The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Though Greely’s prose is clotted, his meaning is clear: the lay of the land itself between Canada and Mexico fosters the southern advance of cold waves just as it hinders their movement to the north. The cold wave of January 12 through 15 was a classic American weather pattern, though amplified to an almost unprecedented extreme.

  In fact, it was the rapid southern advance of the cold wave that finally made General Greely sit up and take notice. The general had spent the day of the storm dealing with the usual bureaucratic vexations attendant on his position: a scrawny young man named Edwin R. Morrow wanted permission to enlist in the Signal Corps despite the fact that he was two inches under height and eleven pounds underweight; one of the seventeen clerks who worked at the Washington, D.C., Signal Office was taken to task for racking up twenty-nine sick days in 1887 and received a stern warning not to “cause any loss of service to the government during the current year”; a couple of new details emerged in the New Orleans scandal involving Signal Corps observers who had been squeezing the local cotton exchange for cash payments for weather data; Lieutenant Woodruff in Saint Paul requested and was granted access to weather reports from Canadian stations in Minnedosa, Swift Current, and Calgary.

  On Friday the thirteenth, Greely undoubtedly saw telegrams about the extent and severity of the storm from both Signal Corps observers and railroad agents, and the first accounts of the suffering and casualties in the Dakotas and Nebraska appeared in the Saturday morning papers. But it wasn’t until Saturday night, when the cold wave was on the doorstep of Texas and Louisiana, that the general finally realized that the situation warranted special attention. The threat to Southern sugar growers was what alarmed him. On Sunday morning, Greely broke with his usual custom and reported to his office at the Signal Corps’ recently acquired headquarters at 24th and M Streets. As he scanned the daily weather maps and the outgoing telegrams of warnings, his alarm turned to outrage. Even a fool could see at a glance that cold air was barreling south like an express train. Just look at the observations from midnight on Saturday—Palestine (southeast of Dallas) was already reporting 24 degrees with strong northerly winds, and San Antonio, farther south and west, was down to 46, while the temperature at Galveston on the coast was 72. The pressure gradient across the state was practically unheard of. Why in God’s name had that puppy, Junior Professor Henry A. Hazen, delayed sending out the signal to hoist the cold wave flags in Texas and Louisiana? It was perfectly obvious that the warnings should have gone out the day before in the 3 P.M. dispatch or at the very latest at 11 at night. But to wait until the freezing air was hours—indeed, minutes—away from thousands of acres of precious sugar and cotton plantations was as baffling as it was insupportable.

  Bent on limiting the damage, Greely took charge at once. He fired off telegrams to New Orleans stating with grave emphasis the severity of the cold that would be upon the sugar districts by that night or the first hours of Monday. And then he set about boxing young Hazen’s ears. “Your attention is called to the fact that errors of such a kind as that made by you seriously injure this service in the minds of those reading such a dispatch,” Greely dictated, fury getting the better of his prose. “It is hoped that you will exercise such care in this respect in the future with these dispatches as will avoid a repetition of such carelessness.” Warming to his subject, Greely decided to use this opportunity to slap Hazen down for another transgression. Back in October, when he was spanking new to his position as civilian forecaster with the Signal Corps, Junior Professor Hazen had engaged in an unseemly public contest with a meteorologist at Boston’s venerable Blue Hill Observatory to see which one issued the more accurate forecasts for a month of Bostonian weather. Hazen then had the gall to publish the results in the December 30, 1887, issue of Science. (Naturally he claimed to have bested the Blue Hill forecaster; just as naturally the Blue Hill forecaster, one H. Helm Clayton, argued in a rebuttal published two weeks later that Hazen had rigged the contest with fuzzy terminology. Clayton insisted that if one defined as “fair” a day on which less than .01 of an inch of rain fell and as “foul” a day with .01 of an inch or more of rain, then his forecasts were far superior to Hazen’s.) Greely ignored this definitional hairsplitting and cut to the heart of the matter: He felt “great dissatisfaction” that Hazen had availed himself of “the first opportunity of an important public duty for advancing your personal interests or gratifying a desire to settle a question of personal standing professionally between Mr. H. Helm Clayton and yourself.”

  There was more, a great deal more, that General Greely would hold Junior Professor Hazen accountable for—but this would have to suffice for now. The general knew full well that it was he, not Hazen, who would have to answer to the irate sugar planters of Louisiana, not to mention the jackals of the press who never passed up an opportunity for taking the Signal Corps to task. Indeed, just the day before, the New York Tribune had run a prominent article under the glaring three-tier headline “Weather Prophets at Odds, A Ludicrous Blunder Yesterday, A Signal Service Inspector Says More Gumption and Less Science Are Needed” in which a reporter wrote with obvious relish that the Signal Corps had issued a forecast for “warmer, fair” weather when in fact the day turned out just the opposite: “The manner in which the prophecy was not fulfilled was remarkable. Seldom have innocent and trustful people been worse beguiled than New-Yorkers who arose in the morning and beheld, not blue skies and clean streets, but rain pouring down upon snow four inches deep, rapidly converting it into slush and a thick haze of fog enveloping earth and sky, and making matters still more unpleasant.” What was still more unpleasant for Greely was that one of his indications officers, the excitable Irishman Lieutenant John C. Walshe (the same Walshe who had inspected the Saint Paul office in December and gotten embroiled in Woodruff ’s dispute with Professor Payne and the Chamber of Commerce), had blabbed to the Tribune reporter that the reason government forecasts were so bad was that “the man now in charge of that branch of the service at Washington [Professor Cleveland Abbe] is too much of a scientist and too little of a weather observer.” Walshe rambled on that “Unless a man spends a long apprenticeship learning the details of weather conditions all over the United States he will fail in making predictions no matter how good a scientist he may be. The general rule that will apply in one place won’t apply in another. A prediction like that sent for to-day does more harm than one might suppose.”

  More harm indeed. Lieutenant Walshe would very shortly be hearing from the general as well.

  In Saint Paul, Lieutenant Woodruff had Sunday off—actually, just Sunday morning and afternoon. In the evening he’d have to climb once again to the top of the Chamber of Commerce building and spend a few hours studying the maps and incoming telegrams so he could issue the midnight forecast for Monday.

  But Woodruff did not have to be in his office surrounded by a litter of maps and telegrams to know that the cold weather that had set in since Thursday’s storm had reached a climax, or rather a nadir, that Sunday morning. He could feel it himself pressing in at every window and door in his residential hotel, cold that no amount of modern steam heat could keep at bay. Over the entire region that Woodruff had charge of, observers were recording the coldest weather of the season—in many locales the coldest temperatures ever measured. Thirty-six below zero at 6 A.M. Central Time according to Sergeant Lyons’s thermometer on the Chamber of Commerce roof (six days later it would fall even lower, to an all-time record of 41 below). Forty-three below at nearby Fort Snelling. Thirty-seven below at Professor Payne’s observatory in Northfield. Twenty below reported by Sergeant Glenn at Huron (temperatures had bottomed out there at 31 below the previous night at 9 P.M.). Twenty-four below at Yankton. Twenty-five below at Omaha. Thirty-five below at North Platte, Nebraska, the lowest temperature ever known in the history of the county, with a barometric pressure of 30.94, the station’s highest pressure then on record.

  Woodruff himself had recorded a temperature of 63 below zero on his spiri
t thermometer during the snow winter of 1880–81 while fighting the Sioux in Montana under Colonel Guido Ilges (the all-time record low for Montana, and the lower forty-eight, for that matter, is 70 below, recorded at mile-high Rogers Pass on January 20, 1954). But as far as personal comfort was concerned, Woodruff conceded that there really wasn’t much difference between 63 below in Montana and 36 below in Saint Paul. At least the winds were calm that Sunday morning, and the sun shone feebly in a sky of steel.

  The only other consolation was that this unprecedented cold wave was the ideal weather for building a rock-hard ice palace for the upcoming Winter Carnival, the high point of the winter social season at Saint Paul. Though Thursday’s blizzard had forced city officials to postpone the ceremonial laying of the corner block, the occasion took place with all due pomp on Saturday evening—a bit of luck, as it turned out, since this just happened to be the day Woodruff celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday. When it was finished a few days hence, the ice palace would rise to 120 feet at its highest turret, with some 55,000 22-by-33-inch ice blocks covering an acre of ground and weighing in at 6,000 tons—all of it frozen solid by the subzero weather and glittering like diamonds.

  Woodruff had already requested Greely’s permission to conduct experiments on the effect of all that ice on the temperature of the surrounding air. He would need to requisition half a dozen maximum-minimum thermometers from the government to carry out the research. All for an excellent cause. With any luck, he and young Sergeant McAdie would publish their findings in the Scientific American.

  Despite the terrible cold that Sunday morning, Anna and Johann Kaufmann went to Gottesdienst (worship service) at the stark white Salem Mennonite Church. They brought their three surviving children with them, six-year-old Julius, three-year-old Jonathan, and baby Emma, whose first birthday they had celebrated two weeks before on New Year’s Eve, when they still had six children living in their house.

  Maria and Johann Albrecht attended church as well. Bowed with grief, the couple looked barely bigger than their four young children. Maria sat with her hands crossed in her lap. Johann, at the age of forty-one, already had more hair in his beard than on his head. Now that their son Johann was gone, Peter at age nine was the oldest child. A thin long-faced boy with prominent ears and very dark hair, Peter looked terrified that his mother would burst into sobs in front of everyone. What a blessing that the child hadn’t gone to school with his older brother that day. How many times had Peter heard his mother repeat this?

  The Graber family was also at church. The two brothers, Johann and Andreas, stared fixedly at the ground rather than meet the eyes of the congregation. They were the only ones who had gotten home safely with Mr. Cotton when their brother Peter and the four other boys wandered off into the storm. No one could understand why God had chosen to spare these two and take the other five. Or why they were unable to find a trace of the missing boys even three days after the storm.

  The Salem church was full and loud with talk before the service began. The names of the missing boys passed from mouth to mouth. Their fathers had been searching, all the able-bodied men of the community had been searching for two days now, and still there was nothing but some stray tracks that vanished in the drifts. Five sets of footprints in some places; three sets of tracks in other places.

  The faithful prayed long and hard in those days. The Mennonite worship service was still in progress in the waning light of afternoon when the minister stopped to make an announcement. Afterward, when members of the congregation talked about it, no one could understand or explain why he had waited so long.

  The minister told the faithful that one of their members named Johann Goertz had come forward with a startling discovery. That morning before church Goertz went walking out in his field beyond the fire break he had plowed around his house as a protection against prairie fires. About forty yards from the house, just along the southwest edge of the fire break, Goertz spotted something he had never seen before. It was an arm emerging from the snow. The arm was raised in the air as if in defiance or triumph. Clutched in the motionless fist was a cloth coat. Goertz approached and brushed the snow away. Before he left for church he had uncovered five frozen corpses. He couldn’t tell who they were or what family they belonged to.

  That was the minister’s announcement.

  The three fathers set out immediately. The mothers went home with the children. The Goertz farm was three miles due east of the church. The men got there as quickly as they could through the deep drifts. From a long way off they could see the saplings of the timber claim, black whips bent and twisted by the wind. The land shelved up in a steady rise ahead of them, like a long smooth wave pushing against the sky but never breaking. A bleak stretch of prairie.

  The section lines made it easy to calculate distance and reckon direction. The fathers knew without thinking about it that their sons had wandered nearly three miles from their schoolhouse, three miles south and east. Like every living thing caught out in the storm, the boys had drifted with the wind and then fallen.

  At first, the men stopped in horror when they saw the dark patches of cloth against the snow. Johann Kaufmann cried out, “O God, is it my fault or yours that I find my three boys frozen here like the beasts of the field?”

  It was terrible beyond words to pry the children off the ground. At first it was impossible to separate the bodies, the boys had died so near each other. Johann Kaufmann had to carry his sons Johann and Elias together because the older boy died with his arms around his younger brother.

  Night was falling by the time Johann returned home. Anna stood at the door with her three little blond children and stared as her husband carried the three bodies inside. The freundliche mother, small and soft-featured, who always had a smile for her children, watched without saying a word.

  Johann set the rock-hard bodies on the floor next to the stove. Anna looked at her dead sons and began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Her husband and her two little boys turned to her in disbelief but Anna didn’t stop. It would be days before they could get the bodies into coffins. Anna laughed.

  Emma was still a baby, too young to know what was happening, but Julius and Jonathan were old enough to understand that those frozen blocks next to the stove were the dead bodies of their brothers. For the rest of their lives, the two brothers would never forget the peals of their mother’s agonized laughter.

  Sunday was nearly over by the time Daniel D. Murphy got out to his haystack. He almost hadn’t bothered to bring in hay at all, there were so few animals left to feed. A bull and a team of horses were all that the blizzard had spared him. Fifteen years since Murphy had come to America from Ireland, first to work in the mines in Michigan and Montana, then to scrape together what he could and file on this ranch outside of O’Neill, Nebraska, and this was all he had left. A bull and a team of horses.

  Murphy took his hired man with him to the haystack. He knew there would be a job shoveling off the snow piled up by the storm before they could even get to the hay. Cold as it was and getting dark, it was not a chore he relished.

  Between the swish and crunch of shovels against snow and hay and their desultory conversation, Murphy and the hired man didn’t hear the voice at first. When it finally grew loud enough to pierce their consciousness, the two men dropped their shovels and stopped dead to listen. There it was again, a thin quaver coming from inside the haystack: “Is that you, Mr. Murphy?”

  The whole neighborhood had been out searching for Etta Shattuck for three days now. Why hadn’t it occurred to anyone to look in Murphy’s haystack?

  Murphy and the hired man dug Etta out carefully. It was a miracle she was alive at all, after seventy-eight hours without shelter or food or water in the coldest weather ever known in Holt County. The girl murmured something about how Christ had covered her defenseless head, but Murphy urged her to be still and conserve her strength while they carried her to the house. His wife would do what she could to get the frost out of the poor g
irl’s arms and legs. Rubbing the frozen parts with snow was the only hope, though after three days God only knew what condition she was in.

  It was too late in the day and too cold to be starting for the Western Union office in O’Neill. Murphy would go Monday morning first thing. Etta’s family in Seward must be notified. Murphy could only hope to God that she lived that long.

  All day Sunday the cold streamed down into Texas and Louisiana. Rain changed to sleet and then snow. Standing water froze. The thin uninsulated walls of houses rattled in the gale. Cold wave warnings came too late or not at all.

  At the Signal Corps station in Abilene, the signal flag could not be lowered on Sunday because sleet had frozen it to the flagpole.

  Galveston on the Gulf coast got hit a few hours later. The Signal Corps observer wrote in the station journal that “the air was filled with fine drifting snow or freezing mist, which, owing to the influence of a wind of forty miles per hour, cut like drifting sand and covered everything with ice.” The temperature plunged from 62 degrees to 29 in a matter of hours. For the first time in the history of the city, milk vendors failed to deliver their goods; horse-drawn hacks and hotel buses were abandoned in the streets. “The blizzard came upon the city with remarkable suddenness and without the slightest warning from the weather bureau at Washington,” noted a local newspaper. “The bulletin ordering up signals and predicting freezing weather arrived only thirty minutes before the blizzard itself.”