The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  At some point in the night the wind died down enough for her to hear coyotes howling. That keening yelp. Or maybe it was still the wind. Etta’s eyes fluttered open and the air looked a little brighter. It must be morning. Whoever had forked the prairie grass into this stack would come. Etta tried her voice to see if she could cry out for help. She could move her mouth and neck and shoulders. But her body was caught in the vise of the frozen haystack and her legs were paralyzed. The hymns and prayers would keep her going until someone came and pulled her out.

  If nothing else, as long as she could sing and pray, Etta could ward off deep sleep—the sleep from which she would never rouse herself.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Prairie Dawn

  Weather goes on forever with no direction or resolution, but a storm, like a story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The conditions that made the storm will in time unmake it. The seeds of destruction are present from the start. It is the nature of raging low-pressure systems to drag down calm, stable highs. Winds must relax as temperature and pressure gradients dissipate. Once the front moves through, cold air deepens. The clash of contrasting air masses continues—but somewhere else. Another story. On yesterday’s battleground falls the hush of equilibrium. Air aloft dries as it spreads and sinks. Clouds break up. After the worst storms, the most beautiful weather often shines down on the scene of devastation.

  Before dawn on Friday, January 13, 1888, the blizzard had pretty much blown itself out over the Dakotas, Nebraska, and southwestern Minnesota. The last gusts put the final touches on drifts and hollows, and then the atmosphere subsided in a deep sigh of high pressure. Over a thousand miles of prairie, from central Canada down to Oklahoma, the air grew pure and dense and dry with intense cold. Twenty-nine below zero at 6 A.M. at Fort Assinniboine. Twenty-five below at Huron. Seventeen below at Omaha. Sunrise two hours later barely budged the mercury. As the light came up, the dome of the sky seemed to lift and expand like a balloon filling with air. The colors of the most delicate alpine flowers flushed the sky from east to west—first grayish pink, then powder blue, then azure. The last bits of moisture condensed and froze and fell glittering in tiny crystals from the cloudless sky—diamond dust, meteorologists call it, a sign that the coldest, driest weather is building in.

  “Silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight,” Hamlin Garland wrote of the prairie the day after a winter storm.

  In hilly Buffalo County, bordering the Missouri River in southern Dakota, Thomas Pirnie stepped out of his farmhouse on the morning of the thirteenth to survey a world transformed. “It was a beautiful but awe-inspiring scene,” he marveled. “The frost sparkled like myriads [sic] of diamonds and the sun dogs were beautiful as a rainbow. Overall, there was a death-like stillness, not the sound of a dog barking, a cow bellowing or a horse neighing. The hills which had been sharply outlined were now but rounded knolls. Ravines had almost disappeared. Everywhere there was perfect whiteness. The smoke from the house chimneys went straight up in round columns high into the sky. This was the only sign of life about us.”

  The towns and cities were paralyzed, their wide, straight main streets drifted over, the shops and schools closed, the rail yards deserted. “Not a team or vehicle of any kind is to be seen,” wrote a resident of Bismarck. “It reminds one of the ancient depopulated cities. The terrible swirling masses of snow prevents [sic] objects from being seen across the street.” Bismarck’s Signal Corps observer Sergeant Sherwood reported drifts as high as twenty feet. Trains were abandoned on impassable tracks. Rail service had ceased altogether on the smaller lines. Locomotives equipped with plows set out from Aberdeen, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Lincoln along the major routes but were unable to break through the wind-packed drifts. Heavy snow brought down telegraph wires. Not a word came or went from most of western Iowa. “Travel almost entirely suspended,” wrote the Signal Corps observer in Des Moines.

  The prairie was void of motion and color. Every object large enough to raise a profile had an amphitheater of white carved in its lee. The exposed northern and western faces were scoured clean by the wind. The first rays of sun spread fleeting colors but no warmth. The snow turned pinky yellow, the shadows blue. At intervals in the vast, smooth white surface bits of black and brown caught the light, dark irregular specks, as if the wind had snatched scraps of cloth from the farmhouses and barns and littered the open ground with them.

  These were the cattle that farmers had failed to bring to shelter the day before.

  Some lay on their sides completely encased in ice. Some stood with their heads anchored to the ground by globes of ice as large as bushel baskets that had formed from their congealed and frozen breath. In western Minnesota’s Pipestone County, a Scot named Jackson rode out in search of the Black Angus herd that he had seen vanish into the blizzard while he had been out watering them. A few miles from home he came upon the first of the cows, dead in the snow. He rode on. The line of frozen cattle extended for ten miles, running from northwest to southeast, just as the wind had blown. “Most of them were frozen stiff,” wrote David Maxwell Fyffe, a neighbor of Jackson’s and a fellow Scot, “but sometimes they found one that had life in it tho badly frozen and they shovelled snow on it and passed on. They found out that covering with snow was wrong when they came back as the snow had started up a heat in the animal and it began to revive and commenced to struggle out of the snow and it got worse frozen than ever. They hauled a few of these home to the barn, but when they got properly thawed out the frozen flesh came off them in chunks…. Jackson was left with only two bulls which were kept around the barns.”

  As the light grew stronger, smaller and finer objects became distinct in the vast whiteness. The gray sleeve of a jacket, the frozen folds of an apron, a boot, a shock of hair, a child’s naked hand.

  It seems incredible that a person could survive that night without shelter or food or warm clothing, yet most did.

  Though some survived the night only to die instantly when they rose to their feet in the new light of day.

  Twenty-five miles south of where Etta Shattuck lay imprisoned in a haystack, a blanket lay half buried in the snow. When the rising sun set the snow ablaze, hands pushed the blanket away and two children rose slowly from the ground. Amelia Shirk and Omar Gibson had lived through the night because of this horse blanket. The morning before, Omar and Amelia had been lucky enough to have a horse to ride to their country school. When the storm hit Holt County, their teacher, John Schneider, dismissed school and told Amelia and Omar to set out for home on their own. He was confident that the horse would get them back safely. But the horse went astray and the children were soon blind and lost. They dismounted, removed the horse’s saddle blanket, and turned the animal loose. About three miles from their school, just over the Wheeler County line, they became exhausted and collapsed together in a snowbank.

  Amelia was twelve, Omar sixteen, the younger brother of her stepfather. They weren’t blood relatives. Nonetheless Omar looked after the girl tenderly. He wrapped her in the blanket, and when she wouldn’t stop shivering he gave her his jacket as well.

  They were both alive at sunrise. In fact, Omar was strong enough to get to his feet without help. He told Amelia he was going to search for the horse. Omar set out, took a few slow steps, and then Amelia saw him drop. He died moments later.

  The same thing happened to a young boy named Jesse Beadel in Dakota’s Jerauld County. Jesse and his grandmother had ridden together to his school the day before in a horse-drawn sleigh. The grandmother was filling in as substitute teacher for a couple of days. The blizzard struck late in the morning. At first the grandmother decided they must wait out the storm in the schoolhouse, but as the blizzard raged on, she and Jesse took pity on the horse, still hitched to the sleigh at the south end of the building. The grandmother’s house was only three miles from the school, to the southeast, which meant they’d have the wind at their backs. They got most of the way there when the horse floundered in deep snow. Jesse unhitched
the horse and freed it from the drift, but the sleigh was stuck fast. Even had they been able to walk through the deep drifts, Jesse and his grandmother had no idea where to go. The best he could do was tip the sleigh up on its side so it would break the wind. He gave his grandmother the robes they had brought along in the sleigh and huddled down beside her.

  They endured the night. At dawn Jesse saw a house about half a mile away and he told his grandmother to wait for him in the shelter of the sleigh while he went for help. He pulled himself to his feet. He spotted the horse standing and looking at him across the snow just a few yards away. Jesse managed to stagger most of the way to the house before he collapsed. He, too, died in moments.

  Jesse and Omar both died of cardiac arrest caused by shock. All night long as they lay in the snow, their bodies had fought to keep warm by drawing the blood away from their skin and exposed extremities and pushing it deep into the core. In the morning, when the boys stood up and began to walk for the first time in hours, the sudden change of position and unaccustomed motion triggered a massive fall in blood pressure. Blood from the cores of their bodies cooled as it moved into the cold extremities. Their pumping hearts forced this chilled blood to circulate. When it reached their hearts, the boys instantly went into ventricular fibrillation. Instead of contracting and releasing in steady rhythmic beats, the lower chambers of their hearts began to quiver without coordination or effect. Pumping quit; blood stopped circulating through their bodies. Jesse and Omar blacked out. Ten or fifteen minutes later, their fibrillating hearts ceased to beat altogether and the boys died.

  The cold heart is extraordinarily sensitive. Rough handling, the mild jarring of feet hitting the ground, or simply the change of position from prone to upright can set off ventricular fibrillation. Coming in out of the cold can also stop the heart. In severe hypothermia, death by rescue is all too common. In 1979, sixteen Danish fishermen shipwrecked in the frigid waters off Greenland were rescued after more than an hour in the icy sea. All of them were conscious and able to board the rescue ship. They were wrapped in blankets and given warm drinks. When they stood to walk across the deck of the ship, all sixteen of them dropped dead. Their hearts, like Jesse and Omar’s, had gone into ventricular fibrillation. Doctors call this rewarming shock.

  That was what killed eighteen-year-old Frederick Milbier. Frederick had been caught out in the storm in an open bobsled with his sister, Christina, her husband, Jacob Kurtz, and their baby. They were on their way home from dinner at the home of Jacob’s parents near Yankton in southeastern Dakota, just north of the Missouri River. When the horses refused to walk into the wind, Jacob left his wife, child, and brother-in-law in the bobsled and went for help. He made it only a few yards before the wind knocked him over. Unable to get up, Jacob lay on the snow and lapsed into a stupor. In the teeth of the storm, Christina Kurtz unbuttoned her dress and her blouse and placed her baby next to her naked skin. This probably saved both of their lives. In the clear light of morning, Christina and Frederick saw a farmer in the distance standing by his haystack. Frederick got down from the bobsled, but, unable to walk, he had to crawl to reach the farmer. The farmer’s family quickly got Frederick and his sister and the baby inside. Frederick died soon afterward in the warmth of the farmer’s house.

  Rescuers went out after Jacob Kurtz and found him buried in the snow. They reported that he was entirely frozen but for a sphere of warmth surrounding his heart. It’s likely that Jacob Kurtz could have been revived in a modern hospital. But the search party that found him assumed he was beyond hope. Kurtz was brought to the farmhouse. Like his brother-in-law, he probably died of heart failure as he thawed.

  When the light bored into her eyelids, Lena Woebbecke stirred. All through the night long, as the wind threw snow at her, she had drifted in and out of consciousness. Her brain was so sluggish with cold she could barely remember or comprehend what had happened to her. The storm rattling the windows of the schoolhouse, the children shoving their way to the door and the shouting in English she only partly understood, the quarrel with the boy about which way to go. She remembered leaving the boy and setting out by herself across the field. And the snow in her face. And turning back when she lost her way. But everything else was a blank.

  Snow had melted under her body where she lay and then frozen again. When Lena tried to get up, she heard the ice crackle. She was frozen to the ground. With an effort she managed to free herself. She stood. Everything was clear now. She could see smoke from the frail chimney of the Woebbecke house. The school was just a few hundred feet behind her at the top of the hill.

  Lena could manage only a few steps before she fell. She had no sensation in her feet or legs, and the drifts were deep. But somehow she was able to drag herself through the snow. It was downhill most of the way home, but at the bottom of the hill she’d have to cross a steep creek-bed and climb up the other side. Lena was near the creek-bed when her strength gave out. It was too cold. Exertion failed to warm her. Being female and big for her age was some advantage: a thin boy in her place would probably have been dead by now. But Lena had used up her reserves. Again she collapsed in the snow and lay still. Lena waited patiently for death.

  Even before sunrise Wilhelm Woebbecke decided it was bright enough to resume his search for Lena. Over his wife, Catherina’s, vehement protest he had gone out in the storm the previous afternoon to bring the child home from school only to find the schoolhouse shut up and empty. By that time the blizzard was so bad that Wilhelm was unable to find the path and he wandered lost for an hour. When he finally, miraculously, stumbled on the house, he agreed with his wife that it was too dangerous to search any longer. Either Lena had found shelter with the neighbors or she was dead. Wilhelm and Catherina had done the best they could, probably more than Lena’s own mother would have done. They had treated her like their own daughter ever since her mother had brought her to live with them in the summer. But they wouldn’t risk their lives. They had their own children to worry about.

  Wilhelm had just started out on his horse when he spotted a dark shape on the hillside opposite the ravine. He shouted Lena’s name and watched in amazement as the girl lifted herself off the snow and rose to her knees. Though she could not stand, she held her hands up to show that she still had her dinner pail and reader. Wilhelm floundered through the deep snow that filled the ravine. Lena was unable to speak or use her legs, but Wilhelm managed to put her arms around his neck and she held on as he carried and dragged her through the ravine.

  It was eight o’clock, the hour of January sunrise, when Wilhelm and Lena reached the house. By the time Catherina had gotten the child’s frozen clothing off and put her to bed, Lena was in a coma.

  Johann Albrecht Sr. left for the Rosefield Township school at first light. His wife, Maria, had packed a large pail of food for him to bring with him. Enough food for their son Johann, for the teacher, James Cotton, and for any other students who had spent the night in the schoolhouse. There was no question in their minds that their boy and the teacher were safe at school. Even Maria had stopped sighing.

  Johann Albrecht reached the Rosefield school without any trouble. Mr. Cotton was there to greet him—but no one else. “Where is Johann?” he demanded. Albrecht’s English was limited. Cotton spoke no German. But Albrecht understood soon enough that his son and the four other Schweizer boys were missing.

  Johann Albrecht could not comprehend why the teacher was safe inside the school while the boys were lost outside on the prairie, but he wasted no more time trying to get Cotton to explain. The neighbors must be told what had happened. They must start to search at once while there was still hope.

  The sun rose on the Reverend S. F. Huntley, warming his feet at his fire in Harmony Township, Jerauld County, Dakota—warming his feet and wondering about his wife. As befit a Congregational minister, the Reverend Huntley was a tall, gentlemanly figure of a man with a calm, settled demeanor and a physique that more and more resembled a bowling pin. S.F.’s wife, Abi, was
a minister, too—an ordained Quaker minister and a founding member of the Harmony Township Friends Meeting. The Reverend Huntley would be the first to say that his wife was a pious, selfless woman; all her life she had taught school and preached the word of God. She was a person others turned to in adversity. But that only made her want of faith the previous night all the more baffling and disconcerting. Abi had bowed her head and prayed with him when he clasped his hands and entrusted their children, Mary, Ernest, Mabelle, to God. Together, as night fell and still the children did not return from school, they prayed to God to watch over the little ones, to shelter them in the storm and see them safely home. S.F. sincerely believed that there was nothing more to be done. But still Abi would not resign herself. All through the night S.F. heard his wife tossing and fretting. By morning, she was haggard with fear.

  The Reverend Huntley felt it was his duty to remain calm. Surely, he told his wife in his most comforting voice, the children’s teacher, Miss Hunt, had taken them to her boarding place close by the school. No doubt they had passed a comfortable night in her more than capable care. It had probably been a wonderful lark to be away from home and in the company of other children.

  So confident was he of the children’s safety that S.F. spent the first frigid hours of daylight doing chores in the barn that he had been unable to attend to the evening before. That was enough to convince him that he had been wise to stay home the night before instead of risking his life on a wild rescue mission, as Abi had demanded. Even in the few minutes it took to walk back to the house from the barn S.F.’s feet had become insensate. Before he could set out to collect the children from Miss Hunt’s boarding place, it was imperative to thaw his feet and make himself thoroughly warm.