This series contains depictions of violence and death involving children and may not be suitable for everyone. From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Imagine it's the late 1880s and you're a pioneer farming a homestead in the Dakota Territory. So far, January has been very cold. But this morning, January 12th, is a little warmer. There's some sun. Who knows? Maybe it's the sign of a winter thaw? Your kids go off to the schoolhouse, and you head off to a day of farm chores. You have no idea what's coming. The blizzard that hit the upper Midwest on January 12th, 1888, took thousands of people by surprise. Everywhere from Montana to Nebraska and the Dakota Territory to Iowa, it was one of the worst blizzards in U.S. history, devastating for the people who became trapped, especially for schoolchildren trying to get home. My guest today is award-winning author David Laskin. He wrote The Children's Blizzard, which won the Washington State Book Award in 2005. David Laskin, welcome to Against the Odds. Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here. So tell me, why did you write this book about a blizzard that probably most people have never heard of? When did it first come on your radar? Okay, so I am a lifelong weather nut. That's something that was instilled in me by my dad. And I turned that mania for weather to good use in a book that I wrote many years ago now called Braving the Elements. Its subtitle, which was chosen by my publisher, was The Stormy History of American Weather. And it was a cultural history of weather in this country. And one of the chapters was called Weather in the West. And that chapter detailed the reactions of the early settlers and pioneers to new weather phenomena that they experienced as they started pushing west to settle the Great Plains and all the way up to California. And while researching this chapter, that was when I first came upon references to the Children's Blizzard or the School Children's Blizzard. There were many, many firsthand accounts of this storm. I probably devoted two or three paragraphs to it, but the event stuck in my mind and haunted me. And several years later, when I was between books, this haunting came back, and that's when I decided to write the book. That's the cool thing about firsthand accounts. It's like almost like a time capsule. And when that blizzard hit on January 12th, 1888, in these firsthand accounts, how did the survivors describe how the blizzard appeared? So I think the best way is just to read you one. There are many in the book, but this is one that really struck me. And it was written actually by a professional weather observer. This is Sergeant Samuel Glenn in Huron, what is now South Dakota, then Dakota Territory. So Sergeant Glenn was in charge of recording weather data. And usually, for most of the recorders, it was just temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. But for this particular event, it was so intense and so extreme that Glenn wrote, I think it was nine pages in his journal. He kind of pasted them in. And this is his description of how the storm hit. And I'm just going to read it now. The air, for about one minute, was perfectly calm. and voices and noises on the street below appeared as though emanating from great depths. A peculiar hush prevailed over everything. In the next minute, the sky was completely overcast by a heavy black cloud, which had in a few minutes previously hung suspended along the western and northwestern horizon, and the wind veered to the west by the southwest quadrant, with such violence as to render the observer's position very unsafe. The air was immediately filled with snow, as fine as sifted flour. The wind veered to the northeast, then back to the northwest, in a gale which in three minutes attained a velocity of 40 miles an hour. In five minutes after the wind changed, the outlines of objects 15 feet away were not discernible. Can you place us in the American prairie land of 1888 in Nebraska and the Dakota Territory, Montana, Iowa? Where was the country in terms of the Western migration by then? So by 1888, the country was pretty much settled. The Oregon Trail had been open. There were people on the West Coast. My Fair City of Seattle had been founded. But it was still the pioneer period on the prairie. The Homestead Act was passed during the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln. That led to a great influx of settlers. So in some ways, we're kind of at the threshold of the modern era. There were trains coast to coast. Telegraphs were kind of the internet of the day. But in this particular region in which the children's blizzard struck, conditions were quite primitive. By the nature of the Homestead Act, you laid claim to 160 acres. So the settlers were not settling in towns. I mean, there were some small towns where there were services, but for the most part, the people were very spread out. And that was a major factor in the danger and the number of deaths and the number of lost people in the storm. If you've ever read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I I read to my kids when they were young. You have a very good sense of what it felt like to be on the prairie during this period. No services, one-room schoolhouses, if any. Often the teachers in the schoolhouses were teenagers themselves. So all of that contributed to the loss of life that day because the people were so spread out and communications were so primitive. Yeah, I can't imagine what it would have been like to be out there. Can you tell me a bit more about these people, the ones who came there? Where were they from? What was the plan? There were many immigrants, for the most part, from Germany and Scandinavia and Ukraine. Those were the biggest groups of immigrants to the prairie, but pretty much every big ethnic group in Western Europe was represented. People who had never been to this country before, who came over on ships and then took trains out to the Midwest and staked their claim. But there were also people who were born here from New England or from the Middle Atlantic who went west pretty much for the same reasons, searching for free land, new opportunities, wanted to get a fresh start. So the way that I tell the story of this storm is by following a handful of families, and I really trace them from their migration stories, whether it's from New England or Norway or Ukraine, how they ended up in Huron, South Dakota, or Chamberlain, South Dakota, or wherever they ended up staking their claim. I think the lure of free land was so strong. And to some extent, the railroads also put out a fair amount of propaganda, including propaganda in Europe, luring settlers. Oh, this is a garden. No felling of trees necessary. You've got this beautiful grassland with the best soil in the world. That lured people out. Some of them were experienced farmers. Some were not. But even those who were experienced farmers in Ukraine or Norway were coming up against conditions that they were not accustomed to. One of the big ones, aside from weather, was grasshoppers. There were plagues of grasshoppers in that period. And I did come across many accounts of how they would just come through in these huge clouds of bugs and strip everything bare. So, you know, it was kind of biblical, these plagues that people experienced. But this blizzard was really a kind of watershed event in the lives of these settlers. And I think part of the reason that we still talking about it today and people are still remembering it on the prairie is because so many of the victims were children And generally how was the life of children during this time in these homesteads Children in that period and in that place did not really have childhoods the way we think of childhood today. They were the unpaid workforce of the prairie. And this sounds a little brutal, but I think it's correct. Many families had large numbers of children for two reasons. One, because infant or child mortality was very high then. And two, because those who survived were farmhands. So these were family enterprises and children were expected to pitch in at a very young age. They did go to school. They did teach school very soon after they finished school in some cases. And it was also a very dangerous place to be a kid. Kids got lost in the grass and never found again. Diphtheria was common. I talked to many families who are descended from victims of the blizzard. And I would say pride is the strongest note. But they were tough. They were tough people and they raised tough kids. And they had seen a few terrible winters or at least some bad weather living in America prior to January 1888. Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, this is a period in which some of the winters were so rough that they got named. So instead of saying the winter of 1880 to 1881, that was the snow winter because there was so much snow. And then when the snow finally melted in the spring, there were huge floods. Another killer winter was the winter right before 1886 to 1887. That was the winter of blue snow. Not quite sure why it got called that, but it was also a winter that did vast damage to cattle. This was the period of the big cattle drives down through the heartland. And so the cattle were on free range and not put in barns or anything like that during the winters. And this winter was so severe, there was huge die-offs in the cattle population. The prairie was littered with the corpses of cattle. So, you know, if you grew up in Norway or Ukraine, you were used to long, hard, dark, cold winters. But these extremes, this kind of snow coming sideways when it came, storms one after another, these were all new and devastating for the pioneers when everything lined up, which everything did tragically line up on January 12th, 1888. So obviously, with all this in mind, it would be important for these people living in the prairies to get a weather report on time so they could prepare, especially since some of these winters have been absolutely horrific. How often would they get weather reports? I mean, there must be a massive delay between a center finding out what's happening and them actually receiving the news. Well, back then, the telegraph was instantaneous, essentially. And that was how weather information and weather reports were broadcast. So in a sense, there was not a lag, but a couple of factors. First of all, the state of the art of weather forecasting was in its very early days. And two, even if they got it bright on the nose, if you were living out on the prairie, there was no way that you were going to get the word out. The way the word was spread for cold waves, which is a term that we don't use anymore, but they would hoist a flag at the railroad station telegraph office that would indicate cold wave. So if you lived in town and if the conditions were clear enough that you could see the flag, you would know, okay, you know, extreme cold coming, better keep the kids home or better get the cattle watered before this hits. And that did help some people. And I read some accounts of people in towns who saw the flags, heard the warnings, and took action. But the vast majority of people living in this prairie region at that time were completely unaware of what was about to hit. So early January 1888, there was what was called an unusual disturbance forming in the weather, and that caused the blizzard to hit on the 12th of January. What was this unusual disturbance. And you mentioned in the description that it was almost explosive. Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, I'm going to really boil this down. You know, if you've ever watched the Weather Channel or really any television weather, when they give the setup for severe weather, and I'm talking about possible tornado weather, severe thunderstorms that can spawn tornadoes, The pattern goes like this. There was cold, high pressure to the north and very warm, humid air to the south, often in the Gulf of Mexico. The greater the contrast between the air masses and the more rapidly they're drawn together, the bigger the explosion. So that's kind of the fuel for this fire, if you will. And in the book, I give much more detail and I get much more into the kind of process by which the storm formed. But the essential elements were this pool, a shallow pool of very, very cold air that was stagnating in Canada and kind of oozing down from Canada over a period of days and very warm, humid air in the Gulf of Mexico that was moving north. And then steered by a low that came over the Rockies and kind of acted like a magnet that drew these two air masses together. And when those air masses collided, that ended up in a kind of meteorological explosion. In our series on Against the Odds, we met the man responsible for getting the word out about the incoming cold wave, the blizzard that hit on January 12th. His name was First Lieutenant Thomas Mayhew Woodruff, and near midnight on January 11th, he filed a weather forecast. What information did he use to craft this forecast? So the information Woodruff used was the same information that all of the forecasters used back then. The Weather Bureau was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in those days. And all of the forecasting was based on readings that were taken at a network of weather stations all over the country. As you can imagine, they were pretty sparse in the region that we're talking about, but they existed for the most part at forts. And I think it was four times a day, the observers would record the temperature, the barometric pressure, the wind speed and direction, and the humidity. And those were recorded and transcribed. And so Woodruff would have relied on those to forecast the cold wave. And in fact, I did find the forecast that he issued during this period. And I guess it's fair to say he kind of got it right. He did say the wind would shift. He did say it would start off mild and get colder. So technically, it's all there. But there was nothing to indicate the severity, the historic nature of what was about to hit. You know, I'm reminded of before Katrina, the National Weather Service was kind of running out of exclamation points in their bulletins. Unprecedented hurricane coming at New Orleans. Bullseye, et cetera, et cetera. They really hyped that hurricane, and rightfully so. It still did not save the city of New Orleans, and it was a tragic event. But it was not under forecast. I would say the children's blizzard, the forecast was not botched, but it was under forecast. It was underplayed. There was no urgency. And as we know from the segment that I read from Sergeant Glenn in Huron at the beginning of the show, there were people on the ground who saw what was happening and recorded how intense it was and how frightening and how life-threatening. But you don't get any sense of that from Woodruff's forecasts. So, I mean, I think it's a difficult job, too. Like you said, with Katrina, they ran out of exclamation marks. But if you over-predicted the severity, then you'd be kind of like the boy who cried wolf. And if you under-predicted, which it sounds like he did, there obviously is dire consequences. So do you think that he was being a bit reserved? Like, what made it less urgent of a report? That's a very good question, Mike. And my hunch and it really based on nothing more than a hunch is that Woodruff was a very capable conscientious career officer who was doing his job And his job was to issue these forecasts He had a limited vocabulary that he could use to craft his messages He had some training in meteorology, but probably more of his training went into telegraphy, how to use the telegraph than actually into weather forecasting. And so I think it was kind of a lack of imagination. He could have, like Sergeant Glenn, gotten on the telegraph and said, you know, holy cow, this is the worst thing I've ever seen. Pull out all the stops. Let's get the word out in every way we can. He didn't do that. So I think he did his job. And tragically, doing one's job was not enough in this event. The entity that gave the weather reports was called the Signal Corps. Can you give us a sense of what it was like working inside the Signal Corps? Yeah. To use a contemporary term, it was a hot mess back in those days. And that was something that surprised me. I mean, I think that we look back at the past and we go, well, yeah, there was corruption. We know that our era does not have a lock on corruption. You know, people cheated or what have you. But somehow, at least I, when I look back on the history of the weather service, don't expect things like, oh, weather observers closing all the blinds so they can take nude photographs of women instead of doing the weather observing that they're supposed to do. Or guys going fishing and just filling in their forms for four days. Like, oh, you know, 25 degrees at night, 30 degrees in the day. Just kind of making it up so they can take a fishing trip or embezzling money to funnel to their mistress. I'm not making any of this up. All of this was, in fact, happening. So the weather service was rife with malfeasance, corruption, hanky-panky. And also the leadership was in disarray. Cleveland Abbey was the first head of the weather service. He was a civilian, so there was friction with the Army higher-ups. And then Adolphus Greeley was brought in over his head, and if that name is familiar, it's because he led one of those disastrous expeditions to the Pole, so he didn't have a good track record coming in. And Woodruff was installed in a weather office in St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota. This was kind of an experimental office. It was opened up at the bequest of local business and farming interests. So he was kind of the man on the ground forecasting really life and property were the two major missions, but I would say property came a lot higher than life in those days. But anyway, there was a lot going on that impeded the efficiency and accuracy of the weather forecasting back then. And it was part of the military, correct? That's right. The initial weather bureau was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Very soon after this storm and after another blizzard hit New York City and was blotched, it was moved to the Department of Agriculture, and now the National Weather Service is part of the Department of Commerce. So when Woodruff put out this unimaginative weather forecast, how did everyone find out? So was there a flag raised, like you mentioned earlier, and some people saw, some people didn't? How much advance notice did people have? It really depended on where you lived and where you were. There were cold wave flags that went up at all of the railroad stations and all of the telegraph offices. I actually spent a lot of time in this region traveling, walking the walk where children's schools were, where their houses were, trying to get the lay of the land. And even to this day, if you're outside of Freeman, South Dakota, where a bunch of kids died trying to get home from school, they're in the town. But if you're out where that school was, you are far, far from town and you are far out range of the cold wave flag. There were some cases of the word came down the railroad line from Montana. The temperature has dropped, you know, 30 degrees in half an hour. You know, holy cow, it's coming. So if you were in a town with a railroad and a telegraph, you probably took some steps to stay out of it. Omaha, Nebraska was hit slightly later in the day. the storm came down out of the Northwest. So it hit the Dakotas before it hit Nebraska. And by the time it hit Omaha, word had gotten out pretty well. So those who got the word at least had the opportunity to stay safe and keep their kids inside. But that was not the case for settlers on the prairie. In your book, you say that the tragedy of that day was that the storm came disguised as welcome relief from the weeks of bitter cold. That day it was warmer, and that's why a lot of children went to school that day. And generally in that kind of like warmer weather that people were relieved to have, how would they dress to go to school? Well, that's something that, again, there were many firsthand accounts of. They were not dressed well. I mean, you have to remember this was the days before waterproof clothing, before down insulated parkas, all that kind of stuff. I mean, we're talking about wool was the most effective barrier against cold. So it's interesting, reading the firsthand accounts, there were many that would say, oh, it was practically like spring. It was such a warm day. The kids went off to school in their shirt sleeves. It was a January thaw. So I had this image that, you know, kind of 60 degrees and sunshine. Well, checking the weather records, it was nowhere near 60 degrees. I mean, I think it was maybe in the 40s. So yeah, anything above freezing, it was a relief. So when this January 12th dawned above freezing and calm, that seemed great. Many kids didn't go to school during severe weather. So there were days in that January in which kids skipped school. But this one, this January 12th, looked fine. As the children's blizzard of 1888 bore down on the Great Plains, can you tell us more about the storm itself? The wind, I've heard about this electricity, and also more about the ice. So there was a huge amount of static electricity that built up at the surface because of the pulverization of the snow crystals and the intensity of the wind. And so as a result, there was some thunder. There was some St. Elmo's fire, which is an electrical phenomenon that comes out of static electricity. It does seem almost biblical. Showers of sparks and St. Elmo's fire and thunder and lightning during a blizzard. And the ice was really kind of ground up. The crystals were ground up. So what was coming down and blowing sideways at the surface were not snowflakes, but ice dust. And that made the visibility that much more difficult. There were accounts of victims who were found who had bloody patches around their eyes and on their eyelids. These ice crystals would kind of cake up over their eyes, web their eyelashes together, and they would scrape them away with the back of their hands to try to see something. And that repeated scraping would lead to this raw, bloody skin. So that gives you a sense of just how bad this was. Let's talk about when the blizzard hit. So some teachers and children remained in the schoolhouses to stay safe, while others dismissed class and tried to get students to safety. We talked about a few different families in the series here on Against the Odds. But there were so many caught in the storm. You tracked down two sisters in Nebraska. Can you tell us this story that we didn't share in the podcast for our listeners at home? So two of the girls that I wrote about in the book were the Westphalen sisters. There was Etta, who was 13, and Matilda, who was 8. And they were living in Scrivener, Nebraska. These two sisters tried to get home from school, became lost and disoriented, were unable to continue, were unable to see. Etta had wrapped her coat around her little sister's shoulders to try to keep her warm, but they both froze to death. One of the things that really stuck with me was just how limited the visibility was. And there are stories of farmers freezing to death in their own farmyards between the barn and the front door because they could not see that far. So these sisters were caught in just those conditions You know I spoken a lot about the book and I often get the question of why didn the teachers just keep the kids inside And it's a good question. I don't have a definitive answer, but here's some of my theories. In some cases, these one-room schoolhouses had very limited amount of fuel. often the wood or the sod that they burned was the responsibility of local parents to provide. And if they fell behind, the teachers would not have enough fuel to keep the schoolhouse warm. So I think they did that calculus. Well, we've got so much wood on hand and it's going to run out by this afternoon so the kids would be better at home with their own families. So that was, I think, one calculus. Another was that frequently these blizzards or these storms would last three or four days. I think some of the teachers thought, well, if it keeps blowing like this for three days, we're just going to starve to death. So better for the kids to get home. And it came so darn fast. So I think some of these teachers just figured, you know, Etta's house is half a mile away. It's okay now. If she runs, she'll get home. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that part of the research for your book, you actually went to where the children's blizzard happened. And you also visited archives and graveyards. And you found one of the relatives of these two girls. Can you share what the meeting with them was like? Yeah. I put classified ads in every newspaper in South Dakota and Nebraska, and I got a ton of responses from that. And one of them was from a descendant of these two girls. She was a little wary at first, you know, who's this guy from Seattle who's interested in my ancestors and so on and so forth. But we had a good talk and we drove around together. And one of the things that struck me was the monument in the local cemetery to these two sisters. I mean, it was this fairly imposing obelisk. I was surprised because I knew that these girls were from a very modest background. And it turns out the monument had been paid for by a blizzard fund. There was a lot of press about the storm in the local newspapers after it hit, and especially after it was discovered that so many of the victims were children. And so money was raised for this monument. And, you know, people have asked me, you know, why did you track down these graves? And I don't really have a good rational answer. I think my irrational emotional answer is that it was my way of paying respect to these people. I was telling their story. I was researching their lives and their deaths. And I don't know, it was important for me in crafting this to make that connection. Well, by writing the book, it allowed us to make the podcast. And in a way, we are bringing these stories and these people back for a brief time. I always have to remind myself, these are real people that we're voicing and talking about. And some of the stories just sound so outlandish, but these are all real people. I know you're a father of three daughters. Maybe is that part of the connection too? Yeah, I think as a parent, and now I'm a grandfather of three grandkids, I think that love, that worry, that for want of a better word, imagination of disaster, which I think all parents and grandparents have, and we try to keep it at bay, but we live in a dangerous world and dangerous times, and we always have in a way. Yeah, I think when I write some of these heartbreaking scenes of taking shelter in a haystack through the night or holding hands and praying with your brothers that you survive the night, when you have kids of your own or grandkids of your own, I think it intensifies the emotion. And I think for me, when there is Alina Webke or Matilda Westphalen with a face, with a story, with their cloak that they wrapped around their sister, I think it really brings it home in a way that just the kind of raw statistics do not. So in the beginning of the podcast, I think you said that the propaganda, the news was it was a land of plenty. I imagine that this changed after the children's blizzard. Did people continue to move west or did everything kind of take a turn? I don't want to overstate it and say this was the end of the pioneering period. That would be a distortion. People continued to come to the region. But I would say that the children's blizzard marked a turning point. And I don't think it was the only factor that precipitated that turning point, but it was one of them. I did come upon accounts of people saying, that's it, we're moving back east or we're getting out of here. I think living in a place in which children are killed by the weather on their way home from school inevitably colors your perception of the place. And that combined with some of the realities that were setting in after the great die-off of the winter of blue snow, after a series of droughts that made it increasingly difficult to farm, the influx of settlers definitely slowed down. and I think the sense of how difficult it was to make a go of farming in this region was settling in. So again, the children's blizzard was not the cause of the end of pioneering, but it was one factor among many. But of those factors, it had the most emotional pull. And it's interesting. I mean, we each are given a small little window of experience on Earth, but there's lots of things that only happen every few centuries that no one living now is witness. And it sounds like the storm was exactly one of those things. And people still in the upper Midwest remember the blizzard today, and it's been over a hundred years. Can you share a bit more about that? Because I find that quite fascinating. Absolutely. If somebody came to me and said, tell me about what your grandparents were doing, you know, their immigration story, all four of my grandparents were immigrants. and I've actually done research and written a book, so I probably know more than the average person. But certainly before writing the book, I would say, well, I think they came through Ellis Island. It was hard. They lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I don't really know a whole lot more. So the fact that I would walk into a stranger's living room in Seward, Nebraska, and start talking about an event that happened over 100 years ago and was met not only with, oh, yes, that was the storm that dad got lost in and almost died, but here's a sheaf of papers that dad wrote after the storm, and here's a letter that my aunt wrote, and here's what my mother told me about it. That surprised me. Blizzard stories were clearly part of living history for them. And one of the things that struck me was both the grief that people still held for the suffering of their ancestors and also the pride. There's a huge amount of pride in overcoming the elements, in surviving the harsh conditions of the prairies, of making a living in a region that can be harsh and unforgiving. So that was something that really reinforced to me that this has not been forgotten and is woven into the psyche of the region in a way that endures. David Laskin, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm with me today on Against the Odds. Absolutely my pleasure, Mike. It was great to be on the show. This is the fifth and final episode of our series, School Children's Blizzard. Thanks so much to my guest, David Laskin. He's the author of several books, including The Children's Blizzard and The Family. I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker. Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Original theme music by Scott Velasquez and 2K for Freeze on Sync Series produced by Emily Frost Managing producer is Desi Blaylock Senior producers are Andy Herman and Austin Rackless Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery
