The Children's Blizzard (2 page)

—was small compared to that of the Johnstown Flood that wiped out an entire industrial town in western Pennsylvania the following year or the Galveston hurricane of 1900 that left more than eight thousand dead. But it was traumatic enough that it left an indelible bruise on the consciousness of the region. The pioneers were by and large a taciturn lot, reserved and sober Germans and Scandinavians who rarely put their thoughts or feelings down on paper, and when they did avoided hyperbole at all costs. Yet their accounts of the blizzard of 1888 are shot through with amazement, awe, disbelief.

There are thousands of these eyewitness accounts of the storm.

Even those who never wrote another word about themselves put down on paper everything they could remember about the great blizzard of 1888. Indeed, it was the storm that has preserved these lives from oblivion. The blizzard literally froze a single day in time.

It sent a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie. It forced people to stop and look at their existences—the earth and sky they had staked their future on, the climate and environment they had brought their children to, the peculiar forces of nature and of nature’s God that determined whether they would live or die.

What follows is the story of this storm and some of the individuals whose lives were forever changed by it. Parents who lost children. Children who lost parents. Fathers who died with their coats and their arms wrapped around their sons. Sisters who lay side by side with their faces frozen to the ground. Teachers who locked the schoolhouse doors to keep their students safe inside or led them to shelter—or to death—when the roofs blew off their one-room schoolhouses. Here, too, is the story of the Army officer paid by his government to predict the evolution of the storm and warn people of its approach. In a sense it is a book about multiple and often fatal collisions—collisions between ordinary people going about their daily lives and the immense unfathomable disturbances of weather.

To understand the causes and consequences of these collisions, it’s necessary to trace the elements involved to their sources and points of origin. To tease out from the detritus of the past how these particular families happened to find themselves in the path of the northwest wind on that particular day. To isolate the forces in the atmosphere that conspired and converged to create the wind and the deadly cold it carried in its wake. To see those atmospheric forces through the eyes of an Army forecaster who had been trained to fight Indians, follow orders, and apply fixed rules.

“Everything changes; nothing does,” the poet James Merrill wrote in a poem called “After the Fire.” The effects of disaster, no matter how extreme, do not last forever. We bury our dead, nurse the wounded, rebuild, and get on with our lives. Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyards and the occasional roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888

remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: 
This is a place where
 
blizzards kill children on their way home from school.
 To understand why and how the deadliest Midwestern blizzard happened the way it did is to understand something essential about the history of the American prairie—indeed about the history of America itself.

*All temperatures are Fahrenheit unless otherwise indicated.

Land, freedom, and hope. In the narrow stony valleys of Norway and the heavily taxed towns of Saxony and Westphalia, in Ukrainian villages bled by the recruiting officers of the czars and Bohemian farms that had been owned and tilled for generations by the same families, land, freedom, and hope meant much the same thing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: America. Word had spread throughout Europe that there was land—empty land, free land—in the middle of the continent to the west. Land so flat and fertile and unencumbered that a family could plant as soon as they got there and harvest their first season. “Great prairies stretching out as far as one could see,” wrote one Norwegian immigrant of the image that lured him and his wife and three sons to America in 1876, “with never a stone to gather up, a tree to cut down, or a stump to grub out—the soil so black and rich that as somebody said, you had only ‘to tickle it with a plow, and it would laugh with a beautiful harvest.’” As for the sky above this land, there was no need to worry. Rain, they were promised, would fall abundantly and at just the right times. Winters were bright and bracing, snowfalls light and quick to melt. "Indeed, it may be justly claimed as one of the most beautiful climates in the world,” proclaimed a pamphlet written, translated, and distributed by agents of one of the railroad companies that owned millions of the choicest acres of this land, “and one best adapted to the enjoyment of long and vigorous life.” And so they came for land, freedom, and hope, some 16.5 million of them between 1850 and 1900, the majority of them never getting beyond the East Coast cities, but many hundreds of thousands, especially the Germans and Scandinavians, ultimately bound for the vast American grassland frontier bordered by the Mississippi to the east and the Missouri River to the west.

Gro Rollag was one of the seven hundred fifty thousand Norwegians who emigrated to America in the nineteenth century. She was twenty-two years old and a bride of several days when she left her family’s farm in Tinn in the Telemark region of southern Norway in April 1873. Gro had married a strapping blond boy named Ole, three years her junior, from a neighboring farm. Rollag was his sur-name as well, since it was the custom in that part of Norway for families to take the names of the farms where they lived. In Tinn there were six Rollag farms scattered through the valley—North Rollag, South Rollag, Center Rollag, and so on—all of them small and niggardly in yields of barley, oats, potatoes, hay. Growing seasons were short this far north, crop failures all too common in chilly overcast summers, fields so pinched that only the most primitive tools could be brought in. “Our honeymoon took us to America," Gro Rollag wrote fifty-six years later with her dry humor, as if they might have chosen Paris or Nice instead. While the truth, of course, was that Gro and Ole left Tinn because the fields of the Rollag farms were being divided into smaller and smaller parcels every generation, because they didn’t want to leave their children with less than they had, because in Norway only the firstborn sons inherited the arable valley parcels known as
bonde gaard,
and because Ole was facing five years of compulsory military service.

But it wasn’t in Gro’s nature to write this in the memoir she titled “Recollections from the Old Days.” Nor did she mention how hard it was to leave behind this stunningly beautiful landscape at the beginning of spring—the mountains rising sharply from the shores of a twenty-five-mile-long lake known as the Tinnsjo, the farms clustered on a level shelf of land at the head of the lake, the waterfalls gleaming on the sides of the mountains and feeding streams that merged into the broad Mana River, the red and white farmhouses scattered around the stately white church. Beauty was abundant and free in the countryside of Tinn—but you couldn’t eat beauty, and the beautiful farms were yielding less and less while the population steadily grew. But they were comparatively lucky in Tinn. Elsewhere in Telemark the farm fields had become so small from repeated division that farmers had to harvest the hay that grew on the thatch of their roofs and grow vegetables by spreading dirt and manure on top of rocks. It was a sad, haunted country for all its beauty. Men in the prime of their lives built their coffins and stored them inside until they were needed. “It was not a very pleasant thing to look at before you got used to it,” recalled one Norwegian immigrant.

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor—lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

Gro and Ole were the first of the family to emigrate, leaving Oslo on April 24, 1873. “We traveled via England and with the Cunard Line from Liverpool,” Gro wrote in her recollections half a century later, furnishing precious few details. “We were thirteen days on the Atlantic and landed at Boston. From there we went west in a railroad boxcar. We took a little snack for the journey—a piece of sausage and a few crackers each." Her brother, Osten Knutson Rollag, was a bit more expansive when he wrote down his own story. Osten explained that their mother, Kari Nilsdatter, had been left a widow in 1862 with three children to support—Soneva, the oldest, was thirteen; Gro, eleven; and Osten himself, eight. It was the custom in that part of Norway for children to work to support themselves right after confirma-tion—at fourteen or fifteen—so presumably Soneva got a job soon after her father’s death, probably as a maid for a neighboring farm family. Soneva seems to have been the family favorite. “She was a more than usually nice person,” wrote Osten, “and respected by all who knew her." Soneva died in 1873 at the age of twenty-four. Her death severed the family’s ties to Norway. That same year, Kari sold the farm that her husband had purchased thirty-one years before, Gro married and left for America, and Osten and Kari followed them the next spring. “On the morning of the 15th of May, 1874, we left the home in the valley where my forefathers had lived for how long one does not know,” Osten recorded solemnly. “The morning of May 15 began with bright sunshine and the old ‘graend’ was very beautiful.

In the sunshine we saw the new foliage on the birches and the many rushing waterfalls which flowed into the valley. It was very hard to say farewell forever to all of this.” He was nineteen years old. "Among the various arguments for going to America, the strongest was the poverty among the common people where we lived in Norway,” wrote a fisherman named Lars Stavig, who left his home in Romsdal on the west coast in 1876. “Also, the hopelessness of ever amounting to anything and the hard struggle awaiting my boys if they were to remain in Norway."

Two families to a wagon—they had agreed on this beforehand. The women would sit on top of the trunks and bags and bedrolls with the smaller children, while the men and older children walked alongside.

Of the fifty-three families who loaded the wagons to overflowing that day, Anna and Johann Kaufmann were among the less encumbered. They only had the two children, a three-year-old named Johann like his father and Peter, a baby who would ride in his mother’s arms. Some of their neighbors had five, seven, ten children to look after, mountains of luggage, feeble elderly parents. Until that day, Anna Kaufmann had spent her entire life in the village of Waldheim amid the wide windswept fields of the Ukrainian province of Volhynia. She prayed with her family and neighbors every Sunday in the Mennonite church where her father, the Reverend Johann Schrag, served as the elder. The farthest Anna had ever traveled was to neighboring villages—Horodischtz, where her husband had grown up, Kotosufka, Sahorez, German-speaking Mennonite settlements whose names have long since fallen off the map.

In a single summer day, all of these villages emptied.

In the weeks before, the fields and farmhouses had been sold to neighboring farmers, the horses and wagons to peasants, the furniture and kitchen items to Jews. The women packed baskets with flat bread and sausage and dried fruit for the long journey. The men scraped together enough rubles for the expensive Russian passports. Then came the day of departure. Overnight, Horodischtz, Waldheim, Kotosufka ceased to be the homes of the Kaufmanns, Grabers, Albrechts, Schrags, Preheims, and Gerings. Fifty-three families, some 342 people in all, left together for America late in July 1874. "Schweizers,” these Swiss-German Mennonites called themselves, though their families had not lived in Switzerland for some two hundred years. Because they practiced a different kind of Protestantism from their neighbors, they had been expelled from their farms in Emmental in the Canton of Bern in the 1670s.

Rather than baptize their infants a few days after birth, the Schweizers waited until they were old enough to choose baptism as a “confession of faith.” They advocated complete separation of church and state and refused to serve in armed forces or fight in wars. For these beliefs, particularly the last, they had been crammed into the prisons of Bern, sold as galley slaves to Venetian merchants, branded, flogged, burned at the stake, and hounded through Europe. From Emmental to the Rhineland of Germany, from Germany to Alsace and Galicia, and then to Poland and Central Ukraine near Zhitomir (west of Kiev), the Schweizers had fled and started over again every few generations—always moving together in groups of families, always settling together in enclaves of villages, always retaining their German language and Swiss customs, always clinging to their Mennonite faith.

They had come to the Polish-Ukrainian border region at the end of the eighteenth century at the invitation of Polish noblemen. It was the same period when thousands of other German-speaking Mennonites, so-called Low Germans, settled farther south in the Crimea at the behest of Catherine the Great. Schweizers and Low Germans alike had been lured to this country by the promise of religious freedom, exemption from military service, the right to own land and to speak German in school and church. And for three or four generations, they had prospered on their small farms between Kiev and Lublin. Hardworking, thrifty, communal, ingenious, the Schweizers had almost uncanny success as farmers. Their flower and vegetable gardens were renowned, their cheese and butter were prized in Kiev and Odessa, silkworms fattened on their mulberry trees, and great swarms of bees pollinated their orchards. But the Schweizers’ golden age was short-lived. In 1870, Czar Alexander II withdrew the rights and protections granted by Catherine and inaugurated a policy of Slavicizing the German-speaking Mennonites. If they wanted to remain in the Crimea, they would have to submit to Russian military service and send their children to schools where only Russian was spoken.