The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  Will’s younger brother, Walter, got himself into several more scrapes after the blizzard, but he managed to survive his childhood, graduate from the University of Minnesota, and land a couple of jobs with railroads before he joined his older brother on the staff of the Dakota Farmer in 1910. Walter remained with the publication for the next fifty years, retiring as its director in 1960. He died in 1973 at the age of ninety-three.

  Walter’s daughter, Barbara Wegner, still lives in Groton, almost directly across the street from the long-demolished schoolhouse where her father went to fetch his precious perfume bottle on the afternoon of January 12, 1888.

  Lieutenant Woodruff was six months shy of his fortieth birthday when he left the Signal Corps on June 1, 1888, a vigorous if beleaguered infantry officer with a wife and young daughter and a military career that had been stalled since 1879 at the rank of first lieutenant. Eleven years later he was dead.

  For some reason Woodruff did not take up his post as General Ruger’s aide-de-camp immediately but instead returned to his regiment for fifteen months of frontier service at Fort Bliss near El Paso, in the extreme western tip of Texas. When he joined Ruger at Saint Paul in August 1889, Woodruff installed himself in the swanky new Aberdeen Hotel up on the bluff near the mansions of Summit Avenue. “Bathroom with each apartment,” boasted the Aberdeen’s ads. “A high-class patronage solicited. Rates $3.50 to $6.00 per day.” There is no record of whether Woodruff crossed paths with Professor Payne or Mr. Cochran during his second residence in Saint Paul, but it seems unlikely.

  Two years later, the long-awaited promotion to captain finally came through. Woodruff left Ruger’s staff and returned to his regiment, now stationed in Florida.

  Shortly after President McKinley declared war on Spain on April, 25, 1898, Woodruff was appointed Inspector General of Volunteers. He served with the obese, bumbling General William Shafter during the Santiago campaign, the decisive land and sea battle for Cuba’s second-largest city, and was later on the staff of Major General John C. Bates. The Spanish-American War was brief by nineteenth-century standards—Cuba fell to U.S. forces by July and a cease-fire was declared on August 12—and relatively inexpensive. The US government laid out about $250 million on combat and ended up with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam; for another $20 million Spain handed over the Philippines. Of the three thousand Americans who lost their lives in the war, 90 percent died of infectious tropical diseases, especially malaria and yellow fever.

  One of the victims of disease was Captain Woodruff. He was still in Cuba the summer after the war when he contracted yellow fever near Santiago. He died at the age of fifty on July 11, 1899. A loyal soldier, Woodruff had devoted twenty-eight years of his life to serving the dreams of his young ambitious country. On March 5, 1900, his remains were taken to Arlington National Cemetery and laid to rest in the presence of his widow, his daughter, family and friends.

  “I have seen the Dread of Dakota. A genuine blizzard and am now ready to leave anytime, that we can sell,” pioneer wife Sadie Shaw wrote to relatives back east from her Dakota homestead in Douglas County. “Oh, it was terrible. I have often read about Blizzards but they have to be seen to be fully realized.”

  The Shaws did not sell, nor did Abi Huntley prevail upon her husband to take her and their traumatized children back to New York State. There were many such threats and much misgiving after the blizzard of 1888, but few families left—at least not right away. The weather finally moderated. Summer came and the prairie turned hot and dry. Day after day the sun sucked the moisture out of the black soil of the prairie. Grieving families got on with their lives, prayed for rain, had more children.

  The blizzard of January 12, 1888, did not put an end to the great white endeavor of settling and taming the prairie, but it did mark a turning point, a change of mood and direction. The Dakota boom had ended. Immigration to the prairie frontier slowed to a trickle in the last years of the 1880s. A time of reckoning and taking stock had set in. A new mood of caution, suspicion, and bitterness took hold. “Good bye, Lord, I am going west,” Arthur Towne remembered the church deacon shouting as Dakota-bound families streamed out of their Vermont village in 1881. By the close of the decade the joy was gone and the Townes were exhausted. “It did seem as if the whole James River valley was just a dumping ground for blasted hopes,” Towne’s mother told him wearily. “The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely vanished,” wrote Hamlin Garland of the sullen mood of the decade’s end. “The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissension had grown common. Two of my father’s neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their crops….[S]omething gray had settled down over the plain. Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were now quite firmly established…. No green thing was in sight, and noshade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn road, dust rose like smoke from crevices.”

  The truth was beginning to sink in: The sudden storms, the violent swings from one meteorological extreme to another, the droughts and torrents and killer blizzards were not freak occurrences but facts of life on the prairie. This was not a garden. Rain did not follow the plow. Laying a perfect grid of mile-sided squares on the grassland did not suppress the chaos of the elements. The settlers had to face the facts. Living here and making a living off this land was never going to be easy.

  Weather that takes lives and destroys hopes presents a moral quandary. Call it an act of God or a natural disaster, somebody or something made this storm happen. But what? Who was to blame for the deaths of the Kaufmann brothers? For the surge of frigid air that killed John Jensen’s wife, Nickoline, and their little daughter, Alvilda? For the fact that after January 12 Addie Knieriem never again walked on the feet she was born with, never ran, woke up every morning to the sight of the scarred stump below her ankle? Was it the fault of the railroads and the United States government for colluding to lure pioneers to country too wild and dangerous to support secure settlements? Was Lieutenant Woodruff guilty for failing to see the storm coming sooner or for not striving harder to get the word out? Were the immigrant parents themselves to blame for uprooting their families from the relatively safe enclaves of the Ukraine, Vermont, Prussia, and Norway and exposing them to the brutal cold fronts and lows that sweep down off the Canadian Rockies?

  Or should one condemn an economic system that gave some families mansions on Summit Avenue and left others so poor that they would risk their children and their own lives for the sake of a single cow? They called it “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were so young—but in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children’s disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for. The outpouring of grief after scores of children were found frozen to death among the cattle on Friday, January 13, was at least in part an expression of remorse for what children were subjected to every day—remorse for the fact that most children had no childhood. This was a society that could not afford to sentimentalize its living and working children. Only in death or on the verge of death were their young granted the heroine funds, the long columns of sobbing verse, the stately granite monuments. A safe and carefree childhood was a luxury the pioneer prairie could not afford.

  “The dark, blinding, roaring storm once experienced, ever remains an actual living presence, that has marked its pathway with ruin, desolation and death,” wrote South Dakota historian Caleb Holt Ellis in 1909. “The 12th of January, 1888, is, and long will be, remembered, not only by Dakotans, but by many in the northwest, not for the things we enjoy, love, and would see repeated; but for its darkness, desolation, ruin and death, spread broadcast; for the sorrow, sadness and heartache that followed in its train.” To this day, nearly a century after Ellis wrote these words, the storm remains “an actual living presence” in the region. Mention the dat
e to anyone whose family experienced the storm and you’ll get a story of death or narrow escape. “There are those who say that that storm was no worse than others we have had,” wrote Austen Rollag fifty years later, “but those who speak thus could not have been out of the house but sitting around the stove. I have seen many snowstorms in the more than sixty years I have been living here, but not one can compare with the storm of January 12, 1888.”

  The memories still burn. They burn all the fiercer because sorrow, sadness, and heartache did indeed follow in the blizzard’s train. Drought ravaged the prairie in the early 1890s. Thousands who had borrowed against their homesteads went bankrupt in the financial panic that inaugurated the depression of 1893. Farm income slipped steadily in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The price of corn fell by half between the mid-1870s and the 1890s. A great exodus commenced on the prairie. By the time the rains returned late in the 1890s, over 60 percent of the pioneer families had abandoned their homesteads. Settlers came back, tried to make a go of it in the Dakotas or even farther west—and once again got burned out, frozen out, and blown away. Out-migration is on the rise once more. Nearly 70 percent of the counties in the Great Plains states have fewer people now than they did in 1950. These days nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the Census Bureau in the nineteenth century. Seven of our nation’s twelve poorest counties are in Nebraska. As whites flee to cities and coasts, Native Americans and the bison that sustained them for thousands of years are returning. Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s. The white farmers and townspeople who remain would shun you for daring to say it, but in large stretches of prairie it’s beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history. “It’s time for us to acknowledge one of America’s greatest mistakes,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof on the op-ed page of the New York Times, “a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.”

  The blizzard of January 12, 1888, was an early sign of that mistake. In the storm that came without warning, the pioneers learned that the land they had desired so fervently and had traveled so far to claim wasn’t free after all. Who could have predicted that the bill would arrive with a sudden shift of wind in the middle of a mild January morning? A thousand storms of dust and ice and poverty and despair have come and gone since then, but this is the one they remember. After that day, the sky never looked the same.

  Sources

  I drew on a wide range of sources in writing this book—interviews with descendants of people caught in the storm, firsthand accounts archived at state and regional historical societies and research centers, contemporary newspapers, as well as secondary sources.

  The archives I found richest in information about the storm were the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul; the Norwegian American History Association in Northfield, Minnesota, the Minnesota State Climatology Office at the University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Division of Library/Archives of the Nebraska State Historical Society; Holt County Historical Society in O’Neill, Nebraska; the Seward County Genealogical Society in Seward, Nebraska; the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre, South Dakota; the Center for Western Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen, South Dakota; the Heritage Hall Museum and Archives in Freeman, South Dakota; the Dakotaland Museum in Huron, South Dakota; and the Jerauld County Historical Society in Wessington Springs, South Dakota.

  The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, holds the records of the Weather Bureau (Record Group 27) that I sifted through in order to piece together the story of how the storm was forecast and by whom.

  In the notes that follow, I list and discuss the most important source materials I used for each chapter. I footnote only lengthy quotations, controversial issues, incidents or events for which I have found conflicting accounts or claims, and prickly subjects that have stirred up debate or confusion among historians of the period.

  The only other adult book devoted entirely to this storm is In All Its Fury: A History of the Blizzard of January 12, 1888, collected and compiled by W. H. O’Gara (Lincoln, Nebraska: Union College Press, 1947), which I found invaluable for its account of the evolution and track of the storm, the historical context, and the extent of its impact.

  Prologue

  Books consulted for historical background on the Gilded Age include America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Sean Dennis Cashman (New York: New York University Press, 1993); America’s Gilded Age: An Eyewitness History by Judith Freeman Clark (New York: Facts on File, 1992); The Gilded Age, H. Wayne Morgan, editor (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1970); Unity and Culture: The United States, 1877–1900 by H. Wayne Morgan (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), and The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America edited by Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996).

  The claim that forecasts were correct 83.7 percent of the time comes from Annual Report of the Chief Signal Officer of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Year 1888 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1888), pages 9–10.

  Quote from Major John Wesley Powell beginning “[T]he promise of a science of profound interest…” comes from The Chautauquan, “National Agencies for Scientific Research,” December, 1891, pages 291–97.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Departures and Arrivals

  For the story of the Rollag family, I drew on family papers collected and translated from the Norwegian by Brynhild Rowberg of Northfield, Minnesota. Additional information and details about Norwegian immigrants come from No Drum Before Him by June Tisland (Madison, S. Dak.: Hunter Pub. Co., 1983); Grass of the Earth: Immigrant Life in the Dakota Country by Aagot Raaen (New York: Arno Press, 1979), and the memoirs and letters of Lars A. Stavig held at the South Dakota State Historical Society and at the Center for Western Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The detail about young Norwegian men building and storing their coffins comes from Stavig’s papers.

  My account of the history of the Swiss-German Mennonites, their migration to America, and their experiences in the communities around Freeman and Marion, South Dakota, relied on many conversations with and countless e-mails from Duane Schrag of Freeman, South Dakota. I also interviewed Gladys Waltner and her sister Anna Kaufman, nieces of three of the boys caught in the storm. I relied on the following books for additional details: After Fifty Years by John J. Gering (Marion, S. Dak.: Pine Hill Printery, 1924); Memoirs of Rev. John Schrag and Family (privately printed); Our People and Their History by P. R. Kaufman, translated by Reuben Peterson (Sioux Falls, S. Dak.: Augustana College Press, 1979); Looking Back 100 Years 1880–1980, Salem-Zion Mennonite Church of Freeman, South Dakota, compiled and edited by Nita M. Engbrecht (Freeman, S. Dak.: Pine Hill Press, 1980); The European History (1525–1874) of the Swiss Mennonites from Volhynia by Martin H. Schrag, edited by Harley J. Stucky (North Newton, Kans.: Swiss Mennonite Cultural & Historical Association, 1974). Martin H. Schrag’s book, pages 129–30, supplied several details about the journey from the Ukraine.

  Details about the conditions on board ships of the Inman line are from Travelling by Sea in the Nineteenth Century: Interior Design in Victorian Passenger Ships by Basil Greenhill and Ann Giffard (New York: Hastings House, 1974), page 52.

  Background on Lena Schlesselmer, later known as Lena Woebbecke, came from an interview with Lawrence Woebbecke at his farm outside Seward, Nebraska. I found additional information with the help of Jane Graff at the archives of the Seward County Genealogical Society.

  Material on the Allen family comes from an interview with Barbara Allen Wegner at her home in Groton, South Dakota, and from copies of unpublished memoirs and recollectio
ns written by her father, Walter J. Allen.

  Background on Benjamin Shattuck’s Civil War service with the Seventy-third Ohio and his imprisonment on Belle Isle comes from Whitelaw Reid’s Ohio in the War (Columbus, Ohio: Eclectic Publishing Co., 1893), Samuel H. Hurst’s Journal-History of the Seventy-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry (Chillicothe, Ohio: 1866), Warren Lee Goss’s The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons (Boston: I. N. Richardson, 1874), and John L. Ransom’s Andersonville Diary (New York: Haskell House, 1974).

  Quote from railroad pamphlet beginning “Indeed, it may be justly claimed…” is from Northern Dakota: Its Soil, Climate and Productions by Northern Pacific Railroad Co., printed in Fargo, Dakota Territory, in 1877.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Trials

  Details on grasshoppers are from The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Journal by Stephen R. Jones (Camden, Maine: Ragged Mountain Press/McGraw-Hill, 2000) and After Fifty Years by John J. Gering. I also found many pioneer accounts of grasshoppers and prairie fires in the archives of the Minnesota History Center and the South Dakota State Historical Society.

  For the description of the sight and sound of a blizzard I drew on the story “Genesis” by Wallace Stegner in Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (New York: Penguin, 1991), page 424.

  Details about the blizzard of 1873 in Minnesota come from original accounts at the Minnesota History Center as well as Gilbert C. Fite’s The Farmers’ Frontier: 1865–1900 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966).

  The quote from The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940) appears on pages 134–35.

  For my description of the Winter of Blue Snow I draw on material in Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); “The Hard Winter and the Range Cattle Business” by Ray H. Mattison in The Montana Magazine of History 1 (October 1951), pages 5–21; Dee Alexander Brown’s Trail Driving Days: The Golden Days of the Old Trail Driving Cattlemen (New York: Scribner’s, 1952); and Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).