The Children's Blizzard (26 page)

Had a rescue team found the five Schweizer boys and moved them exceedingly gently out of the storm and rewarmed them carefully with hot water or heated air, they might still have recovered. Assuming they slipped into unconsciousness around 4 P.M., the boys may still have been alive at 7 P.M., when the temperature had dropped to 10 below zero and the wind out of the northwest blew at 40 miles an hour. It’s conceivable that one or more of them might have been resuscitated as late as 9 P.M.

But nobody found Johann, Heinrich, and Elias Kaufmann, Peter Graber, or Johann Albrecht—not in time to save their lives.

Once their core temperatures fell below 84 degrees, their hearts were beating at less than half the normal rate. With every degree of temperature loss, the heartbeat slowed and weakened. Just as their leg muscles had failed to obey commands to contract and release while they were still able to walk, so their hearts now became less and less responsive to the electrical signals transmitted by their nerves. Fiber by fiber, the cold was paralyzing their hearts. Eventually the signals were so faint that they failed to trigger any cardiac response at all. Circulation ceased. With no oxygen the brain gut-tered and went dark.

The boys lay on their sides with their arms pulled in tight and crossed on their chests and their knees drawn to their stomachs.

By every vital sign, they were dead. They had no pulse, they were not breathing, their eyes were dilated, their brains were void of electrical activity. They were dead, but still they were not entirely gone. The cold that killed them also preserved the possibility of salvation. At normal body temperatures, the brain suffers irreversible damage three minutes after the heart stops beating. But in cases of profound hypothermia, the brain is so cold that it remains intact far longer. Modern doctors have succeeded in resuscitating an individual pulled out of icy water sixty-six minutes after cardiac arrest—full recovery with no brain damage.

Modern doctors.

Even the kindest, wisest rescuer in 1888 would have inadver-tently killed the boys.

Before Thursday, January 12, 1888, ended at midnight and Friday the thirteenth began, every bit of moisture in the five young bodies, every cell, every tissue was frozen solid.

We’ll never know how many spent that night out on the prairie. It had to be at least several thousand, most of them in the southern and eastern parts of Dakota Territory, in the eastern half of Nebraska, and in southwestern Minnesota. Northern Dakota was largely spared because the storm blew through so early that people remained home and kept their children in. Iowa, though it received the heaviest snow, also suffered relatively few casualties. The storm didn’t hit there until late in the day, when evening was gathering and farmers and their children were back home. But in southern Dakota and Nebraska the timing could not have been worse.

Sergeant Glenn estimated that 1 percent of “those overtaken and bewildered by the storm perished” and that of the dead 20 percent were children.

The catalog of their suffering is terrible. They froze alone or with their parents or perished in frantic, hopeless pursuit of loved ones. They died with the frozen bloody skin torn from their faces, where they had clawed off the mask of ice again and again. Some died within hours of getting lost; some lived through the night and died before first light. They were found standing waist deep in drifts with their hands frozen to barbed-wire fences, clutching at straw piles, buried under overturned wagons, on their backs, facedown on the snow with their arms outstretched as if trying to crawl. Mothers died sitting up with their children around them in fireless houses when the hay or coal or bits of furniture were exhausted and they were too weak or too frightened to go for more.

A young Dutch couple in Minnesota died kneeling side by side with their hands held high above their heads.

A nine-year-old Nebraska boy named Roman Hytrek was walking the prairie with his dog when the storm overtook them. That evening the dog turned up scratching at the door of a neighbor’s house. Roman’s empty coat was found in March. Eventually a search party recovered the boy’s body. Roman had died alone leaning against the side of a hill. They speculated that he had unbuttoned his coat so that he could cradle his dog next to him in it and that the wind ripped it from his shoulders. But it may have been an instance of paradoxical undressing.

William Klemp, a newly married Dakotan in the full vigor of young manhood, left his pregnant wife at home and went out in the storm to care for their livestock. He never returned. A few weeks later, Klemp’s wife gave birth to a son. It was spring when they found his body in a sod shanty a mile from the house. Klemp’s face had been eaten away by mice and gophers.

In the region that would soon become the state of South Dakota there were deaths in thirty-two of the forty-four counties east of the Missouri River. Every pioneer who wrote a memoir, every family that recorded its history included a story of someone who died in the blizzard. Every story is heartbreaking.

Lois Royce, a young teacher of a Nebraska country school, huddled on the open prairie all night with three of her pupils—two nine-year-old boys and a six-year-old girl. The children cried themselves to sleep. Lois stretched out on the ground, lying on her side with her back to the wind and the children cradled in the hollow of her body. She covered their sleeping bodies with her cloak. The boys died first. Lois felt one of the bodies cease to breathe and go cold.

Then, a few hours later, the other. The boys went in silence. The little girl, Hattie Rosberg, had begged her teacher through the night for more covers to keep her warm. She died at daybreak deliriously crying, “I’m so cold, mama, please cover me up.” When the air had cleared enough to see, Lois left the three dead children lying together and crawled on her hands and knees a quarter of a mile to the nearest farmhouse.

In Dakota’s Beadle County, six miles southwest of Huron, where Sergeant Glenn staffed the Signal Corps observing station, Robert Chambers, a farmer in his early thirties, was outside watering cattle with his two sons and their Newfoundland dog when the weather turned. The older boy, who was eleven, suffered from rheumatism, so Chambers sent him home before the storm got bad. He thought that he and nine-year-old Johnny could drive the cattle to the barn themselves. The dog would know the way.

But, in Sergeant Glenn’s words, father and son were overtaken and bewildered. When Chambers realized there was no hope of finding their farmhouse, he burrowed into a drift, wrapped Johnny in his jacket and vest (neither of them had come out with overcoats), and told the boy to get into the hollow out of the wind. Robert Chambers stood in the storm shouting for help as long as his voice held. The dog barked frantically. But no one heard them over the wind.

By evening Chambers was too cold to do anything but lie down in the snow next to his son. He put the dog beside them for extra warmth. Johnny could feel how frigid his father’s body was. He urged his father to get up and to look for the line of the trees they had planted by the house. But Chambers would not leave his son.

As the night wore on, father and son talked about death. Chambers assured Johnny that they would survive and repeated over and over that the boy must lie still. Johnny knew that his father was freezing to death. At some point the boy dozed off. When he woke, his father was still alive, but barely. Chambers told his son to pray and that he would pray with him.

At daylight a rescue party heard the Newfoundland barking and found them. The snow had drifted so deeply that Johnny was entirely buried but for a small opening by his mouth. The dog was standing guard. Robert Chambers was dead.

The Westphalen girls, Eda and Matilda, also died in the night.

Though born five years apart, the daughters of German immigrants, the girls had grown close to each other in the tragedies that had befallen their family during the past few years. Diphtheria struck the Westphalens in the winter of 1883. Two days before Christmas, six-year-old Frederick died. Six weeks later, their father, Peter, deranged by grief, hanged himself. Since then their mother had managed alone with six children. The winter of the blizzard, Eda was thirteen, Matilda, eight. The storm hit when the girls were at their country school in a hilly section of eastern Nebraska near the railroad town of Scribner (named by an Eastern railroad official for his son-in-law, New York publisher Charles Scribner). The teacher, Nellie Forsythe, told the children to go home. Eda and Matilda left together. The schoolhouse was halfway up the side of a smooth rounded hill; their house was a mile due north at the bottom of a valley cut by a creek. Usually it was an easy walk downhill across the fields. But in the storm the girls had the wind in their faces. No matter how they struggled against it, the northwest wind pushed them east into a series of ravines. For a while they wandered in circles. Then they drifted east and south with the wind. Only when they came to a wire fence did Eda realize they had gone in the wrong direction. They needed to turn around—but turning meant walking into the wind. Matilda failed, and Eda took off her wraps and covered her younger sister.

Most victims of hypothermia curl up on their sides and die in a fetal position. Eda and Matilda died facedown. Very likely they dropped while fighting to walk into the wind. Once they fell, they must have lost consciousness very quickly. They lay on the snow a few feet apart on the side of a hill. The windward side. All night the wind blew snow over their bodies, covering them and laying them bare again.

In the course of the night, the haystack in which Etta Shattuck had taken refuge became her prison. The hay had become so compacted and heavy with drifting snow that it pinned Etta in the small hollow she had dug for herself. As the temperature plunged, the fibers tightened. Etta’s torso stayed fairly warm, but the cave was so shallow that she was unable to shelter her legs or feet. Exposed to the cold, her legs turned to blocks of wood. She was powerless to escape.

Etta drifted in and out of consciousness, but she never fell into a deep sleep. She felt mice rustling through the stack and nibbling at her wrists and somehow that comforted her. It seemed miraculous that something else was alive in the storm. When she was most alert, Etta prayed. She moved her lips and tried to summon the voice to sing hymns. She ran the words through her mind, but the sound that came from her mouth was hardly more than labored breathing. She was glad as never before that she had found God.

God had brought her to the haystack; she was sure of it. God would guide the steps of a rescuer. Etta had faith. She knew she would be saved.

At some point in the night the wind died down enough for her to hear coyotes howling. That keening yelp. Or maybe it was still the wind. Etta’s eyes fluttered open and the air looked a little brighter. It must be morning. Whoever had forked the prairie grass into this stack would come. Etta tried her voice to see if she could cry out for help. She could move her mouth and neck and shoulders. But her body was caught in the vise of the frozen haystack and her legs were paralyzed. The hymns and prayers would keep her going until someone came and pulled her out.

If nothing else, as long as she could sing and pray, Etta could ward off deep sleep—the sleep from which she would never rouse herself.

Weather goes on forever with no direction or resolution, but a storm, like a story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The conditions that made the storm will in time unmake it. The seeds of destruction are present from the start. It is the nature of raging low-pressure systems to drag down calm, stable highs. Winds must relax as temperature and pressure gradients dissipate. Once the front moves through, cold air deepens. The clash of contrasting air masses continues—but somewhere else.

Another story. On yesterday’s battleground falls the hush of equilibrium. Air aloft dries as it spreads and sinks. Clouds break up.

After the worst storms, the most beautiful weather often shines down on the scene of devastation.

Before dawn on Friday, January 13, 1888, the blizzard had pretty much blown itself out over the Dakotas, Nebraska, and southwestern Minnesota. The last gusts put the final touches on drifts and hollows, and then the atmosphere subsided in a deep sigh of high pressure. Over a thousand miles of prairie, from central Canada down to Oklahoma, the air grew pure and dense and dry with intense cold. Twenty-nine below zero at 6 A.M. at Fort Assinniboine. Twenty-five below at Huron. Seventeen below at Omaha.

Sunrise two hours later barely budged the mercury. As the light came up, the dome of the sky seemed to lift and expand like a balloon filling with air. The colors of the most delicate alpine flowers flushed the sky from east to west—first grayish pink, then powder blue, then azure. The last bits of moisture condensed and froze and fell glittering in tiny crystals from the cloudless sky—diamond dust, meteorologists call it, a sign that the coldest, driest weather is building in. "Silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight,” Hamlin Garland wrote of the prairie the day after a winter storm.

In hilly Buffalo County, bordering the Missouri River in southern Dakota, Thomas Pirnie stepped out of his farmhouse on the morning of the thirteenth to survey a world transformed. “It was a beautiful but awe-inspiring scene,” he marveled. “The frost sparkled like myriads [ 
sic
] of diamonds and the sun dogs were beautiful as a rainbow. Overall, there was a death-like stillness, not the sound of a dog barking, a cow bellowing or a horse neighing. The hills which had been sharply outlined were now but rounded knolls. Ravines had almost disappeared. Everywhere there was perfect whiteness.

The smoke from the house chimneys went straight up in round columns high into the sky. This was the only sign of life about us." The towns and cities were paralyzed, their wide, straight main streets drifted over, the shops and schools closed, the rail yards deserted. “Not a team or vehicle of any kind is to be seen,” wrote a resident of Bismarck. “It reminds one of the ancient depopulated cities. The terrible swirling masses of snow prevents [ 
sic
] objects from being seen across the street.” Bismarck’s Signal Corps observer Sergeant Sherwood reported drifts as high as twenty feet.