The Children's Blizzard (32 page)

The Reverend Presson again reported that Etta was remarkably brave and cheerful. But on Thursday, February 2, she took a turn for the worse, growing suddenly feeble and listless. Drs. Reynolds and Potter had feared that this might happen. Like all nineteenth-century doctors, they had seen the pattern before: A patient would survive surgery, show promising signs of recovery, but then swiftly go into a decline. In most cases the cause was sepsis—an overwhelming bacterial infection of the bloodstream contracted during surgery or from the unsanitary condition of hospitals or homes. It’s also conceivable that Etta had come down with pneumonia as a consequence of her prolonged exposure to cold in a weakened condition. In both cases, the doctors were powerless to help her. Without antibiotics there was little they could do but keep her comfortable and prepare her for the end.

Etta told her pastor that she was perfectly satisfied no matter what her fate might be. Her mind remained clear and her faith un-shaken. She had no word of regret and gave no sign of fear.

Early on the morning of Monday, February 6, Reynolds and Potter were summoned to the Shattucks’ house. The doctors knew at a glance that death was imminent. Etta’s blood pressure had dropped precipitously, her breathing was light and shallow and her pulse rapid. Delirium clouded her few waking moments.

Ben and Sarah Shattuck gathered at their daughter’s bedside with their four surviving children. Etta died peacefully at 9 A.M., two months and two days shy of her twentieth birthday.

Drexel & Maul, Omaha’s premier undertaking firm, selected a casket—“the most expensive casket they have," according to The 
Bee
—and sent it free of charge to Seward on the day Etta Shattuck died. The funeral was held the following day, Tuesday, February 7, at 2 P.M. Seward’s Methodist church was packed to overflowing hours before the procession arrived from the Shattuck house. Members of the local Grand Army of the Republic post—the Seward veterans of the Civil War—led the cortege. Six young men bore Etta’s casket, which had been draped with a cloth of white velvet brocade and fixed with a plate that read "At Rest.” Members of the Seward press had contributed a floral display of a two-foot-high arch from which hung the gates of heaven, left ajar to receive Etta’s soul. The scent of lilies pervaded the church.

One should not speak of Miss Shattuck as dead, the Reverend Presson insisted in his sermon, for her heroism and religious spirit made her life appear more like the morning twilight than the shadows of evening. While the congregation wept, the minister spoke at length of Etta’s faithful discharge of her duties as a daughter, a teacher, a member of the church, and the sole support of her family. After the sermon the mourners filed by the open white casket.

It had thawed the first week of February, but that day the temperatures were back in the single digits and the ground was frozen hard. It was a long, cold mile from the Methodist church to Seward’s North Cemetery. The funeral procession moved in a dark line between the white fields. Etta Shattuck was laid to rest among the graves of Seward’s Civil War veterans.

None of the funerals of the other storm victims was remotely like this. Parents who lost children to the storm summoned carpenters or neighbors to nail together coffins of whatever lumber they had on hand. It was the custom among some of the immigrant families to blacken the coffins with burnt cork. “On two chairs stands the little black coffin,” wrote a Norwegian mother of a child’s funeral in Dakota. “With awe we had watched the carpenter, working with candle light, the night before, making this box. We had seen the little form laid into it and the lid nailed down.” The child’s father and the carpenter sang a hymn, and then they carried out the coffin and put in on the back of a sleigh. “The father bade the wife good-by, threw the sleigh rope over his shoulder and, followed by the carpenter, started off on the weary trudge to the cemetery. That was a pioneer funeral." It was worse than that for the three Schweizer families who had lost sons in Rosefield Township. Even after the bodies of their boys had thawed, rigor mortis kept them in the contorted positions in which they had died. The parents had to struggle to get their sons into coffins. The five boys were buried in a single grave in thecemetery next to the Salem Mennonite Church, three miles from where they died.

It was so cold in Brookings County, Dakota, that the Tisland family could not dig a proper grave for the body of their father, Ole. His son, Ole Jr., tried day after day to get his team to the lumberyard at Volga to buy a coffin, but finally gave up. Using scrap lumber and boards pried from a straw shed, Ole Jr. managed to make the box with the help of the neighbors and lined it with a quilt. When they finally got the grave dug, it snowed, so they had to dig the snow out of the hole before they laid the old man to rest. On the way to the cemetery the sleigh tipped over as the horses were hauling the coffin through the snow. Finally the men set Ole Tisland’s coffin on a toboggan and dragged him to his grave. Most of the women turned back on account of the cold, but Ole’s wife and his daughters followed behind the toboggan, walking in the footsteps of the men. One of the neighbors said the Lord’s Prayer in Norwegian by the open grave.

It was spring before the Lutheran pastor came and offered a proper Christian burial service at Ole Tisland’s graveside.

George Burkett, the superintendent of public institutions for Seward County, made it his personal mission to save the life of Lena Woebbecke. Thanks to Burkett’s efforts, the 
Bee
 ran the story of how the German girl had spent the night of the blizzard alone on the open prairie and began raising money on her behalf. Dr. G. W. Brandon was summoned from Milford to attend to the child. He reported that the Woebbecke family was destitute and Lena was suffering terribly from frostbite. Gangrene was well advanced in her feet and Dr. Brandon amputated her right foot above the ankle at once. The left foot, he believed, could be saved. Lena survived the surgery but in the days afterward complained of excruciating headaches. A local paper reported that the child was “greatly isolated where she is at present, the roads in that vicinity being almost impassable. She ought to have better clothing and better nursing." Eventually Burkett secured a court order to be appointed Lena’s guardian and trustee of the nearly four thousand dollars that had been raised for her—a sizable sum at a time when a hired man on a farm earned two dollars a day, a hotel clerk three dollars a day, and a housekeeper counted herself lucky to get two dollars, fifty cents a week. Lena was moved from the Woebbecke house and placed in the care of a German woman in Milford. In time she was fitted with a wooden foot and began walking again.

By the end of February, the Heroine Fund had reached $11,267.56.

The 
Bee
 reported that the $3,752.01 that had been raised for Miss Shattuck would now go to her bereaved family. Minnie Freeman, in addition to her share of the Heroine Fund, received a gold watch from a prominent San Francisco jeweler: The watch chain was fashioned to look like a rope, a tribute to the teacher’s foresight and bravery in roping her students together and leading them through the storm (though at least one of these students denied that this had ever happened). Lyon & Healy, a Chicago music publisher, printed a song about Minnie’s heroic deeds—“Song of the Great Blizzard 1888, Thirteen Were Saved or Nebraska’s Fearless Maid,” dedicated to Miss Minnie Freeman, schoolteacher and heroine, “Whose Pluck and good Judgment Exhibited during the Recent fearful Blizzard in the Myra [ 
sic
] Valley District, Nebraska, Saved the Lives of thirteen helpless little Children.” Eighty some odd men wrote to ask her hand in marriage. Minnie became a national celebrity, her image in wax displayed throughout the country, her story retold and elabo-rated endlessly. The legend endured for years. Well into the twentieth century, whenever Nebraska was mentioned in other parts of the country, it was Minnie Freeman and the blizzard that sprang to people’s minds. As one prominent Nebraskan wrote in his pioneer memoir, “Twenty years after the storm I visited St. Petersburg, Florida, and heard the Minnie Freeman story with all the horrors of an Arctic storm accompaniment being discussed among those at the table where I ate my first meal in that town." "We had been calling every storm a blizzard,” the Reverend S. F. Huntley wrote a friend in New York, “but then [after January 12] decided that we had never had a blizzard before and never wanted one again.” The three Huntley children recovered from the touch of frostbite they had suffered during the storm, as did Fred Weeks.

By all rights Fred should have been lionized as a hero of the storm, but for some reason local papers failed to take up his story. However, a fund was set up to raise money for Addie Knieriem after her foot was amputated. Through the efforts of A. M. Mathias, the doctor who had performed the amputation, a philanthropist in Brooklyn, New York, learned of Addie’s plight and agreed to set up a yearly annuity of six hundred dollars to aid the child. Like Lena, Addie eventually was able to walk unassisted on a wooden foot.

Some of the money that was raised for the Westphalen sisters went to purchase the soaring marble obelisk that marks their graves in the cemetery of St. John’s Ridgeley Lutheran Church in the hamlet of Ridgeley, Nebraska. Three couplets inscribed in the stone com-memorate the brief lives of Eda and Matilda Westphalen: 
How soon alas our brightest prospects fail

As autumn leaves before the driving gale;

Meteors an instant glittering through the sky
 
Like them they fall but not like them they die:
 
In cloudless glory they shall ever bloom

New life inhale immortal from the tomb.

But even in the grave weather was not done with the sisters. In the summer of 1890, a windstorm blew their monument over and broke the obelisk in half. “All who contributed will regret to hear of the circumstances,” reported the local paper. A new collection must have been taken up because the obelisk stands flawless today.

"There was a cruel aftermath to the blizzard,” wrote a survivor, “funerals, surgical operations, cripples, fingers with first joints gone, ears without rims, and some like poor Will Moss, who spent the night on the prairie in the shelter of his cutter, and supposed that he had escaped without damage, afterward died of diseases caused by the exposure." The precise number of the dead was never determined. Estimates published over the years in state histories and local newspapers have ranged from 250 to 500. The southern and eastern part of Dakota Territory suffered the majority of the casualties. Undoubtedly many deaths were never reported from remote outlying districts. Scores died in the weeks after the storm of pneumonia and infections contracted during amputations. For years afterward, at gatherings of any size in Dakota or Nebraska, there would always be people walking on wooden legs or holding fingerless hands behind their backs or hiding missing ears under hats—victims of the blizzard.

Sergeant Glenn wrote that the widespread loss of livestock “will operate seriously against the losers, as they are principally men struggling to make a home in a new country. Care of and anxiety for livestock was the principal cause which took men away from the immediate vicinity of their homes." Huron and the surrounding country was especially hard hit, and in the days after the storm angry farmers demanded to know why the Signal Corps had failed to issue coordinated storm warnings far enough in advance to do them any good. “The service has been crit-icized in several quarters in the Territory for not disseminating a specific warning from some central point, like Chicago or Saint Paul,” Glenn wrote in his storm report. “So far as he has had the opportunity, the observer has explained that the Service can not do more than it does in consequence of contracted means in the way of appropriations.” This has a decidedly contemporary ring to it. In fact, Glenn admitted that the “first definite information that a storm of such magnitude was approaching” came not from the Signal Corps, but over the railroad telegraph wires. Glenn hinted that the heavily centralized bureaucratic structure of the Corps itself was at fault for the forecast failure since observers like himself were unable to make use of their knowledge of local weather conditions.

Back in the autumn, when Lieutenant Walshe had inspected the Huron station, Glenn requested permission “to have an opinion about the weather”—in other words, to issue his own local forecasts. He now speculated that had such authority been granted, instead of expressly denied in his orders from General Greely, he might have been able to warn the people of Huron and its vicinity of the coming storm.

Could Sergeant Glenn have saved the life of Robert Chambers, the Huron farmer who sacrificed himself so that his son might live, had his hands not been tied by military regulations? Probably not, given the primitive communication system at the time. Still, it was maddening to Glenn that in the face of meteorological disaster Army regulations rendered him essentially powerless.

Greely’s first impulse was to downplay the severity of the storm.

The 
Monthly Weather Review
 for January 1888, published by the Signal Office in Washington under Greely’s direction, conceded that it was “a violent storm in which many lives were lost and large numbers of cattle perished,” but then went on to argue that “the loss of life as given in newspaper accounts has been doubtless exaggerated, but was evidently greater than in any previous storm, owing to the extensive settlement of the country in the last few years.” Only later, when he sat down to write his book 
American Weather,
 did the general acknowledge that the storm was “the most disastrous blizzard ever known in Montana, Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, and Texas. The change in the direction of the wind and the fall in the temperature was more sudden than usual. . . . High winds ranging from thirty to fifty miles per hour occurred, with falling and drifting snow, which, in addition to the great loss of human life, caused the destruction of herds of cattle and an enormous amount of suffering to entire communities." Today a “surprise” storm that killed over two hundred people would instigate a fierce outcry in the press, vigorous official hand-wringing, and a flood of reports by every government agency remotely involved, starting with the National Weather Service. But in the Gilded Age, blame for the suffering attendant on an act of God was left unassigned. Hardly anyone believed that government agencies had either the expertise or the obligation to forestall disaster, and that attitude suited the government just fine. Though the Southern newspapers muttered a bit about the Signal Corps’ failure to provide sufficient warning of the cold wave, the Northern press refrained from finger-pointing. Heroines were called for, not cul-prits. Making too big a deal about the storm would only scare away prospective settlers or send them fleeing to balmier climes. Best to put the whole incident behind them and get back to work.