The Children's Blizzard (7 page)

By all appearances the Allens were doing fine in the burgeoning, relatively civilized river town of Minneapolis. But they were restless. Though they had a house well stocked with children, books, furniture, and piano, W.C. and Edna decided that Minneapolis was not their fate. They must keep moving west, always west. They would resettle on the virgin prairie of Dakota Territory. For the “opportunities,” they said.

And so in the summer of 1880, W.C. made a scouting trip. He got as far west as the winding, shallow James River—then called the Dakota River—that spools south through the prairie before joining the wide Missouri at Yankton and decided he had come far enough. W.C. claimed his homestead at an outpost known as Yorkville (prominent enough to house Brown County’s first post office before vanishing from the map), and then he had a look around a townsite a few miles east that officials of the Milwaukee Railroad had designated Groton. Nearby towns, or rather train stops that were expected to become towns, were called Aberdeen, Bath, Andover, Bristol, and Webster—every ten miles or so another reminder of the glorious Anglo-Saxon heritage. At Groton, W.C. bought a building lot for one hundred fifty dollars on what was destined to become Main Street, the first lot sold in town, and got to work. W.C. must have been a man of considerable energy and pluck because by the time he returned to Edna and the children in Minneapolis at the end of the summer of 1880, he had managed to construct a simple but ample three-room frame house of milled lumber, shingled roof, and glass windows—four tall windows running down the sides of the house and one by the front door looking out over the mud of Main Street. This was the first frame house in Groton.

In July 1881, W.C. returned with his family and furniture to take possession. It was a memorable trip. The floods that resulted from the sudden late spring melting of the thirty-foot drifts that had accumulated during the long winter had turned the James River into a giant lake stretching across the breadth of what is now South Dakota, and it was touch and go whether the tracks would be clear in time for the Allen family exodus. In any event, the train they boarded in Minneapolis on July 14 was the maiden voyage of the H & D Division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad—“the Milwaukee,” as it was commonly called—bound for Groton, which was then (briefly) the end of the line. The Allens, like the Kaufmanns and their fellow Schweizers, traveled in an immigrant car—and they were just as dismayed at how crude and uncomfortable it was. Edna Allen recalled that a cow and team of horses were stabled at the front of the car, the family’s belongings (including their piano and one thousand carefully chosen books) were stacked at the rear, while she and her husband and the children occupied rough wooden seats at the center. It was “terrifi-cally hot,” so they traveled with the side doors slid back for air.

Walter, not yet two, was ill and fretful and had to be held in his mother’s arms the entire trip. Hugh and Will, though old enough to look after themselves, made their stepmother’s heart constrict whenever they got too close to an open door. The sea of waving grass outside was unbelievably green and tall and lush from the melting off of the deepest snows ever measured on the prairie.

For some reason the train went only as far as Andover, a stop shy of Groton, and the Allens had to complete the final leg of their journey by horse cart. Arrival afforded them no rest. The town, though surrounded by miles of drowsing prairie, was feverish with activity. Every lot lining Main Street was a building site—there was so much construction going on that just the scrap wood lying around the new houses and stores supplied the Allens with all the fuel they needed for their cookstove. Practically overnight the prairie boomtown had a feed and coal store, a blacksmith shop, a building contractor, hotel, lumberyard, and a business mysteriously identified as a “purveyor of liquid hardware.” By September 1881, just weeks after its founding, Groton boasted two rival newspapers: the
Mirror
and the
Groton News,
which prided itself on beating the
Mirror
into print by two days.

W.C. was right there in the thick of it all. Upon arrival he began practicing law out of his home, but he soon diversified into trade, local politics, and civil service. He teamed up with one Frank Stevens to open a hardware store and a lumber, harness, and tin emporium near the post office, which was also under his control, first as deputy and then head postmaster (Edna, meanwhile, ran the original Yorkville post office during the summer months). W.C. later went into the real estate business, became the town’s “police justice,” and, according to one of the local papers, “fixed up a court room at the rear of the post office,” where he handed out stiff fines to some of Groton’s leading citizens when they broke the town’s prohibition ordinance.

He sounds a bit like the Wizard of Oz—a comparison that springs readily to mind since thirty-two-year-old L. Frank Baum took up residence in nearby Aberdeen (two stops west on the train) a few years later. Baum, who had not yet discovered that writing fiction was his true calling, spent his two-and-a-half-year stint in Dakota Territory bankrupting a variety store called Baum’s Bazaar and then alienating most of the readers and advertisers of a local newspaper he edited and published. When it became clear, as Baum said later, that “the sheriff wanted the paper more than I,” he and his devoted wife and children hightailed it to Chicago.

Baum’s stint in Dakota was not a complete loss. When he wrote
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
in 1899, Baum based his descriptions of the “great gray prairie” of Kansas (which he had never seen) on his memories of the landscape around Aberdeen in the hot dry summer of 1888: “Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.” Baum used the catchall prairie adjec-tive
flat
advisedly, for this stretch of South Dakota was once the bottom of a shallow hundred-mile-long glacial lake that silted in gradually to form a broad sweep of exceptionally flat country.

That one writer of standing should have turned up in Brown County in the 1880s is curious. That two literary lions should have stalked this sweep of prairie in the same decade seems downright bizarre, yet there was the young Hamlin Garland just a few years earlier, toiling away on his father’s claim not a dozen miles north of where Baum set up shop. Or perhaps not so bizarre since this was the decade of the Dakota Boom, what Garland called the “mighty spreading and shifting” that heaved hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the country and the world onto the Dakota prairie, the Garlands, the Baums, and the Allens among them. The ambitious and restless, the poor and desperate, the gullible, the land hungry, the exile from oppression, the start-over dreamer, the Go West! hothead, the get-rich-quick drifter—all were spellbound by the mystique of Dakota in the 1880s. The territory’s population nearly quadrupled during that decade, from 135,177 to 511,527, and the number of farms increased almost five-and-a-half-fold from 17,435 to 95,204. At every train stop, towns popped up like mush-rooms after rain. “Language cannot exaggerate the rapidity with which these communities are built up,” marveled one contemporary observer. “You may stand ankle deep in the short grass of the uninhabited wilderness; next month a mixed train will glide over the waste and stop at some point where the railroad has decided to locate a town. Men, women, and children will jump out of the cars, and their chattels will be tumbled out after them. From that moment the building begins.” Garland, whose parents homesteaded near the town of Ordway, north of Aberdeen, in the same year that the Allens moved out to Groton, wrote that the builders of these new prairie towns labored like zealots caught in the spell of a collective delusion: “The village itself [Ordway] was hardly more than a summer camp, and yet its hearty, boastful citizens talked almost deliriously of ‘corner lots’ and ‘boulevards’ and their chantings were timed to the sound of hammers." This was exactly the kind of carnival the Allen family got swept up in as soon as they arrived in Groton. With their piano and library and relatively comfortable house, they offered a small oasis of civilization on Main Street, and visitors flocked to them. Litigants dropped into W.C.’s office, teachers and prospective brides consulted with Edna, young shopkeepers or farmers stopped by for advice or medical care. When the beds and floor overflowed with overnight guests, Edna spread a blanket on the piano top. For the Allen boys it was bliss. The teenage Will and Hugh promptly went to work setting type for the local newspapers, and Will, who was especially enterprising, petitioned the City Council for permission to open a lemonade stand on Main Street—which his father, as police justice, denied. Young Walter, meanwhile, was collecting rat-tlesnake skins on the prairie (which rolled right up to the edge of their backyard), falling down badger holes, tumbling off roofs, messing about in the James River, and fooling around with guns.

(When he was seven, Walter and a friend fired off a shell from a single-shot .22 rifle that grazed the forehead of one of their female neighbors, a fierce Prussian woman named Mrs. Messerschmidt, which landed them in W.C.’s “court.”) And of course, for a few months every fall and winter, there was school. Groton’s citizens organized a school district in February 1882, after the initial frenzy of construction died down, and by the following December, the town’s first schoolhouse was finished—a rather grand two-story four-room hip-roofed frame building set all by itself on the bald, bare prairie half a mile west of Main Street. The idea behind this remote location was that the town was expected to expand and engulf the school—but meanwhile, until that happened, the Groton school stood like a sentry at the edge of the great flat abyss. W.C. naturally took a place on the Groton board of education.

Fifty pupils walked out on schooldays, cutting through the backyards of the houses and business buildings that stood one deep along Main Street, skirting outhouses and heaps of barrels and crates, dodging the fence of the St. Croix Lumber Yard, and finally ascending the imperceptible rise to what would be dubbed Presby-terian Hill. Jessie Warren, the district’s first teacher, earned thirty-eight dollars a month for her troubles, which was good pay for a female teacher back then (the men usually got between 30 and 50 percent more). A few years later she was succeeded by a hapless young “professor” from an Indiana business college who had never taught school before. Somehow Walter Allen discovered that the teacher was frantically cramming every night in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the class, and he hatched a scheme to unmask him. Walter and his accomplices, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, studied their “fool heads off,” as family lore relates, reading pages and pages ahead of the daily assign-ments and easily outpacing their teacher. In class each day the boys would torment the “professor” by stumping him with questions about material he hadn’t gotten to yet. This is quite sophisticated compared to the typical prairie school prank of strong-arming the teacher outside the schoolhouse and then locking the door. Being "turned out” or “carried out” by the bigger farm boys was the worst nightmare of many a country schoolteacher. One Indiana schoolteacher was only able to regain control of his schoolhouse by capping the chimney and literally smoking the children out. Or so the story went.

But Walter Allen was no rude farm boy, as he would have been the first to point out. A wry sense of humor, a streak of mischief, and the twinkling conviction that he was clever enough to get away with anything were traits he shared with his older half brother Will. The two boys, though born ten years apart, were extremely close. Will and Walter were both impulsive, and in difficult situations both preferred to take matters into their own hands rather than heed their elders.

Like a lot of brothers, they seemed to have an instinct for knowing when the other was in trouble—which in those days on the prairie almost always meant being on the wrong side of an act of God.

God inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians to punish them for refusing to free the Israelites, but with the settlers of the North American prairie He limited himself to three: fire, grasshoppers, and weather. The stories that the pioneers made of their lives were essentially about how they coped with the hardships these plagues left behind.

A prairie fire swept through the Schweizer settlement just days after the families settled in Dakota. They stood on the treeless land and watched the flames travel with unbelievable speed over the dry autumn grass. Clouds of smoke blotted out the sun. The heat was unbearable. The Kaufmanns and their neighbors in Rosefield Township escaped, but others lost everything—the trunks they had hauled from the Ukraine, the lumber they had purchased in Yankton, the sod houses they had sweated to build. One pioneer boy remembered the prairie fires of his childhood as “a strange glare against the window” that would haunt his sleep on summer nights. "Upon looking out, I saw a great wave of fire, a moving wall of flame, pass by our house and going on to the south.” When the fires passed, the boy wrote, the prairie was a black expanse “dotted with ashpiles which in many cases, as though they were tomb-stones, marked the graves of all the settlers’ material possessions." Fire destroyed utterly and sometimes killed, but if anything, the settlers hated the swarms of grasshoppers—the now extinct Rocky Mountain locust species
Melanoplus spretus
—even more than fire because the insects were alive and conscious and seemingly perverse in their intentions. All summer long the crops would grow beautifully, filling the farmers’ hearts with hope, and then on a sultry windy afternoon a mass of locusts would descend from the sky, and in hours they would strip the fields bare. “Tragic, abominable injustice,” Hamlin Garland railed when grasshoppers cleaned out his parents in the early 1880s. A single swarm, according to early settlers, could be a mile high and a hundred miles across—one hundred billion bugs moving east at the rate of five miles an hour like an immense atmospheric stain. The air became so thick with insects that “the light took on a gray flickering look” according to one pioneer. “They drifted over in such clouds as to blacken the whole heavens,” another prairie settler wrote of the locusts that descended again and again in the 1870s, “and with such a buzzing, roaring noise that it could be heard a long time before they came over us. . . . When they settled down the corn and vegetables would be so completely covered as to be black with them one over another. The corn was their first choice. When they had stripped it of every particle of foliage—which they would in a night—they would stick so thick on the stumps of stalks that there would be no room to stick the point of a finger. . . . As we walked along they would rise from the ground in such clouds and swarms that we had to fight our way through them. It was a time when nobody needed to be admonished to keep his mouth shut." This is exactly what the Schweizers experienced during their first two summers in Dakota. Some potatoes and a few bushels of wheat were all Johann Kaufmann was able to salvage in the summer of 1875, and the next summer was worse. The insects waited until August of 1876, just weeks away from the grain harvest, and then descended on the fields in ravenous clouds. The day after the swarm landed, the wind shifted to the south and blew without cease for the next two weeks, effectively pinning the grasshoppers in place. By the time the cursed insects left, the crop was utterly destroyed. The loss of the second crop was devastating to the struggling families. Many considered returning to the Ukraine—but they knew it was impossible. “They had burned their bridges behind them,” one of their children wrote, “and were now destined to live or die on the frontier." The Rollags endured the same devastation on their homesteads in southwestern Minnesota. “One day we thought it was raining,” recalled Gro, “but instead of drops of water rattling on the roof boards, it was grasshoppers. We looked at our little garden and potato patch and it wasn’t long before everything was taken slick and clean all around us. . . . We had 60 acres of wheat sowed, but we only harvested 13 bushels more than we seeded.” Gro’s brother Osten told his grandchildren that after devouring “every green living thing in their path” the hoppers would attempt to gnaw the wooden handles of the farm tools. Others watched helplessly as they went after fences, curtains, furniture, clothing. After losing all their crop in the plague years of the mid-1870s, the Rollag men were forced to get jobs laying track for the Great Northern Railroad in order to earn enough money to feed their families. They hated taking orders from gang bosses, they hated being taunted by Irish workers for their Norwegian accents, they hated being away from their families and fields. Like the Schweizers, they thought about leaving but they were too poor to move.