The Children's Blizzard (21 page)

Austin and Ann wouldn’t leave the farmyard until they had found the foal.

Old-timers on the prairie will tell you that a lull often follows the first blast of a blizzard, a short pause before the storm really lets loose, and meteorologists confirm this observation. It’s like that sharp intake of breath between a baby’s initial scream and a full-fledged tantrum. The lull was what cleared the air enough for the younger Graber boys and Mr. Cotton to see the row of saplings and find their way to the farmhouse. This same lull saved the life of the Rollags’ foal—and probably their own. In that brief moment of calm Austin and Ann heard the foal whinny. They heard him and then they saw him. Now all the animals were safe.

Only after the foal was shut up in the barn with the rest of the animals did it occur to Austin and Ann that they couldn’t see their house. Pioneer families always argued about where to put the barn: too close to the house and you’d get flies and the odor of the animals all summer; too far and you’d waste time walking back and forth and risk your life in storms like this one. Austin and Ann now realized that they had erred on the side of too far.

It was Austin’s mother, Kari, who saved them. When she heard the storm come up, Kari somehow found an old cowbell inside the house and she grabbed it and stood just inside the door and rang it into the wind with everything she had. Austin and Ann heard the faint clangs over the keening of the wind and followed it home like a beacon.

Grace Rollag may not have been the best housekeeper in Minnesota—she was too fond of reading to stay on top of every little chore—but she knew how to handle herself when life got rough.

She was not one to get lost in a blizzard.

Grace drew up her shawl as she stepped out of her house, bowed her head into the wind, and marched straight ahead to where she reckoned the barn was hidden behind the blowing snow. Fifteen years of farmwork and childbearing had thickened Grace’s body and coarsened her hands. The waist she was so proud of in the photograph taken on her wedding day in April 1873 was long gone and she’d never again put on that black dress with the white lace collar. Never mind. A willowy waist would not help her now.

Grace reached the barn with no problem. By sheer luck Peter had found his way there just moments before. As Grace had predicted, he’d gotten the cattle up from the spring, but now he was having a hard time. It was the door to the barn—the snow had already drifted so high that Peter couldn’t get it open. Grace tried her best, but it was hopeless. Even if they shoveled it out fast enough to open it, they’d never get the door shut again. They’d have to drive the cattle around back by the horses’ stable and get them into the barn that way. The door here was sheltered from the wind, but it was narrow and gave on a tight passage between stalls—just wide enough for a single cow. Cows were always balky about entering tight spots, but there was no other choice.

Somehow, with sticks and shouts and desperate brute force, Grace and her son forced the cows into the door to the horse stable and led them one by one down the passage through the stable and into the barn. Every last one was safe. Even in the cold Grace and Peter were sweating by the time they got the job done.

Luck was also with Ole and Charley that afternoon. Blinded by the snow and staggering at the mercy of the wind, they might have ended up anywhere. By dead chance the wind deposited them at the neighboring farm, about a mile to the east. At first Ole couldn’t believe it since he was convinced they had been traveling 
northeast.

But the northwest wind was so powerful that they had barely gone north at all.

Once he had gotten out of his frozen clothes and thawed out enough to see straight, Ole was shocked by the condition of Charley’s face. The fair skin of the boy’s cheeks and forehead, which usually turned blotchy red in the cold, was cheesy white with frostbite. Ole knew the boy would also feel worse as he thawed.

The neighbor’s wife took Charley in hand. She rubbed the frozen skin with snow so it would thaw gradually. She’d see that there would be no scars.

When the boy was settled and a bit of color returned to his face, Ole made up his mind. Grace would be frantic if he didn’t get home that night—so frantic she might go out looking for them.

She might be out looking now. It was a mile to home—a mile due west, not directly into the wind, but bad enough. No matter. He wouldn’t be wrestling with the horses—they could stay in the neighbors’ barn until the storm was over. And there was no question of taking Charley back out again. He would spend the night here. So Ole would be walking unencumbered. It would be easier this way. He would walk the mile to his home and find Grace and the other children. Before it got any darker, Ole set out by himself into the storm once more.

The blizzard reached Lincoln, Nebraska’s capital, at 3 P.M. Snow had been falling on the city since the early morning, a dreamy Christmas kind of snow with large wet flakes coming straight down through the white windless air. Then, at three o’clock, the sky suddenly blackened and the wind veered from south to north.

Four minutes later, it was impossible to see even the outlines of buildings across the street. All the city streetcars were immediately taken in and teamsters rushed to haul drays and wagons to cover. A few last straggling hackneys battled the rapidly mounting drifts.

Pedestrians ran for their lives.

At Lincoln’s Capital Hotel the assembled committeemen of the Nebraska Press Association descended anxiously on the front desk.

Their convention was scheduled to convene at the hotel at eight o’clock that night, though few of the members had arrived. Association president Bushnell had reason to believe that some 125 esteemed Nebraska newsmen were either en route from other parts of the state or had yet to set out. Among the former was the associ-ation’s secretary, MacMurphy, who was at that very moment sitting on a stalled Lincoln-bound train enshrouded in sheets of snow.

Bushnell inquired of the desk clerk whether he had any knowledge of when MacMurphy and his fellow Nebraska editors and reporters were likely to arrive at the Lincoln train station. Indeed he did. The clerk had it on the best authority that not a wheel was turning on any of the ten railroads that served the capital. Those unfortunate enough to be traveling were therefore stranded without hope.

Those who had not yet set out would have to wait for the storm to abate, which at the moment it showed not the slightest indication of doing.

Ten minutes after it rolled over Lincoln, the storm was upon Crete, nineteen miles to the southwest. Signal Corps observer Private C. D. Burnley noted in the station journal that after the wind shifted “the temperature fell 18 degrees in less than three minutes. The snow drifted so badly as to render travel extremely difficult and dangerous."

An hour later the blast had reached Omaha. At the Signal Service station in the Custom House building at the corner of Dodger and First, Sergeant Chappel clocked the wind shift at 4:17 P.M. Central time. By 5:30 P.M. all streetcars in the city ceased to run because it was impossible to keep the tracks clear of drifts. No trains left Omaha that day.

The storm overtook a large party of local citizens who were out celebrating the completion of a new bridge over the Missouri River between Omaha and Council Bluffs on the Iowa side. Some four hundred sleighs and cutters had paraded down Omaha’s Douglas Street earlier in the day and crossed to Iowa—not on the new bridge, but on the partially frozen river. The citizens’plan was to dine and dance in Council Bluffs, and then return to Omaha by starlight.

The bridge was narrow. There were gaping holes in the ice on the river. There was no safe way to cross back to Omaha. As the blizzard raged, an urgent telegram arrived at the office of the Omaha 
Republican
 from a reporter who was with the group in Council Bluffs: “Turn the whole force loose on possible loss on the river."

Farther east, in Des Moines, a parade was forming to honor the inauguration of Iowa’s governor, William Larrabee, just elected to his second term. Company B, Second Regiment of Davenport, was supposed to escort the Governor’s Guards from Kirkwood House to the State Capitol—but the troops were delayed in the storm and the procession left without them. The governor’s carriage rolled slowly through the drifting snow with a straggling accompaniment of mounted officers from the Third Regiment. There were many empty seats in the Capitol rotunda as the Republican Governor Larrabee launched into a lengthy address attacking the railroads for encroaching on the rights of the people and arguing for more stringent regulation of large corporations.

In the middle of January, the sun sets a few minutes after five o’clock over the prairie states. Professor William Payne, at his observatory on the campus of Carleton College, would have known precisely how many minutes and seconds after five o’clock and would have seen to it that anyone who was curious knew the exact instant of sunset as well. Not that the official time really mattered on the afternoon of January 12. It was the advancing storm, not the sun, that controlled the intensity and duration of light that day.

The blizzard created its own sunset, which moved southeast down the prairie at 60 to 70 miles an hour.

Sergeant Glenn reported that the storm hit Huron a few minutes before noon, so Wessington Springs, which is twenty-six miles to the southwest of Huron as the crow flies, must have gone dark just a few minutes later. From noon until 4 P.M., May Hunt did her best to carry on in the roaring twilight with the seven students who had come to the country school she taught near Wessington Springs. Four o’clock was when the fuel ran out and May Hunt and the seven children were suddenly faced with the choice, in Sergeant Glenn’s words, “of freezing where they were or in the attempt to find other shelter, more comfortable." May Hunt chose to go. Just 140 yards west of the school, on the other side of a gully, there was a farmhouse belonging to the Hinner family. The children in school that day—Fred and Charles Weeks, the three older children of the Reverend S. F. Huntley and his wife, Abi, and Frank and Addie Knieriem—all lived at least three-quarters of a mile away. The Hinner place looked like the best option.

The gully was what worried May. It was five feet or so to the bottom and the sides were steep. There was a culvert thrown across it that served as a bridge, but it might be hard to find in the storm. If they missed the culvert bridge the children would be in danger of falling in the gully—and in drifting snow the smaller ones would have trouble getting out again. May counted herself lucky that Fred Weeks had come to school that day. At eighteen, Fred was by far her oldest pupil, a big shy dark-haired farm boy with a round face and large hands. When May told him about her plan of taking the children over to the Hinner place, Fred volunteered to go scouting. If he could find the bridge, he’d clear a path and then come back for the others.

Fred was gone for half an hour while the rest of them stood around the dying fire. When he finally came back the younger children cheered. He told them that he had walked back and forth between the school and the bridge not once but twice. They’d be all right following him. Once he got them all across the bridge, they could pick up the path and take it to the Hinner house.

It was after 4:30 by the time all seven of May Hunt’s students were ready to go. Addie Knieriem, one of the younger girls, was wearing thin, dainty little shoes, so Miss Hunt wound scarves around each shoe to keep her feet from freezing. More time was lost while Miss Hunt arranged her hat and veil. Fred went first, and when they got outside they all joined hands behind him in a human chain. Even in those few minutes the blizzard had gotten worse.

The track that Fred had kicked into the snow was completely drifted over. There was no sign of the bridge that he had just crossed twice.

One hundred forty yards separated the Knieriem school, as it was called, from the closest house—nearly half again as long as a football field. On a clear day all but the youngest of the children could have walked it in ten minutes. But in the storm, blinded and deafened and barely able to breathe, the children quickly came to grief.

It was the gully that brought on panic. Stepping out where he hoped the culvert bridge would meet his shoe, Fred fell through the snow that had drifted into the gully and dragged the others down with him. They toppled over one after another like bowling pins. It would have been funny—certainly the children would have thought so—if they weren’t so frightened. As they plunged, the teacher’s veil tore away from her hat. She became aware that Addie Knieriem was in trouble. The scarves had come off Addie’s shoes as the girl floundered up the far side of the gully. More precious time and body warmth were lost fussing with the teacher’s veil and the child’s shoes.

Somehow they all got up out of the gully and reassembled. Eight of them counting May Hunt. Again Fred went first. Since they had missed the bridge it was hopeless to try to find the path. But if the wind relented even for thirty seconds maybe they could make out the Hinner house. They knew it sat on a rise just above the gully—a stone’s throw away. With every step they expected to catch a glimpse of the house through the gray horizontal snow. By now the sun had set and what little light remained was quickly draining out of the air.

It’s hard to fathom how children who walked to and from school a half mile or more every day became exhausted to the point of collapse while walking a hundred yards that afternoon. Hard to fathom until you consider the state of their thin cotton clothing, their eyelashes webbed with ice and frozen shut, the ice plugs that formed inside their noses, the ice masks that hung on their faces.

This was not a feathery sifting of gossamer powder. It was a frozen sandstorm. Cattle died standing up, died of suffocation before they froze solid.

When they got out of the gully, May Hunt’s students were wet to the skin and nearly blind. Most had lost the use of their fingers.

Addie Knieriem had no sensation in her toes. Panic wicked away what little heat remained inside their bodies. All of them were shivering violently and the younger children looked limp as rag dolls.