to the State Capitol—but the troops were delayed in the storm and the procession left without them. The governor’s carriage rolled slowly through the drifting snow with a straggling accompaniment of mounted officers from the Third Regiment. There were many empty seats in the Capitol rotunda as the Republican Governor Larrabee launched into a lengthy address attacking the railroads for encroaching on the rights of the people and arguing for more stringent regulation of large corporations.

  In the middle of January, the sun sets a few minutes after five o’clock over the prairie states. Professor William Payne, at his observatory on the campus of Carleton College, would have known precisely how many minutes and seconds after five o’clock and would have seen to it that anyone who was curious knew the exact instant of sunset as well. Not that the official time really mattered on the afternoon of January 12. It was the advancing storm, not the sun, that controlled the intensity and duration of light that day. The blizzard created its own sunset, which moved southeast down the prairie at 60 to 70 miles an hour.

  Sergeant Glenn reported that the storm hit Huron a few minutes before noon, so Wessington Springs, which is twenty-six miles to the southwest of Huron as the crow flies, must have gone dark just a few minutes later. From noon until 4 P.M., May Hunt did her best to carry on in the roaring twilight with the seven students who had come to the country school she taught near Wessington Springs. Four o’clock was when the fuel ran out and May Hunt and the seven children were suddenly faced with the choice, in Sergeant Glenn’s words, “of freezing where they were or in the attempt to find other shelter, more comfortable.”

  May Hunt chose to go. Just 140 yards west of the school, on the other side of a gully, there was a farmhouse belonging to the Hinner family. The children in school that day—Fred and Charles Weeks, the three older children of the Reverend S. F. Huntley and his wife, Abi, and Frank and Addie Knieriem—all lived at least three-quarters of a mile away. The Hinner place looked like the best option.

  The gully was what worried May. It was five feet or so to the bottom and the sides were steep. There was a culvert thrown across it that served as a bridge, but it might be hard to find in the storm. If they missed the culvert bridge the children would be in danger of falling in the gully—and in drifting snow the smaller ones would have trouble getting out again. May counted herself lucky that Fred Weeks had come to school that day. At eighteen, Fred was by far her oldest pupil, a big shy dark-haired farm boy with a round face and large hands. When May told him about her plan of taking the children over to the Hinner place, Fred volunteered to go scouting. If he could find the bridge, he’d clear a path and then come back for the others.

  Fred was gone for half an hour while the rest of them stood around the dying fire. When he finally came back the younger children cheered. He told them that he had walked back and forth between the school and the bridge not once but twice. They’d be all right following him. Once he got them all across the bridge, they could pick up the path and take it to the Hinner house.

  It was after 4:30 by the time all seven of May Hunt’s students were ready to go. Addie Knieriem, one of the younger girls, was wearing thin, dainty little shoes, so Miss Hunt wound scarves around each shoe to keep her feet from freezing. More time was lost while Miss Hunt arranged her hat and veil. Fred went first, and when they got outside they all joined hands behind him in a human chain. Even in those few minutes the blizzard had gotten worse. The track that Fred had kicked into the snow was completely drifted over. There was no sign of the bridge that he had just crossed twice.

  One hundred forty yards separated the Knieriem school, as it was called, from the closest house—nearly half again as long as a football field. On a clear day all but the youngest of the children could have walked it in ten minutes. But in the storm, blinded and deafened and barely able to breathe, the children quickly came to grief.

  It was the gully that brought on panic. Stepping out where he hoped the culvert bridge would meet his shoe, Fred fell through the snow that had drifted into the gully and dragged the others down with him. They toppled over one after another like bowling pins. It would have been funny—certainly the children would have thought so—if they weren’t so frightened. As they plunged, the teacher’s veil tore away from her hat. She became aware that Addie Knieriem was in trouble. The scarves had come off Addie’s shoes as the girl floundered up the far side of the gully. More precious time and body warmth were lost fussing with the teacher’s veil and the child’s shoes.

  Somehow they all got up out of the gully and reassembled. Eight of them counting May Hunt. Again Fred went first. Since they had missed the bridge it was hopeless to try to find the path. But if the wind relented even for thirty seconds maybe they could make out the Hinner house. They knew it sat on a rise just above the gully—a stone’s throw away. With every step they expected to catch a glimpse of the house through the gray horizontal snow. By now the sun had set and what little light remained was quickly draining out of the air.

  It’s hard to fathom how children who walked to and from school a half mile or more every day became exhausted to the point of collapse while walking a hundred yards that afternoon. Hard to fathom until you consider the state of their thin cotton clothing, their eyelashes webbed with ice and frozen shut, the ice plugs that formed inside their noses, the ice masks that hung on their faces. This was not a feathery sifting of gossamer powder. It was a frozen sandstorm. Cattle died standing up, died of suffocation before they froze solid.

  When they got out of the gully, May Hunt’s students were wet to the skin and nearly blind. Most had lost the use of their fingers. Addie Knieriem had no sensation in her toes. Panic wicked away what little heat remained inside their bodies. All of them were shivering violently and the younger children looked limp as rag dolls. These children, all but Fred and his brother, were already desperate and ready to give up. It happened that fast.

  If you had your choice of what to burn to keep your house warm, the straw of the oilseed flax plant would surely be near the bottom of the list. Unless it’s processed and compressed into briquettes, flax straw burns so fast that you need a small mountain of it to heat even a shack or sod house through a long prairie winter. It’s messy and brittle and needs to be twisted or braided into bundles to burn efficiently. But in a place with no trees and not enough money to buy coal, flax straw or hay were better than freezing to death and cleaner than buffalo chips. After a snowstorm on the treeless prairie, the first set of tracks usually led from the farmhouse door to the mound of the straw pile, the second set to the barn.

  Farmers generally kept their straw or hay piles just a few yards away from their houses, so when Fred Weeks stumbled into the Hinners’ pile he figured they were saved. The party could take shelter in the straw pile for a few minutes while Fred went to look for the farmhouse. Then he’d come back and lead them to safety. The Hinners would give them food and let them warm themselves by the fire of twisted straw. That was how it was supposed to happen.

  By a stroke of luck Fred found a pitchfork and a piece of lath next to the straw pile and he enlisted his brother, Charles, to help him dig out a cave in the sheltered side. The exertion warmed the boys and cleared their heads. It took some time to hollow out a space big enough for Miss Hunt and the children. When it was done they piled in and huddled together, panting and gasping. It was better, far better, than standing out in the vicious wind and snow.

  Miss Hunt insisted that Fred must not go out looking for the farmhouse alone. Charles would go with him, and the Huntley boy, Ernest, volunteered to join the Weeks brothers. Before they set out, someone had the idea of making a guide rope for the boys. Several of the girls had worn aprons to school that morning and Miss Hunt collected these and tore them into st
rips. When all the apron strips were tied together they had a good length of rope. Fred would take one end and Miss Hunt would hold tight to the other. Then, when they found the farmhouse, the boys could follow the rope back to the pile and get the others.

  Or, if they failed to find to find the Hinner place, at least they wouldn’t get lost in the storm. One way or the other, they’d follow the apron rope back to the pile.

  Fred and the two other boys went back out in the storm and began to walk around the straw pile in ever larger concentric circles. One time around, then a few steps back, and they’d circle it again. They shouted at the top of their lungs. They held out their arms hoping to brush against a piece of farm equipment or the side of a building. They stopped and peered through the vibrating air. Nothing. Not a sound aside from the keening of the wind. Not a solid shape anywhere. At least they had the rope of shredded aprons to guide them back to the straw pile. Without that the three boys would surely have drifted with the storm and frozen to death.

  At first May Hunt refused to despair. Now that the boys were back, they had eight voices. If they shouted in chorus, one of the Hinners would certainly hear them. They’d have to keep shouting to guide their rescuer through the storm. They kept it up as long as their voices held.

  Nothing.

  The smaller children had begun to whimper. Miss Hunt wondered if they’d be warmer if they could burrow farther into the straw pile. She asked Fred and his brother to get the pitchfork and dig them a deeper cave. Deep enough so that all of them could lie down together side by side. This would be their shelter for the night. Fred did the best he could with the straw. When May judged the cave large enough, they settled in. Without being asked or told, Fred took his place at the mouth of the cave—the coldest and most exposed spot. They all understood that it was he, if anyone, who would see them through.

  None of the children had had anything to eat since noon. None of them had adequate clothing. Not a blanket. Few had even worn hats.

  For a while they told stories and sang songs. Then Miss Hunt had the idea of calling the roll every few minutes. Anything to keep them awake. She believed—everyone on the prairie believed—that sleep was death. Fred Weeks? Present. Charles Weeks? Present. Mary Huntley? Present. Ernest Huntley? Present. Mabelle Huntley? Present. Frank Knieriem? Present. Addie Knieriem? Present. It passed the time. And it reassured her that all seven of the children were still alive.

  Sergeant Glenn estimated that there were twenty thousand people “overtaken and bewildered by the storm.” Many of them were children sent home from school or out doing farm chores, but there were also farmers working in their fields or leading their cattle to water, doctors making their rounds, peddlers, salesmen, mail carriers, itinerant grocers. Glenn himself got lost as he tried to make his way home from the Huron weather station that night. Blowing snow sealed both his eyes nearly shut and he wandered around dazed and exhausted until by chance he encountered someone who pointed him in the right direction. There are hundreds of firsthand accounts of the onset of the blizzard, the wind shift, the first wave of blinding snow as fine as dust. There are scores of stories of narrow escapes, houses or barns found by accident or luck, horses or dogs that led their owners back to the barn, landmarks that suddenly appeared when the wind dropped for a moment.

  Rare are the stories of rescues. People saved themselves or they weren’t saved. With few exceptions, once a body was prostrate in the snow it stayed there.

  Had it not been for his eighteen-year-old half brother Will, that would have been Walter Allen’s fate.

  The afternoon was well advanced by the time the drays full of Groton’s school children appeared on the main street of town. The teams came one behind the other, just as they had set out, only now the drays behind them were solid with huddled gray shapes. The horses labored, their noses clogged with melted and refrozen snow, their breathing rough. They moved up Main Street so slowly that the children had no trouble dropping off as the drays came abreast their houses. One by one, the kids landed on their buried feet, got their balance, and then waded, staggering through the drifts and bent nearly double in the wind, into the arms of relieved parents. Slow as they were, the horses didn’t take long to cover the few blocks of town. And of course the loads got lighter as the kids peeled off.

  Every child was safe now. For the men who had volunteered to rescue the kids there was still the business of getting the horses unhitched, awkward to do with frozen hands, stowing the drays so they didn’t get buried under snowdrifts, and putting the horses under shelter for the night. A nasty job in a storm like this, but it wouldn’t be any easier tomorrow.

  The men were in the middle of the chore when W. C. Allen and his boy Will came hustling up. Shouting over the wind, Allen told them there was no sign of Walter. Had the teachers taken a head count before they set out? Maybe the boy had stayed behind in the schoolhouse for some reason. Or could he have fallen off one of the drays on the way home? Edna was worried sick. They’d have to go back—and go fast while there was still light.

  The men conferred for a few minutes and decided they better take two drays for an extra measure of safety. W.C.’s boy Will would come along, too. At eighteen he was full-grown and as strong as any of them.

  If the men who had driven the drays thought it was a fool’s errand to go back out in a blizzard like this, they kept the thought to themselves. Each knew, or felt, that there really wasn’t any choice. There was a boy missing. They’d never be able to look W.C. or Edna Allen in the eye if they didn’t at least try to look for their son.

  It was harder going back because it was darker and they had to drive the horses into the wind. The men kept their heads down and their shoulders hunched up almost to their ears. No need to talk even if talking had been possible over the wind. Will was the only one among them who wasn’t grim faced and hollow chested. He was looking forward to giving his brother a good tongue-lashing. He’d be teasing Walter about this for years to come: “Remember the time that damn fool of a boy ran off and hid in a blizzard and scared us all half to death? Just like Walter to pick the worst storm in history. The terrible blizzard of ’88.”

  They pulled the horses up next to the main schoolhouse door on the east wall, the lee side. The tall, narrow building was taking quite a beating in the wind, but it wasn’t so bad in the steep-sided hollow that the wind was scouring out behind the school. They stood there for a minute watching the snow whistle off the lip of the drifts. Not a track in sight, not a sign of the boy. They went into the school and hollered and tramped through the classes just to make sure. The cold was already bone-chilling in the empty rooms.

  The men went back outside and spread out around the school. There was nothing, no one. It was getting more painful every minute to keep their eyes open. After a while they stopped looking and stood by the school entrance shouting over the wind. W.C. said he was going to stay and keep looking. The others should take the drays back. He’d find the boy and get him home.

  Or die trying, they all thought but nobody had to say.

  The other men wouldn’t hear of it. W.C. would go home with them. He had a wife and family to provide for. It was madness to stay out in the storm alone.

  There was more shouting. Finally W.C. agreed, or at least stopped arguing.

  The men were so intent on their shouting match that they’d forgotten about Will Allen. No one saw him disappear. Strangely, no one missed him on the way back. W.C. was sunk in misery and numb with the cold. The other men just wanted to get out of the storm before it was too late. Their hands were like blocks of ice. It was impossible to hold the reins. They let the horses go and hoped for the best.

  Arthur E. Towne was a boy when his family took him from Vermont to Huron in Dakota Territory during the summer of 1881. That first winter a blizzard struck Dakota, a bad storm that left the prairie for miles around littered with the corpses of cattle and horses. Arthur’s father had the misfortune of getting caught outdoors in that blizzard, but being a
Vermonter he was canny about snowstorms. When he couldn’t see which way to go, he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled along the ground, feeling for the wagon track as he went. “He had been nearer death in those few minutes than he ever was again while he lived in the west,” his son wrote. His fingers were in agony by the time he made his way back to their sod house, but Towne survived.

  That was how Will Allen found his brother Walter. Somehow Will figured out that the visibility was a little better right next to the ground—“under the storm,” as the settlers said. So he fell to his hands and began to stalk around like a dog. Whether it was instinct or pure dumb luck, Will eventually stumbled upon Walter’s body.

  The boy was unconscious but breathing. His limbs hung limp from his frame, which was good because it meant they weren’t frozen.

  Will barely felt the cold as he carried and dragged his eight-year-old brother back to Groton. Instinct or luck stayed with him. If he lost his way they’d both be dead. If he dropped the boy, or tried to leave him and go for help, it was unlikely that he would ever find him again. Nightfall was near.

  The Allens’ house was at the upper end of Main Street, and next door to the house was the building that housed W.C.’s law office. That was as far as Will got. Though he knew his parents would be waiting at home in panic, he couldn’t summon the energy to cross those last few steps. Will dragged the boy inside their father’s office, out of the wind and cold, and then his strength gave out.

  W.C. and Edna were beside themselves when Will appeared at the door. In a minute he told them what had happened. Walter was still next door in the office, conscious but too weak to walk. Will was barely able to stagger over there again and help his father get the boy back home.

  Walter had his eyes open and kept looking from his father to his brother and back, but he still could not understand how he had gotten from the snow-packed ground outside the school to his father’s office. All he knew was that he had a terrible stinging sensation all over his skin and a feeling of cold that penetrated to the core of his being. He was shivering uncontrollably.