by David Laskin
Fifty pupils walked out on schooldays, cutting through the backyards of the houses and business buildings that stood one deep along Main Street, skirting outhouses and heaps of barrels and crates, dodging the fence of the St. Croix Lumber Yard, and finally ascending the imperceptible rise to what would be dubbed Presbyterian Hill. Jessie Warren, the district’s first teacher, earned thirty-eight dollars a month for her troubles, which was good pay for a female teacher back then (the men usually got between 30 and 50 percent more). A few years later she was succeeded by a hapless young “professor” from an Indiana business college who had never taught school before. Somehow Walter Allen discovered that the teacher was frantically cramming every night in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the class, and he hatched a scheme to unmask him. Walter and his accomplices, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, studied their “fool heads off,” as family lore relates, reading pages and pages ahead of the daily assignments and easily outpacing their teacher. In class each day the boys would torment the “professor” by stumping him with questions about material he hadn’t gotten to yet. This is quite sophisticated compared to the typical prairie school prank of strong-arming the teacher outside the schoolhouse and then locking the door. Being “turned out” or “carried out” by the bigger farm boys was the worst nightmare of many a country schoolteacher. One Indiana schoolteacher was only able to regain control of his schoolhouse by capping the chimney and literally smoking the children out. Or so the story went.
But Walter Allen was no rude farm boy, as he would have been the first to point out. A wry sense of humor, a streak of mischief, and the twinkling conviction that he was clever enough to get away with anything were traits he shared with his older half brother Will. The two boys, though born ten years apart, were extremely close. Will and Walter were both impulsive, and in difficult situations both preferred to take matters into their own hands rather than heed their elders.
Like a lot of brothers, they seemed to have an instinct for knowing when the other was in trouble—which in those days on the prairie almost always meant being on the wrong side of an act of God.
CHAPTER TWO
Trials
God inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians to punish them for refusing to free the Israelites, but with the settlers of the North American prairie He limited himself to three: fire, grasshoppers, and weather. The stories that the pioneers made of their lives were essentially about how they coped with the hardships these plagues left behind.
A prairie fire swept through the Schweizer settlement just days after the families settled in Dakota. They stood on the treeless land and watched the flames travel with unbelievable speed over the dry autumn grass. Clouds of smoke blotted out the sun. The heat was unbearable. The Kaufmanns and their neighbors in Rosefield Township escaped, but others lost everything—the trunks they had hauled from the Ukraine, the lumber they had purchased in Yankton, the sod houses they had sweated to build. One pioneer boy remembered the prairie fires of his childhood as “a strange glare against the window” that would haunt his sleep on summer nights. “Upon looking out, I saw a great wave of fire, a moving wall of flame, pass by our house and going on to the south.” When the fires passed, the boy wrote, the prairie was a black expanse “dotted with ashpiles which in many cases, as though they were tombstones, marked the graves of all the settlers’ material possessions.”
Fire destroyed utterly and sometimes killed, but if anything, the settlers hated the swarms of grasshoppers—the now extinct Rocky Mountain locust species Melanoplus spretus—even more than fire because the insects were alive and conscious and seemingly perverse in their intentions. All summer long the crops would grow beautifully, filling the farmers’ hearts with hope, and then on a sultry windy afternoon a mass of locusts would descend from the sky, and in hours they would strip the fields bare. “Tragic, abominable injustice,” Hamlin Garland railed when grasshoppers cleaned out his parents in the early 1880s. A single swarm, according to early settlers, could be a mile high and a hundred miles across—one hundred billion bugs moving east at the rate of five miles an hour like an immense atmospheric stain. The air became so thick with insects that “the light took on a gray flickering look” according to one pioneer. “They drifted over in such clouds as to blacken the whole heavens,” another prairie settler wrote of the locusts that descended again and again in the 1870s, “and with such a buzzing, roaring noise that it could be heard a long time before they came over us…. When they settled down the corn and vegetables would be so completely covered as to be black with them one over another. The corn was their first choice. When they had stripped it of every particle of foliage—which they would in a night—they would stick so thick on the stumps of stalks that there would be no room to stick the point of a finger…. As we walked along they would rise from the ground in such clouds and swarms that we had to fight our way through them. It was a time when nobody needed to be admonished to keep his mouth shut.”
This is exactly what the Schweizers experienced during their first two summers in Dakota. Some potatoes and a few bushels of wheat were all Johann Kaufmann was able to salvage in the summer of 1875, and the next summer was worse. The insects waited until August of 1876, just weeks away from the grain harvest, and then descended on the fields in ravenous clouds. The day after the swarm landed, the wind shifted to the south and blew without cease for the next two weeks, effectively pinning the grasshoppers in place. By the time the cursed insects left, the crop was utterly destroyed. The loss of the second crop was devastating to the struggling families. Many considered returning to the Ukraine—but they knew it was impossible. “They had burned their bridges behind them,” one of their children wrote, “and were now destined to live or die on the frontier.”
The Rollags endured the same devastation on their homesteads in southwestern Minnesota. “One day we thought it was raining,” recalled Gro, “but instead of drops of water rattling on the roof boards, it was grasshoppers. We looked at our little garden and potato patch and it wasn’t long before everything was taken slick and clean all around us…. We had 60 acres of wheat sowed, but we only harvested 13 bushels more than we seeded.” Gro’s brother Osten told his grandchildren that after devouring “every green living thing in their path” the hoppers would attempt to gnaw the wooden handles of the farm tools. Others watched helplessly as they went after fences, curtains, furniture, clothing. After losing all their crop in the plague years of the mid-1870s, the Rollag men were forced to get jobs laying track for the Great Northern Railroad in order to earn enough money to feed their families. They hated taking orders from gang bosses, they hated being taunted by Irish workers for their Norwegian accents, they hated being away from their families and fields. Like the Schweizers, they thought about leaving but they were too poor to move.
Weather, the third of the prairie plagues, was in fact the root cause of all the other miseries. Fire, grasshoppers, bad harvests, disease, the deaths of children—whatever went wrong in their lives—ultimately came from bad weather. None of them, even the families who had relocated from other parts of the country, were accustomed to the pace and the scale of prairie weather. The ceaseless wind, the epic lightning storms, the abrupt irrevocable droughts. The sky was so immense, the atmosphere so volatile that it only heightened the monotonous absences of the earth: absence of trees, landmarks, features, variety. But when a blizzard struck, the very absence was erased. “When the fierce winds swept the blinding snow over hill and valley, everything looked alike and it was almost impossible to find your way,” Norwegian immigrant Lars Stavig said of his new home in Day County, Dakota Territory. “Many a brave pioneer who came out here with great hopes and plans for a long, prosperous and happy life, in his own home with his family, was cut down in the prime of life. This cruel, treacherous enemy, the blizzard, spared no one.” A blizzard sent everything visible streaming sideways before their eyes; no sound could be heard but the rush of wind and sometimes at the edge of t
he mind a howl rising in the distance, then lost again in the blast. In a blizzard the essential conditions of their lives—their solitude, their exposure, the distances between their houses, the featurelessness of the landscape, the difficulty of communication—turned against them. Only a few steps away from shelter, death was waiting, though plenty of settlers died inside, too, when the cold was too much for the piles of coal, twisted hay, dried animal droppings, or bones that they burned for fuel. If limitless space was the ultimate blessing of the prairie, a blizzard was the ultimate curse. It was the disaster that epitomized all the others.
And so every pioneer narrative from the prairie includes a reckoning of the worst blizzards. Rarely do they embellish or blur the facts with emotion. The assumption is that the reader will know what it feels like. But still there is the compulsion to set down the essentials—where they and family members were when the storm hit, how they got home or why they didn’t, what they burned to stay alive, how long the storm lasted, when and where the victims were found. Survivors’ stories.
The first bad blizzard came on January 7, 1873, and blew without cease for three days. Tilla Dahl, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Minnesota’s Blue Earth County, remembers that her mother was out visiting neighbors when the storm struck. Tilla’s father, Niels Dahl, concluded his wife was lost and decided he must go out in search of her. Before he left he filled the cookstove with wood, drew up three chairs a safe distance from the fire, and instructed his three daughters—Tilla, four, Caroline, six, and Nellie, eighteen months—to sit in the chairs, fold their hands in their laps, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer until he returned. Under no circumstances were they to leave the chairs. Astonishingly, the children obeyed, and Niels found them just where he had left them when he returned safely with his frightened wife. Tilla wrote that at some point during the storm the temperature fell to 40 below zero.
Seventy people died in Minnesota during that January blizzard, some from families so poor that the bereaved could not attend the funerals because they didn’t have enough clothing to venture out. The Minnesota legislature appropriated five thousand dollars for relief of storm victims, but the funds were not even sufficient to pay the doctors who cared for the frostbite victims.
Another three-day blizzard arrived two months later, in early March, after a thaw had melted some of the snow and muddied the fields. The wind came so suddenly that it sucked up mud from the fields and spat it into the blowing snow. On the Henjum farm between Wells and Blue Earth, Minnesota, drifts quickly covered the stables and shacks where the family kept their animals, and the chickens froze to death. When their fuel ran out, the Henjums stayed warm by cutting the tops off the saplings they had planted as a windbreak and feeding the green sticks into their stove. But it wasn’t all grim horror. Between the granary and the pigpen the wind spun a fantastic delicate white mountain. “The snow had whirled and piled up into a mountain 62 feet high, actual measurement,” recalled the Henjums’ daughter. “The mountain was a beautiful sight, reaching to a thin point at its uppermost peak.”
The next blizzard, which followed a few weeks later, in April, is still talked about in Yankton, South Dakota, because it came when George Armstrong Custer was quartered in town. Lieutenant Colonel Custer had been assigned to frontier duty in the Dakotas early in 1873, and he traveled west with a company of eight hundred officers and enlisted men from the Seventh Regiment of the United States Cavalry along with his devoted wife, Elizabeth, and forty government laundresses. Ill when the blizzard hit, Custer weathered the storm in the comparative comfort of a cabin attended by Elizabeth, while scores of his men wandered lost in the blast after their tents blew over. Winds at Yankton blew at an average velocity of 39 miles an hour for nearly a hundred hours, and for the entire twenty-four hours of April 15 the average wind speed exceeded 52 miles per hour. Townspeople rallied round and eventually gathered in the missing soldiers and laundresses, including one who had a newborn baby. Custer later officially commended the good people of Yankton for saving “the lives of a great number belonging to this command, besides saving the government the value of public animals amounting to many thousands of dollars.” Three years later, he was dead at the fiasco of Little Bighorn.
General Adolphus W. Greely, who was head of the nation’s weather forecasting service from 1887 to 1891, wrote in his 1888 book American Weather that “shortly after this storm the use of the word [blizzard] became tolerably frequent in the northwestern parts of the United States, to indicate such cold anti-cyclone storms as are attended by drifting snow.”
They called the winter of 1880-81 the Snow Winter because the snowstorms started early and never let up. A three-day blizzard took the settlers of the Upper Midwest by surprise on October 15, and after that, snowstorms came at regular intervals through the winter and into the spring. In some places snow from that first October storm was still on the ground come May. Mary Paulson King, a child of immigrant Norwegian parents in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota, remembers opening the door on the morning of October 15 to a wall of snow that “just fell in the house.” Her father had to get up on a chair and make a hole in the snow in order to crawl out. After that the blizzards broke in waves—“almost one continued blizzard,” according to a Dakota pioneer. Children sledded from the peaks of their roofs all winter. Soddies and one-story shacks were entirely buried in snow, but even substantial two-story homes had snow up over their second-floor windows.
No one was prepared for deep snow so early in the season, and farmers all over the region were caught with crops to harvest and fuel supplies low. Like most, Johann and Anna Kaufmann had not yet milled their grain or dug out their potatoes when the first blizzard of the Snow Winter arrived. At first they were sure that the snow would melt and there would be time to haul the grain to the mill before winter really set in; but as the weeks passed and new storms kept piling the snow higher, they realized they were trapped with no prospect of grinding the wheat harvest into flour for bread. What made it harder was now there were three children to feed. At last, after losing the three babies—one in the Ukraine, one on the voyage to America, and the third during that first bitter year in Dakota—Anna and Johann had three healthy sons. Johann, their oldest, was nine, old enough to help his father with the animals and maybe hold the plow come spring. Heinrich was three and their baby, Elias, would turn one that coming May.
By Christmas, starvation loomed again, just as it had those first two winters. Anna heard that some families were boiling their un-milled wheat kernels into a kind of mush, but she knew she could not keep her children alive on that diet. Without flour they would never survive the winter. Finally, when it was clear that the weather would not break, six Schweizer farmers decided to make the twenty-mile trip to the nearest mill together: Each farmer took a wagon loaded with grain sacks and a team of horses, and each team broke trail for half a mile or so until the animals were exhausted; then that team would drop to the rear and the next in line would break through the drifts for the next half mile. It was a long grueling trip, but the men returned with flour, and Anna was able to bake bread for her family.
The snow was so deep by January 1881 that train service was almost entirely suspended in the region. The railroads hired scores of men to dig out the tracks, but it was wasted effort. “As soon as they had finished shoveling a stretch of line,” wrote Osten Rollag, “a new snowstorm arrived, filling up the line and rendering their work useless.” The blizzard of February 2, “a terrible storm with thunder and lightning and very soft snow,” according to Osten, halted rail traffic to Sioux Falls completely. The trains did not run again until June 15—four and a half months later. As the Snow Winter wore on, the suffering of isolated farm families became acute. Without train service there was no food to be had in towns and the deep drifts made it impossible to haul wagonloads across the prairie. Families who had neglected to get their milling done before the October 15 storm were reduced to grinding wheat in coffee mills—a tedious proc
edure that required almost continuous grinding to supply enough flour for a family. Many ground the seed grain intended for spring planting and lived on that, or tried to. Mary Paulson King recalled that her Norwegian parents became so desperate for coffee that they improvised a substitute called “knup.” First they would cook potatoes, then mash them and mix in flour and graham. This mush was rolled out to the thickness of a piecrust, cut into tiny morsels about the size of coffee beans, and browned in the oven. Then the toasted bits were ground in the coffee mill and brewed into knup. The Rollags improvised coffee by scorching kernels of rye and wheat. “This they called coffee,” wrote Osten, “but ‘hu-tu-tu’ what coffee!”