The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Walter was too weak and dazed to be aware of a little trickle running down the side of his leg. It was the water in the perfume bottle that had frozen while he was lying unconscious in the snow. Frozen and burst. In the warmth of his father’s office, the ice had thawed and the water was seeping through the shards of the glass.

  Grace Rollag was stunned to see the familiar bulky shape of her husband Ole heave itself out of the storm just as she and Peter returned home from the barn. At first she didn’t trust her eyes. With the snow blowing sideways like this and her eyes crusted in ice she couldn’t be certain. Shapes kept emerging and then the snow snatched them back again. And the sounds that flew by in the torrent—mutterings and keenings and distant shouts whose words she could almost make out but not quite. But yes, it was Ole sure enough. Snow was so thickly matted in his beard and eyebrows that she could barely see his face. Where had he come from? Where was Charley? “Bare fint—fine, fine,” he shouted to her over the wind. Once they were inside and Ole got the ice off his beard, he explained how he had left the boy with the neighbors because his face had been so badly frozen. He’d be fine there overnight. The horse, too.

  “It was a miracle that Ole had found the way,” Grace wrote later. “But he never lost his composure so that the whole time he knew which direction to take. And we were happy indeed when at last we were all inside the house.”

  By nightfall an old Norwegian settler named Ole Tisland had rubbed the ice around his eyes so often and so violently with the back of his sleeve that he had torn the frozen skin away and exposed his cheekbones. A father and grandfather who had come to America after the Civil War, Ole had been out shoveling on his farm in Brookings County in southeastern Dakota when the blizzard struck. His son-in-law, Bengt, saw Ole standing there with his shovel in hand staring fixedly at the northwest sky. Ole’s wife, Karen, saw him, too, and wondered why he didn’t rush for home.

  That night a little boy named Carl Hildens, who lived on the farm adjoining the Tisland place, heard someone shouting outside. Carl and his parents were sitting by the stove while the blizzard raged on. The boy told his parents he heard shouts for help—he insisted over and over that he wasn’t imagining it. Finally Carl’s father, Hans, got his overcoat and went outside. He called at the top of his voice, stopped to listen, called again. Nothing. Nothing but the scream of the wind and the snow lashing his face. “God help anyone lost in this,” Hans told his son. “It is getting colder.”

  There is no way of knowing how many people spent the night out on the prairie. Or when the first person died.

  The dark was absolute by six o’clock.

  Hundreds, possibly thousands of children spent the night in schoolhouses or the boarding places of their teachers while their parents sat up and wondered where they were. Precious desks and tables and chairs were fed into the stoves. The last bits of lunches were carefully divided. Thin coats served as blankets.

  These were the lucky children.

  Among the unlucky children that night were Lena Woebbecke, lying on the side of a hill near Seward, Nebraska; the five Schweizer boys from school number 66 in Dakota’s Rosefield Township—Johann, Heinrich, and Elias Kaufmann, Johann Albrecht, Peter Graber; the seven students of May Hunt huddling in a haystack near the Hinner farm; the two Westphalen sisters, Eda, thirteen, and Matilda, eight, who had left their country school near Scribner, Nebraska, together and lost their way in the storm; the Heins children, who had unlocked their schoolhouse door and run off into the storm; Etta Shattuck in her haystack in Holt County, Nebraska; sixteen-year-old Omar Gibson and his twelve-year-old niece, Amelia Shirk, pressed together under a horse blanket in the south part of Holt County; nine-year-old Roman Hytrek, who had lost his coat on the open prairie as he wandered alone with his dog; seven-year-old John Schaaf, who had been sent off on a pony to do an errand for his parents and was overtaken by the storm.

  As night fell, each one of them had to understand that there was no hope left of finding shelter, no chance of being found. The unimaginable had happened.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  God’s Burning Finger

  It was the turbulence kicked up by the strengthening low that bewildered those caught out on the prairie that afternoon. But it was the high that dropped down in the wake of the low that killed them.

  By the twelfth of January, the arctic air that had been massing for days under the persistently clear skies of western Canada had matured until it resembled a vast shallow rotunda many hundreds of miles across but less than a mile and a half deep at the center—a dome of high pressure, in meteorological parlance, though what this familiar phrase fails to capture is the dynamic fluid nature of a high-pressure system. The cold dense air that raised barometric pressure at the surface not only sank slowly, but also spread out horizontally in currents radiating from the center of the high. The effects of the earth’s rotation turned these air currents to the right in a vast clockwise outward spiral known in meteorological jargon as an anticyclone. Just the opposite happened in the low, or cyclone, that preceded the high: Winds spiraled inward toward the center of lowest pressure in a counterclockwise pattern.

  As the anticyclone surged south down the center of the continent, the dense frigid air encountered the great spine of the Rocky Mountains rising along its western edge. Clockwise circulation pushed the southwestern sector of the air mass up against the eastern flank of the mountains, and the mountains pushed back. The pressure kept increasing. All through the twelfth, the cold high continued to build into Alberta and northern Montana even as Signal Corps observers in Dakota and Nebraska tracked the progress of the advancing low on their plunging barometers. Though hundreds of miles separated them, the low and the high were now locked together and violently reinforcing each other. By midafternoon the pressure difference between the center of the low over southeast Nebraska and the center of the high over Edmonton in Alberta was 1.2 inches of mercury—a pressure gradient rarely seen in the course of the most severe winter.

  As night fell, the low was still deepening, and as it deepened it sucked in greater and greater volumes of air. Some of that volume got fed into the high. Picture it like shoveling snow into an ever-rising mound at the center of a gargantuan circular drive, but instead of snow, the atmosphere was shoveling the air itself. The low was shoveling in air at the lower levels of the atmosphere, sucking it up in an ascending spiral, and spewing it out aloft. Some of what got spewed out of the low in the upper atmosphere landed on the high, effectively piling and cramming even more air onto the top of the dome. In meteorological shorthand: Upper-level divergence over the developing low worked in tandem with upper-level convergence over the strengthening high.

  The lower the air pressure fell over Nebraska and Iowa on the night of the twelfth, the higher it rose over Montana and northern Dakota. The greater the pressure difference between the cyclone and the anticyclone, the stronger the winds blew in a futile effort to fill the vacuum created by the low. Northerly gales dislodged some of the coldest air on record from central Canada and forced it south over the Upper Midwest. As long as the high kept building in behind the low, the arctic air would keep moving south, steered and funneled by the Rockies, right down the dead-level center of the country, until it crossed the border and spilled into Central America.

  Only the most intense cold waves got that far south. As January 12 drew to a close, it was becoming clear that this was shaping up to be one of the most intense cold waves ever seen in the United States.

  A sign of the fierceness—and strangeness—of this storm was the eerie electricity that crackled through the air as the temperature began to drop. It was like a lightning storm, only instead of bolts flashing thousands of feet between cloud and ground or cloud and cloud, smaller electrical discharges sparked at the surface. In effect, the storm had created a kind of horizontal thunderstorm—with one key difference: While a thunderstorm is driven by the instability of rapidly warmed air, the driving force behind these static discharges was the e
xtreme differences between the various currents of air that were screaming past each other in the blizzard.

  As the winds roared from the high to the low, air saturated with a mixture of shattered snow crystals, ice pellets, and water droplets blew over surfaces that were much colder or warmer than the air itself—crusted snow on the ground, patches of bare earth or vegetation that had absorbed the warmth of the morning sun, the sides of frame or sod houses. The storm was developing so rapidly that seams and pockets of sharply contrasting temperatures were rubbing up against each other. Think of the cold front sweeping down not like a smooth plate-glass window, but rather like a curtain crimped into deep irregular folds, with very different kinds of air caught up between and within the folds. To add to the volatility, the cold air immediately behind the curtain was quite shallow: It spread over the prairie like spilled syrup oozing across a countertop, a thin film of cold sliding under the much warmer air above and around it. Cold and warm, liquid and frozen, humid and dry were abruptly dragged together by the developing storm. Enhancing the roiling contrasts were the airborne snow and ice particles themselves, which were of markedly different temperatures and structures, warmer or colder, wetter or drier, depending on which part of the storm they came from. All of this acting together set up the ideal conditions for significant static discharge at the surface.

  As the patchwork curtain ripped over the prairie, the very air began to tingle with electricity. Sailors used to call this phenomenon Saint Elmo’s fire, or the corposants (holy bodies), and meteorologists have since renamed it corona or point discharge. Very likely, the electrical field at the surface was enhanced by lightning aloft—“thunder snow” is another sign of a violently intense cold front. But since the visibility was so poor and the wind so loud, no one saw the lightning bolts or heard the booms of explosively expanding air.

  The Saint Elmo’s fire, however, was unmistakable and terrifying. At the height of the blizzard people inside their houses felt their hair rise off their scalps. They watched showers of sparks leaping off the ends of pokers as they held them to their stoves. The air popped and sizzled when a hand was passed over someone’s head. “Frank went to put up the draft in the stove,” wrote Dakota pioneer Julia Carpenter of her husband, “when his fingers snapped and fire came from them. He tried this again and again, putting first one finger and then another near the stove, always with the same effect. I did not try it. When Frank was out of the room there was still a snapping.”

  At Fort Buford near Bismarck, Signal Corps observer Sergeant A. Schneider wrote that the air was charged with electrical sparks “more than an inch long” that jumped from the telegraph wires to the switchboard. As Schneider moved his hand toward the switchboard, a spark jumped off the ends of his fingers when they were about two inches from the board and nearly knocked him to the ground. Panicked, he tried to leave the station, only to find that heavy drifts had blockaded the door. Schneider finally escaped through the window.

  Sergeant Glenn in Huron spent the evening at the weather station watching sparks of electricity leap from the gilt molding used for hanging pictures and play over the gilt stamping of the curtains, the stove, and the chains from which the lamp fixtures were suspended. Glenn was literally stunned when an electrical shock passed from his hand to the hand of an acquaintance standing just outside the office. Many settlers became so terrified of the sparks showering off their stoves that they would not go near them, even to add more fuel.

  Herman Melville described Saint Elmo’s fire in “The Candles” chapter of Moby-Dick as The Pequod labored through a typhoon east of Japan: “All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.” To the hapless mariners it appeared as if “God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship.”

  It was after God withdrew His finger that the film of cold air pooled and deepened and the temperatures over the prairie began to plunge in earnest.

  The storm was just grazing Saint Paul with light dry snow and bursts of wind when Lieutenant Woodruff returned to the Chamber of Commerce building from his evening meal at 10:15 P.M. Central time. The temperature in Saint Paul had been rising all day, and by the nighttime observations it had reached 11 above zero. But Woodruff could see at a glance on the afternoon maps that the cold was coming his way fast. Indeed, when the telegrams of the 10

  P.M. (Eastern time) observations began to arrive, it was clear that the cold was on his doorstep. Fort Assinniboine was now reporting 27 below zero with north winds at 13 miles an hour; 4 below in North Platte; Omaha, which had reached 27 above at 3 P.M. Eastern time, was reporting temperature of 6 below with winds of 30 miles an hour. Eleven below in Yankton. Seventeen below in Huron. The cold had dropped all the way south to Kansas, where Leavenworth was reporting 4 above, a drop of 29 degrees in the past seven hours, with northwest winds at 22 miles an hour.

  Even in a region notorious for sudden cold outbreaks, these numbers were impressive. In the course of four and a half hours the temperature fell 50 degrees at Helena. At North Platte, Nebraska, a drop of 32 degrees in thirteen hours. At Keokuk, Iowa, 55 degrees in eight hours.

  “The most decided and most severe cold waves follow severe storms,” Woodruff had written in “Cold Waves and Their Progress.” “The maximum effect, or the minimum temperature, occurs when the barometer is the highest above normal.” By midnight on the twelfth, it was clear to Woodruff that this Dakota storm was bringing down one of the most decided and most severe cold waves he had ever seen or was likely to see. What path it would take, how far south the cold air would spill, whether it would engulf the cities of the East Coast—these were questions Woodruff knew he was unable to answer with any degree of confidence. Luckily, he didn’t have to. The cotton-and sugar-growing regions of Louisiana and Texas, which were particularly sensitive to sudden cold waves, and the hubs of Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington were Greely’s headache.

  Shortly before midnight, Woodruff issued his indications for the following day—unlucky Friday the thirteenth, as it happened:

  January 13, 1888 12:15 AM

  Signal Office War Department Saint Paul

  Indications for 24 hours commencing at 7 AM today

  For Saint Paul and Minneapolis: Snow colder with a cold wave, fresh northerly winds

  For Minnesota: Colder with a cold wave, snow followed in northern part by fair weather, fresh northerly winds

  For Dakota: Local snows, colder with a cold wave, fresh northerly winds becoming variable.

  In a few hours it would become clear how inadequate the word colder was to describe the air that was pouring down over the prairie on those “fresh northerly winds.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Exposure

  The fear came first, but the cold followed so hard on its heels that it was impossible to tell the difference. The two smaller boys, Heinrich and Elias Kaufmann, felt it first. They were lost. Their minds might try to shove the word aside, but their bodies knew it was true. Mr. Cotton and Peter Graber’s two younger brothers were gone. There was no sign of the Grabers’ farmhouse at the end of the field. No sign of a barn or a haystack or a fence in the blinding snow. They were lost, the five of them together. They could see from the way the older boys—their brother, Johann, and Peter Graber and Johann Albrecht—stopped and cupped their hands around their eyes and turned in circles that they had no idea where they were, either. Elias, who was only seven, wanted to scream for his mother, but he knew that the others would be angry at him. And what would be the use? Hadn’t they all been shouting at the tops of their voices?

  In the first flush of panic Elias felt his stomach turn to water and the cold sweat drip down his ribs and pool at the small of his back. He had worn no hat or gloves or heavy woolen coat when he left for school with Heinrich and Johann in the mildness of the morning. None
of them had. The wind found every gap in the homespun cloth, every pore in the woolen socks and underwear, every buttonhole and cuff. Elias hunched his bony little-boy shoulders. Pinpricks of snow lanced his clammy skin and made it tingle. The blood-rich capillaries began to tighten down at his feet and hands and his exposed neck: His body was trying to conserve warmth by removing blood from the lash of the wind and sending it deeper within.

  Lost, alone with his terror, too scared to cry, Elias Kaufmann started to shiver.

  In an awful way, the five Schweizer boys who had wandered off when the blizzard struck had become factors, very small and frail factors, in the immense equation of the weather. Physics dictated that their warm body tissues and fluids would eventually reach equilibrium with the cold fluid of the ambient air. It was biology that infinitely complicated the equation. The size and shape, weight, consistency, and age of their bodies; their gender; the actions, both voluntary and involuntary, that their brains initiated; the subtle physical and chemical changes tripped by their emotions—all of these would determine how long they survived. Every living thing fights the physics of freezing to death, whether it wants to or not. Whether the body wins or loses is so complicated, so mysterious a process, as to resemble fate or luck.

  When they left the schoolhouse and walked out into the storm, the internal temperature of the boys was presumably 98.6 or close to it. They may have gained a couple of degrees in the first minutes outdoors from the force of their exertions to remain upright in the wind and from the adrenaline rush of striding off into the streaming snow ahead of their teacher. But inevitably, gradually at first and then more swiftly, their core temperatures began to drop as their bodies lost heat to the air. The same basic physical processes that move heat energy through the atmosphere—radiation, conduction, evaporation, and convection—worked against the boys.