The Children's Blizzard (19 page)

The school windows went from pearl to charcoal as the cloud of snow enveloped them, not so much falling as slamming sideways.

Within minutes the wind had sucked the warm air out of the uninsulated building. Powdery snow began sifting in through every crack in the walls and around the window frames and spraying against their faces. Soon there was fine snow hanging in fringes from the maps on the wall and eddies of snow snaking across the floorboards. Even a few feet away from the stove, it was so cold that the snow didn’t melt. White cobwebby drifts mounted in the corners.

Instinctively, the younger boys looked to their older brothers to see what to do. Heinrich and Elias Kaufmann knew that Johann would take care of them. Their kindly mother, Anna, always told them that if anything happened, they must listen to Johann. He and Peter Graber were practically men. They would know what to do in a storm like this. Probably better than an outsider like Mr. Cotton.

Johann Albrecht, with no brother at school, turned to Mr. Cotton. But the teacher would not meet his eyes. He just kept looking over at the rattling windows and shaking his head. With the wind roaring in their ears and the room going colder every minute, there was no question of trying to teach any longer. But what should they do? Usually he gave the commands and the boys obeyed, no questions asked. But now Mr. Cotton was asking the two older boys for advice and then arguing with them. Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber drew together. They must stay in school and wait for their fathers to come for them. That was what they had always been told to do in a blizzard. Keep under shelter. Remain where you were. Stay together.

But no. Mr. Cotton had made up his mind. They must leave the school and go to the nearest house, where they would find food and warmth. All of them would go together to the Grabers’ place—less than a quarter of a mile away, a few hundred paces. They would take shelter with the Graber family and wait out the storm there.

Mr. Cotton ordered them to get their wraps from the little vestibule and get ready. The Schweizer boys looked at each other with long faces and shook their heads, but they obeyed as they had been raised to. The two older boys went outside first, each one winc-ing as if slapped when he stepped into the wind. When all eight of them were outside in the storm, they huddled for a minute behind the south wall of the schoolhouse, which was the only place they could stand up straight. But even there in the lee of the building they had to hunch their shoulders and drop their faces against the on-slaught of tiny crystals. Then they set out, one by one, into the wind.

As soon as they were outside, Mr. Cotton’s authority vanished as if it had been torn from him by the wind. Within a few paces, the boys had split into two groups. Peter Graber and Johann Kaufmann, the two sixteen-year-olds, went first and three of the younger boys went with them. Heinrich and Elias Kaufmann stayed close to their brother Johann, as they knew their mother, Anna, would want them to. Johann would take care of them and see that they got home safely.

Johann Albrecht fell in with this group, too. He was thirteen, almost as old as Johann Kaufmann and Peter Graber. They didn’t need the teacher to find their way to the Grabers’ house. They weren’t babies.

Andreas and Johann Graber got separated from their older brother, Peter, and ended up with Mr. Cotton. Later Andreas would have a hard time explaining what happened. It all went so fast and it was so difficult to see anything with the wind lashing needles of ice in his eyes. They had started out together, staggering one after the other into the wind, but then their brother Peter and the Kaufmann boys and Johann Albrecht somehow got in front. One moment they were there, ghostly shapes a few paces ahead. The next moment they were gone and there was nothing where they had been but the stinging white.

The drifts were already too deep for Andreas to walk through.

Andreas began to flounder in the snow and his hands ached with cold. He couldn’t see Mr. Cotton or his brother Johann anymore.

They were going on without him. He couldn’t see anybody. Andreas panicked and shouted for Peter to come and help him. But instead of Peter, Mr. Cotton and Johann appeared. As they loomed out of the snow, Andreas heard Mr. Cotton calling ahead to the five other boys to wait for them. But there was no answer that Andreas could hear over the wind.

Mr. Cotton told Andreas and Johann that the other boys must already be at the Graber house. Peter would know the way home.

He must have led the others there. The house couldn’t be far. The five boys would be there waiting for them.

So they staggered on—Mr. Cotton in the lead and the two younger Graber brothers behind. Strangely, Andreas did not feel the cold anymore. In fact, he felt a kind of warm glow spread through him. So he didn’t cry when Mr. Cotton stopped and turned around and shouted that they must have missed the farmhouse. He wasn’t scared when his brother Johann wailed in German that they were lost. Maybe they could make it back to the school—but which way? If they had passed their house, then what?

Where was the next house? Or even a barn? Mr. Cotton turned slowly to peer in every direction. Nothing.

It was the row of spindly trees that saved them. Andreas’s father had planted the trees soon after he settled in Dakota. Most of the Schweizer farmers did the same—an orchard of fruit and nut trees near the house, just like the ones they had in the Ukraine. For an instant, the air cleared enough for them to see the end of a row of his father’s fruit trees. Andreas now knew exactly where they were. The row began at the house and ran due east. All they had to do was follow the line of saplings back to the house. It was the kind of lucky stroke people always called a miracle. Had the storm not abated just at that moment, they never would have seen the trees, never would have realized that the storm had forced them well east of where they meant to be. Had it not been for the trees, they would have continued drifting east with the storm until the wind finally blew them to the ground. Luck. Pure luck.

As soon as they got inside the farmhouse Mr. Cotton asked the Graber parents, “Are the other boys here yet?” Andreas’s mother and father shook their heads—they didn’t understand. So Johann shouted the same question in German. Peter and Susanna Graber stared wide-eyed at the two boys. Andreas knew it was a foolish question. This was no mansion with rooms to hide in. If their brother Peter and the Kaufmann boys and Johann Albrecht had made it to the house, there would be no need to ask.

Those who were fortunate enough to be inside when the storm came up faced the same dilemma as passengers on a ship who have just seen one of their fellows fall overboard. To stay indoors and do nothing seemed heartless, but to venture forth on a rescue mission was likely to be fatal to the rescuer and useless to the lost. What would be the good of another soul wandering blind in the storm?

So the settlers kept candles burning through the night at their windows or they stood at their doors shouting or ringing bells or beating on kettles or washtubs with hammers or spoons. They strained to hear cries for help over the wind. They prayed.

They prayed for the nineteen-year-old teacher Etta Shattuck in the house where she boarded in Holt County. Etta had made her plans clear before she left the house late in the morning. She had already closed her school. Tomorrow she was heading back to Seward to rejoin her family. Once she collected her final wages, she would go. That was why Etta had walked out that morning—to get her order signed so she could be paid her twenty-five dollars. If it hadn’t been for that, Etta would have been inside and safe when the blizzard struck.

The man at whose house Etta boarded stood at his door and shouted for as long as his lungs held out. He knew which way she had walked—he had seen her disappear. But there was no question of going after her. Didn’t he have a wife and children of his own to think about? Etta was a strong and sensible girl, very settled for nineteen, religious, too. She knew every hymn in the hymnal, it seemed. When it got darker and colder and she still didn’t come back, he and his wife prayed that Etta had found shelter. That was the best they could hope for.

But that’s not what happened to Etta Shattuck.

Etta was not far from the house where she boarded when the storm blew up. There was a forty-acre pasture around the house that the farmer had fenced in, and Etta was still inside the fence-line. That was lucky, for fences were rare in that part of the country.

Eventually, if she kept going in a straight line, Etta would hit the fence. And then, no matter which way she turned, the fence would lead her back to the house. All she had to do was hold fast to the fence and follow it around the pasture. If she kept her wits about her, the fence would save her.

Etta knew this, and when she reached the fence she followed it as best she could. But then she began to doubt. It was hard to think straight with the wind slamming against her head. She had been following the fence for what felt like miles and still no sign of the house. Surely she had come too far. She began to be confused, and confusion made her desperate. The fence was not guiding her but trapping her.

In her bewilderment and rising panic, Etta made a move she could not reverse. She bent over, put her hands and knees on the snow, and crawled under the fence. Two steps and the fence was gone as if it had been erased. Now she was in open country with no barrier or landmark for miles. The odds of stumbling upon a farmhouse or sod hut in zero visibility were essentially nil.

At the mercy of the storm, Etta drifted with the wind and prayed. The habit of prayer had taken hold strongly since she became a Christian at the age of sixteen. She prayed and sang hymns.

Etta knew God had a reason for unleashing the blizzard. God, who brought the storm, would guide her steps to safety. God would not let her die on the prairie. She prayed to God to give her shelter.

And sure enough. A haystack suddenly loomed before her.

By the time she reached it, Etta was nearly giddy with fear and exhaustion. She was too weak to dig in very much. She had no pitchfork and her hands were frozen. Etta managed to scrape off some of the hay and make a cavity for herself. But it was shallow. When she fell into the hay, the cold was still biting at her legs. She pulled her legs up and covered them the best she could. She knew she needed to burrow in deeper but she couldn’t. Her hands didn’t work, the fingers wouldn’t close. She couldn’t summon the strength to get up again.

Etta prayed to God to watch over her.

In Huron, 130 miles due north of where Etta Shattuck lay in a haystack, Sergeant Glenn was now jotting down the wind velocity every few minutes—11:45 A.M. (Central time): 42 miles per hour; 11:47 A.M.: 48 miles per hour; 12:15 P.M.: 57 miles per hour from the northwest; 1:30 P.M.: a maximum sustained speed of 60 miles per hour. He estimated the gusts at 80.

Five minutes after the wind reached 60 miles an hour, Glenn received Woodruff ’s telegraph to hoist the cold wave flag. There must have been a problem on the Huron line or a backup at the local Western Union office, because most of the Nebraska and Dakota observers had received their telegrams an hour earlier—12:30 P.M. Central time in Crete, Nebraska; 12:20 at North Platte; 12:20 at Bismarck, where a gale had been blowing since 5:30 in the morning. In Omaha, Sergeant George M. Chappel, the Signal Corps observer in charge, wrote in the station journal that the arrival of the cold wave warning at 12:40 P.M. was “not far enough in advance of the cold wave to enable this office to get the warning telegraphed to the northern and western portion of the state before the blizzard had struck there." “Not far enough in advance” was putting it mildly. In Moorhead, in far northwestern Minnesota, fifteen minutes after Woodruff ’s telegram arrived at 12:30 P.M., Private Frank L. Harrod noted a “sudden and fierce change of wind from south to north" followed by “heavy blinding snow."

On a map the advance of the cold front looked like the lobes of a glacier advancing out of the northwest. By 1 P.M., it had covered almost all of Dakota Territory, the western two-thirds of Nebraska, and the northwestern fringe of Minnesota. Over the next two hours the front picked up speed as it spread inexorably over the most populated section of the prairie. Only three Dakota Signal Service stations had failed to hoist their cold wave flags by now: Huron and Yankton, where Woodruff ’s message arrived late, and Rapid City, way out in the Black Hills, where the telegraph lines were down and the message didn’t arrive until the following afternoon. But it made little difference. Nobody knew about the flags except those who lived within sight of the stations—and even then, visibility was so bad as to render the black square at the center of the white flag invisible unless you were a few feet away. In all the hundreds of accounts written by those who endured the blizzard, there is scarcely a mention of the appearance of the cold wave flag. Though Greely boasted that the system of cold wave warnings operated “to the general satisfaction and frequently great advantage of the public,” the public never breathed a word of gratitude—or complaint.

Whatever Greely believed, the people of the region knew they were on their own when a blizzard hit.

Particularly the schoolteachers, many of them barely older or more educated than the children they taught. As the blizzard broke against the northwest walls of their schoolhouses, every teacher faced the same choice alone: stay in the school with the children or send them home? According to Sergeant Glenn, those who chose the former were “principally persons familiar with the western storms and who fully appreciated the danger of going over the open prairie in a ‘blizzard.’” But not all of those who left or dismissed the children were ignorant or careless. Some took the children out into the storm only after their fuel was “exhausted,” wrote Glenn, and “it became a question of freezing where they were or in the attempt to find other shelter, more comfortable; others started out supposing they could go in safety but were soon bewildered and lost." Minnie Mae Freeman was one of the many teenage teachers who faced the question of freezing or fleeing in the storm. She had sixteen pupils, some nearly as old as she was, at her country school house near Ord in the Loup River region just east of the Nebraska Sand Hills. It was a sod building, unusual for a schoolhouse on the prairie, with a crude door attached by leather hinges and a roof of tar paper with sod laid over it. Around noon, the first blast of the storm tore the door off the leather hinges and blew it into the schoolroom. A couple of the boys helped Minnie get the door back up, whereupon it blew in again. This time she had them nail it shut all around. Minnie knew she had enough coal to heat the soddie schoolhouse all night, and she was determined to stay put and keep the children inside.