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