Catastrophes!: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and Other Earth-Shattering Disasters

8 Blizzards: White Death

8 Blizzards White Death A blinding barrage of snowflakes was driven by strong winds which wrapped schoolgirls’ skirts around their legs, frightfully impairing efforts of the youngsters to reach safety. Battling the powerful force of the stiff cold air currents, and stumbling through the reduced visibility of the fierce snowy gale, young Avis “was down more than up,” and her hands froze painfully during the lengthy one-block trip to her house. —Dick Taylor, The Schoolhouse Blizzard The “Great Blizzards” of the 1880s During the 1870s, settlers flocked to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions by the thousands. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and numerous other railroads opened access to homesteaders and farmers . Meanwhile, wars with indigenous Americans had been winding down ever since the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn spurred the U.S. Army to force Native Americans onto reservations. Hunters had been steadily slaughtering the bison herds at the rate of millions a year, so that by the early 1880s, the great sea of bison that once covered the plains were nearly extinct. Civiliza- Blizzards 203 tion was rapidly coming to the Wild West, and with the invention of barbed wire, even the long cattle drives to railheads like Dodge City, Kansas, were coming to an end. The railroad companies had made huge profits off the land Congress had originally given them. Along with many other land hucksters and swindlers, they heavily advertised the Great Plains and Rockies as a paradise ready to be farmed, plowed, and turned into fertile green valleys. These misleading promotions claimed that the climate was mild and the lands well watered, even though as early as the 1860s, John Wesley Powell had argued that “The Great American Desert” would never be wet enough to support full-scale agriculture without dams and irrigation. The popular myth was that “rain follows the plow,” so if a farmer plowed the land, it somehow released moisture and triggered more frequent rain in formerly dry country. In the words of promoter Charles Dana Wilber: God speed the plow . . . By this wonderful provision, which is only man’s mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains . . . [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden . . . To be more concise, Rain follows the plow. (The West Film Project and WETA 2001) During the 1870s, an abnormally long wet spell made the Great Plains and Rockies unusually green, and farmers and cattlemen were able to sustain themselves. It turned out that this wetter climate was short term, and by the early 1880s, the West began to revert to its normal hot, dry summer conditions. Soon, cattle were starving all over the plains and dying from lack of fodder. Ranchers and farmers who had homesteaded the region saw their investments wiped out. The final blow came when the climate reverted not only to its normal dry conditions but also went through a cold snap in the 1880s that produced blizzards and freezing conditions that lasted months. This was the last gasp of the Little Ice Age, a climatic cooling cycle that had chilled much of the Northern 204 Catastrophes! Hemisphere since the 1600s. The winter of 1880–1881 was particularly harsh, with blizzard after blizzard killing hundreds and stranding settlers who suffered extreme privation and starvation. These events were vividly portrayed by Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie and seven other books in the Little House series. In The Long Winter, Wilder described how her snowbound family nearly froze and starved to death while stranded in De Smet, South Dakota, for many months. The blizzards began in early October before most of the crops had been harvested and never seemed to let up, lasting for two or three days each with only a few days of clear, cold weather inbetween . When the trapped trains finally were able to break through in May, the residents of De Smet celebrated Christmas (and their survival)—and their Thanksgiving turkey was still frozen. The terrible winter of 1880–1881 is also described in O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, an award-winning tale of immigrant Norwegian farmers in the Dakota Territory, who suffered horribly during the blizzards. The final blow came during the winters of 1886–1888. The previous droughts and hard winters had put the cattle business in jeopardy, and the herds...