The Children's Blizzard (34 page)

Johann’s wife, Anna, a widow who had lost her first six children, remarried and moved to Kansas. But it was not a happy match.

The second husband was unkind and her four surviving children—Julius, Jonathan, Emma, and Anna—did not get along with their stepfather. Julius died in Kansas of a ruptured appendix at the age of twenty.

Jonathan married to get away from the stepfather and returned to his childhood home in Dakota’s Rosefield Township to raise a family. His two daughters, Gladys and Anna, were born there, Gladys in 1912 and Anna in 1917, and they still live near the old homestead in the town of Freeman, South Dakota. Jonathan, three and a half years old when his three brothers died, rarely spoke to his children about the blizzard. Gladys and Anna say that the only thing they remember their father telling them about that day was the sight of the three frozen bodies lying next to the stove—and the sound of his mother’s laughter.

In the autumn of 1888, George Burkett moved his ward, Lena Woebbecke, to Lincoln and enrolled her at the C Street School.

Burkett reported that the child’s English was still poor, but he expected her to make good progress now that she was attending a grade school instead of a one-room country school where children of all ages were mixed together. Lena had learned to walk quite well on her wooden foot.

Burkett invested $3,750 of the money raised for Lena in real estate secured by first mortgages with a handsome return of 8 percent. He was confident that this would generate more than enough income to support and educate the girl.

For the next six years, Lena lived in Lincoln under Burkett’s supervision. She graduated from the public school and then attended Union College, run by the Seventh Day Adventists. When she turned seventeen, Burkett made over to her the $4,939.46 in cash and notes that had accrued from the investment of her fund. In gratitude, Lena and her family gave him a beautiful rocking chair.

The family planned to invest Lena’s money in a farm near Milford.

The trail of Lena Woebbecke’s life becomes faint in her final years. In 1901, when she was twenty-four years old, she married a local man named George Schopp, a German by the sound of his name and most likely a farmer. She died less than two years later at the age of twenty-five—whether from disease or accident or some lingering complication of her amputation or in childbirth, as was all too common in those days, we’ll never know. Lena was laid to rest in her wedding dress in the graveyard of the Immanuel Lutheran Church near the country crossroads called Ruby. If there ever was a town of Ruby, it has disappeared, as has the Immanuel Lutheran Church. The church cemetery, however, remains—a fenced patch of rough grass studded with headstones between two farmhouses not far from the interstate. A tiny island of the dead in the sea of Nebraska agriculture.

Lena’s mother, Wilhelmine Dorgeloh, died a few days after her daughter at the age of fifty-two. She was buried beside the grave of the child she had abandoned sixteen years earlier. Their matching granite headstones—inscribed in German and decorated with sprays of chiseled leaves—are by far the finest in the churchyard, a final legacy of the heroine fund. 
“Wahrlich, wahrlich ich sage euch: so
 
jemand mein Wort wird halten, der wird den Tod nicht sehen ewiglich,” 
reads the inscription on Lena’s headstone. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death." As for the Woebbecke family that took Lena in during the summer of 1887, their descendants are still living and farming the same hilly acres south of Seward. Lawrence Woebbecke, the grandson of Wilhelm, who carried Lena up through the ravine on the morning of January 13, grows wheat and corn and soybeans on the family farm. He does well enough that he was able to travel to Germany a few years ago and visit the village of Herkensen outside of Hameln that his grandfather left in 1878. A married son lives nearby and helps with the farmwork, and there are grandkids, too—so it looks as if Woebbeckes will be on this land for some years to come.

Walter Allen never forgot that he owed his life to the scrappiness and determination of his brother Will. The boys remained close for the rest of their lives.

Eighteen at the time of the blizzard, Will Allen already had six years of newspaper printing experience under his belt in Groton and he soon sought out the larger challenges of Aberdeen, recently forsaken by the hapless L. Frank Baum. Unlike Baum, however, Will Allen made a notable success of his journalistic enterprises in Aberdeen. Eventually he went to work for the 
Dakota Farmer,
 the region’s premier agricultural publication, and over the years he rose through the ranks to become managing editor, editor in chief, and publisher. In 1933, on the strength of his reputation for integrity and hard work and his wide circle of business acquaintances, Will Allen secured the nomination of the Republican Party in the South Dakota governor’s race. He ran as a progressive Republican on a platform of operating government with the efficiency of a business, restoring the state’s property tax, and bringing nonresident landowners onto the tax rolls. The Democratic candidate, Thomas Berry, defeated him resoundingly. Allen died six years later at the age of sixty-nine.

Will’s younger brother, Walter, got himself into several more scrapes after the blizzard, but he managed to survive his childhood, graduate from the University of Minnesota, and land a couple of jobs with railroads before he joined his older brother on the staff of the 
Dakota Farmer
 in 1910. Walter remained with the publication for the next fifty years, retiring as its director in 1960. He died in 1973 at the age of ninety-three.

Walter’s daughter, Barbara Wegner, still lives in Groton, almost directly across the street from the long-demolished schoolhouse where her father went to fetch his precious perfume bottle on the afternoon of January 12, 1888.

Lieutenant Woodruff was six months shy of his fortieth birthday when he left the Signal Corps on June 1, 1888, a vigorous if belea-guered infantry officer with a wife and young daughter and a military career that had been stalled since 1879 at the rank of first lieutenant. Eleven years later he was dead.

For some reason Woodruff did not take up his post as General Ruger’s aide-de-camp immediately but instead returned to his regiment for fifteen months of frontier service at Fort Bliss near El Paso, in the extreme western tip of Texas. When he joined Ruger at Saint Paul in August 1889, Woodruff installed himself in the swanky new Aberdeen Hotel up on the bluff near the mansions of Summit Avenue. “Bathroom with each apartment,” boasted the Aberdeen’s ads. “A high-class patronage solicited. Rates $3.50 to $6.00 per day.” There is no record of whether Woodruff crossed paths with Professor Payne or Mr. Cochran during his second residence in Saint Paul, but it seems unlikely.

Two years later, the long-awaited promotion to captain finally came through. Woodruff left Ruger’s staff and returned to his regiment, now stationed in Florida.

Shortly after President McKinley declared war on Spain on April, 25, 1898, Woodruff was appointed Inspector General of Volunteers. He served with the obese, bumbling General William Shafter during the Santiago campaign, the decisive land and sea battle for Cuba’s second-largest city, and was later on the staff of Major General John C. Bates. The Spanish-American War was brief by nineteenth-century standards—Cuba fell to U.S. forces by July and a cease-fire was declared on August 12—and relatively inexpensive. The US government laid out about $250 million on combat and ended up with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam; for another $20 million Spain handed over the Philippines. Of the three thousand Americans who lost their lives in the war, 90 percent died of infectious tropical diseases, especially malaria and yellow fever.

One of the victims of disease was Captain Woodruff. He was still in Cuba the summer after the war when he contracted yellow fever near Santiago. He died at the age of fifty on July 11, 1899. A loyal soldier, Woodruff had devoted twenty-eight years of his life to serving the dreams of his young ambitious country. On March 5, 1900, his remains were taken to Arlington National Cemetery and laid to rest in the presence of his widow, his daughter, family and friends.

"I have seen the Dread of Dakota. A genuine blizzard and am now ready to leave anytime, that we can sell,” pioneer wife Sadie Shaw wrote to relatives back east from her Dakota homestead in Douglas County. 
“Oh, it was terrible.
 I have often read about Blizzards but they have to be 
seen
 to be fully 
realized.”

The Shaws did not sell, nor did Abi Huntley prevail upon her husband to take her and their traumatized children back to New York State. There were many such threats and much misgiving after the blizzard of 1888, but few families left—at least not right away. The weather finally moderated. Summer came and the prairie turned hot and dry. Day after day the sun sucked the moisture out of the black soil of the prairie. Grieving families got on with their lives, prayed for rain, had more children.

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, did not put an end to the great white endeavor of settling and taming the prairie, but it did mark a turning point, a change of mood and direction. The Dakota boom had ended. Immigration to the prairie frontier slowed to a trickle in the last years of the 1880s. A time of reckoning and taking stock had set in. A new mood of caution, suspicion, and bitter-ness took hold. “Good bye, Lord, I am going west,” Arthur Towne remembered the church deacon shouting as Dakota-bound families streamed out of their Vermont village in 1881. By the close of the decade the joy was gone and the Townes were exhausted. “It did seem as if the whole James River valley was just a dumping ground for blasted hopes,” Towne’s mother told him wearily. “The holiday spirit of eight years before had entirely vanished,” wrote Hamlin Garland of the sullen mood of the decade’s end. “The stress of misfortune had not only destroyed hope, it had brought out the evil side of many men. Dissension had grown common. Two of my father’s neighbors had gone insane over the failure of their crops. . . .

[S]omething gray had settled down over the plain. Graveyards, jails, asylums, all the accompaniments of civilization, were now quite firmly established. . . . No green thing was in sight, and no shade offered save that made by the little cabin. On every side stretched scanty yellowing fields of grain, and from every worn road, dust rose like smoke from crevices." The truth was beginning to sink in: The sudden storms, the violent swings from one meteorological extreme to another, the droughts and torrents and killer blizzards were not freak occurrences but facts of life on the prairie. This was not a garden. Rain did not follow the plow. Laying a perfect grid of mile-sided squares on the grassland did not suppress the chaos of the elements. The settlers had to face the facts. Living here and making a living off this land was never going to be easy.

Weather that takes lives and destroys hopes presents a moral quandary. Call it an act of God or a natural disaster, somebody or something made this storm happen. But what? Who was to blame for the deaths of the Kaufmann brothers? For the surge of frigid air that killed John Jensen’s wife, Nickoline, and their little daughter, Alvilda? For the fact that after January 12 Addie Knieriem never again walked on the feet she was born with, never ran, woke up every morning to the sight of the scarred stump below her ankle? Was it the fault of the railroads and the United States government for colluding to lure pioneers to country too wild and dangerous to support secure settlements? Was Lieutenant Woodruff guilty for failing to see the storm coming sooner or for not striving harder to get the word out? Were the immigrant parents themselves to blame for uprooting their families from the relatively safe enclaves of the Ukraine, Vermont, Prussia, and Norway and exposing them to the brutal cold fronts and lows that sweep down off the Canadian Rockies?

Or should one condemn an economic system that gave some families mansions on Summit Avenue and left others so poor that they would risk their children and their own lives for the sake of a single cow? They called it “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were so young—but in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children’s disaster. Children were the un-paid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for. The outpouring of grief after scores of children were found frozen to death among the cattle on Friday, January 13, was at least in part an expression of remorse for what children were subjected to every day—remorse for the fact that most children had no childhood. This was a society that could not afford to sentimentalize its living and working children. Only in death or on the verge of death were their young granted the heroine funds, the long columns of sobbing verse, the stately granite monuments. A safe and carefree childhood was a luxury the pioneer prairie could not afford.

"The dark, blinding, roaring storm once experienced, ever remains an actual living presence, that has marked its pathway with ruin, desolation and death,” wrote South Dakota historian Caleb Holt Ellis in 1909. “The 12th of January, 1888, is, and long will be, remembered, not only by Dakotans, but by many in the northwest, not for the things we enjoy, love, and would see repeated; but for its darkness, desolation, ruin and death, spread broadcast; for the sor-row, sadness and heartache that followed in its train.” To this day, nearly a century after Ellis wrote these words, the storm remains "an actual living presence” in the region. Mention the date to anyone whose family experienced the storm and you’ll get a story of death or narrow escape. “There are those who say that that storm was no worse than others we have had,” wrote Austen Rollag fifty years later, “but those who speak thus could not have been out of the house but sitting around the stove. I have seen many snowstorms in the more than sixty years I have been living here, but not one can compare with the storm of January 12, 1888." The memories still burn. They burn all the fiercer because sor-row, sadness, and heartache did indeed follow in the blizzard’s train. Drought ravaged the prairie in the early 1890s. Thousands who had borrowed against their homesteads went bankrupt in the financial panic that inaugurated the depression of 1893. Farm income slipped steadily in the last decades of the nineteenth century.