Free The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin

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 tomb-stones, 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