by David Laskin
That story of the blizzard was a particularly gripping and awful part of the family saga, but the entire family history has always held me in thrall. Our great-grandparents and their families suffered such terrible hardship and risked so much, but their strength was their legacy to us—all of us, their descendants keep their memories alive.
Carolyn goes on to describe a recent trip she and her husband, Tom, made to Freeman, South Dakota, in search of the Graber family homestead.
“‘Our great-grandparents and their families suffered such terrible hardship and risked so much, but their strength was their legacy to us.’”
It was just across the section and down a bit from the church. There was still a farm at the location where the map indicated that my great-grandparents had lived. Tom would just have slowed and nodded at the mailbox, but I was driving, so there was NO chance of such a glancing encounter with my history. I pulled into the farmyard, got my camera, knocked on the door. The farmer and his wife were home and, although quite surprised to find a descendant of the original owner of the property on their doorstep, very gracious. Leroy Epp and his wife, Janette. Lovely people.
Leroy took us on a walking tour of the farm. We stood on the site of the school house (still visible as a faint depression in the ground), and I posed beside the school’s cistern while Tom took my picture. We walked to the other side of the farmyard, about a quarter mile from the school, where Leroy had allowed a shelterbelt of trees to grow up around the foundation stones of the old homestead. I felt as though my blood were carbonated. It was such a short distance from the school to the homestead, just a few minutes’stroll for us on that sunny September morning. The terror of that storm was so long ago, but there we were, walking in their footsteps, imagining the suffocating snow and the immense cold.
—Carolyn Graber Trout
“The incidents I found most upsetting to write about concerned children who survived the night of bitter cold on the prairie only to drop dead the next morning after getting up and taking a few steps.”
I’ll close with one last story. In a book full of heartbreak, the incidents I found most upsetting to write about concerned children who survived the night of bitter cold on the prairie only to drop dead the next morning after getting up and taking a few steps. One such unfortunate was a young boy named Jesse Beadel, whose story I recount in the “Prairie Dawn” chapter. If you turn to that section, you’ll see that I mention a robe that Jesse’s grandmother had brought along in the sleigh and how the two of them huddled together under that robe during the long frigid night.
After the book was published, I received an e-mail message from a man named Nick Sheedy living in Oregon. Mr. Sheedy told me that Jesse Beadell (as he spelled the name) was his great-grandmother’s first-cousin, and he wanted to know where I had gotten my information about him. He mentioned the robe that sheltered Jesse and his grandmother, pointing out that it was a buffalo robe (something I had not known). “The old buffalo robe was unfortunately lost in a house fire in Coquille, Oregon, about 1900,” Mr. Sheedy wrote, “but it was impressionable enough that it is still remembered a century later.”
I found my notes and sent Mr. Sheedy what additional information I had uncovered about his relative. This evidently prompted him to do a bit of digging on his own. In another e-mail message to me, Mr. Sheedy added a paragraph about the buffalo robe:
“‘It is a testimony to the impact of that terrible storm that it should still be so remembered—even by keeping a ratty old buffalo robe clear out here in Oregon.’”
I believe that I mistakenly mentioned to you that the old buffalo robe that sheltered Sylvia (Paris) Phillips and her grandson, Jesse Beadell, during the great storm, was lost in fire. It was not. I have been informed that it has been housed for many years at the Horner Museum on the Oregon State University campus. Horner Museum has closed and the items they had are now going into a county museum in the Corvallis area (Benton County, Oregon).
Though all who experienced the children’s blizzard are gone, the storm and its aftermath live on in the memories of thousands of families. I’m grateful to all who have made the effort to contact me. It has been an honor to chronicle the suffering and the heroism of those who endured that terrible storm—and to learn that so many families still remember.
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ALSO BY DAVID LASKIN
Artists in Their Gardens (coauthor)
Partisans
Rains All the Time
Braving the Elements
A Common Life
Copyright
THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD. Copyright © 2004 by David Laskin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2007 ISBN: 9780061866524
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* All temperatures are Fahrenheit unless otherwise indicated.