The Children's Blizzard(93)

    The facts: In 1888, there was no National Weather Service. Meteorology didn’t quite exist as a science. But the Army Signal Corps did have a branch of weather “indicators,” career soldiers who had been selected to train, as much as the science of the time allowed, to try to indicate the weather. (They did not use words like predict or forecast then.) The Signal Corps was, at the time of the blizzard, under the command of Brigadier General Adolphus Greely, who had famously commanded a tragic expedition to the Arctic; most of his men perished, but he and a handful survived. The expedition was known as the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. Despite controversy, he returned home a hero, and President Grover Cleveland appointed him chief signal officer of the army.

At the time, weather indicating consisted of an array of stations, many at army forts and railroad depots, each manned by a member of the Signal Corps whose job it was to take weather readings—barometric pressure, wind direction and speed, temperature—and telegraph the readings, at various intervals during the day, to Washington, D.C. There, soldiers would map out all the readings and indicate the weather for the next few hours. The time it took to gather the readings, form an indication, then telegraph it back out to various stations and newspapers, meant that the indications rarely got to where they should be in a timely manner. Too, there was much corruption in the Signal Corps: false readings, mismanagement, unmanned stations. In 1887, Greely felt pressure by the railroads to open up a western branch, to better serve the railway west of the Mississippi and, to a far lesser extent, the homesteaders there. He opened an office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Woodruff.

    The Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln, encouraged the settlement of what was then known as the West—primarily Nebraska, Minnesota, Dakota Territory, then later Montana and Wyoming and Colorado. Anyone who could afford a small filing fee was given the opportunity to own one hundred and sixty acres of land. All that was required was to live on the land continuously for five years and prove it up—build a livable structure on it—and then the land was theirs. Of course, this land came at the expense of the Native Americans who had roamed it freely for thousands of years; this, and the discovery of pockets of gold and silver, ignited the post–Civil War Indian Wars, the genocide at the hands of the U.S. Army that resulted in relocating Native Americans to reservations.

The railroads were the great investment and marvel of the age, and they, along with the territories and states in this area, needed people—white people—to settle there. Territories wanted to become states; railroads needed people and goods to move up and down their lines. So a great propaganda—“fake news,” if you will—campaign was waged to get people to homestead. Many of those targeted were northern Europeans eager to leave their homeland and go to this allegedly bountiful new land of milk and honey. They were sold a false bill of goods to get them there—the character of Gavin Woodson is not based on anyone in particular, but he represents those who engaged in this fake news and propaganda. But conditions in the countries of Germany and Norway and Sweden, or in the slums of New York, too—many homesteaders were from the crowded cities of the East—were difficult. Farms in Europe were generally divided up among all the children of a family so that in each succeeding generation, there was precious little land left to farm. And there was forced conscription in the army, as well. Thus, at the time, immigrants were welcomed to this country; the country needed them, their bodies were needed to grow the population, prove up the land, and make the railroads a profit.

    During the 1880s, the weather in the Great Plains was especially daunting; this was what was known as the Little Ice Age. The weather there was both severe and wildly unpredictable. And it had hardly turned out to be the land of milk and honey that was promised; it was actually—it still is actually—a desert. The land could not be tamed by the methods the immigrants brought with them from their homelands. The crops they were used to planting simply wouldn’t grow. There were prairie fires, grasshoppers that rained down, floods in the spring, tornados in the summer. And terrifying blizzards in the winter. Eventually, the homesteaders who persisted adapted their methods and crops; the introduction of dryland farming, and then the discovery of the Ogallala Aquifer, eventually turned this region into the breadbasket of America.

Many immigrants didn’t stay for these advances; in the 1880s and 1890s, over sixty percent of homesteaders abandoned their property.

That left forty percent who did stay.

English was not the native tongue for most of the homesteaders who staked their claim. But their children were forced to speak the language in school—school so often taught by children themselves. One of the things that most intrigued me about this tragedy is that life-and-death decisions were made by young women, for the most part, barely out of school; teachers only sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years of age.

    When the blizzard struck on January 12, 1888, no one had any advance notice. The weather indication for that day did not call for any unusual warnings, and of course, even if it had, most homesteaders lived far from the stations that would hoist these weather flags. And most did not get the city newspapers like the Omaha Daily Bee, which ran the indications. Even if they had received the papers, they wouldn’t have been able to read them.

Blizzards were not unusual on the prairie, of course, especially not during the Little Ice Age. What made this one different was the fact that the morning of the twelfth was unusually balmy after an extended period of below-zero cold. Homesteaders were able to leave their homes for the first time in weeks, and they did. Farmers took their livestock out for exercise, people went to town to get supplies. Children went to school for the first time in days.