The Children's Blizzard (18 page)

Walter cherished the glass perfume bottle not only because it was so pretty and fine to look at, but because the stopper in its neck allowed him to squirt out just a few drops at a time. No one else in his classroom had anything like it.

The morning began like every other with recitation and chanting in unison of a passage from their “reader”—very likely one of the McGuffey readers that were then almost universal throughout the Midwest.

Hear the children gay-ly shout,

“Half past four, and school is out!”

See them, as they quickly go,

Tripping home-ward o’er the snow.

Thus these lit-tle children go,

Tripping home-ward o’er the snow;

Laugh-ing, playing, on their way

Ver-y hap-py, glad, and gay.

There are many children whose parents are too poor to send them to
 
school. Do you not pity them? Take good care of your new book,
 
and give your old Reader to some child who is too poor to buy one.

Around 10:30, the chanting in Walter’s classroom abruptly ceased. Everyone had gotten up to look out the windows at the sky.

The windows and doors rattled as the wall of shattered crystals slammed into the school. In an instant the droning orderliness of the classrooms dissolved. Walter watched his teacher leave the room to confer with the other teachers and then return quickly.

They had decided to dismiss school for the day and send the children home. Walter’s teacher had to shout over the roar of the wind that the row monitors were to get the wraps and distribute them as quickly as possible, then the children were to get dressed and go home. This took perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. But by the time the kids from the four classrooms were ready to go out, the storm had grown much worse. The teachers realized that they could not, that they must not, send the children out in these conditions. The youngest were hardly more than toddlers; the oldest were only fourteen. Somehow these excited, terrified kids had to be controlled and kept in school until it was safe for someone to go for help.

Visibility was so poor that none of them saw the drays approaching—wooden platforms mounted on bobsleds and dragged by horses, the nineteenth-century winter version of a flatbed truck.

Five drays in all, each one attended by two men and drawn by two horses. They drove through the snow in a kind of ghostly procession, one dray right behind the other so that none would stray from the road and get lost.

For the teachers at their wits’ end, the drays were a godsend.

With transport and men to help, it was just a matter of getting the kids lined up and counted and then marched out the door and onto the drays. Again, Walter and the other monitors were called on to get their rows ready. The monitors must go last, after the other kids in their rows had filed out, one by one.

The air, when they finally got outside, was a shock. The air itself seemed to be streaming sideways in billows of grit. The snow felt like frozen sand against their eyelids and nostrils and lips. They couldn’t face into the wind or open their eyes, even for a second.

The wind was blowing so hard that if you fell you couldn’t get up again. But to the kids it didn’t matter. Being out in a storm powerful enough to shut down school and bring ten men out from town to rescue them was a tremendous lark, and the children fairly poured outside and down the rickety schoolhouse steps, everybody shouting over the wind and shoving and edging sideways or backward toward the drays.

The wood of the drays was already rimed with snow and frozen solid as rock, but for the first couple of minutes none of them felt the cold through their thin clothing. They piled on in masses of bodies and they had each other for warmth and a bit of shelter.

There was much gleeful screaming as the schoolhouse emptied.

Walter took his responsibility as monitor very seriously. Not until his entire row was accounted for, assembled, and marched outside would he even dream of leaving the school. So he was one of the last ones out. The drays were nearly full by now—there was just room for him at the back of one. Walter scrambled up, the teachers did a final head count and shouted to the drivers that it was all right to start. The men snapped the reins and the five drays began creaking forward, one after the other in the storm, just as they had come out from town.

They hadn’t gone ten yards when Walter suddenly hopped off.

He had just remembered his precious water bottle. He knew enough about weather to realize that the water inside the fragile perfume bottle would freeze as soon as the schoolhouse stove went cold and then the ice trapped inside would burst the bottle. Without thinking, Walter dropped from the dray and rushed up the wooden steps, down the hall to his room, grabbed the bottle from his desk, and ran back out.

Only then did his thoughts catch up with his body. The drays had been barely creeping when he jumped off. He had assumed that they would still be in front of the school when he got back—or at least close enough to run after and overtake. Ordinarily, he could see for miles out here. Surely someone would spot him standing there and stop the dray and wait for him.

But that’s not how it worked out. In the seconds that it took Walter to get his bottle, the drays had vanished without a trace—out of sight in the whiteout, out of earshot in the screaming wind. "The world is full of nothing” ran inanely through Walter’s mind.

And now he experienced that little seizure that tightens around the heart when you first realize you’ve taken a step that you cannot reverse. Snow clogged his nostrils and coated his eyelashes. Snow blew down the neck of his coat and up his sleeves. The air was so full of powdered ice crystals and it was moving so fast that Walter had trouble filling his lungs. The exposed skin of his face and neck felt seared, as if the wind carried fire not ice. A cottony numbness spread through his body and brain. It did not occur to Walter that he could still take shelter in the schoolhouse. Though he could barely see or breathe, he decided to set out for home.

Once he had made that decision, a door shut behind him. After a dozen steps into the storm, he could not have returned to the schoolhouse if he wanted to.

Countless witnesses wrote that visibility was so poor at the height of the blizzard that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It’s tempting to dismiss this as hyperbole or a figure of speech—but there is in fact a meteorological basis for these claims.

Dr. Louis Uccellini notes that the smaller the particles of the ice crystals, the worse visibility becomes—and there are numerous accounts of how the snow that day was as fine-grained as flour or sand. “There is a phrase used in blizzards of ‘zero/zero’ visibility," says Dr. Uccellini, “which means you can’t see up or horizontally." This would explain how a woman near Sioux Falls froze to death with her key in her hand just steps from her door. And the husband and wife who both perished while blindly circling each other in their farmyard. And David Fyffe, the crusty Scottish cattleman in southwestern Minnesota, who was only able to traverse the 101 feet from his barn to his house (he was very precise about the distance) because by pure luck he stumbled on one of the bobsleds he tied up at the iron pump that was exactly halfway between. Had it not been for that fortunate accident he “would never have been heard of,” Fyffe wrote in his memoirs. “There was no house nearer than a mile or more.” A young Norwegian farmer, trapped in his barn in Dakota when the storm blew up, described how he “focused his mind on where the house stood in line with the barn” and then set out into the wind with hands out in front of him. It was only when his fingers caught in his wife’s clothesline that he knew where he was. A homesteader in Buffalo County, South Dakota, wrote of a neighbor who was staggering lost between barn and house when he tripped over a snowdrift and fell against the house.

The thud of his body hitting the house was loud enough to be heard over the storm and brought the family out to rescue him.

So it’s hardly surprising that eight-year-old Walter Allen became confused and disoriented when he rushed out of the school clutching his perfume bottle and found himself alone in the storm. Even worse than the whiteout was the agony of his eyes when he tried to see through the snow. The fine hard pellets blew into his eyes and made them water. Walter cried and the snow mixed with his tears until it formed a crust between the upper and lower lids. Instinctively he reached up to brush the crust away with the back of his hand. Soon his eyeballs were inflamed, which further distorted his vision. The pain became so acute that it felt better to let the ice crust build. Tears and blowing snow melded together and sealed his eyes shut tightly.

There was no way to break the seal except by tearing the tender skin.

Once Walter’s eyes were gone, the rest of his face went fast. A mask of ice covered the exposed skin of his face except for holes at the nostrils and mouth. Snow penetrated his clothing and froze into an armor of ice around his body. All of this happened in moments.

Walter stumbled. The sizzle of driving snow hummed in his ears, and the frozen needles cut his face and throat. He knew he was lost.

It was probably only a matter of minutes before he collapsed, whether in a gust of wind or because his feet became too frozen to bear his weight or from simple exhaustion we’ll never know—and Walter himself didn’t know either.

Strangely, once he was down, everything was better. On the ground the snow was softer and the wind didn’t blow so hard. Walter curled up in the snow and surrendered.

The south wind had been in Johann Albrecht’s face as he walked across the rutted fields to the schoolhouse, though it was soft for a winter wind and carried a smell of something damp and foggy. A fine January day—which only made his mother’s tears and pleas more baffling. Peter, his younger brother, had given in, so he would spend the day at home listening to their mother cry and looking after Anna and the two baby brothers. But Johann was glad to be going to school—the English school, as his parents called it. No matter how dull the lessons or how repetitive the eternal chanting, school was better than farm chores. Two recesses a day, which was more than he got at home working for his father. With any luck the Graber and the Kaufmann boys would be there, too, and they’d have enough strong arms for a proper snowball war. The snowballing got fierce when the Schweizer parents of Rosefield Township let all their sons attend school.

For a thirteen-year-old boy like Johann Albrecht, who had walked these southern Dakota fields all his life, the prairie didn’t offer much to look at, especially in winter. To the west, the land heaved slightly so that a low rolling ridge blocked the horizon.

The vista to the south went on forever. The plowed farm fields were either deep in drifts or crusted furrows, according to the whims of the wind. The saplings that his father and the other Schweizer farmers had planted in their timber claims—cottonwoods given to them by the government, mulberry trees, ash, elm, hackberry—were like crooked poles rising out of the snow. Everything else was sky—sky that seemed to revolve around you in slow circles when you walked out under it alone. Somehow you always felt a little foolish about singing or talking to yourself for fear somebody was watching or listening—though, of course, that was even more foolish, for who on earth could see or hear you out there except God?

There would have been but two columns of smoke in view—one from the neighboring farmhouse and one from the school, both of them curling slowly toward Johann as he walked into the southerly wind.

The school, like the Salem Church that the Schweizer families had built a few years earlier, was the simplest, starkest building possible—four rectangles capped by two triangles and a roof laid over the top. The door opened under one of the triangles on the west side and inside the door there was a tiny vestibule where the children hung their wraps on hooks. Two steps and you were standing in the classroom—a stove in the middle, crude wooden desks for the children, a dull light glowing at the small windows that had been cut into the long north and south walls. And at the front of the room, Mr. James P. Cotton, the American teacher who boarded with Johann Albrecht’s family. It never ceased to amaze Johann how Mr. Cotton always seemed so much larger and more important in the classroom than he did at their house. This was his world, and here his word was law. Not a word of German could be spoken as soon as they crossed the threshold, though, of course, John—as he was called in school—and the others cheated sometimes.

Sure enough, when Johann reached the schoolhouse he saw that the Kaufmann boys and the Graber boys were already there—the other two families lived closer to school than the Albrechts; indeed, the Grabers were so close that the school was practically within shouting distance of their farmhouse. But surprisingly, they were the only other pupils in attendance that day. Seven boys altogether: strapping Johann Kaufmann and his two younger brothers, Heinrich and Elias Kaufmann; Peter and Johann Graber, sixteen and fourteen, and their eleven-year-old half brother, Andreas—three of the fourteen children who filled the Graber house.

And to round out the number to seven, Johann Albrecht himself, still known in the little Schweizer settlement as the baby who had been born on board the steamship 
City of Richmond
 during the great migration of 1874.

When Mr. Cotton asked Johann why his brother Peter was not with him, Johann had to explain shamefacedly about the bad feeling his mother, Maria, had that morning and how soon after Mr. Cotton had left the Albrecht house for school, Maria had insisted that the boys stay home. Peter, weak of will, had listened to their mother, so Johann came alone, with his father’s permission. School was too important to miss.

Mr. Cotton nodded his head. What was there to say? They had some strange ways, these Russian Germans. But at least they raised their kids to obey and to show respect; Mr. Cotton would grant them that much.

When the blast rocked the north wall of the school at around 11:00 in the morning, the boys and their teacher all turned to look at the north windows as if they had been summoned by a trumpet call. As everywhere, the wind and the darkness came almost simultaneously.