Free The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin Page B

must go out in search of her. Before he left he filled the cookstove with wood, drew up three chairs a safe distance from the fire, and instructed his three daughters—Tilla, four, Caroline, six, and Nellie, eighteen months—to sit in the chairs, fold their hands in their laps, and repeat the Lord’s Prayer until he returned.
    Under no circumstances were they to leave the chairs. Astonish-ingly, the children obeyed, and Niels found them just where he had left them when he returned safely with his frightened wife. Tilla wrote that at some point during the storm the temperature fell to 40 below zero.
    Seventy people died in Minnesota during that January blizzard, some from families so poor that the bereaved could not attend the funerals because they didn’t have enough clothing to venture out.
    The Minnesota legislature appropriated five thousand dollars for relief of storm victims, but the funds were not even sufficient to pay the doctors who cared for the frostbite victims.
    Another three-day blizzard arrived two months later, in early March, after a thaw had melted some of the snow and muddied the fields. The wind came so suddenly that it sucked up mud from the fields and spat it into the blowing snow. On the Henjum farm between Wells and Blue Earth, Minnesota, drifts quickly covered the stables and shacks where the family kept their animals, and the chickens froze to death. When their fuel ran out, the Henjums stayed warm by cutting the tops off the saplings they had planted as a windbreak and feeding the green sticks into their stove. But it wasn’t all grim horror. Between the granary and the pigpen the wind spun a fantastic delicate white mountain. “The snow had whirled and piled up into a mountain 62 feet high, actual measure-ment,” recalled the Henjums’ daughter. “The mountain was a beautiful sight, reaching to a thin point at its uppermost peak." The next blizzard, which followed a few weeks later, in April, is still talked about in Yankton, South Dakota, because it came when George Armstrong Custer was quartered in town. Lieutenant Colonel Custer had been assigned to frontier duty in the Dakotas early in 1873, and he traveled west with a company of eight hundred officers and enlisted men from the Seventh Regiment of the United States Cavalry along with his devoted wife, Elizabeth, and forty government laundresses. Ill when the blizzard hit, Custer weathered the storm in the comparative comfort of a cabin attended by Elizabeth, while scores of his men wandered lost in the blast after their tents blew over. Winds at Yankton blew at an average velocity of 39 miles an hour for nearly a hundred hours, and for the entire twenty-four hours of April 15 the average wind speed exceeded 52 miles per hour. Townspeople rallied round and eventually gathered in the missing soldiers and laundresses, including one who had a newborn baby. Custer later officially commended the good people of Yankton for saving “the lives of a great number belonging to this command, besides saving the government the value of public animals amounting to many thousands of dollars.” Three years later, he was dead at the fiasco of Little Bighorn.
    General Adolphus W. Greely, who was head of the nation’s weather forecasting service from 1887 to 1891, wrote in his 1888 book American Weather that “shortly after this storm the use of the word blizzard  became tolerably frequent in the northwestern parts of the United States, to indicate such cold anticyclone storms as are attended by drifting snow." They called the winter of 1880-81 the Snow Winter because the snowstorms started early and never let up. A three-day blizzard took the settlers of the Upper Midwest by surprise on October 15, and after that, snowstorms came at regular intervals through the winter and into the spring. In some places snow from that first October storm was still on the ground come May. Mary Paulson King, a child of immigrant Norwegian parents in Yellow Medicine