The Children's Blizzard (29 page)

At seven the next morning I started and thought I would go home. When I came home I found my loving wife outside the house, froze to death, and then I went into the house and there lay Alvilda on the floor froze to death. After what I can see from the tracks she [Nickoline] had gone to the stable. She had many clothes on but that didn’t help. The little one [Anna Nickoline] in the wagon was living.

She was a very good wife and it makes me feel that I wish I was dead. But it must be God’s will that it should happen so.

But what I am glad over, we shall meet in HEAVEN, where we will never part.

After discovering the bodies of his wife and daughter, Jensen walked two miles to his brother Andrew’s house with the baby in his arms. When Andrew heard what happened he asked, “What did you do, John?” “I cared for the living,” was his reply.

"A scene became quite familiar in many localities,” a Dakota historian wrote of the immediate aftermath of the storm; “the arrival of a party in quest of a doctor and bearing either on their arms or in some sort of conveyance, the half frozen body of a neighbor or two who had been exposed to the storm. . . . The heartrending cries of the bereaved were heard in a hundred homes. . . . The whole scene covering almost the entire territory remind[ed] one familiar with battles of the scene around the hospital camps while a hotly contested battle was in progress and the wounded were being borne to the rear and turned into the surgeon’s care."

The Schweizer community came out in force once Johann Albrecht spread the word that the five boys were missing. It was bitter cold and clouds blew in by Friday afternoon, making it hard to see anything on the surface of the snow in the flat light. Around the schoolhouse there were many fresh tracks in the snow where parents had come and gone, so it was impossible to pick up a trail. The men made wide circles around the school, but they saw nothing.

Not a trace of the boys. A light snow began to fall around three o’clock that afternoon and continued into the gloaming hours.

Darkness came early. They would search again the next day.

South of Scribner, Nebraska, some seventy-five men had spent the day searching for the Westphalen sisters, Eda and Matilda. The men had gone out with poles and shovels and they were working methodically through the drifts. A few of them spotted tracks on the sheltered side of a hill, and someone else found deep indents in the snow. They speculated that the girls had stamped their feet here trying to warm themselves. Some men said they were sure that the tracks circled back on themselves. They followed every ripple in the surface of the snow. They dropped the poles into the deeper drifts, thinking they would feel the difference between a frozen body and frozen earth. But by dark, the searching parties gave up and went home. Someone was sent to the Westphalens’ house to tell the widow that there was still no sign of her two daughters.

In the days following the blizzard of January 12, 1888, the cold came down from the north like a river in flood.

Channeled by the Rocky Mountains to the west but otherwise unimpeded, the frigid Canadian air mass surged south on the back of the intense temperature and pressure gradients that had unleashed the storm. Alberta, Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas—as long as there was energy to propel its flow, the cold air would keep moving south. Only the most robust cold fronts make it as far south as Oklahoma and Texas in howling blasts they call blue northers. The front that spawned the blizzard of January 12 was so robust that it traveled all the way down to Mexico, pushing cold air into Veracruz and through the narrow waist of land pinched between Oaxaca and Chiapas, until it finally issued into the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

Chief Signal Officer Greely was well aware of how North America’s terrain acts to direct the flow of cold waves. As he wrote in his book 
American Weather,
 published the same year as the blizzard,

There are very marked topographical features in the United States, which result in causing to advance from British America [in other words, Canada] the greater part of the winds following in the wake of cyclonic storms. The Rocky Mountain range, averaging about nine thousand feet in elevation, is as high or higher than the upper strata of most low-area storms, and so the air current cannot be drawn from the westward. Again, the broad, vast valley drained by the Mississippi descends with a gradual and substantially unbroken slope from British America to the Gulf of Mexico, so that any air flowing northward must be considerably retarded in its movement by the great friction arising from moving over continually ascending ground. On the other hand, the air from British America passes off gradually descending surfaces, and this movement is further facilitated by the air being dry and cold, and hence dense, which naturally under-runs with readiness the lighter, warmer air of the retreating low area.

Though Greely’s prose is clotted, his meaning is clear: the lay of the land itself between Canada and Mexico fosters the southern advance of cold waves just as it hinders their movement to the north.

The cold wave of January 12 through 15 was a classic American weather pattern, though amplified to an almost unprecedented extreme.

In fact, it was the rapid southern advance of the cold wave that finally made General Greely sit up and take notice. The general had spent the day of the storm dealing with the usual bureaucratic vexations attendant on his position: a scrawny young man named Edwin R. Morrow wanted permission to enlist in the Signal Corps despite the fact that he was two inches under height and eleven pounds underweight; one of the seventeen clerks who worked at the Washington, D.C., Signal Office was taken to task for racking up twenty-nine sick days in 1887 and received a stern warning not to “cause any loss of service to the government during the current year”; a couple of new details emerged in the New Orleans scandal involving Signal Corps observers who had been squeezing the local cotton exchange for cash payments for weather data; Lieutenant Woodruff in Saint Paul requested and was granted access to weather reports from Canadian stations in Minnedosa, Swift Current, and Calgary.

On Friday the thirteenth, Greely undoubtedly saw telegrams about the extent and severity of the storm from both Signal Corps observers and railroad agents, and the first accounts of the suffering and casualties in the Dakotas and Nebraska appeared in the Saturday morning papers. But it wasn’t until Saturday night, when the cold wave was on the doorstep of Texas and Louisiana, that the general finally realized that the situation warranted special attention.

The threat to Southern sugar growers was what alarmed him. On Sunday morning, Greely broke with his usual custom and reported to his office at the Signal Corps’ recently acquired headquarters at 24th and M Streets. As he scanned the daily weather maps and the outgoing telegrams of warnings, his alarm turned to outrage. Even a fool could see at a glance that cold air was barreling south like an express train. Just look at the observations from midnight on Saturday—Palestine (southeast of Dallas) was already reporting 24 degrees with strong northerly winds, and San Antonio, farther south and west, was down to 46, while the temperature at Galveston on the coast was 72. The pressure gradient across the state was practically unheard of. Why in God’s name had that puppy, Junior Professor Henry A. Hazen, delayed sending out the signal to hoist the cold wave flags in Texas and Louisiana? It was perfectly obvious that the warnings should have gone out the day before in the 3 P.M. dispatch or at the very latest at 11 at night. But to wait until the freezing air was hours—indeed, minutes—away from thousands of acres of precious sugar and cotton plantations was as baffling as it was insupportable.

Bent on limiting the damage, Greely took charge at once. He fired off telegrams to New Orleans stating with grave emphasis the severity of the cold that would be upon the sugar districts by that night or the first hours of Monday. And then he set about boxing young Hazen’s ears. “Your attention is called to the fact that errors of such a kind as that made by you seriously injure this service in the minds of those reading such a dispatch,” Greely dictated, fury getting the better of his prose. “It is hoped that you will exercise such care in this respect in the future with these dispatches as will avoid a repetition of such carelessness.” Warming to his subject, Greely decided to use this opportunity to slap Hazen down for another transgression. Back in October, when he was spanking new to his position as civilian forecaster with the Signal Corps, Junior Professor Hazen had engaged in an unseemly public contest with a meteorologist at Boston’s venerable Blue Hill Observatory to see which one issued the more accurate forecasts for a month of Bostonian weather. Hazen then had the gall to publish the results in the December 30, 1887, issue of 
Science.
 (Naturally he claimed to have bested the Blue Hill forecaster; just as naturally the Blue Hill forecaster, one H. Helm Clayton, argued in a rebuttal published two weeks later that Hazen had rigged the contest with fuzzy terminology. Clayton insisted that if one defined as “fair” a day on which less than .01 of an inch of rain fell and as “foul” a day with .01 of an inch or more of rain, then 
his
 forecasts were far superior to Hazen’s.) Greely ignored this definitional hairsplitting and cut to the heart of the matter: He felt “great dissatisfaction” that Hazen had availed himself of “the first opportunity of an important public duty for advancing your personal interests or gratifying a desire to settle a question of personal standing professionally between Mr. H. Helm Clayton and yourself." There was more, a great deal more, that General Greely would hold Junior Professor Hazen accountable for—but this would have to suffice for now. The general knew full well that it was he, not Hazen, who would have to answer to the irate sugar planters of Louisiana, not to mention the jackals of the press who never passed up an opportunity for taking the Signal Corps to task. Indeed, just the day before, the 
New York Tribune
 had run a prominent article under the glaring three-tier headline “Weather Prophets at Odds, A Ludicrous Blunder Yesterday, A Signal Service Inspector Says More Gumption and Less Science Are Needed” in which a reporter wrote with obvious relish that the Signal Corps had issued a forecast for “warmer, fair” weather when in fact the day turned out just the opposite: “The manner in which the prophecy was not fulfilled was remarkable. Seldom have innocent and trustful people been worse beguiled than New-Yorkers who arose in the morning and beheld, not blue skies and clean streets, but rain pouring down upon snow four inches deep, rapidly converting it into slush and a thick haze of fog enveloping earth and sky, and making matters still more unpleasant.” What was still more unpleasant for Greely was that one of his indications officers, the excitable Irishman Lieutenant John C. Walshe (the same Walshe who had inspected the Saint Paul office in December and gotten embroiled in Woodruff ’s dispute with Professor Payne and the Chamber of Commerce), had blabbed to the 
Tribune
 reporter that the reason government forecasts were so bad was that “the man now in charge of that branch of the service at Washington [Professor Cleveland Abbe] is too much of a scientist and too little of a weather observer.” Walshe rambled on that “Unless a man spends a long apprenticeship learn-ing the details of weather conditions all over the United States he will fail in making predictions no matter how good a scientist he may be. The general rule that will apply in one place won’t apply in another. A prediction like that sent for to-day does more harm than one might suppose." More harm indeed. Lieutenant Walshe would very shortly be hearing from the general as well.

In Saint Paul, Lieutenant Woodruff had Sunday off—actually, just Sunday morning and afternoon. In the evening he’d have to climb once again to the top of the Chamber of Commerce building and spend a few hours studying the maps and incoming telegrams so he could issue the midnight forecast for Monday.

But Woodruff did not have to be in his office surrounded by a litter of maps and telegrams to know that the cold weather that had set in since Thursday’s storm had reached a climax, or rather a nadir, that Sunday morning. He could feel it himself pressing in at every window and door in his residential hotel, cold that no amount of modern steam heat could keep at bay. Over the entire region that Woodruff had charge of, observers were recording the coldest weather of the season—in many locales the coldest temperatures ever measured. Thirty-six below zero at 6 A.M. Central Time according to Sergeant Lyons’s thermometer on the Chamber of Commerce roof (six days later it would fall even lower, to an all-time record of 41 below). Forty-three below at nearby Fort Snelling. Thirty-seven below at Professor Payne’s observatory in Northfield. Twenty below reported by Sergeant Glenn at Huron (temperatures had bottomed out there at 31 below the previous night at 9 P.M.). Twenty-four below at Yankton. Twenty-five below at Omaha. Thirty-five below at North Platte, Nebraska, the lowest temperature ever known in the history of the county, with a barometric pressure of 30.94, the station’s highest pressure then on record.

Woodruff himself had recorded a temperature of 63 below zero on his spirit thermometer during the snow winter of 1880–81 while fighting the Sioux in Montana under Colonel Guido Ilges (the all-time record low for Montana, and the lower forty-eight, for that matter, is 70 below, recorded at mile-high Rogers Pass on January 20, 1954). But as far as personal comfort was concerned, Woodruff conceded that there really wasn’t much difference between 63 below in Montana and 36 below in Saint Paul. At least the winds were calm that Sunday morning, and the sun shone feebly in a sky of steel.

The only other consolation was that this unprecedented cold wave was the ideal weather for building a rock-hard ice palace for the upcoming Winter Carnival, the high point of the winter social season at Saint Paul. Though Thursday’s blizzard had forced city officials to postpone the ceremonial laying of the corner block, the occasion took place with all due pomp on Saturday evening—a bit of luck, as it turned out, since this just happened to be the day Woodruff celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday. When it was finished a few days hence, the ice palace would rise to 120 feet at its highest turret, with some 55,000 22-by-33-inch ice blocks covering an acre of ground and weighing in at 6,000 tons—all of it frozen solid by the subzero weather and glittering like diamonds.