The Children's Blizzard (20 page)

When a gust ripped off a piece of tar paper at the top of the roof where the sod had fallen away, Minnie realized that they would all eventually die of cold if they tried to stay. The family with whom she boarded lived half a mile north of the school and she decided that the best plan was to take the children there for the night. According to some accounts, she found a length of rope and tied the children one to another before setting out. Others insist the roping up was pure myth fabricated later to glorify the teacher. A student named Emma Lee, who was present that day, wrote that Minnie had the children crawl out through the south window since the door was nailed shut. “The nearest house was not quite a quarter of a mile away,” recalled Emma. “We could have gone there with the storm at our backs. However we were told to stay with the teacher and go to her boarding place, which was a half mile away, and we had to face the storm. We were not tied together in any way, as has been erroneously stated so many times.” Several of the smaller students stumbled and fell on the way, and at one point Minnie fell.

Minnie Freeman always insisted that she deserved no special attention—that she had done what anyone would do. But in fact many older and more experienced teachers failed to act as quickly and as sensibly. All of Minnie’s students stayed together and made it safely to the two-room sod house where she boarded.

Stella Badger, another young Nebraska schoolteacher, had a one-room schoolhouse in a hilly area south of Seward, about a hundred miles southeast of Minnie Freeman’s school. This was the stretch of land they called the Bohemian Alps—the rough, broken, ravine-choked sections that more prosperous or canny farmers had sold to German and Czech immigrants. A good blow in winter would fill the ravines between the hills with snow to depths of ten or fifteen feet.

Stella Badger’s school sat on a rise just south and west of a web of deep ravines with creeks running through their bottoms.

Though the local children could have walked to and from school along the straight section roads, they always cut through the ravines. Miss Badger told them again and again to take the roads, but the German and Czech kids had a way of not understanding what they didn’t want to hear.

Lena Woebbecke was one of the German kids who never seemed to understand. Miss Badger couldn’t tell if she was backward or hard of hearing or just headstrong. Lena wouldn’t meet her eyes when she talked to her. She kept to herself. Large for eleven, scarred from smallpox, the child had just started at school in the fall. Miss Badger heard she’d been sent to live with the Woebbeckes because her own mother had abandoned her. All through the autumn Lena barely spoke, even to the other German children.

When the wind slammed against the north side of the schoolhouse around three o’clock on the afternoon of the twelfth and the classroom went suddenly dark, Miss Badger ordered the children to stay just where they were. She would not dismiss school until the storm ended. The ravines would be too dangerous already and even the road would be hard to see in the blowing snow. She told them as calmly as she could that there was enough coal in the coal house to keep them going all night if need be. It was a relief that none of the children put up a fight.

Miss Badger surveyed the faces before her and drew a mental map of where each child lived. The smaller children and the girls worried her most—but nearly all of them lived south of the school near the place where she boarded. The terrain wasn’t as rough in that direction. Only one of the girls lived north of the schoolhouse, beyond the ravines on a deeply cut up section of the Bohemian Alps. That was Lena.

Miss Badger was wondering whether they should all try to make a dash for her boarding place when she heard the sound of boots stomping in the little vestibule. The door to the classroom opened and a farmer who lived nearby appeared in a gust of cold and snow.

He looked like he’d just dug out of an avalanche. Snow clung like lint to every bit of his clothing, to his eyebrows and hair. The farmer shouted over the wind to Miss Badger that he had come to take his children home. Their farm lay south of the school so they’d have the storm at their backs on the way home.

Miss Badger and the man talked for a few minutes and the two of them looked the children over. All of the pupils but two—Lena and an older boy—lived south of the school, as did Miss Badger herself. The farmer promised that he’d see all of them home safely.

He had brought blankets for the smaller children. It would be madness to spend the night in the classroom with no food. Even with the coal fire in the small stove, the drafty frame building was getting colder by the minute.

But what about Lena? Miss Badger knew the German girl would never agree to accompany her to her boarding place or spend the night with one of the other children. Lena was stubborn. She would insist on getting back to the Woebbeckes. But how could Miss Badger send one girl out alone in the storm?

The older boy who lived near the Woebbeckes came to her rescue. “I can see to her,” he said, pointing to Lena.

And so it was settled. Miss Badger and the farmer would take all the children who lived south of the school. Lena and the older boy would go together the other way. The farmer was urging Miss Badger to get moving before the storm became worse. There really wasn’t time to think through the plan.

The schoolhouse was set back just a few feet from the dirt road that ran along the section line and that’s where the two groups parted. Miss Badger was the last to disappear, her dark skirt wrapped around her legs, her body tilted back at a strange angle from her heels so that the wind didn’t blow her over onto her face.

As soon as Lena and the boy were left alone they began to argue—or rather the boy argued and Lena pulled her thin cloak around her shoulders and looked at the ground. The wind was full in their faces on this exposed hillside. In the few minutes they stood there on the road Lena felt the floury snow work its way down her collar and up the cuffs of her sleeves. The air was moving so fast and was so dense with crystals she could hardly breathe. The boy screamed over the wind that he was taking the road—and he pointed down the hill. Lena stood her ground and shook her head. She would cut across the stubble field behind the school and take the ravine as she always did. The boy hollered and pointed again. And then he became exasperated and gave up. She could suit herself. He started down the hill on the straight road and instantly vanished. Within an hour he was safe at home.

Being alone did not make anything worse for Lena—at first. She knew the way. She didn’t need the boy. She tightened her hands around the lunch pail and the reader that the Woebbeckes had given her and made her promise never to lose or leave at school, and she walked down the path she always took home. She could feel the ground descending beneath her feet, but with the snow frozen to her eyelashes she couldn’t see anything. Lena was about halfway home when she stopped. She knew instinctively that she had wandered off the usual path.

Lost.
 The fact is usually irrevocable long before the brain produces the word. Lena was lost. She was seized by that rising panic when the chest goes hollow and the heart races in the ears and the body slicks itself in sweat. But her stolid temperament served her well. Lena was not flighty or hysterical. Ever since her father died she had looked after herself. Lena kept her wits about her. With her freezing fists still wrapped around the lunch pail and reader, she sensibly turned around and attempted to retrace her steps. Back to the school. Hadn’t Miss Badger said there was plenty of coal?

Lena made it to within a hundred yards of the district 71 schoolhouse and then her strength gave out. She collapsed in a furrow of the stubble field adjoining the school. Her last conscious act was to cover herself with her cloak.

Every object prominent enough to catch the wind already had a drift shadowing its lee. Haystacks, fence posts, houses, barns.

When she fell on the side of the hill below the schoolhouse, Lena became one of those objects.

Signal Corps observations taken simultaneously at 2 P.M. Central time:

Fort Assinniboine, Montana: Pressure 27.49 and rising; temperature 22 below zero, north wind at 9 miles per hour.

North Platte, Nebraska: Pressure 26.79; temperature 2 below zero (a fall of thirty degrees in the past eight hours); north wind 40 miles per hour.

Huron, Dakota Territory: Pressure 28.29 and rising; temperature two below zero (a fall of twenty-one degrees in the past eight hours); northwest wind 44 miles per hour.

Yankton, Dakota Territory: Pressure 28.16 and falling; temperature eighteen above zero; northwest wind 18 miles an hour.

Omaha: Pressure 28.31 and falling; temperature 27 degrees above zero; southeast wind 9 miles per hour.

The cold front was now so well defined that it looked like a giant comma dropping down from the northwest. In the course of the day the upper part of the comma had elongated and assumed a nearly vertical north-south orientation so that by 2 P.M. Central time, when the observers checked their thermometers and barometers and anemometers, the front sliced a clean line down the Minnesota-South Dakota border and then bent slightly southwest to lop the eastern triangle of Nebraska off from the rest of the state.

Huron was already behind the front; Omaha would fall within the hour; Saint Paul not until after sunset.

At the two o’clock observations the Rollag family farms in the extreme southwestern corner of Minnesota and just over the border in southern Dakota exactly straddled the leading edge of the front.

Austin Rollag, his mother, Kari, Ann, his wife of five years, and their small children lived on the Dakota side. His sister, Gro, now known as Grace, and her husband, Ole Rollag, lived with their six children just east of the Minnesota state line in Beaver Creek. The storm hit the two farms within a matter of minutes, Austin’s place first, then Ole’s.

Grace Rollag thanked God that at last she had a frame house after enduring the soddie for seven years. And a proper barn for the animals. It would have been impossible to live much longer in the sod hut with six children. Six American children, all born in Minnesota. Peter or Peder, Charley or Carl—it didn’t matter what they called themselves, they were Norwegian underneath. And of course the older they got, the more Norwegian they looked—Peter now thirteen and Charley ten, with their clear faces and high brows.

Grace was alone at home with her four younger children—Nels, Clara, Susan, and Anna Marie—when the house went dark and the wind began to roar so loudly she couldn’t hear the chil dren’s voices. Ole and the two older boys were outside working—Peter watering the cattle at a spring about two hundred yards north of the house, Ole and Charley bringing back a load of hay from a pasture in the bottomland about a mile southeast of the house. Grace had been on the prairie long enough to know what that roaring meant. She didn’t pause to think. In a matter of seconds she had pulled on a pair of spare boots, wrapped herself in a cloak and scarf, and told Nels, who was nine, that he must look after the baby. Her oldest son, Peter, was in trouble. Even with the wind at his back, Peter at thirteen was too small and too young to drive the cattle from the spring to the barn and get them all under shelter by himself. She must go out to find Peter and help him. As for Charley, he had his father to look after him.

Ole would get the boy to safety—with God’s help. Grace must see to Peter.

Before she opened the door and put her head down in the wind, Grace paused to collect her thoughts. She knew that once she got outside it would be impossible to see or to think and that even the smallest error in judgment could be fatal—for her, for her son.

House, barn, spring: Grace fixed a picture in her mind of the layout of their property and then she set out to find her son.

Ole and Charley had gotten the wagon loaded up with hay and were about half a mile from home when the storm overtook them.

The wind came up so fast that it knocked the wagon over and spooked the horses. Ole shouted to the boy that they must unhitch the horses and get them home. The hay could wait. They would come back for the load after the storm. The thing to do was calm the horses down and find shelter.

Ole Rollag was a big, burly, bearded man who was accustomed to imposing his will on the world around him by brute force—a true pioneer—so he figured on muscling his way through the storm. He’d grab one horse, the boy would take the other. Ten was plenty old enough to lend a hand.

The problem was that they’d been working southeast of the house. To get back they would have to walk straight into the wind. Even if Ole and Charley could have staggered that distance, the horses refused. Try as they might, they could not get the horses to walk with their faces into the wind. Buffalo will stand stock-still in a blizzard with their heads down and their thick hides going gray with snow and wait for the wind to blow itself out, but horses and cows tend to drift where the wind takes them, sometimes for miles, before they die of exhaustion or freeze to death or break their legs in gullies. Ole and Charley fought the horses for all they were worth, but the best they could do was to turn them northeast. Ole was well aware that this wouldn’t get them home—but it was better than doing nothing or losing the horses altogether.

Austin and his wife, Ann, were also caught outside in the blizzard.

Eager to use every minute of the good weather that morning, they had left the children at home in the care of Austin’s mother, Kari, and gone out to work in the barn. Since the morning was mild, they had turned their animals—a few horses, a foal, and some cows—into the pasture near the barn, while the two of them worked close by. “After noon, about 3:30, we heard a hideous roar in the air,” remembered Austin. “At first we thought that it was the Omaha train which had been blocked and was trying to open the track.” When he looked up at the sky, Austin saw the snow descend "as if it had slid out of a sack. A hurricane-like wind blew, so that the snow drifted high in the air, and it became terribly cold. Within a few minutes it was as dark as a cellar, and one could not see one’s hand in front of one’s face." Like almost every farmer caught out that day, Austin and Ann’s first thought was the safety of their animals. Never mind that they had young children and an aged parent at home—they had to get the animals under shelter. The stock had not strayed far from the barn so it was relatively easy to drive them in. All except for a foal, which had gotten separated from the other horses. There was no way a horse that young could survive a prairie blizzard.