January 12, 1888 -
the date of disaster on the great plains, the culmination of immigrants being
mislead and following dreams of black soil, mild weather, and great crops, the
date that the weather service - then run by the military failed miserably and changed
the weather bureau forever - taking the service out of the military and putting
it in the Department of Agriculture.
This was the Children's Blizzard because so many of the horrid stories of death, involved children. It is a storm that went from Canada to Mexico, a cold spell that surrounded the blizzard and impacted the south and their economy, but gathered the worst elements in SD because of the timing when the storm struck.
Laskin does a great job surveying historic sources and telling the intimate details of the people and the suffering. The impact changed depending on where you were along the storm track as he shows in this quote, "Chance is always a silent partner in disaster. Bad luck, bad timing, the wrong choice at a crucial moment, and the door is inexorably shut and barred. The tragedy of the January 12 [1888] blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population. The storm his the most thickly settled sections of Nebraska and Dakota Territory at the worst possible moment - late in the morning or early in the afternoon on the first mild day in several weeks, a day when children had raced to school with no coats or gloves and farmers were far from home doing chores they had put off during the long siege of cold. But the deadly quirks of chance went deeper and farther than circumstance or time of day. It was the deep current of history that left the prairie peculiarly vulnerable to the storm."
“Even in a region known
for abrupt and radical meteorological change, the blizzard of 1888 was
unprecedented in its violence and suddenness there was no atmospheric herald.
No eerie green tinge to the sky or fleecy cirrus forerunner. One moment it was
mild, the sun was shining, a damp wind blew fitfully out of the south—the next
moment frozen hell had broken loose.”
St. Paul
Daily Globe: “STUNG TO DEATH: Several Persons Put to Sleep Forever by the
Blizzard's Viper Tongue.” The blizzard claimed some 235 lives across the frozen
prairie; an estimated 20 percent of the dead were children. Amidst the many
tales of tragedy and horror that came from the blizzard of January 12, 1888,
stories of survival against the odds and the elements stand out, including the
following account published in the St. Paul Daily Globe:
Particulars
come in this evening of a terrible experience, the result of yesterday's storm.
A son of Henry Oeder, a farmer living about ten miles northwest of here,
started out in the morning with a team and sleigh to take four of his younger
brothers and sisters to school. He reached the school house with his load and
had started home when the storm struck him. He started back to the school house
to get the children. The two older expressed a desire to remain, but the others
started home with the young man. They had not gone far when they lost their way
and finally unhitched the team and covered themselves up with robes and lay
down in the sleigh. There they remained twenty-six hours until they were
discovered this morning, all three being almost dead. The other members of the
family stayed in the school house all night, and returning home this morning
gave the alarm. The sufferers were brought to the nearest farm house. They are
in bad shape, but it is thought all will survive. One of the horses was dead
when found. It is thought other reports of a similar nature will come in after
the storm. The blizzard which raged was the worst ever experienced by the
oldest settler. To-night the thermometer is away down and the wind still blows. http://www.weatherwise.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2012/January-February%202012/retrospect-full.html
“After the storm
subsided, the few dirt roads that could be found among the white, treeless
landscape were blocked by 5- to 10-foot-high drifts. One York
County drift measured 30 feet deep and a mile long.
"The snow drifts
were frozen so hard that even a horse could walk on top," wrote
Ernest Nyrop of Neligh.” http://journalstar.com/news/local/the-blizzard-of----the-force-of-a/article_546c2c74-5780-5d73-9f77-76495246d412.html
As much as this is a
story of the storm and settlers it is also a story of the weather service
and the leadership of the service - then, as often happens, caught in
politics and economics and bureaucracy. Here is an excerpt about
First Lieutenant Greely who would become a brigadier general in charge of
the signal corp (early weather bureau) as a result - a pretty questionable
promotion. What they accomplished was putting a self-recording
spirit thermometer in a nine foot rock cairn in Western Greenland
four miles further north than any other explorers had ventured.
"Almost everything
else about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was a disaster. In 1882
and again in 1883, supply ships failed to reach Greely's camp at Fort Conger on
the east coast of Ellsemere Island - one ship sank with all the provisions and
the other, encountering thick ice, returned home with its full cargo of relief
supplies. The expedition's orders, drawn up in the comfort of
Washington, D. C. specified that in the event that the relief ships
never showed up, Greely was to move the party south by September 1, 1883 and
ono August 9, that is exactly what he insisted on doing, despite the fact that
nearly every other member of the crew vehemently objected to leaving the
comparatively well-supplied camp. In the best of circumstances,
Greely, when crossed could be a waspish martinet: He was a dogmatic, stubborn,
uncompromising commander who led not by natural authority or earned
devotion, but by rigid enforcement of rules and orders. But the
rigors of the Arctic brought out his worst. By the time he gave the
order to break camp at Fort Conger, most of his men hated him to the point of
violence. But they had no choice: Since Greely controlled the
supplies, it was either obey or die. After nearly two nightmarish
months on drifting ice pack, with winter fast closing in, the party made camp
on the desolate wastes of Cape Sabine, some two hundred miles to the
south. MADNESS one of the men scrawled in his diary. They
had lost several boats and much food on the trek south- and there was no
resupply cache and no big game to hunt. As the dark frigid months
dragged on, they ate their belts and boots and trousers - and then they ate the
clothing of men who had died. They ate the filthy oil-tanned covers
of their sleeping bags, warming them in a nauseating stew of lichens and seal
skin. Finally, in desperation, some of the survivors were reduced to
dragging the corpses of the dead out of their shallow graves and
carving off strips of flesh to swallow in secrecy. In the course of
that grim winter and spring, the parties third inside the Arctic, eighteen men
died - of starvation, exposure, suicide and in one case military execution that
Greely ordered as punishment for stealing food and insubordination."
Six men survived by the
time they were rescued, along with Greely and one of them died after having
limbs and fingers amputated on board the ship - by that time he weighed 78
pounds. And then Greely was honored and put in charge of the signal corp as a
brigadier-general.
Laskin covers the storm
in details that are stunning and shows us the weather prediction (Indications
in 1888) changes that resulted. It is a riveting book, but it does have a
flaw - where are the Indians of the plains? What happened to them?
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