Free The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin Page A

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 ences of the earth: ence of trees, landmarks, features, variety. But when a blizzard struck, the very ence 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 the 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