Horses and Harness Repair on the Dakota Prairie

Horses and Harness Repair on the Dakota Prairie

In the summer of 1998, my dad, Julius A Just, born, May 3, 1914, presented to me a homemade wooden harness maker/repair stand, along with a metal box of tools.

He said, “My brothers, Reinhold and Ephraim, left McIntosh County for Berlin, in LaMoure County, before I did so when I moved my family to Berlin in April 1944, I took this piece with me.  I rebuilt the bench part of it recently. This harness maker/repair stand belonged to my father, Karl Just.” Dad shared that this item may even have belonged to Karl’s father, Christof Just , who with his wife, Elizabeth Wanner and their infant son,  Karl, left Kassel, in South Russia (now Ukraine) in October 1884. Baby Karl died en route and was buried at sea.  Christof and Elizabeth arrived at Yankton, Bon Homme County, Dakota Territory a few weeks later and spent the winter with family and friends who left Kassel for Dakota Territory some years earlier.  Another child, also named Karl, (Dad’s father) was born there on January 1, 1885. The following spring of 1885, Christof Just filed a homestead claim in McIntosh County in what is now North Dakota.   

Dad said, “In the wintertime for at least a month in the afternoons we boys would start a fire in the Summer Kitchen and repair harness. The thread was made from cotton. We tarred it and put it through a needle. We used two needles that we wove both ways.  We used a pointed awl to punch the holes and put the needles through them each way. Then we would pull it tight and punch another hole. After our father died in 1923, our mother, Katharina Meidinger Just, needed to scale our farming operation down so she had an auction sale.  With money from that sale she bought a new harness for the team of horses she used for her buggy.” Even though the family owned an automobile, Katharina preferred to use the team of horses.

Following Karl’s death, Katharina married her brother-in-law, Christof Thurn. She died in November, 1925, after giving birth to her 10^th child, a son named Edwin.  

Karl and Katharina and all their children are now enjoying one another in heaven. All we have left are items like this homemade harness maker/repair stand and the stories that come with them.

Karl’s great-grandson, Dan Feist, is a collector of items that celebrate and remember farms and farm work. He has agreed to add this item and the story that goes with it to his collection. Dan’s son Michael Feist, said he will take care of it when the time comes and will share the family story. I think Julius would be pleased that it will be placed into good hands.

May many generations of descendants of Karl Just look at this family treasure and imagine a cold winter afternoon sitting  with their brothers around the fire in the summer kitchen doing important work like making or repairing harness.

Carol Just – December 2014

I've done all that I need to do here...

“I’ve done all that I need to do here”

Celebrating Julius Andreas Just on Father’s Day, 2014

On May 3, 1914, just a few months before shots rang out in Austria triggering the “war to end all wars,” commonly  known as World War I, a boy, the 5^th child, 4^th son was born to Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just in a little house on Karl Just’s rocky homestead in McIntosh County, North Dakota.

Named Julius Andreas, he would soon be followed by four more sisters.  Large families were common in that era and Karl and Katharina considered each child a gift.

Ephraim on Karl's lap, Adam, Aldina, Reinhold and Julius on Katharina's lap 1914

An opportunity to move to a larger farm a few miles closer to the grain elevators and train station at Zeeland, North Dakota, came in March 1920. The idea of avoiding rolling hills when hauling grain to market with a team of horses had great appeal to Karl and Katharina.

House on new Just Farm  1920

Julius was just about six-years-old and remembered the move well. His father, Karl, drove their Overland Touring Car while the older boys, eleven-year-old Adam and nine-year-old Reinhold walked the five miles to the new farm, herding the cattle to their new home. Seven-year-old Ephraim was in charge of the cat and the little girls - four-year-old Eva and three-year-old Katharina.  Almost twelve-year-old Aldina was in charge of two month old Elizabeth. Julius didn’t remember what his job was. Neighbors helped with the move and neighbor ladies had the big house warm and food ready when they arrived at their new farm.

 According to Julius, everyone lived and worked in harmony and they were a happy family.  He remembered his mother had a beautiful voice. She sang and played the organ and when neighbors and family visited, group singing was common.  Katharina had earned a teaching certificate and taught school before she married Karl Just. Religious and secular education for her children was important to her. Julius remembered a contented household where friends and family often visited. Karl and Katharina always took their turn hosting the local teacher. Julius remembered how much his mother enjoyed the company of another adult woman.

The new farm was a financial struggle. The house and the farm buildings were not in the condition they expected. A new furnace and building improvements began immediately. The two bottom plow and ten foot drill and other machinery they brought to the new farm were not sufficient to handle more acreage. Julius remembered that his father was a very kind and quiet person who was well respected in the community. One day little Julius was riding on the mower with his father at a section of rented hay land when they had to stop to change the sickle. In the process, Julius cut his finger. In an interview seventy-three years later, Julius could still remember how concerned his father was – how bad he felt - as he made a makeshift bandage to cover the wound.

The move meant a new school in Frieda Township. Julius remembered that they went to school in a sleigh pulled by horses. There was a barn at the school site to house the horses during school hours. A school year was seven months and regularly attended unless the student was needed to plant or harvest the crop. Many boys, including the Just boys missed school to take care of chores at home.

Julius 4th from right

The family continued to worship at their little Friedens Gemeinde (Peace Lutheran) Church even though they were now closer to St Andrew’s, the “mother” church organized in 1893 by Julius’s Meidinger and Just grandparents and where his parents, Karl and Katharina, were the first to be married in 1907, in the newly erected tall, white Carpenter Gothic style church that stands today as a “Beacon on the Prairie.”

Karl and Katharina on their wedding day, June 1907

Life moved on in harmony and happiness until the winter of 1922 – 23. Diptheria, a deadly respiratory infection was epidemic and four of the children were placed under the care of the local physician. Julius, Eva, Katharina and Elizabeth were terribly ill with the dreaded disease. Katharina’s niece, Katie, came to help the exhausted mother care for her sick children but Dr. Grace sent her home because he feared the newly married Katie could be pregnant and could become ill with the disease. The father, Karl, was also on bed rest, as he was many winters because of a weak heart and lungs resulting from an accident he had as a young man with a runaway wagon and team of horses.

 It was a cold, hard winter and the big house was drafty. They were almost out of coal. Karl got up from his sickbed, got dressed and announced he was going the sixteen miles to Zeeland to get a load of coal. Katharina protested saying that she was certain his younger brother, Jacob, could do it. But Karl would not hear of it and set off for town.

Underestimating his weak condition, Karl collapsed and was brought home by neighbors. Dr Grace examined him and announced to Katharina that Karl’s heart was weak and he likely would not survive. Overwrought, Katharina implored Karl to get well saying, “I cannot run this farm by myself. I cannot raise these children by myself!” Karl opened his eyes, took her hand, and said, “I’ll take some with me.”

Karl died on February 12, 1923. He had just turned thirty-eight-years-old.  Eva died on February 14, Katharina and Elizabeth died on the 19^th and 20^th. Karl took three of the children with him. Julius remembered waking up one morning, seeing sunshine and getting up from his sick bed at some point in the middle of all the illness and death. He walked into the parlor where people were assembled near two of his sisters laid out in caskets. While he was deliriously ill, he had lost a parent and three siblings. It didn’t stop there. The same epidemic claimed Julius’s Aunt Christina Just Thurn and her sons, Edwin, Julius and Jacob in those same days.

Karl Just cemetery marker.
Children each have granite markers  with their initials
at the foot of the grave.

The winter weather was unrelenting. Karl and Eva were buried at tiny Friedens Cemetery in one coffin. When Katharina and Elizabeth died a few days later, the grave diggers exhumed the coffin holding Karl and Eva and dug into the earth horizontally below the frost line to create a grave for the other two girls who were buried together in one wooden coffin. 

The sad family continued on. Julius remembered that sometimes he and his brother, Ephraim, would lie together under a feather comforter while their mother sang the lullaby, “Müde bin ich, geh zur ruh” Translated it means: “Weary am I, to Rest I Must Go”. Years later Julius would sing that same lullaby to his grandchildren. Still later, Julius’s granddaughter, Katharina, sang it in his honor at his funeral.

One night young Julius couldn’t sleep and walking into the kitchen of the big house, discovered his mother filling Easter Baskets for the children. Even in her sorrow, Katharina tried to keep life normal for her remaining children.

Taking care of the six surviving children and a farm with considerable acreage was a daunting undertaking. Katharina was able to lease some of the land to neighbors. Reinhold and Adam did most of the remaining farm work and the neighbors helped plant and harvest the rest of the acreage. Katharina’s father and father-in-law hired farm hands to help out. 

  

In November, 1925, Katharina Meidinger Just, since remarried, died while giving birth to her tenth child. She joined Karl, Eve, Katharina and Elizabeth in tiny Friedens Lutheran Cemetery, leaving her sixteen-year-old daughter, Aldina, to care for the remaining children. The infant son, Edwin, survived and was raised by his maternal uncle and aunt.

Everyone soldiered on. Julius, a good student, attended eight grades at Frieda School #2. In the eighth grade he achieved the highest math score in the county and was recommended by the McIntosh County Superintendent of Schools to attend high school. But Julius’s stepfather determined his fate and deemed that “Julius does not need a high school education to be a farmer,” – thereby refusing to fund the expense of room and board at the nearest high school. It is likely that, had she been alive, Katharina would have felt differently.

Ephraim, unknown friend, Julius and Adam

Julius with pets

Young Julius

Julius and his brothers worked for their stepfather on the family farm and on the stepfather’s acreage for the next many years until each emancipated at age twenty-one.  The happiness and harmony of their early years with Karl and Katharina never returned. Life with their stepfather was a struggle and unrewarding.  Their oldest sister, Aldina, took care of the garden, laundry, housekeeping and cooking while helping to raise the youngest sister, Marie, who was born just a year before her father and sisters died. 

Aldina and Marie 1931

Julius became Aldina’s right hand, carrying in the water, carrying out the slop and helping with the gardening and the milking as well as taking his turn with field work.  

Aldina Just 1940's

In later years, Aldina worked as a housemaid for their stepfather until he died in 1953. She never married and was the glue that held that sad family together for all those years. Their stepfather saw no need to provide land, livestock or machinery to help his stepsons get established and no dowry for his stepdaughters to get a start in life - as was the custom in our Germans from Russia culture.

Helen Dockter

In November, 1939, Julius married a local girl, Helen Dockter, and they embarked on a sixty-three-year marriage. They rented land in McIntosh County until April 1944 when they purchased a run-down farm just north of Berlin, in LaMoure County, North Dakota, some 80 miles to the east. Two of Julius’s brothers, Reinhold and Ephraim, and their wives were already established on farms nearby. Julius and Helen raised five children on that farm. Their two oldest sons, Donald and Myron, remember as small children planting rows of trees north and south, then east and west to shelter the house and out buildings. In February 1945, a large hip-roofed barn was moved onto the property. 

Julius and Helen Just Family 1950
Don, Walter, Julius (hanging on to Carol) Marcella, Helen and Myron

Over time, every shabby out-building was replaced and in 1949 the run down farm house was remodeled and modernized. Over time, more acreage was added to the farm operation.  Switching from cattle to raising sheep with sons, Myron and Walt, took up much of the 1960’s.

House on Just Farm 1/2 mile north of Berlin, ND  circa 1960's

Julius on tractor

Julius counting sheep

Walt and Julius surveying freshly sheared sheep

In 1969, twenty-five years after their move to Berlin, Julius and Helen retired to five acres of land at the edge of Berlin, ½ mile south of their farm. There they raised bumper vegetable and flower crops and hosted their children and grandchildren for every Christmas and a reunion round-up every summer. They enjoyed their retirement years, including travel across the US and Europe. 

Helen and Julius enjoying retirement in Berlin, ND

Helen and Julius Just Family at Just Farm  1982
Helen and Julius in front
Walt, Carol, Don Marcella and Myron in back 

Their son, Myron and his wife, Ruth, took charge of the farm for the next twenty-five years and at the helm today is their grandson, Christof Just and his wife, Kelli. Julius and Helen can be assured that Just Farm at Berlin, North Dakota is alive and in good hands.

Brothers Julius and Reinhold enjoying a beer during harvest circa 1970's

Julius Just was my dad. He lived to be 88 ½, outliving his mother and father by seventy-seven and seventy-nine years. Almost every Memorial Day in my memory, Dad and my mother, Helen, would make the pilgrimage back to Friedens Cemetery in McIntosh County, lovingly attending the graves where his parents, three sisters and one brother are buried.

Myron with Julius, Fall 2002 during
Julius's last visit to his beloved Just Farm at Berlin

Not long before he died Dad told me, “I’ve done all that I need to do here. When it is my time, I’ll be ready. I miss my parents, sisters and brothers and I look forward to a reunion with them.” The image of him in reunion with the ones who were taken from him when he was so young sustained me in the years after he died. I still miss him but he is happy because he has even more company now. Mother has joined him along with Uncle Reinhold and Aunt Lydia. I’m pretty sure they are playing some fantastic rounds of Pinochle or Whist and talking politics from on high

.

Happy Father’s Day in your centennial year Dad! 

Carol Just, June 2014

Much of the information for this story came from interviews I conducted with my dad, Julius, and his brother, Reinhold, the two remaining children of Karl and Katharina (Meidinger) Just, in September, 1996. They were the men I admired the most in my life and I will always be grateful to them for sharing their stories with me.  The deathbed scene between Karl and Katharina was shared with me by Rosina Wiest (Just) Schauer in an interview at her home in Ashley, North Dakota, November, 1974. Rosina and her first husband, Andrew Just, witnessed the exchange between Karl and Katharina while they were sitting vigil at the bedside of Karl Just in February, 1923. 

A big Thank You to Myron Just for generously sharing 50 years of family photographs for this essay.

Prairie Blizzards

PRAIRIE BLIZZARDS

I live in Minnesota and this winter has been an unusually cold and snowy one.  I’m not complaining. I live here because I like the changing seasons. Truth is, some seasons are more challenging than others. This winter I find myself nesting and reading more than normal. Preparing hot soups and comfort food like strudels or knoepfla with sausage or pot roast makes this season a little more tolerable.

Weather.com and The Weather Channel devoted lots of air time to the "polar vortex" this winter. It is a new term for us to talk about since talking about the weather seems to be all we do. In brief – Polar Vortex is one of several semi-permanent weather systems that can hover over the Earth. It is an area of low pressure in the upper atmosphere that, on average in the Northern Hemisphere, typically has centers in two main areas: near Canada's Baffin Island, and over northeast Siberia. This winter a large piece of the vortex broke off and was forced well to the south over Ontario and the northern Great Lakes. Contributing to this southward buckling of the jet stream was a pronounced northward diversion of the polar jet stream over the eastern Pacific Ocean and West Coast of the U.S. To the east, or downstream of this northward diversion, or ridge of high pressure aloft, the polar vortex was forced southward. Thus, in the Midwest, we have had extremes of cold AND snow.

This year’s extreme weather caused me to pause and genuinely appreciate my pioneer ancestors. They counted on the Farmer’s Almanac and experience to guide them through the winter. I live in an era that provides 24 hour weather reporting.   School districts are able to cancel school days ahead (six, so far this year) of the extremes so parents have time to make arrangements for childcare. My townhome complex offers prompt snow removal so I am seldom inconvenienced.

 Some years ago a cousin gave me a copy of “The Children’s Blizzard” a book by David Laskin, Harper  Collins, 2004. This long, cold, snowy winter I finally took it off the shelf.  For those 270 pages I was transported back to January 12, 1888, when a blizzard broke over the center of the North American continent.

From the Prologue:

“The cold front raced down the undefended grasslands like a crack unstoppable army. Montana fell before dawn; (temps fell 50 degrees in 4 ½ hours) North Dakota went while farmers were out doing their early morning chores; South Dakota, during morning recess; Nebraska as school clocks rounded toward dismissal.”

There were major blizzards before and after January 12, 1888, but this one was called the “The Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were children caught on the open prairie on their way home from school.  This blizzard was unprecedented. One moment mild and the next a frozen hell broke loose. Farmers who had spent a decade walking the same worn paths became disoriented in seconds. Temps dropped 18 degrees in 3 minutes.

Accustomed to hail, prairie fires and tornados, no one on the prairie was prepared for ice dust that sealed their eyes shut and froze their clothing to their bodies until their skin was packed in snow. The number of blizzard deaths was estimated between 250 and 500. Many bodies were not discovered until spring or summer. The book contains well researched stories of foolishness and heroism, self sacrifice, level headed thinking and courage, along with some extraordinary luck.

The author continues: “ God inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians to punish then 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.”  According to Laskin, most diaries that recorded the January 12, 1888 blizzard noticed something different about the quality of that morning – the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw…”

The year before The Children’s Blizzard, was another heartbreaker. Called the “Winter of Blue Snow,” it killed the cattle kingdom that had flourished for nearly a decade on the western prairie. 72 hours of blowing snow and arctic temps meant 80% losses, proving that the open range system was flawed. Teddy Roosevelt wrote,” The losses are crippling. For the first time I have been utterly unable to enjoy a visit to my ranch.” He never recouped his initial investment of $85,000.

Then, there was the April blizzard of 1873 when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, assigned to frontier duty in Dakota Territory and traveling west with 800 officers and enlisted men from the Seventh Regiment of the US Cavalry, as well as forty government laundresses, weathered the storm with his wife, Elizabeth, in relative comfort in Yankton, the territorial capital, while scores of his men wandered lost in the winter blast after their tents blew over. Townspeople rallied and eventually gathered in the missing soldiers and laundresses.  Three years later, Custer and many of those men died in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

I went back to my library to search for documentation of more blizzard experiences. My old and weathered copy of “Per, Immigrant and Pioneer,”  written by E Palmer Rockswold, Adventure Publications, 1981, tells the story of Per who emigrated to Dakota Territory from Hadeland in Norway. Per claimed a homestead in LaMoure County in 1884. By 1887 he had broken the required acres of sod, owned some livestock and a small frame house. “On the 12th of January, 1888, came the grandfather of all winter blizzards. Late in the afternoon, the sky grew dark and the storm struck out of the northwest with sudden and dramatic fury.”  Worried about his animals, Per used the clothesline strung from the house to the barn to guide him. He tended to the animals. He continued this for two days. Even though he had a scarf wrapped around his face, the air almost took his breath away as he made his way from house to barn. He did not sustain losses but many settlers around him did.

From another volume on my shelf, “The Checkered Years: excerpts from the diary of Mary Dodge Woodward written while living on a Bonanza Farm in Dakota Territory during the years 1884 – 1889.” January 19, 1888 “The papers give accounts of fearful suffering in the last blizzard, the one on the twelfth. Two hundred people are reported dead and they have not all been found. The railroads were blockaded, the snow standing fifteen feet deep in the cuts. The Northern Pacific tried to open their tracks by hitching a procession of cars together, headed by a snowplow, and forcing them through the drifts. There should be no school here in winter. At Aberdeen some children were lost coming from school. One smart teacher (a lady, of course) tied her scholars together, three abreast and brought them in safely to a farm house three-quarters of a mile from the schoolhouse. Many people suffered the loss of their livestock. The Fargo Argus reports two thousand head of cattle, sheep and horses lost or frozen to death. Nobody except those who have heard it rave and tear and shriek and roar, and have seen the snow fly by horizontally, cutting the air with a whistle like bullets, can imagine how fierce blizzards really are.”

Another search of my bookshelves takes me to the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) February 1984 issue of Heritage Review and an article entitled, “The Gottlieb Dockters: German-Russian Hostelers of Emmons County” researched and written by Dr. Gordon L Iseminger, Department of History, University of North Dakota.  He writes:

“Germans-Russians in South Russia had experienced almost all of the natural disasters they would face in Dakota – droughts, prairie fires, cyclones, hailstorms, grasshoppers, and gophers – but not blizzards. Winters in the area of the Black Sea were mild. Grapes could be grown. Farmers could be in their fields by February. Exposed to a Dakota winter for the first time, many Germans-Russians were not certain that they would survive until spring.

Winters were especially bad when they came early, before people had secured adequate supplies of food and fuel. Winter arrived early in 1891, with a blizzard on October 28, and nearly all of the settlers in the Dockter neighborhood were caught without their winter provisions. The Dockter’s shared the 1500 pounds of flour they had on hand, but even this amount was not enough to last until spring.

This winter was also marked by heavy snowfall. A huge drift covered the Dockter’s house, except for the chimney, and extended to a point high up on the slope of a nearby hill. Because the windows were covered by snow, the Dockers were frequently forced to keep a kerosene  lamp burning during the daytime. The well was located in a draw between the house and a hill beyond and during much of the winter it was covered by as much as 25 feet of snow. To obtain water for themselves and for their livestock, the Dockters were frequently forced to melt snow.

Not only had the winter arrived early, it also lasted late into the spring of 1892. During Easter week, the Dockters ran out of food and Gottlieb was forced to hazard a trip to Eureka for flour. Because the weather was threatening and the snow so deep, Gottlieb loaded only 500 pounds of flour on his wagon. Even this small load proved too much for the horses, however, and he was forced to leave sacks of flour with settlers along the way until he had only one sack left. Struggling through the blizzard, Gottlieb arrived at the home of Markus Weigel in western McIntosh County. His team was exhausted and Gottlieb was nearly frozen. The blizzard was so bad that it would have been foolhardy to go on even with fresh horses. Gottlieb was welcome in the Weigel’s house, but they had no room for his team. Gottlieb cared too much for his horses to leave them outside in the storm and finally persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Weigel to move their stove and furniture out of the kitchen and allow him to bring his horses into the house Gottlieb never forgot the kindness and made Weigels his stopping place on subsequent trips to and from Eureka.”

The next volume I pulled off my shelf is a self-published memoir entitled, “As I Remember It from 1912 - 1994” by Jacob Klotzbeacher. Born in his mother’s claim shack in Dickey County, ND, on November 30, 1912, Klotzbeacher chronicled his life paralleled with events of the 20^th Century. 

Klotzbeacher’s  blizzard story is preceded by the story of his courtship and engagement to the local country school teacher, Ethel Skogland, who was introduced to him by his young cousin, Wilbert Gulke, a student of Ethel’s at the country school. During this time Jake was living with Wilbert’s family, Mr and Mrs John Gulke. 

 He writes: In the winter of 1936-37, we had at least three feet of snow on the level. People didn’t have the means of opening the roads; snow removal equipment amounted to a horse-drawn road grader. Most townships probably only had one. As a result, people probably only got to town once a month by horse and sleigh to pick up necessities such as coal, sugar, salt, coffee, kerosene, etc.  I was staying at Uncle John’s and we were badly in need of supplies, so Uncle John and the neighbor, Christ Miller, at whose home  Ethel was boarding, decided to make a trip to town by sled.

It was a cold, sunny day and the trip was eight miles into town, but rough going. They left town at about 3:30 p.m. with a half-ton load of coal and other supplies. It started to get dusk and they were headed back on a country trail. When they got within a mile of home, the sleigh tipped over in the dark and a sudden blizzard struck without warning. They couldn’t see anything ahead of them. Uncle John had a flashlight which he used to check the weeds sticking through the snow so they knew where the road was. Then they unhooked the sleigh and Christ Miller led the horses behind Uncle John. In this manner they plodded along until they got as far as Miller’s mail box - about 50 yards from the house. There they got a heck of a surprise.

When they weren’t home by dark we didn’t worry too much. We felt certain that they had stayed in town. Meanwhile, I had done up all of Uncle’s chores.

About 8:30 p.m., Uncle John appeared in the dark and blizzard. He had followed the fence line home from Miller’s place and he proceeded to relate the other part of this story.

There was school on this particular day. School let out about 4 p.m. The weather up till this time had been cold but sunny. John Pahl came by sleigh about 1 ½ miles to pick up his kids and he asked Ethel if she wanted a ride home as he was going within 50 yards of the place she was boarding at. She declined. It was still nice out and it was the custom in those days for the teacher to do her own janitor work, like banking the fire with coal to keep a little heat in the school room, sweep up the place, clean the blackboard and erasers, correct papers, etc.

About 4:30 p.m., Ethel started home – a distance of a half mile. She had hardly gotten under way when the blinding blizzard blew in. By the time she got as far as Christ Miller’s mail box, it was so bad she couldn’t see over twenty feet ahead of her. It was like sitting in a bottle of milk. She was afraid to leave the mail box in fear of getting confused. She felt as long as she stayed by the mailbox, she knew where she was and someone would come to find her.  But no one showed up for over three hours when Uncle John bumped into her. By this time she was pretty well frost bitten. Fortunately the temperature was about 20 degrees above zero. If it had been below zero, she would have been frozen stiff! It was Ethel’s good fortune that Uncle John and Christ Miller didn’t stay in town that day.

All the reading about prairie blizzards kept me up some nights and made me question whether I would have been a good pioneer.  It brought to the surface my memory of the blizzard of March 1966 when we didn’t have school for a week. Some folks didn’t have phone service or electricity for many weeks. I don’t remember feeling unsafe. There was ample food in our freezers and except for mountains of snow to move, we managed to get the outside chores done. There were marathon Pinochle and Canasta games and maybe some cabin fever, I can’t really remember.  

No, my blizzard experiences will never make it into the record books. Confirming what I guess I already know. I lead a charmed life compared to my ancestors. They have my undying respect and I am eternally grateful for their courage and fortitude.

Jake  Klotzbeacher’s blizzard story is included in the anthology, “Hollyhocks and Grasshoppers: Growing up German from Russia in America,” North Star Chapter of Minnesota, Mill City Press, 2013