The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Corpus Christi was next. The temperature dropped from 55 to a low of 16 during Sunday, and light snow fell through the day. Wind speeds could not be recorded accurately at the Signal Corps station because the cups of the anemometer were coated with ice. No cold wave warning had been received from Washington. “Much suffering was caused by the extreme and sudden change of temperature,” the local observer wrote in the station’s journal, “and this service received several criticisms for failure to give warning of the expected cold wave and storm.”

  It was raining in New Orleans late Sunday morning, but at 2:15 P.M. the wind veered suddenly from southwest to northwest and the temperature began to plummet. Eventually the temperature would fall some 35 degrees, from almost 80 before the cold wave to 45 that night.

  Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, had its coldest weather since December 31, 1880, and January 1, 1881, with temperatures falling nearly 40 degrees in eight hours. Ice an inch thick covered trees, houses, and fences and brought the Western Union telegraph lines down. “Not much damage to crops,” the observer noted, “but cattle and people suffered greatly.” For the first time since white settlement, the Colorado River in Texas froze over with ice a foot thick.

  By nightfall on Sunday, ice had downed the telegraph and telephone lines connecting Galveston to the mainland and the city remained cut off for the next twenty-four hours.

  The Westphalen girls, Eda and Matilda, were not found until midday on Monday, January 16. They were lying on their faces on the snow, their frozen bodies mostly exposed. It was a mystery how scores of searchers could have combed the hills and ravines around the school and missed them lying there, plain as day, on the side of a hill on John Haun’s farm. Two miles from their home, almost due east.

  The only comfort the men could bring their mother was that Eda, the older child, had wrapped her little sister Matilda in her shawl. Thirteen and eight years old.

  It was a slow, sad walk back to the Westphalen place. One of the men would have to come forward and ask the girls’ widowed mother where she wanted them to set the bodies down.

  General Greely, though “very much crowded with work,” as he complained to one of his many correspondents, found time in the course of that week to give Junior Professor Henry A. Hazen a thorough dressing-down for his ineptitude over the cold wave warning in the South. The general issued a severe blast on Wednesday: “It is not understood how you possibly delayed the display of this cold-wave signal until midday of Sunday when you already sent a special message that freezing temperatures would prevail that very morning, nor why, under similar circumstances, you neglected to display the cold-wave signal at Galveston.” Hazen’s delay, continued Greely, “tends to bring the service into ridicule as such a dispatch for Texas and Louisiana was evidently a saving clause and not in the interests of the people.” As a direct result of Hazen’s actions, “one of the most severe and pronounced” cold waves in a quarter century “reached the Texas coast practically unannounced.”

  A few days later, Greely upbraided Hazen again for his “disposition toward captiousness, irascibility [and] petulance,” and warned the junior professor that in the future he must “prevent even a tendency in this direction.”

  And with that, the blizzard and the cold wave it ushered in dropped from official Signal Corps correspondence.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Heroines

  News of the storm reached the major cities first. The Saint Paul Dispatch, an afternoon daily, carried reports of the blizzard on the same day it hit, and the Friday papers in New York and Chicago were full of the storm. The New York Times reported on Friday that it had received word via telegrams moving east along the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway that the worst storm in twenty years was raging in the Upper Midwest. “Very Severe in Dakota,” noted the Chicago Tribune that day.

  Chicago got the news before Dakota. In Dakota itself and throughout the blizzard region there was something of a news blackout. Though the major telegraph lines connecting big cities remained intact, local telegraph lines and the few existing telephone lines were down, and trains were at a standstill. No trains and no wires meant no hard news. For the first few days after the storm, editors in Dakota and Nebraska were reduced to looking out their windows at the drifts and improvising. The initial accounts in the local dailies were whimsical, ironic, folksy—the blizzard was just another bad trick that old man winter had pulled out of his sack.

  It wasn’t until Saturday that editors throughout the upper Midwest realized they had a major story on their hands. The chuckling abruptly ceased. Rivers of black boldface ran down the front pages of the papers in Omaha and Lincoln, Huron and Sioux Falls and Aberdeen. THE DIRE STORM AND ITS FRIGHTFUL RECORD. UNPRECEDENTED LOSS OF LIFE. MANY LITTLE CHILDREN PERISH WHILE ON THE WAY HOME FROM SCHOOL. In long unbroken columns the papers listed the names of the dead and missing. Every paragraph reported a fresh tragedy: Fred Eller, an Omaha cigar maker, found frozen to death within a block of his boardinghouse. Emil Gilbertson, formerly of Chicago, frozen to death eighty rods from John Murphy’s place near Hitchcock, Dakota. George F. Allen overtaken by the storm when he went out with his boy to get a load of hay, resulting in the death of the boy and the freezing of the father’s feet and arms. The story of the ultimate sacrifice that Robert Chambers made to keep his son Johnny alive and the valiant loyalty of their Newfoundland ran for days on the front page of the Daily Huronite, and eventually turned up in papers all over the country.

  By the start of the new week, the tally of the dead was the lead headline in most of the major metropolitan papers. On Tuesday, January 17, the New York Tribune put the death toll at 145 and “growing almost every hour.” The Tribune kept the story on its front page for a week, reporting 217 dead on Thursday, January 19, and 235 by Saturday, January 21. “THE RECORD OF THE DEAD” was the right-hand lead headline in the Chicago Tribune that Saturday. The next deck down promised “Thrilling Tales of Suffering from Exposure—Men and Women Perish on Their Own Premises—The Dire Distress of the Passengers on a Blockaded Train—Babies Frozen in the Arms of Their Mothers—Many Indians Missing.”

  Pure catastrophe is fatiguing. The city dailies soon wearied of tales about frozen children and blockaded trains. After only a few days, accounts of amputations, record cold temperatures, and staggering losses of livestock began to blur together. It was a Nebraska paper called the Omaha Bee that found a fresh angle to keep the story alive and tingling. On Wednesday, January 18, the Bee reported that one of its “representatives” had “learned an interesting tale of the pluck and good judgment exhibited by a young lady schoolteacher of Valley County.” “A Heroine of the Storm,” proclaimed the headline, and the story went on to describe how a nineteen-year-old teacher named Minnie Freeman had rescued her “little brood” of pupils after “a terrific gale, sweeping everything before it, struck the [schoolhouse] and carried away in the twinkling of an eye the entire roof of the structure, leaving the frightened little ones exposed to the elements.” Two days later, the Bee was back with new and juicier details. Somehow its “representative” had gotten hold of a photograph of the heroic schoolteacher and the paper was now pleased to report that Miss Freeman was a very attractive young lady indeed, that she was engaged to be married to a commissioner from South Omaha (swiftly denied by the heroine herself), and that she evinced a becoming personal modesty in protesting that she had done nothing out of the ordinary in rescuing her little brood. The storm now had its first certified heroine.

  The Bee did not let matters rest there. Noting that its story on Miss Freeman had “excited wide interest,” the paper declared: “She has become a heroine, and deserves to be rewarded. In France she would be voted a life pension. It has been suggested that this brave young lady, aged only nineteen years, be given a medal. The Bee would make another suggestion. Miss Freeman deserves something more substantial than a mere souvenir. She is now earning a scanty livelihood at probably $25 per month. She should be liberally reward
ed by contributors in money that would enable her to acquire a home and become independent.”

  Meanwhile, a second heroine had come to light—Miss Lois (or Louise or Loie, depending on the whim of the reporter or copy editor) Royce of Plainview, the young teacher whose three small students died in her arms the night of the blizzard. Lois herself survived, but now faced the imminent loss of both of her feet and possibly one of her hands to severe frostbite. She, too, the Bee argued, deserved to be recognized and rewarded.

  And so was born the Heroine Fund. Each day the Bee solicited—indeed begged—readers to contribute what they could to reward these paragons of young womanhood. Tallies of daily receipts preempted the death toll figures. Interspersed with lists of contributors, which the Bee soon took to calling The Roll of Honor, were snippets about the sterling lives and characters of the heroines themselves. Minnie Freeman took center stage as the Gibson girl, all apple cheeks and chin-up, commonsense bravery, while Lois Royce lurked in the shadows as the languishing heroine of a penny dreadful.

  Then, before interest flagged or attention strayed, fate handed the press a third heroine. From a journalistic point of view, the third was the best of all. Like Minnie and Lois, this new heroine was a teenage schoolteacher, but her tale was far more intriguing and, better yet, her fate still unresolved. It began with a mysterious disappearance into the white maelstrom; there followed a fruitless search, an agonizing brush with death, an eleventh-hour rescue; now there was a young life hanging in the balance as the likelihood of recovery from grievous injuries waxed and waned every hour. The papers had learned of the ordeal of Etta Shattuck.

  It wasn’t until Tuesday, January 17, that Ben Shattuck received the telegram from O’Neill reporting that his daughter had been found late in the day on Sunday—that she was alive but suffering from severe frostbite. Before he could leave Seward, Ben had to borrow money for the train tickets and other expenses of the journey. It took him two days to get from Seward to O’Neill by train, a distance of 135 miles. A week had now passed since Etta had gotten lost in the storm.

  Ben Shattuck was familiar with gangrene from his three years of service in the Union Army during the Civil War. He knew, when he examined his daughter in the Murphys’ farmhouse near Emmet, that the gangrene in her legs and feet was well advanced. There was no question of the girl walking.

  It was Monday, January 23, before Ben and the Murphys felt Etta could be moved. The journey back to Seward was grueling. The Murphys arranged to have a sleigh filled with hay and they carried Etta out and tucked the hay around her, covering her over with a piece of canvas. The ride from the farm to the train depot in O’Neill was nine miles. Ben Shattuck walked at his daughter’s side, despite the war wound in his right leg. The temperature that day never rose out of the single digits.

  The train to Seward, scheduled to leave O’Neill early Tuesday morning, was eight hours late because of the weather. They thought Etta would be more comfortable if she could recline, so they arranged a kind of cot for her in the baggage car. The nightmarish trip took all night. Etta never once complained.

  Poor as he was, Ben Shattuck spared no expense for his daughter’s recovery. As soon as they got to Seward, three doctors and a nurse were called in. Drs. Reynolds, Potter, and Townsend saw at once that amputation was the only recourse. On Thursday, January 26, Etta lost both of her legs just below the knee.

  The Omaha Bee, Tuesday evening, January 31, 1888: “The Shattuck Special Fund. Miss Etta Shattuck, the young school teacher who lost both limbs from the exposure in the recent storm will be incapacitated for any service by which she may derive a living. It is desired that $6,000 be raised…. This is to be known as the ‘Shattuck Special Fund.’” The entire front page that day was devoted to blizzard relief. In light of the fact that Miss Shattuck’s father was a war veteran who “suffered all the horrors of Andersonville prison” [actually, it was Belle Isle], every soldier was pressed “to send in his mite, be it ever so small, in appreciation of her heroic conduct and as a token of esteem for an old soldier and comrade.” A new fund had been added—the Westphalen Monument Fund—to raise money for a headstone to be set over the graves of the Westphalen sisters.

  Two days later, the Bee published a notice from Seward County Superintendent of Public Institutions George F. Burkett appealing for contributions to help Lena Woebbecke: “As yet nothing has been done…for the comfort and maintenance of Miss Woebbecke. She is the unfortunate girl who, on her return from school in district No. 71, northeast of Milford, became lost and remained out all night in a stubble field…. She is an orphan, eleven years old and is in very needy circumstances financially.” The Lincoln Journal joined in the appeal. Children all over Nebraska handed over their pennies. Crusty typesetters at small-town newspapers coughed up a dollar.

  Meanwhile, in the national press an unseemly brawl had broken out over the number of blizzard fatalities. On January 20, the Nebraska City Press devoted a story to a judge named A. F. Kinney, the agent for the Yankton Sioux tribe, who asserted that Dakota papers were deliberately underestimating and “covering up” the truth about the loss of life in the storm. When all the dead were counted, Kinney believed, the number would stand at almost one thousand in Dakota alone. The article went on to recount the details of Kinney’s harrowing nine-day train journey through the storm—“The coal was running low. The passengers were crowded into one car trying to keep warm. Two babies perished. The men discarded all the outer garments they could spare and gave them to the ladies and children. Finding these not enough, they brought mailsacks from the post-car and wrapped the children up in them. While at one station in Bonhomme County [Dakota], the Judge says, nineteen frozen bodies were brought into the depot in one day.”

  The Chicago Tribune picked up the story the next day, and it ran the day after that in the New York Tribune. The editor of the New York paper, however, seriously undermined Judge Kinney’s claims by tacking on a vehement rebuttal from J. S. McLain, editor of the Minneapolis Journal: “This statement [of almost one thousand fatalities] is an evident absurdity. Future reports are rather likely to decrease than increase the list…. It is simply impossible that the news has been suppressed, for the Journal’s reports have been verified by those of the morning papers. How a man who confesses to having been snowed up for the last nine days can estimate the loss of life with more accuracy than newspapers in constant telegraphic communication with the whole territory is incomprehensible.”

  What was at issue here was not just the accuracy of the death toll figures, but the truth about the climate of the prairie. A region that could slay a thousand innocent American citizens in the course of an afternoon did not look like a fit place for human habitation—quite the contrary—whereas if the figure stood at a mere couple of hundred, that could be written off as an unfortunate sacrifice on the path to progress. In essence it was an argument over image and reputation: prairie public relations.

  Dakota and Nebraska papers rose as one to defend their land and its climate. Editorials insisted that even with the blizzard fatalities their territory remained far healthier and enjoyed a far lower death rate than the fetid cities of the East Coast or the malarial swamps of the South. “Let people who are worrying about loss of life in Dakota remember this,” demanded the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. “In Dakota a man occasionally gets blown away or frozen to death. But his teeth never chatter for years because of ague, his form never withers under miasmatic troubles and seldom does his face whiten with pallid consumption…. Dakota is, once in years, the scene of some distressing calamity such as saddened her homes last week. But the lingering sickness and epidemic disease so common in other places are strangers here.” There were catalogs of Atlantic storms, Pacific earthquakes, and lake region “catastrophes” in the Aberdeen Daily Republican. The Daily Huronite refused to grieve over the losses, but instead greeted the blizzard in a “spirit of rejoicing.” “And why? Because the deep snow means good harvest in Dakota: the drought deamon [sic] flies bef
ore the breath of the snow blizzard.”

  The Mitchell (Dakota Territory) Capital growled that reports in the Eastern papers of the death and destruction inflicted by the blizzard were not only grossly exaggerated, but deliberate attempts to “disadvantage…the entire territory of Dakota.” The message was clear: Devious editors were using the blizzard to blacken the good name of the prairie in order to scare away prospective settlers or divert them to their own regions. The Capital clinched its defense of Dakota with hard data. Though there was no denying that the storm had been deadly, the paper’s editor calculated that when the number of fatalities was averaged over the entire population of the territory, there was but a single life lost for every three thousand residents.

  Just about the same ratio applied to New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.

  The heroine story took on a life of its own. Papers were now advertising a large photo of Minnie Freeman posing by her sod schoolhouse with the precious children she had saved—a dollar each, eight dollars for a dozen. The Roll of Honor expanded daily. The Bee’s lead story on February 4 opened with a detailed description of the condition of Lois Royce’s feet—“a great piece of frozen flesh has sloughed off from one side of the heel”—prior to their amputation. But the greatest coverage by far—and the largest share of the money raised—went to Etta Shattuck. Anything written or said by anyone remotely connected with her was rushed into print. “I know the family and I have known Miss Etta,” George W. Morey, a minister living in Wahoo, Nebraska, confided to the Bee on January 30. “I have been their pastor for two years and was personally acquainted with them and their circumstances before they went to Holt county, Nebraska two years ago. Mr. Shattuck is not only a veteran soldier but a worthy upright honorable Christian gentleman having the respect of all who know him. I knew Miss Shattuck while in Seward as a brave young woman struggling to prepare for the work of teaching with aught but their own labor to aid her. Who can tell the suffering of those ‘seventy-eight hours!’”