The Children's Blizzard (31 page)

By the start of the new week, the tally of the dead was the lead headline in most of the major metropolitan papers. On Tuesday, January 17, the 
New York Tribune
 put the death toll at 145 and "growing almost every hour.” The 
Tribune
 kept the story on its front page for a week, reporting 217 dead on Thursday, January 19, and 235 by Saturday, January 21. “THE RECORD OF THE DEAD” was the right-hand lead headline in the 
Chicago Tribune
 that Saturday. The next deck down promised “Thrilling Tales of Suffering from Exposure—Men and Women Perish on Their Own Premises—The Dire Distress of the Passengers on a Blockaded Train—Babies Frozen in the Arms of Their Mothers—Many Indians Missing.”

Pure catastrophe is fatiguing. The city dailies soon wearied of tales about frozen children and blockaded trains. After only a few days, accounts of amputations, record cold temperatures, and staggering losses of livestock began to blur together. It was a Nebraska paper called the 
Omaha Bee
 that found a fresh angle to keep the story alive and tingling. On Wednesday, January 18, the 
Bee 
reported that one of its “representatives” had “learned an interesting tale of the pluck and good judgment exhibited by a young lady schoolteacher of Valley County.” “A Heroine of the Storm,” proclaimed the headline, and the story went on to describe how a nineteen-year-old teacher named Minnie Freeman had rescued her "little brood” of pupils after “a terrific gale, sweeping everything before it, struck the [schoolhouse] and carried away in the twinkling of an eye the entire roof of the structure, leaving the frightened little ones exposed to the elements.” Two days later, the 
Bee
 was back with new and juicier details. Somehow its “representative” had gotten hold of a photograph of the heroic schoolteacher and the paper was now pleased to report that Miss Freeman was a very attractive young lady indeed, that she was engaged to be married to a commissioner from South Omaha (swiftly denied by the heroine herself), and that she evinced a becoming personal modesty in protesting that she had done nothing out of the ordinary in rescuing her little brood. The storm now had its first certified heroine.

The 
Bee
 did not let matters rest there. Noting that its story on Miss Freeman had “excited wide interest,” the paper declared: “She has become a heroine, and deserves to be rewarded. In France she would be voted a life pension. It has been suggested that this brave young lady, aged only nineteen years, be given a medal. The Bee would make another suggestion. Miss Freeman deserves something more substantial than a mere souvenir. She is now earning a scanty livelihood at probably $25 per month. She should be liberally rewarded by contributors in money that would enable her to acquire a home and become independent." Meanwhile, a second heroine had come to light—Miss Lois (or Louise or Loie, depending on the whim of the reporter or copy editor) Royce of Plainview, the young teacher whose three small students died in her arms the night of the blizzard. Lois herself survived, but now faced the imminent loss of both of her feet and possibly one of her hands to severe frostbite. She, too, the 
Bee
 argued, deserved to be recognized and rewarded.

And so was born the Heroine Fund. Each day the 
Bee
 solicited—indeed begged—readers to contribute what they could to reward these paragons of young womanhood. Tallies of daily receipts pre-empted the death toll figures. Interspersed with lists of contributors, which the 
Bee
 soon took to calling The Roll of Honor, were snippets about the sterling lives and characters of the heroines themselves. Minnie Freeman took center stage as the Gibson girl, all apple cheeks and chin-up, commonsense bravery, while Lois Royce lurked in the shadows as the languishing heroine of a penny dreadful.

Then, before interest flagged or attention strayed, fate handed the press a third heroine. From a journalistic point of view, the third was the best of all. Like Minnie and Lois, this new heroine was a teenage schoolteacher, but her tale was far more intriguing and, better yet, her fate still unresolved. It began with a mysterious disappearance into the white maelstrom; there followed a fruitless search, an agonizing brush with death, an eleventh-hour rescue; now there was a young life hanging in the balance as the likelihood of recovery from grievous injuries waxed and waned every hour.

The papers had learned of the ordeal of Etta Shattuck.

It wasn’t until Tuesday, January 17, that Ben Shattuck received the telegram from O’Neill reporting that his daughter had been found late in the day on Sunday—that she was alive but suffering from severe frostbite. Before he could leave Seward, Ben had to borrow money for the train tickets and other expenses of the journey. It took him two days to get from Seward to O’Neill by train, a distance of 135 miles. A week had now passed since Etta had gotten lost in the storm.

Ben Shattuck was familiar with gangrene from his three years of service in the Union Army during the Civil War. He knew, when he examined his daughter in the Murphys’ farmhouse near Emmet, that the gangrene in her legs and feet was well advanced. There was no question of the girl walking.

It was Monday, January 23, before Ben and the Murphys felt Etta could be moved. The journey back to Seward was grueling.

The Murphys arranged to have a sleigh filled with hay and they carried Etta out and tucked the hay around her, covering her over with a piece of canvas. The ride from the farm to the train depot in O’Neill was nine miles. Ben Shattuck walked at his daughter’s side, despite the war wound in his right leg. The temperature that day never rose out of the single digits.

The train to Seward, scheduled to leave O’Neill early Tuesday morning, was eight hours late because of the weather. They thought Etta would be more comfortable if she could recline, so they arranged a kind of cot for her in the baggage car. The nightmarish trip took all night. Etta never once complained.

Poor as he was, Ben Shattuck spared no expense for his daughter’s recovery. As soon as they got to Seward, three doctors and a nurse were called in. Drs. Reynolds, Potter, and Townsend saw at once that amputation was the only recourse. On Thursday, January 26, Etta lost both of her legs just below the knee.

The 
Omaha Bee,
 Tuesday evening, January 31, 1888: “The Shattuck Special Fund. Miss Etta Shattuck, the young school teacher who lost both limbs from the exposure in the recent storm will be incapacitated for any service by which she may derive a living. It is desired that $6,000 be raised. . . . This is to be known as the ‘Shattuck Special Fund.’” The entire front page that day was devoted to blizzard relief. In light of the fact that Miss Shattuck’s father was a war veteran who “suffered all the horrors of Andersonville prison" [actually, it was Belle Isle], every soldier was pressed “to send in his mite, be it ever so small, in appreciation of her heroic conduct and as a token of esteem for an old soldier and comrade.” A new fund had been added—the Westphalen Monument Fund—to raise money for a headstone to be set over the graves of the Westphalen sisters.

Two days later, the 
Bee
 published a notice from Seward County Superintendent of Public Institutions George F. Burkett appealing for contributions to help Lena Woebbecke: “As yet nothing has been done . . . for the comfort and maintenance of Miss Woebbecke. She is the unfortunate girl who, on her return from school in district No. 71, northeast of Milford, became lost and remained out all night in a stubble field. . . . She is an orphan, eleven years old and is in very needy circumstances financially.” The 
Lincoln Journal
 joined in the appeal. Children all over Nebraska handed over their pennies. Crusty typesetters at small-town newspapers coughed up a dollar.

Meanwhile, in the national press an unseemly brawl had broken out over the number of blizzard fatalities. On January 20, the 
Nebraska City Press
 devoted a story to a judge named A. F. Kinney, the agent for the Yankton Sioux tribe, who asserted that Dakota papers were deliberately underestimating and “covering up” the truth about the loss of life in the storm. When all the dead were counted, Kinney believed, the number would stand at almost one thousand in Dakota alone. The article went on to recount the details of Kinney’s harrowing nine-day train journey through the storm—“The coal was running low. The passengers were crowded into one car trying to keep warm. Two babies perished. The men discarded all the outer garments they could spare and gave them to the ladies and children. Finding these not enough, they brought mailsacks from the postcar and wrapped the children up in them. While at one station in Bonhomme County [Dakota], the Judge says, nineteen frozen bodies were brought into the depot in one day." The 
Chicago Tribune
 picked up the story the next day, and it ran the day after that in the 
New York Tribune.
 The editor of the New York paper, however, seriously undermined Judge Kinney’s claims by tacking on a vehement rebuttal from J. S. McLain, editor of the Minneapolis 
Journal:
 “This statement [of almost one thousand fatalities] is an evident urdity. Future reports are rather likely to decrease than increase the list. . . . It is simply impossible that the news has been suppressed, for the 
Journal’s
 reports have been verified by those of the morning papers. How a man who confesses to having been snowed up for the last nine days can estimate the loss of life with more accuracy than newspapers in constant telegraphic communication with the whole territory is incomprehensible." What was at issue here was not just the accuracy of the death toll figures, but the truth about the climate of the prairie. A region that could slay a thousand innocent American citizens in the course of an afternoon did not look like a fit place for human habitation—quite the contrary—whereas if the figure stood at a mere couple of hundred, that could be written off as an unfortunate sacrifice on the path to progress. In essence it was an argument over image and reputation: prairie public relations.

Dakota and Nebraska papers rose as one to defend their land and its climate. Editorials insisted that even with the blizzard fatalities their territory remained far healthier and enjoyed a far lower death rate than the fetid cities of the East Coast or the malarial swamps of the South. “Let people who are worrying about loss of life in Dakota remember this,” demanded the 
Sioux Falls Argus 
Leader.
 “In Dakota a man occasionally gets blown away or frozen to death. But his teeth never chatter for years because of ague, his form never withers under miasmatic troubles and seldom does his face whiten with pallid consumption. . . . Dakota is, once in years, the scene of some distressing calamity such as saddened her homes last week. But the lingering sickness and epidemic disease so common in other places are strangers here.” There were catalogs of Atlantic storms, Pacific earthquakes, and lake region “catastrophes" in the 
Aberdeen Daily Republican.
 The 
Daily Huronite 
refused to grieve over the losses, but instead greeted the blizzard in a “spirit of rejoicing.” “And why? Because the deep snow means good harvest in Dakota: the drought deamon [ 
sic
] flies before the breath of the snow blizzard." The 
Mitchell
 (Dakota Territory) 
Capital
 growled that reports in the Eastern papers of the death and destruction inflicted by the blizzard were not only grossly exaggerated, but deliberate attempts to “disadvantage . . . the entire territory of Dakota.” The message was clear: Devious editors were using the blizzard to blacken the good name of the prairie in order to scare away prospective settlers or divert them to their own regions. The 
Capital
 clinched its defense of Dakota with hard data. Though there was no denying that the storm had been deadly, the paper’s editor calculated that when the number of fatalities was averaged over the entire population of the territory, there was but a single life lost for every three thousand residents.

Just about the same ratio applied to New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The heroine story took on a life of its own. Papers were now advertising a large photo of Minnie Freeman posing by her sod schoolhouse with the precious children she had saved—a dollar each, eight dollars for a dozen. The Roll of Honor expanded daily. The 
Bee
’s lead story on February 4 opened with a detailed description of the condition of Lois Royce’s feet—“a great piece of frozen flesh has sloughed off from one side of the heel”—prior to their amputation.

But the greatest coverage by far—and the largest share of the money raised—went to Etta Shattuck. Anything written or said by anyone remotely connected with her was rushed into print. “I know the family and I have known Miss Etta,” George W. Morey, a minister living in Wahoo, Nebraska, confided to the 
Bee
 on January 30. “I have been their pastor for two years and was personally acquainted with them and their circumstances before they went to Holt county, Nebraska two years ago. Mr. Shattuck is not only a veteran soldier but a worthy upright honorable Christian gentleman having the respect of all who know him. I knew Miss Shattuck while in Seward as a brave young woman struggling to prepare for the work of teaching with aught but their own labor to aid her.

Who can tell the suffering of those ‘seventy-eight hours!’" Two days later the Shattuck family’s current pastor, the Reverend J. H. Presson of the Seward Methodist Episcopal Church, sent in his own firsthand account of a recent conversation with Etta. “The religion of Christ sustained me in this affliction,” Etta had told him solemnly. “I have suffered but very little pain, for which I thank God.” The Reverend Presson was convinced that Etta’s life “was spared that she might show us how victorious a christian [ 
sic
] can be." Etta’s doctors, however, remained cautious. Though she seemed stronger in the first few days after her operation, it was becoming clear that the damage from the frostbite had progressed farther than Drs. Reynolds and Potter had originally thought. A second round of amputations now looked unavoidable. In addition, a wound had opened up in the part of her back that had been in contact with the hay during her three-day imprisonment. The skin and the flesh beneath the skin were falling away, leaving a two-inch-deep cavity. Healing these kinds of wounds was extremely difficult.