The Children's Blizzard (6 page)

The Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was the first color-blind, sex-blind equal opportunity piece of legislation on the American books. White or black, male or female, foreign born or native born, it made no difference. As long as you were twenty-one or older, could muster $18 for the filing fee, and lived on the land and farmed it for five years, 160 acres was yours.

The one group the Homestead Act privileged was the military.

Those who served in the Civil War had a year stricken from the five-year residency requirement for every year of service in the Union Army.

For Benjamin Shattuck that meant that just two years after he and his family moved out from Ohio, the 160 acres of prime Nebraska prairie belonged to him. Born in the rich rolling farmland of eastern Ohio in 1835, Ben was twenty-six years old and single when he enlisted in the seventy-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry on November 16, 1861, seven months after the war began. He was assigned to Company B under the command of Second Lieutenant Thomas W. Higgins, and he drilled through the cold, wet winter months along with hundreds of other raw recruits at Camp Logan near Chillicothe. By the end of January 1862, the Seventy-third Ohio was considered battle ready and the men boarded trains bound for West Virginia. Their first taste of action was a forced march of eighty miles over mountain roads in a winter storm. Near Moorfield, on the South Branch of the Potomac, they were ambushed at night by Confederate snipers as they stood warming themselves at roadside campfires. The next day, the Seventy-third came under Rebel fire again while trying to ford the storm-swollen Potomac and take Moorfield. Eventually the Union soldiers prevailed and briefly held the town before retreating back up the river.

Disease ravaged the green regiment in the aftermath of this first battle. Many died in the mud and snow. Whether Ben Shattuck was among those who fell ill during those first bitter weeks of campaigning, we do not know. But he did survive. On March 20, 1862, he was promoted to the rank of corporal. It was sometime during this first year of his service in the Union Army that Ben “converted” to Christianity, as an awakening of religious fervor was termed, and joined the Methodist church—the Methodist Episcopal Church, as it was known then.

Ben served with the Seventy-third Ohio in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, including the disastrous Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August 1862, in which 147 of the regiment’s 310 men were killed or wounded and 20 taken prisoner, and the humil-iating Union defeat at Chancellorsville the following spring.

Though Chancellorsville ended in confusion and retreat for the massive Union contingent under General Joseph Hooker, the Confederate Army paid dearly for its victory. Robert E. Lee sustained some thirteen thousand casualties during the campaign (about 22 percent of his army) and lost the charismatic General Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded by accident by his own men while returning to the Confederate lines at night. By chance, the Seventy-third Ohio was positioned away from the worst of the fighting and they emerged from the engagement relatively unscathed. In all, Union casualties came to more than seventeen thousand men during those few days in April 1863.

At noon on July 1, 1863, the Ohio Seventy-third arrived at Cemetery Hill overlooking Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and for the next three days they endured the almost ceaseless fire of Lee’s army.

During the few hours at night that the guns and cannons were silent, the Ohio men lay shivering on the ground, listening to the cries of the wounded and dying on the field. “It was the most dis-tressful wail we ever listened to,” wrote Samuel H. Hurst, the regiment’s commander.

The climax of the battle came on July 3. Early that day the Ohio men were driven back at the Emmetsburg Road, but eventually they advanced as the Union forces succeeded in breaching Lee’s line.

Sometime in the course of that day Ben Shattuck, now a sergeant, sustained a bullet wound in his right leg and was taken prisoner by the Confederate forces. For the next eighty-three days he was held at the Confederate prison camp on Belle Isle, a lowlying island surrounded by rapids of the James River near Richmond, Virginia. There were no permanent barracks for the prisoners, only tents, and food was so scarce that prisoners were reduced to gnawing on maggoty bones and stealing the boots off dying fellow soldiers and selling them for food. “All other thoughts and feelings had become concentrated in that of hunger,” wrote a Union prisoner. “Men became, under such surroundings, indifferent to almost everything, except their own miseries, and found an excuse in their sufferings for any violations of ordinary usages of humanity.” Every day, fifteen to twenty-five prisoners died. Their corpses were wrapped in canvas and tossed into holes in the ground just outside the prison. Many on Belle Isle were forced to sleep on the ground without shelter and died of exposure; many froze to death in the tents. "Can those be men?” the poet Walt Whitman wondered when he saw a group of Union soldiers returning from Belle Isle. “Those little livid brown ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarves?—are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses?" After nearly three months, Ben was released from Belle Isle, possibly in an exchange for Confederate prisoners. The wound in his leg would bother him for the rest of his life. During his final fifteen months of military service, Ben fought with General Sherman’s forces in the siege of Atlanta. He watched the city burn in November of 1864 and he marched with Sherman to the sea. On New Year’s Eve of 1864, Sergeant Shattuck’s term of service expired and he was mustered out of his regiment.

Details of Ben’s life become sketchy once he left the Army. On March 1, 1866, he married Sarah Jane Targe—she was twenty-two years old, he thirty-one, old in those days to be starting a new life.

Two years later, on April 8, 1868, the Shattucks’ first child was born—a girl they named Allie Etta and called Etta. Eventually the couple had six other children, two of whom died in childhood. It’s unclear when or why the Shattucks moved west to Nebraska and how many places they lived in before they settled near Seward, the county seat just west of Lincoln named for President Lincoln’s secretary of state William Seward. There is a record of an Ohio-born Shattuck living in Iowa in the early 1870s, though this may have been a cousin. We know for certain Ben and Sarah Shattuck were living near Seward in November 1882, because that’s when they joined the town’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Whether the war injury made it difficult for Ben to work successfully in the fields, whether he was unlucky, unsteady, haunted by memories of Belle Isle, or just a poor farmer is uncertain—but it’s clear that Ben struggled and often failed to support his large family by farming, even though the soil around Seward is good and the climate favor-able. Like many another hapless sod farmer, Ben Shattuck decided to pull up stakes and try his luck elsewhere—farther out on the prairie. On March 15, 1885, Ben and Sarah withdrew from the Seward Methodist church, and around that time the family moved north to Holt County, a bleak, flat, arid region on the edge of the Nebraska sand hills. “B. Shattuck” is listed in an 1886 census as a farmer in the town of Atkinson, Holt County, but once again he failed to raise a crop sufficient to feed his family.

We know these details because, when disaster struck two years later, the Shattucks and their oldest daughter, Etta, briefly became celebrities. The newspapers that told of Etta Shattuck’s plight in excruciating detail for a few frigid weeks in January and February 1888 all mentioned that the girl, not quite twenty years old, was the sole support of her parents and four siblings. A Methodist “convert” like her father, a plain young woman with a full square face and brown hair that she parted in the middle, Etta kept the family going on the twenty-five dollars a month she earned teaching school at the one-room schoolhouse in the Bright Hope School District in Holt County. The newspapers loved it: a wounded Civil War veteran, a devout teenage schoolteacher, a terrible act of God.

The story ran on front pages for weeks.

Between Ben’s service in the Seventy-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the blizzard that took Etta, the record of the Shattuck family is dim. Only war and natural disaster have secured them a few lines in history.

S. F. Huntley and his wife, Abi Townsend Huntley, ordained ministers both, came west to bring the word of God to the Dakota prairie. Abi was forty-one years old and eight and a half months pregnant with her fourth child when the family arrived in the town of Plankinton by train on April 5, 1883. A small straight-backed woman with a long, narrow mouth and sparse fair hair pulled back and tucked neatly behind her prominent ears, Abi brought with her a degree from the Whitestown Seminary in Oneida, New York, a steady devotion to the Quaker faith she had been raised in, crates of precious books both religious and secular, and very little else. At the Plankinton train station the Huntleys hired a young boy and a pair of old, tired horses to drag them, their children, and their few earthly possessions the score of miles to the new-fledged town of Wessington Springs. The horses were so broken down that a team of oxen passed them before evening drew in.

The Reverend S. F. Huntley, though possessed of a sturdy upright frame, a prominent forehead, and a neat goatee, was a bit thin in the shoulders and broad around the middle for a pioneer. By the looks of him, he had more grooming than muscle. Certainly he had more education than most of the men swarming into Dakota in those years. S. F. Huntley prided himself on a degree from Cor-nell University and his service in the Civil War with Company B of the 152nd New York Volunteer Infantry. For a man of his quality and experience, this move to Dakota was to be viewed as something akin to missionary work. He and his wife intended to see church life established and rooted on the godless frontier. He would found a Congregational Church, she would start a Quaker meeting. Though members of different denominations, they traveled together with that joint mission. The earthly possessions they bore with them were few, but that didn’t matter. The Reverends S. F. and Abi Huntley carried their fortune in their heads—and their hearts. For the rest, God would provide.

They arrived in Wessington Springs at night with no claim or kin—just the name of a fellow preacher who had advertised for a new colony. The preacher had no room to put them up, but he showed them the way to the house of a kind stranger. The Huntleys crossed a gully and ascended a series of low hills and finally, with night deep around them, they saw a light burning in the window. It was here, six days later, that Abi, far past her first youth and in an alien primitive country with no home to call her own, gave birth to another daughter. Three daughters and a son now, and all that they owned piled on a wagon.

By June, S.F. claimed a quarter section by squatter’s rights, surveyed the land, and filed the papers. That summer the preacher managed to bust two acres of sod and put in a vegetable garden.

He built his family a house, really not much more than a shack ten feet by twelve—too small for the six of them, so he cut sod for the walls and roof of an additional room and a shed for storing fuel. A couple of years later, the Huntleys homesteaded another quarter section nearby and built a proper frame house, but still they kept the soddie. When the coldest weather hit each winter, they moved back to the old sod house. Truth be told, for all the dirt and mess of walls made of prairie turf, it was easier to keep a soddie warm.

Settlers came fast, many of them Quakers like Abi. When it was time to name their stretch of Jerauld County prairie, the Quakers prevailed and the name they settled on was Harmony Township. It was a blessing for Abi that a Quaker meeting was organized so soon and she did whatever she could to help. S.F. preached at the Congregational Church, and it pleased him that so many of their neighbors attended regularly every Sunday. A one-room schoolhouse was built not far from their home, less than a mile to the west, and the three older children—Mary, Ernest, and Mabelle—walked out there together when the weather permitted. Miss May Hunt was their teacher, an estimable young woman and, S.F. was pleased to note, a member in good standing of his church.

It made Abi uneasy, this turning the children loose to walk the prairie, what with snakes in the tall grass in the warm weather, and standing water in the gullies, and fierce winds whipping up when you turned your back—not like the weather she was used to in the hilly woods of central New York State. But as her husband often said with pride, Abi Townsend Huntley was not one to fret or complain. Never had she uttered a word of discontent since they moved out. And anyway, it was a comfort to them both that there were so many other families in Harmony Township these days. The Reverend Huntley stood at their front door one morning and, gazing out to the north and east, counted eighty-three houses where four years ago there had been nothing but rolling grass and a couple of sod huts.

Plenty of folks to look out for Mary, Ernest, and Mabelle Huntley as they walked back and forth to Miss Hunt’s school.

William Clark Allen went west with his family in 1881—not to bust sod on a homestead or to build a church where they could worship as they pleased or to escape hopeless poverty, but to try something new and large and clean in a town that barely existed until they got off the train and built it. The bearer of a proud Yan-kee name (family legend claims Ethan Allen as their ancestor—mistakenly, as it turns out), a man of enterprise and gumption with piercing blue eyes, wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a high round forehead, and the flowing walrus mustache of his era, William Clark Allen—W.C., as he styled himself—managed to be a man of both adventure and substance. He was born in 1845 in the Great Lakes town of Newcastle, across from Rochester on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario, moved west to Wisconsin as a young man, went to work as a lawyer (no need for law school in those freewheeling days), married, fathered two sons, lost his wife, married a schoolteacher named Edna Jewett whose family had emigrated to the Midwest from upstate New York, and moved again, west again, this time to Minneapolis. In November 1879, when W.C. was thirty-four and Edna twenty-eight, they had a child whom they named Walter, so now there were three boys—Hugh, who had a clubfoot, William, who turned ten that year, and Edna’s new baby.