The Children's Blizzard (17 page)

For Minnesota: snow warmer followed in northern part by colder fresh to high variable winds becoming northerly For Dakota: Snow warmer followed by colder with a cold wave, fresh to high northerly winds

A cold wave is indicated for Dakota and Nebraska tonight and tomorrow; the snow will drift heavily today and tomorrow in Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

The words
cold wave
in the indications triggered a set of special procedures. The instructions were clear and exact in the military way. Newspapers and the Associated Press wire service received the daily indications as a matter of course, but now extra telegrams must go out to the Signal Service stations in Minnesota, Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Chicago, some twenty-two stations in all, as well as to the principal railroads serving the region. Professor William Payne had also arranged with Woodruff to have cold wave telegrams sent to the sixty “flag stations” that he had set up through his Minnesota State Weather Service; although, as Payne noted sourly, “the service as rendered by the Western Union Telegraph Company, in many instances is very poor,” with the result that his volunteer flag displaymen frequently did not receive Woodruff ’s indications or received them late.

In any case, when and if the messages arrived, displaymen at the flag stations and observers at the Signal Corps observation stations were immediately to hoist the black and white cold wave flags—six-by-eight-foot white rectangular sheets with a two-foot black square centered in the middle—and keep them flying until Woodruff instructed them to take them down.

That was the procedure and on January 12 it worked as well as it was expected to. The forecast was substantially correct. The messages were coded and transmitted and duly received. The orders were obeyed. Word went out—the official word as sanctioned by the Signal Office of the War Department.

But by the time the procedure went into effect, it was too late to matter.

In the central Dakota boom town of Huron on the frozen James River, Signal Corps observer Sergeant Samuel W. Glenn was violently ill that morning—so ill that he was late getting the 7 A.M. observations off to Woodruff in Saint Paul and Greely in Washington. This was a most unusual occurrence. Sergeant Glenn was not one of those slipshod, shady observers who pawned the barometer to pay off poker debts or shook down local businessmen for cash in exchange for weather data. Far from it. For Glenn monitoring the weather was both a career and a mission, and rare was the occasion when he failed to perform his duty as the observer in charge of the Huron Signal Corps station punctually and precisely.

To the extent that a town as young and raw as Huron could have institutions, Sergeant Glenn was one of them. It was he who inaugurated the downtown office on Third Street near the opera house six and a half years before, taking his first observation at 5:35 A.M. on July 1, 1881, when the town, in the words of one settler, was nothing but “long lines of weather beaten square-fronted stores, tar-paper covered shacks with one way roofs, sod houses, tents, wagon camps, saloons galore, no churches or schools, and streets hub deep in mud most of the time.” Since the Signal Corps building was then still under construction, Sergeant Glenn had to climb a ladder to get up to his office. Now, some 118,500 observations later, Glenn was still at it—five observations a day (the three standard Signal Corps readings, plus two more for local records) taken with his four thermometers, two barometers, one anemometer with a self-registering attachment, one anemoscope, rain gauge, tele-scope, and field glass. Sergeant Glenn kept his arsenal of instruments in perfect order, wrote meticulously and faithfully in the station’s journal of any unusual local meteorological phenomena, and received the highest praise from the Corps inspectors dispatched each year from Washington. In fact, Lieutenant John C. Walshe had inspected the Huron station on November 26 and 27, shortly before meeting with Woodruff at the Indications Office in Saint Paul, and pronounced it exemplary.

Glenn’s lapse on the morning of January 12 actually had less to do with his illness than the cure. As he noted in the station journal, he been sick on and off since January 3 with an undisclosed ailment and had been receiving “medical advice and medicine from Dr. Alford.” Before dawn on January 12, Glenn had unwisely taken too much of Dr. Alford’s medicine on an empty stomach—alcohol may well have been the primary ingredient—and the reaction was swift and terrible. While Glenn languished in bed, somebody, presumably the station assistant, dragged to the office at 6 A.M. Central time to check the thermometers and rain gauge outdoors and the barometers and anemometer register mounted on the station wall.

The observations, though sent late, do exist, and Glenn was far too upstanding an observer to have fabricated them. Atmospheric pressure 28.21 inches of mercury and falling; temperature 19 degrees; wind out of the south at 24 miles an hour. Though Glenn was an hour late getting the telegrams off, not a single reading was missing. (He later supplied headquarters with a certificate signed by Dr. Alford attesting to his illness.)

By midmorning, the effects of Glenn’s medicine had worn off sufficiently for him to climb out on the roof of the Huron station.

Having noted the rapid fall in the barometric pressure, Glenn concluded that the region was in for a gale. Before it hit he wanted to inspect the anemometer to make sure the wires connecting it to the register inside were in good order. He also, frankly, wanted to see the storm blow in, always a spectacle out on the prairie. And so at 11:42 A.M. Central time Sergeant Glenn went out on the roof to have a look around.

Sixty seconds later, he came within a whisker of getting blown off.

Glenn must have had his pocket watch open in his hand because he recorded to the minute in the station’s journal what occurred in the atmosphere in the moments that followed: “The air, for about one (1) minute, was perfectly calm, and voices and noises on the street below appeared as though emanating from great depths. A peculiar ‘hush’ prevailed over everything. In the next minute the sky was completely overcast by a heavy black cloud, which had in a few minutes previously hung suspended along the western and northwestern horizon, and the wind veered to the west (by the southwest quadrant) with such violence as to render the observer’s position very unsafe. The air was immediately filled with snow as fine as sifted flour. The wind veered to the northeast, then backed to the northwest, in a gale which in three minutes attained a velocity of forty (40) miles per hour. In five minutes after the wind changed the outlines of objects fifteen (15) feet away were not discernible." The Signal Office in Washington supplied observers like Sergeant Glenn with thick volumes of lined blank pages in which to keep the station journals. Months of the year and days of the month were preprinted on the quarto pages, three days per page with about three inches of blank space for each day. Sergeant Glenn wrote “disastrous storm” in the margin next to the three inches allotted to January 12, 1888, filled the blank space to overflowing, and then, at his own initiative, pasted into the journal nine additional handwritten pages. It is an invaluable account of the violence that tore the atmosphere over Huron starting at 11:42 A.M. that day and the suffering that living creatures on the ground endured for weeks afterward.

Sergeant Glenn had his two barometers to alert him that something powerful was coming his way. But out on the prairie and in the one-room country schoolhouses and along the flimsy, flamma-ble main streets of the quick-built railroad towns, the blizzard took people utterly by surprise.

To those standing outside, it looked like the northwest corner of the sky was suddenly filling and bulging and ripping open. In account after account there runs the same thread, often the same words: There had never been anything like it. Settlers who had lived through the blizzards of 1873 and the recurring storms of the Snow Winter of 1880-81 and the vicious blizzards that had killed so many cattle just the previous winter—none of them had ever seen a storm come up so quickly or burst so violently. "My brother and I were out snowballing on a bank,” remembered Allie Green, a fifteen-year-old boy in Clark County in eastern Dakota Territory. “We could see the blizzard coming across Spirit Lake. It was just as still as could be. We saw it cut off the trees like it was a white roll coming. It hit with a 60 mile an hour wind. It had snowed the night before about two or three inches. It just sucked up that snow into the air and nearly smothered you.”

It was like a “gray wall,” said H. G. Purcell, a schoolboy in neighboring Codington County, who stood in awe on a ball field at the edge of town as the storm bore down from the northwest. "We were all out playing in our shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens,” remembered a South Dakota schoolboy. “Suddenly we looked up and saw something coming rolling toward us with great fury from the northwest, and making a loud noise. It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver, and then all tied together with great silvery ropes. The broad front of these cotton bales looked to be about twenty-five feet high; above them it was perfectly clear. The phenomenon was so unusual that it scared us children, and several of us ran into the schoolhouse and screamed to the teacher to come out quickly and see what was happening.” When the storm reached the schoolhouse a few moments later, it hit “with such force that it nearly moved it off its cobblestone foundation. And the roar of the wind was indescribable." “The sky was inky,” wrote a teacher at the Rosebud Indian Agency in Dakota, just north of the Nebraska line. “Lilia [another teacher] ventured a few yards out of the front door at its beginning, and was near not getting back. The wind struck her with such violence as to bring her head down to her knees, and take away her breath. She said she was near falling on her face, and she knew that if she fell she would not get up again." Norris E. Williams, a schoolteacher in Jerauld County, west of Sioux Falls, was standing in front of his schoolhouse with a group of students during the late-morning recess when the storm descended: “I was just saying that I ought to dismiss school and go to Woonsocket for coal when a sudden whiff of cold air caused us all to turn and look toward the north, where we saw what appeared to be a huge cloud rolling over and over along the ground, blotting out the view of the nearby hills and covering everything in that direction as with a blanket. There was scarcely time to exclaim at the unusual appearance when the cloud struck us with awful violence and in an instant the warm and quiet day was changed into a howling pandemonium of ice and snow." Darkness fell, “darkness that might be felt,” as one farmer wrote. “You could hardly see your hand before you or draw your breath and that with the intense cold roaring wind and darkness it would appall the stoutest heart."

Many wrote that the onset of the storm was preceded by a loud roar, like an approaching train. It was a roar they not only heard but felt vibrating in their gut.

That sound was the wind at the knife edge of the cold front smashing the snow to powder. Dr. Louis W. Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and an expert on snowstorms, compares what was happening on the ground as the cold front came through to the smoke and ash roiling through the canyons of lower Manhattan after the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001: “It was not a laminar flow in which the currents move in parallel layers, but a flow moving in turbulent eddies. The turbulence behind this front must have been incredible. The air was rolling over at the same time that it was coming down. The effect was like putting the snow and ice in a grinder. The turbulence pulverized the snow to talcum powder as it entered the last mile or so of the atmosphere above the ground."

That morning the four classrooms of the Groton School were full for the first time since Christmas on account of the balmy weather.

Perhaps a hundred children in all had walked from the houses lining Main Street to the two-story schoolhouse set optimistically beyond the fringe of settlement. As usual, eight-year-old Walter Allen had gotten to school early. As the row monitor of his classroom, he had important duties to perform. And so even before his father W.C. Allen left for his law office next door on Main Street or his two older brothers headed out to their jobs at the sole remaining Groton newspaper, Walter ducked behind the family’s house and cut across the backyard toward school.

On a mild morning like January 12, the walk from the Allen house to school was nothing, even for an eight-year-old. As long as Walter stayed away from the deep drifts that massed behind buildings and fences, he was fine—and anyway, once he got beyond the outhouses tucked discreetly in back of the Main Street homes there were few structures of any kind until he reached the school. Not a single tree varied the monotony or broke the wind, though for once that morning the wind wasn’t a problem.

The vestibule of the school where the children hung their wraps and stowed their wet shoes was less jammed than usual since the weather was so mild. Some kids had dispensed with cloaks and overcoats altogether—their wool stockings and homemade linsey-woolsey and calico dresses and petticoats or thick shirts and trousers would have been warm enough on such a mild morning.

One girl remembered slipping out of the house in a short cape made from the bottom of an outgrown coat before her mother spotted her and insisted on the heavy coat. “My brothers wore little homemade denim jackets. No scarves, mittens or overshoes, for it promised to be a fine winter’s day. Long before I reached school, I was carrying my cape in my hand.” It was hard on a day like that to be in school at all, but finally the teachers managed to herd all of them inside and get them settled—children ranging in age from five or six to fourteen, divided among four classrooms in the two-story frame schoolhouse.

Walter in his coveted front-row seat opened his desk and took out his slate, his erasing rag, and his prize possession—a delicate little perfume bottle. All the kids kept corked bottles of some sort in their desks to use in cleaning their slates—they’d pour a bit of water from the bottle onto the slate and scrub it clean with a rag.