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The Children's Blizzard

Page 20

by David Laskin


  People freezing to death sometimes find they are unaccountably happy and relaxed. They feel flushed with a sudden glow of wellbeing. They love the world and everything in it. They want to sing. They hear heavenly music. As the mind and the body amicably part company, the freezing person looks down on himself as if he’s hovering overhead or already in heaven or a returning ghost. There is his body, lying miserable in the snow, but somehow he is no longer trapped in it. He’s gazing at his corpse and walking on. He’s telling the story of his miraculous escape. In his account of the 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, Jon Krakauer wrote that in the depths of exhaustion and hypothermia he experienced a “queer detachment” from his body, “as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a windchill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm.”

  This disturbing warmth is another common sensation in advanced hypothermia. Right before the end, the skin may feel like it’s on fire. The bliss of merging with the cold is interrupted by a sensation of burning and suffocating. Doctors are not sure why this happens. It may be a delusion manufactured by the oxygen-starved brain or it may be that for some reason in the last minutes of consciousness the body sends a surge of blood back to the constricted capillaries at the surface of the skin. Whatever the cause, the result is that victims of hypothermia suddenly feel so hot and stifled that they strip off their clothes.

  A few days after the blizzard, the New York Tribune reported in perplexity that a number of the dead were found with torn or missing clothing—collars ripped away from their throats, hats tossed off. The paper’s reporter speculated that storm victims had suffocated on the fine powdery snow and wind-borne ice pellets: “In a genuine blizzard the air is filled with fine ice dust, driven with terrible force, which chokes the unfortunate victim in a short time if he attempts to stand against it.” But the Blue Valley Blade in Nebraska correctly attributed this phenomenon to delusion and hallucination: “At this stage of freezing strange symptoms often appear: as the blood retires from the surface it congests in the heart and brain; then delirium comes on and with it a delusive sensation of smothering heat. The victim’s last exertions are to throw off his clothes and remove all wrappings from his throat; often the corpse is found with neck completely bare and in an attitude indicating that his last struggles were for fresh air!”

  It sounds bizarre—to wantonly sacrifice warmth and cover just when you need it most—but it’s common enough that doctors have given the impulse a name: paradoxical undressing. Before paradoxical undressing was identified, police routinely mistook hypothermic women with torn or missing clothing for victims of sexual assault. The reaction explains a disturbing incident in military history. After a brutal three-day storm in January 1719, hundreds of Swedish soldiers were found stripped and dead in the field in the wake of a disastrous campaign against Norway. At the time it was assumed they had been plundered by their comrades, but now doctors believe that they tore off their own clothes as their minds and bodies went mad with cold—a mass outbreak of paradoxical undressing.

  For the five Schweizer boys, the end was probably peaceful. “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—” as Emily Dickinson imagined freezing to death in her poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” As their internal temperature dipped below 85 degrees, the hallucinations lost their grip, the imagined music stopped, the sensation of freezing or burning faded. They just wanted to go to sleep. “I was getting so terribly tired,” wrote another boy who had gotten lost in this storm at the age of thirteen. “I felt sleepy. I thought if I could only lie down just for a few minutes I would be all right. But I had heard the farmers telling stories about lying down and never getting up again in snow storms. So I kept on, but I finally got to the point where I could hardly lift my feet any more. I knew that I couldn’t stand it but a minute or two longer.” The farmers were right. When the body sleeps, its core temperature drops, metabolism slows, heat escapes more quickly from the surface, shivering ceases—all of which hastens the loss of the dwindling supply of bodily warmth.

  Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber undoubtedly knew that sleep meant death, and very likely the younger boys did, too. They would have kept moving as long as they could—anything to avoid lying down in the snow. By late afternoon they had been wandering for three to four hours. They had come to the end of their endurance. Their cheeks and eyelids were raw from scraping the ice off their eyes. Their limbs were stiff. Their hands and feet and ears were beyond warming. Johann and Peter were no longer able to carry the younger boys, and Heinrich and Elias were barely dragging themselves through the snow. Every few steps they fell to their knees, struggled to stand, fell again. The older boys waited, turned back to help, shouted, fell down themselves. When they tried to think, words and images drowned inside their skulls before they could break the surface of consciousness. When they spoke they made no sense, to themselves or to each other. With body temperatures at 80 degrees, delirium entirely eclipsed reason. In the profound darkness of night in a storm, hope was impossible.

  The younger boys gave out first. At some point Heinrich or Elias fell and couldn’t get up again. Nothing Peter or Johann said or did could stir them from their apathy. It’s possible the younger boys fell to their knees and the older boys, thinking they were praying, knelt beside them. That’s how their families preferred to imagine it. In truth, whether they knelt together or not, it was a tribute to the strength of the bonds between them—and to the heroic efforts of Peter and Johann—that they had remained together at all. Other groups of children caught out in the storm straggled, separated, and dropped alone, one by one. But the five Schweizer boys hung together until the end. And perhaps they did pray with some small, glowing ember of the mind.

  By all accounts they were good boys, obedient, cherished by their families. They had been prayed over and instructed in prayer from the moment they were born. Johann Kaufmann, the only one of Anna Kaufmann’s first four sons to survive childhood. His younger brothers Heinrich and Elias, born after so much desperate suffering in the New World when their mother hardly dared to hope anymore. Johann Albrecht, the baby born on board the immigrant ship just three days out of New York Harbor—a child blessedly impervious to the noise and danger and heat of the long journey, and to the deprivations of the hard seasons ahead. Peter Graber, not yet four when his mother died of exhaustion and illness that first bitter spring in Dakota and raised to the age of sixteen by his stepmother in a house packed with brothers and sisters.

  In the small, closed world these boys had grown up in, the only world they ever knew, the impulse to pray was so powerful and deeply ingrained that it was almost an instinct. And kneeling, if one or more of them had indeed summoned the will to kneel, would have been a blessing in its own right. Folding the body in the middle and bringing the knees close to the chest would have provided some protection.

  It was better than lying in the snow.

  But in the end that’s what they did. One by one, they collapsed onto the frozen ground. With his last surge of will, Johann raised himself and wrapped Elias in his arms. As the snow conducted heat away from their bodies, their heartbeats slowed to an occasional twitch. The boys lost consciousness. Beyond both hope and fear, they felt nothing at all.

  Doctors have a brutal phrase they use in treating people found unconscious in the cold: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.” In profound hypothermia, the internal functions become so slow and feeble that the body enters a kind of suspended animation. The pulse is all but gone, the brain barely flickers with activity, the blood moves glacially through the veins and arteries—but there is a window during which an unconscious hypothermia victim can be resuscitated with surprisingly little damage. A fairly wide window, in fact.

  Had a rescue team found the five Schweizer boys and moved them exceedingly gently out of the storm and rewarmed them care
fully with hot water or heated air, they might still have recovered. Assuming they slipped into unconsciousness around 4 P.M., the boys may still have been alive at 7 P.M., when the temperature had dropped to 10 below zero and the wind out of the northwest blew at 40 miles an hour. It’s conceivable that one or more of them might have been resuscitated as late as 9 P.M.

  But nobody found Johann, Heinrich, and Elias Kaufmann, Peter Graber, or Johann Albrecht—not in time to save their lives.

  Once their core temperatures fell below 84 degrees, their hearts were beating at less than half the normal rate. With every degree of temperature loss, the heartbeat slowed and weakened. Just as their leg muscles had failed to obey commands to contract and release while they were still able to walk, so their hearts now became less and less responsive to the electrical signals transmitted by their nerves. Fiber by fiber, the cold was paralyzing their hearts. Eventually the signals were so faint that they failed to trigger any cardiac response at all. Circulation ceased. With no oxygen the brain guttered and went dark.

  The boys lay on their sides with their arms pulled in tight and crossed on their chests and their knees drawn to their stomachs. By every vital sign, they were dead. They had no pulse, they were not breathing, their eyes were dilated, their brains were void of electrical activity. They were dead, but still they were not entirely gone. The cold that killed them also preserved the possibility of salvation. At normal body temperatures, the brain suffers irreversible damage three minutes after the heart stops beating. But in cases of profound hypothermia, the brain is so cold that it remains intact far longer. Modern doctors have succeeded in resuscitating an individual pulled out of icy water sixty-six minutes after cardiac arrest—full recovery with no brain damage.

  Modern doctors.

  Even the kindest, wisest rescuer in 1888 would have inadvertently killed the boys.

  Before Thursday, January 12, 1888, ended at midnight and Friday the thirteenth began, every bit of moisture in the five young bodies, every cell, every tissue was frozen solid.

  We’ll never know how many spent that night out on the prairie. It had to be at least several thousand, most of them in the southern and eastern parts of Dakota Territory, in the eastern half of Nebraska, and in southwestern Minnesota. Northern Dakota was largely spared because the storm blew through so early that people remained home and kept their children in. Iowa, though it received the heaviest snow, also suffered relatively few casualties. The storm didn’t hit there until late in the day, when evening was gathering and farmers and their children were back home. But in southern Dakota and Nebraska the timing could not have been worse. Sergeant Glenn estimated that 1 percent of “those overtaken and bewildered by the storm perished” and that of the dead 20 percent were children.

  The catalog of their suffering is terrible. They froze alone or with their parents or perished in frantic, hopeless pursuit of loved ones. They died with the frozen bloody skin torn from their faces, where they had clawed off the mask of ice again and again. Some died within hours of getting lost; some lived through the night and died before first light. They were found standing waist deep in drifts with their hands frozen to barbed-wire fences, clutching at straw piles, buried under overturned wagons, on their backs, facedown on the snow with their arms outstretched as if trying to crawl. Mothers died sitting up with their children around them in fireless houses when the hay or coal or bits of furniture were exhausted and they were too weak or too frightened to go for more.

  A young Dutch couple in Minnesota died kneeling side by side with their hands held high above their heads.

  A nine-year-old Nebraska boy named Roman Hytrek was walking the prairie with his dog when the storm overtook them. That evening the dog turned up scratching at the door of a neighbor’s house. Roman’s empty coat was found in March. Eventually a search party recovered the boy’s body. Roman had died alone leaning against the side of a hill. They speculated that he had unbuttoned his coat so that he could cradle his dog next to him in it and that the wind ripped it from his shoulders. But it may have been an instance of paradoxical undressing.

  William Klemp, a newly married Dakotan in the full vigor of young manhood, left his pregnant wife at home and went out in the storm to care for their livestock. He never returned. A few weeks later, Klemp’s wife gave birth to a son. It was spring when they found his body in a sod shanty a mile from the house. Klemp’s face had been eaten away by mice and gophers.

  In the region that would soon become the state of South Dakota there were deaths in thirty-two of the forty-four counties east of the Missouri River. Every pioneer who wrote a memoir, every family that recorded its history included a story of someone who died in the blizzard. Every story is heartbreaking.

  Lois Royce, a young teacher of a Nebraska country school, huddled on the open prairie all night with three of her pupils—two nine-year-old boys and a six-year-old girl. The children cried themselves to sleep. Lois stretched out on the ground, lying on her side with her back to the wind and the children cradled in the hollow of her body. She covered their sleeping bodies with her cloak. The boys died first. Lois felt one of the bodies cease to breathe and go cold. Then, a few hours later, the other. The boys went in silence. The little girl, Hattie Rosberg, had begged her teacher through the night for more covers to keep her warm. She died at daybreak deliriously crying, “I’m so cold, mama, please cover me up.” When the air had cleared enough to see, Lois left the three dead children lying together and crawled on her hands and knees a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmhouse.

  In Dakota’s Beadle County, six miles southwest of Huron, where Sergeant Glenn staffed the Signal Corps observing station, Robert Chambers, a farmer in his early thirties, was outside watering cattle with his two sons and their Newfoundland dog when the weather turned. The older boy, who was eleven, suffered from rheumatism, so Chambers sent him home before the storm got bad. He thought that he and nine-year-old Johnny could drive the cattle to the barn themselves. The dog would know the way. But, in Sergeant Glenn’s words, father and son were overtaken and bewildered. When Chambers realized there was no hope of finding their farmhouse, he burrowed into a drift, wrapped Johnny in his jacket and vest (neither of them had come out with overcoats), and told the boy to get into the hollow out of the wind. Robert Chambers stood in the storm shouting for help as long as his voice held. The dog barked frantically. But no one heard them over the wind.

  By evening Chambers was too cold to do anything but lie down in the snow next to his son. He put the dog beside them for extra warmth. Johnny could feel how frigid his father’s body was. He urged his father to get up and to look for the line of the trees they had planted by the house. But Chambers would not leave his son.

  As the night wore on, father and son talked about death. Chambers assured Johnny that they would survive and repeated over and over that the boy must lie still. Johnny knew that his father was freezing to death. At some point the boy dozed off. When he woke, his father was still alive, but barely. Chambers told his son to pray and that he would pray with him.

  At daylight a rescue party heard the Newfoundland barking and found them. The snow had drifted so deeply that Johnny was entirely buried but for a small opening by his mouth. The dog was standing guard. Robert Chambers was dead.

  The Westphalen girls, Eda and Matilda, also died in the night. Though born five years apart, the daughters of German immigrants, the girls had grown close to each other in the tragedies that had befallen their family during the past few years. Diphtheria struck the Westphalens in the winter of 1883. Two days before Christmas, six-year-old Frederick died. Six weeks later, their father, Peter, deranged by grief, hanged himself. Since then their mother had managed alone with six children. The winter of the blizzard, Eda was thirteen, Matilda, eight. The storm hit when the girls were at their country school in a hilly section of eastern Nebraska near the railroad town of Scribner (named by an Eastern railroad official for his son-in-law, New York publisher Charles Scribner). The t
eacher, Nellie Forsythe, told the children to go home. Eda and Matilda left together. The schoolhouse was halfway up the side of a smooth rounded hill; their house was a mile due north at the bottom of a valley cut by a creek. Usually it was an easy walk downhill across the fields. But in the storm the girls had the wind in their faces. No matter how they struggled against it, the northwest wind pushed them east into a series of ravines. For a while they wandered in circles. Then they drifted east and south with the wind. Only when they came to a wire fence did Eda realize they had gone in the wrong direction. They needed to turn around—but turning meant walking into the wind. Matilda failed, and Eda took off her wraps and covered her younger sister.

  Most victims of hypothermia curl up on their sides and die in a fetal position. Eda and Matilda died facedown. Very likely they dropped while fighting to walk into the wind. Once they fell, they must have lost consciousness very quickly. They lay on the snow a few feet apart on the side of a hill. The windward side. All night the wind blew snow over their bodies, covering them and laying them bare again.

  In the course of the night, the haystack in which Etta Shattuck had taken refuge became her prison. The hay had become so compacted and heavy with drifting snow that it pinned Etta in the small hollow she had dug for herself. As the temperature plunged, the fibers tightened. Etta’s torso stayed fairly warm, but the cave was so shallow that she was unable to shelter her legs or feet. Exposed to the cold, her legs turned to blocks of wood. She was powerless to escape.

  Etta drifted in and out of consciousness, but she never fell into a deep sleep. She felt mice rustling through the stack and nibbling at her wrists and somehow that comforted her. It seemed miraculous that something else was alive in the storm. When she was most alert, Etta prayed. She moved her lips and tried to summon the voice to sing hymns. She ran the words through her mind, but the sound that came from her mouth was hardly more than labored breathing. She was glad as never before that she had found God. God had brought her to the haystack; she was sure of it. God would guide the steps of a rescuer. Etta had faith. She knew she would be saved.

 

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