The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Which was why S.F. was sitting by the fire with his feet up and his boots off when his neighbor Mr. Bartie came rushing in without so much as a knock on the door and blurted out excitedly, “You better be seeing after your children. They stayed in a straw stack last night.”

  S.F. could not have been more astonished if the man had raised a fist and struck him. “Are they alive?” he demanded. “I don’t know,” Mr. Bartie replied maddeningly, “I didn’t hear any particular.” “How do you know that they were in a straw stack?” “Mr. Knieriem was over to Mr. Dingle’s and told us,” came the baffling reply. “What did Mr. Knieriem want? Did he come out to tell you?” “No,” said Mr. Bartie, “he came after some beef ’s gall.” “Were his children in the stack?” S.F. asked with rising alarm. “Yes, the teacher and all the scholars.” “Why didn’t you find out if they were alive?” The impossible Mr. Bartie merely shrugged. “As soon as Mr. Knieriem told us I put on my coat and came right over to let you know.”

  Abi, having listened to the entire exchange, was beside herself. S.F. could only comfort his wife with the reflection that the children could not all be dead or Mr. Knieriem would have no need for beef ’s gall. Then he got his feet back in his boots, dashed out for his horse with Mr. Bartie trailing after, and they were gone. Abi stayed home to keep the house warm and look after their four-year-old daughter.

  May Hunt had been calm and competent all night, but at the sight of the tall, somber, bearded figure of the Reverend S.F. Huntley standing inside the Hinners’ farmhouse door and staring down at her and the children with such an expression of dismay, she broke down. Miss Hunt buried her face in her hands and wept—and soon all her students were sobbing with her. What made it more awful was that Miss Hunt belonged to the Reverend Huntley’s church, as did the parents of little Frank and Addie Knieriem. What would people say in church on Sunday when they learned that it was she, Miss May Hunt, who was responsible for the fact that seven children had spent the night of the blizzard in a haystack? What would the Knieriems say when they found out that their precious daughter Addie could not walk—and very possibly would never walk again?

  It was a long time before Miss Hunt was collected enough to tell the Reverend Huntley what had happened. With much prodding from the students she got through the account of the ordeal in the gully, the wandering blind and freezing in the storm, the providential discovery of the haystack, the extraordinary bravery of Fred Weeks in keeping guard at the mouth of the cave and climbing out every few hours to check on the progress of the storm. She made Fred himself tell how at four in the morning he went out of the cave yet again and this time the air seemed thinner and he looked up and saw stars overhead—and there, less than a hundred feet away, was the Hinners’ farmhouse that they had sought so desperately the previous evening. Fred was too shy to say any more, so Miss Hunt told how heroic he was to stagger to the house on the frozen blocks of his feet and shout and pound on the door until Mr. Hinner came out.

  But that was where Miss Hunt broke down again. It was too terrible to describe the rescue and what Addie Knieriem had endured—indeed was enduring still.

  Bit by bit, the story came out. Fred and Mr. Hinner returned to the haystack as quickly as they could, bearing lanterns and piles of blankets. They called to Miss Hunt to bring the children forth to safety. At first, the smaller children were groggy and slow to react. They began to shiver uncontrollably as soon as they got outside the cave. Fred, despite the condition of his feet and hands, was everywhere lending a hand. In a few moments all of the children were out of the straw cave and wrapped in blankets or shawls and staggering as best they could to the glow in the farmhouse window.

  All but Addie. In the excitement of rescue, no one noticed at first that there was something the matter with Addie Knieriem. She was unable to stand up and had to be pulled from the back of the cave. It was her feet. They had gotten wet when she tumbled blindly into the gully and the scarves came off her shoes. As she walked through the storm, the wetness rapidly chilled her feet. By the time Addie took refuge in the haystack, the water in her shoes and stockings had frozen solid. As she lay huddled in the cave through the long night, her feet touched the straw walls: bodily warmth bled constantly from her feet to the straw. Addie was too cramped and too exhausted to remove the shoes—and even if she had, there was no way of warming and drying her feet short of making a fire, which was out of the question in the storm. Addie’s feet remained encased in the ice of frozen wool and leather all night. At some point the feet themselves turned to ice.

  Finally, after Fred and Mr. Hinner carried her to the farmhouse, they got the child’s shoes and stockings off. Miss Hunt was appalled. She had never seen human flesh look anything like this.

  Frostbite, the irreversible freezing of living tissue, is the body’s way of cutting its losses in severe cold and increasing the chances of survival. Warm heart and lungs and brain are more critical than warm ears or fingers or toes. So the blood retreats inward to the body’s core and the extremities are sacrificed. Hands and feet are especially susceptible because they are so remote from the body’s source of heat and because they have no large muscles to generate warmth by moving or shivering. In a blizzard, exposed fingers can become frostbitten in seconds, especially if wet or in contact with metal. Tight, constricting clothing or shoes and dehydration also increase the risk of frostbite. Addie met every one of these conditions. It’s possible that Miss Hunt had wrapped and tied the scarves around the girl’s shoes tightly enough to have hastened the freezing of her feet by cutting off the flow of blood.

  When the skin temperature falls to between 22 and 24 degrees, the moisture in the tissues freezes. The fluid between the skin cells of Addie’s feet froze first. Where there had been soft, pliable skin bathed in saline solution there was now a shallow formation of ice crystals. As the temperature dropped through the night, the crystalline network expanded. The growing ice crystals extracted water from the adjoining layers of cells and froze it into new crystals; facets joined to facets in a hard brittle web. It’s likely that during the minutes that Addie walked through the storm with wet feet, the freezing progressed rapidly enough to rupture the cell membranes. Not only the fluid between the cells but the cells themselves froze solid, damaging the tissues beyond the point of recovery. But even in the relative warmth of the haystack, the insidious, silent freezing progressed. The ice penetrated deeper, taking her toes, radiating out from her heels, spreading into the tendons and cartilage. As the ice solidified, the surrounding flesh became dehydrated. The loss of water, and the consequent rise in saline levels, killed even more cells. Horrifying as it was, the transformation of flesh to ice was almost completely painless. Once the temperature of her feet fell below 45 degrees, Addie felt nothing at all.

  By the time they carried her to the Hinners’ farmhouse and got her shoes and stockings off, Addie’s feet looked like grayish purple marble. Fred Weeks’s feet also were swollen and blotched with a waxy sheen.

  The standard home remedy for frostbite in those days was to rub the frozen flesh with snow and then let it thaw gradually in warm water, and it’s likely that this is what the Hinners did with Addie and Fred. The technique of rubbing with snow became widespread in Napoleon’s army during the catastrophic Russian campaign of 1812 after soldiers suffered devastating burns and tissue damage while warming their frozen limbs at open fires. Rubbing with snow was indeed less harmful than scorching frozen flesh or exposing severely dehydrated, hypothermic bodies to roaring campfires, but it was still harmful. Doctors today treating Addie and Fred at a modern hospital would first give them painkillers to dull the agony of rewarming and then plunge their feet into a whirlpool bath of 104-to 107-degree water. While their feet were thawing, the children would be rehydrated with warm fluids, strengthened with a high-protein diet, and started on a course of antibiotics. But even in a modern hospital the odds of saving Addie’s feet would still be low.

  With the treatment she received at the Hinners’ f
armhouse, the odds were essentially nil. Rubbing with snow, though it initially dulled the pain of thawing, ultimately aggravated the tissue damage. And the pain, though delayed, was fierce. As the frozen flesh melted, Addie felt as if her feet had caught fire. Unbearable itchiness followed. But the full extent of the injury—and the brunt of the pain—did not surface for several days. In deep frostbite, the cells lining the capillaries and small veins rupture and the liquid component of blood leaks into the surrounding tissues. Drained of fluid, the remaining blood cells “sludge” in the vessels. In time the sludged blood starts to clot, and once that happens circulation is cut off entirely. The sludging and clotting of the blood is finally more destructive to the tissues than the formation of ice crystals. For Addie, it killed any hope of saving what had frozen.

  Where the blood in her feet had ceased to flow, the skin soon blistered grotesquely and turned an inky, purplish black. Clear or bloody pink fluid wept from the blisters. Gangrene set in—the death and putrefaction of the blood-starved tissues. There was no recourse but amputation. One foot was saved, though all the toes had to be cut off. Addie’s other foot was removed by a local doctor named A. M. Mathias. The anesthetic effects of ether and chloroform had been known since the 1840s, and the latter was used extensively as an anesthetic during the Civil War. It’s likely that Dr. Mathias was familiar with these anesthetics, and he may well have read of the many deaths during surgery caused by chloroform, which was far more potent than ether. There is no record of whether Dr. Mathias himself knew how to admister inhalable anesthetics, especially when operating on a child. It’s conceivable that Addie endured the amputation of her foot and toes with no anesthetic aside from an opium compound like morphine.

  Fred Weeks was comparatively lucky. For days after the storm, fluid wept from the blisters on his feet and legs and the blackened flesh peeled away. The pain was so bad he couldn’t bear to have clothing touching the skin. It’s likely he ran a high fever. But eventually the wounds healed.

  The Reverend Huntley’s children, Mary, Ernest, and Mabelle, escaped with only swelling and blistering on their feet and shins. They clung to their mother and wept pitifully when their father brought them home later that morning. Abi Huntley wept, too, once she saw their feet and legs. After the children were fed and put to bed, Abi cornered her husband. She had never once complained since moving to Dakota Territory four and a half years ago—pregnant, homeless, well on in years, burdened with the care of three precious children. But this was past enduring, she told S.F. bitterly. They must pack up and go back east as soon as possible.

  For most, the suspense of the night ended that morning—one way or another. In the clear light of day husbands tracked down wives who had wandered out into the storm. Dogs returned home, with or without their masters. Parents rushed to country schools where their children had spent the night next to fires of burning desks and chairs. Or the schools were empty, the children unaccounted for, the teacher dazed with grief and remorse. News of the living and the dead and the still missing got carried into towns on foot or horseback and radiated out again from the hotels and Western Union offices and railroad station agents’ offices.

  Story after terrible story circulated on the telegraph wires.

  Mr. Stearns, a Dakota schoolteacher, had taken his three children to the school he taught near De Smet the day before and still had not returned home.

  Frank Bambas, a Czech farmer, uncovered the body of his wife while shoveling a path from his farmhouse to his barn.

  A Nebraska settler named Closs Blake came upon a bobsled turned upside down and buried under a snowdrift; when he brushed off the snow and righted the bobsled he found the body of a little boy frozen underneath.

  In Turner County, south of Sioux Falls, Peter Wierenga enlisted neighbors to help him search for his four children. Together the men slowly walked the route the children took home from school. They spotted Wierenga’s seventeen-year-old daughter first. She was in a grove of saplings with her back to a tree. She had frozen to death standing up. Her brother and two younger sisters were huddled at her feet. All four of them were dead.

  Peter Heins, in the same county, lost three boys. Crazed with grief, Heins was on his way to the schoolhouse, yelling that he was going to kill the teacher, but a neighbor whose children had survived stopped him and told him what had happened. When the storm came up the teacher had begged the children to stay in school and she even locked the door. But the children refused to obey. One of them was seventeen and he led the rebellion. The kids overpowered the teacher and managed to get the door open and then they fled for home into the storm, Heins’s three sons among them. The boys made it two miles before they collapsed in a pasture.

  Other stories of that Friday morning after the storm came to light only later.

  John Jensen, a handsome young immigrant from Denmark living in Dakota’s Aurora County, not far from the Huntleys and the Knieriems, had gone out to his well to shovel snow when the storm hit around noon. He wandered, lost, for seven hours before he finally stumbled on a neighbor’s house. When he got inside, the neighbors had to cut the clothes off his body, snow was so tightly packed and frozen into the fabric. Though safe himself, Jensen was desperate with anxiety at leaving his young family alone in their farmhouse—his wife, Nickoline, who had never wanted to move to Dakota in the first place, their daughter Alvilda, and their month-old baby, Anna Nickoline. A week later Jensen wrote a letter in Danish to his sister describing the tragedy that had befallen him:

  At seven the next morning I started and thought I would go home. When I came home I found my loving wife outside the house, froze to death, and then I went into the house and there lay Alvilda on the floor froze to death. After what I can see from the tracks she [Nickoline] had gone to the stable. She had many clothes on but that didn’t help. The little one [Anna Nickoline] in the wagon was living.

  She was a very good wife and it makes me feel that I wish I was dead. But it must be God’s will that it should happen so. But what I am glad over, we shall meet in HEAVEN, where we will never part.

  After discovering the bodies of his wife and daughter, Jensen walked two miles to his brother Andrew’s house with the baby in his arms. When Andrew heard what happened he asked, “What did you do, John?” “I cared for the living,” was his reply.

  “A scene became quite familiar in many localities,” a Dakota historian wrote of the immediate aftermath of the storm; “the arrival of a party in quest of a doctor and bearing either on their arms or in some sort of conveyance, the half frozen body of a neighbor or two who had been exposed to the storm…. The heartrending cries of the bereaved were heard in a hundred homes…. The whole scene covering almost the entire territory remind[ed] one familiar with battles of the scene around the hospital camps while a hotly contested battle was in progress and the wounded were being borne to the rear and turned into the surgeon’s care.”

  The Schweizer community came out in force once Johann Albrecht spread the word that the five boys were missing. It was bitter cold and clouds blew in by Friday afternoon, making it hard to see anything on the surface of the snow in the flat light. Around the schoolhouse there were many fresh tracks in the snow where parents had come and gone, so it was impossible to pick up a trail. The men made wide circles around the school, but they saw nothing. Not a trace of the boys. A light snow began to fall around three o’clock that afternoon and continued into the gloaming hours. Darkness came early. They would search again the next day.

  South of Scribner, Nebraska, some seventy-five men had spent the day searching for the Westphalen sisters, Eda and Matilda. The men had gone out with poles and shovels and they were working methodically through the drifts. A few of them spotted tracks on the sheltered side of a hill, and someone else found deep indents in the snow. They speculated that the girls had stamped their feet here trying to warm themselves. Some men said they were sure that the tracks circled back on themselves. They followed every ripple in the surface of the sno
w. They dropped the poles into the deeper drifts, thinking they would feel the difference between a frozen body and frozen earth. But by dark, the searching parties gave up and went home. Someone was sent to the Westphalens’ house to tell the widow that there was still no sign of her two daughters.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sunday

  In the days following the blizzard of January 12, 1888, the cold came down from the north like a river in flood. Channeled by the Rocky Mountains to the west but otherwise unimpeded, the frigid Canadian air mass surged south on the back of the intense temperature and pressure gradients that had unleashed the storm. Alberta, Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas—as long as there was energy to propel its flow, the cold air would keep moving south. Only the most robust cold fronts make it as far south as Oklahoma and Texas in howling blasts they call blue northers. The front that spawned the blizzard of January 12 was so robust that it traveled all the way down to Mexico, pushing cold air into Veracruz and through the narrow waist of land pinched between Oaxaca and Chiapas, until it finally issued into the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

  Chief Signal Officer Greely was well aware of how North America’s terrain acts to direct the flow of cold waves. As he wrote in his book American Weather, published the same year as the blizzard,

  There are very marked topographical features in the United States, which result in causing to advance from British America [in other words, Canada] the greater part of the winds following in the wake of cyclonic storms. The Rocky Mountain range, averaging about nine thousand feet in elevation, is as high or higher than the upper strata of most low-area storms, and so the air current cannot be drawn from the westward. Again, the broad, vast valley drained by the Mississippi descends with a gradual and substantially unbroken slope from British America to the Gulf of Mexico, so that any air flowing northward must be considerably retarded in its movement by the great friction arising from moving over continually ascending ground. On the other hand, the air from British America passes off gradually descending surfaces, and this movement is further facilitated by the air being dry and cold, and hence dense, which naturally under-runs with readiness the lighter, warmer air of the retreating low area.