The Children's Blizzard Read online

  Sometimes, when I see these men, I am filled with such rage, I want to do something to them—but I’m just the strange teacher with the wooden foot who couldn’t get hired anywhere else. They laugh at me, call me names behind my back. I thought the children would do this, but it turns out that it’s the adults who are the cruel ones.

  The food is not parceled out equally and some children do not get enough to eat. I try to help, to sneak them some, to soothe, but even if they don’t mock me, they do recoil from my touch—they recoil from all of us who truly want to help them. But maybe they can’t tell the difference between us and the evil ones; maybe we look the same to them. I try to teach these children, I even try to make them smile with songs and games, but they are sullen and sad. Rows and rows of brown eyes in brown faces, eyes that are dull, that are lost, that are missing their families, their homes, their culture. They look out of place in our clothes. They look as out of place here as I feel, myself.

  I do think we share this, this feeling of being outside what is called “civilized” society, but that society isn’t so civilized, after all. I have seen that firsthand, now. Still, I have what they call a “pale face,” and blond hair, so they distrust me, and rightly so given how other pale faces have treated them. My wooden boot is a source of curiosity, but if I thought it would bind me to these miserable children, make me one of their tribe, I was mistaken. As much as I have suffered, those eyes tell me I haven’t suffered like them. I still think that teaching them how to live in society is a noble idea; what future will they have if they revert back to their old tribal ways? The country isn’t wild any longer. But this is not the way to do it, I know that now. And I can’t save them, nor can they save me.

  I think I will leave this place soon. For where, I do not yet know.

  I hope this letter finds you well, Raina. I know that whatever you do, you will succeed.

  I can only trust that this is the correct address for you now, in Lincoln. And if it isn’t, someone will forward it to you.

  Your loving sister,

  Gerda

  Dear Raina,

  So you are in Chicago now! The big city! You are so much braver than I am. Is it everything you hoped it would be? I trust that by now—it has been so many years, what is it, seven, since we parted?—you have a good husband, children, a loving home. You did not mention these things, but I know you, dear sister. You might be trying to spare my feelings by not revealing your own contentment. Please don’t do that! Your happiness will be my own.

  But why do I hope that you are married with a family? It’s not the only happiness for a woman, but it is the one we are taught to believe in, the ending of the fairy tale. It’s what Mama and Papa would want for you, I know that.

  I wonder what they want for me? I wonder if they think of me every day? I’m sure Mama does. I don’t know about Papa, I disappointed him so.

  I am still in Montana; your letter was forwarded to me from the Indian school. Montana is such a vast place, there is room to wander and wander. You would be surprised to know how I live now, Raina. I live in a tent. By a river, near a mining camp. I take in washing for the men, and I teach those who want to learn, too. You should see my classes—such a mixture of misfits from many different places, all come to Montana to make their fortune in silver. But most of the mining is now being done by large corporations, so there aren’t many mining camps left for the men who use a pickax. Still, there are enough for me to make my living. I don’t require much, after all.

  During the winter months, which are hard here, I go into the town of Butte, where I board. That is where your letter was forwarded to me, so it took a long while to find me out here in the camps. I don’t have many friends, just one or two other souls who are adrift, as I am. I don’t ask them why, and they don’t ask me, and that’s why we are companionable.

  Sometimes I think of going to live with the Indians on a reservation. Why, I don’t know—is it to teach them? Even after my experience at that school? I still think an education is a worthwhile thing and will only help them, but they need to be with their families. They need to be taught the things their ancestors knew, as well as the things that will help them in the future. But I don’t know if they would let me in. After all, I look like the enemy to them, like the people who took their land and killed their ancestors. What they don’t understand is that I am just as sorrowful as they are. But perhaps it’s not up to them to understand me. Or help me.

  I wonder if there is any place where I will feel as if I belong.

  Do you ever think of the storm now, Raina? Or are you too far removed from it, snug in a city surrounded by tall buildings that block out the weather?

  I do. I sometimes stay in my tent too long into the snow season, just so I will never forget how it was that awful night. Just so I can shiver and shake with cold once more, and remember every step I took with Minna on my back, Ingrid clutching my hand. I remember how the storm made me forget everything else, except for taking just one more step. Just one more. Then the one after that. And that was all that mattered. To take one more step.

  At night, in my tent that quivers in the wind, I bundle up in blankets and robes. I have a pistol by my side. A woman can’t be in the camps without one. I haven’t had to use it but I can go to sleep knowing it’s there. But before I go to sleep, I make myself say their names: Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.

  Do you think I will go to hell, Raina? Do you even believe in hell anymore? We did as children, didn’t we? Papa would read from the Bible when we couldn’t make it to church on Sunday, and I believed in hell then, oh, I did! I believed in heaven and hell, that they were two separate places, one above and one below, and that I would either be eternally lost or eternally saved in the end.

  But hell is this life we lead now, not later. So I suppose that means there really is no heaven either, is there? There never was, we were told a lie.

  But maybe you are living your heaven now. I hope you are.

  Your loving sister,

  Gerda

  Dear Raina,

  I suppose you are surprised to hear from me after so many years! I don’t know if you are still in Chicago. I can’t imagine that you are not, because where does a person go after Chicago? It is beyond my imagination. I can’t picture you going home to Nebraska, that is for certain. If home is still there, even.

  I don’t know, but I feel it in my bones—which are so sharp now, I don’t seem to need as much food as I used to—that Mama and Papa are gone by now. It seems likely. I hope they were at peace, and happy, in the twilight of their lives. I know they were together, and that is a blessing. I can’t imagine the two of them ever parting. I know Mama wasn’t always happy, I know she didn’t want to leave Norway. Have you ever thought about that—how it was always the men who left, taking the women with them? I never once heard of a woman leaving the old country on her own accord. It was the men who had to have more. I saw that in Montana, when I was there. No woman wanted to mine for silver. There were smart women who took advantage of the men who did, however. Many were wanton women, but I did not see them that way (although there were many temperance groups and society women who did, mercy!). I saw them as women smarter than anyone else, who knew what men wanted and found a way to make a living providing it. I have shocked you, haven’t I, dearest baby sister! Do not worry, I myself am not a wanton woman.

  Sometimes I wonder if I am a woman at all. Sometimes I think I am just a wraith. Roaming this earth until one day, I will stop.

  Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia. I haven’t forgotten them, I still say their names every night before I lay down wherever I happen to be.

  I left Montana. For no real reason other than I felt like wandering again. I knew too many people in Montana and it has started t
o trouble me, to be in the company of others. So I am starting over again, in Idaho. They have mountains in Idaho, too. I don’t think I shall ever come down from the mountains.

  Do you ever think how odd it is that we both left home? Just when I said it’s what men do, it struck me that we did, too. Two women, two sisters. Because when I think about us, and the others our age, born homesteaders, born of parents who chose to leave somewhere, I think that most of us really didn’t have a choice. That by leaving all they’d known on their own accord, our parents ended up enslaving their children to the land, just so they could have a piece of paper saying that they possessed it. Most of our generation are still there, I am certain. I used to think of the boys we knew, how they had no imagination, they were too content to stay. But now I think it was so unfair to them. They had no choice; their parents lived and died to prove the land, and they left it to their children to continue the cycle. What could those boys do, other than stay there and try?

  But you and I got out. It still mystifies me. It was the storm, of course—it blew us out of there, in a way. You because you did the right thing; me, because I didn’t.

  I don’t know what you are doing now, Raina. I move around too much to ever get a letter back, and I have little hope that my previous letter got to you. I have even less hope that this one will. I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to you finally. Oh, don’t worry, I am not dying!

  I just feel less and less of this world somehow.

  Maybe we will meet again, dear sister. But I don’t think we will. You wouldn’t recognize me anyway. You would pass me on the street. No, you would look at me and ask yourself, “Who is that poor excuse of a woman? That ghost in tattered clothing, stringy grey hair, a pain in her heart that makes her press her hand to her chest now and then to ease it?”

  Up here in the mountains, higher and higher—maybe I will touch God one of these days, after all!—nobody cares. There are so few people, anyway. And they all have their own versions of hell to contend with.

  I do hope you are happy, Raina. You deserve it.

  Goodbye from your loving sister,

  Gerda

  Occasionally, in the years to come, Raina would receive odd gifts in the mail. A packet of eagle’s feathers. A few stones of turquoise. A cowboy hat with silver disks stitched along its brim. Pebbles washed smooth by spring water.

  A yellowed news clipping about a madwoman in the mountains whom no one has ever seen, but who sends presents to the schoolchildren in the nearest town.

  The last thing she ever received, no return address like the others, was just a list, scrawled in a weak hand on brown paper, in pencil: Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.

  To that list, Raina added in her own precise, schoolteacher’s hand:

  Gerda.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD OF 1888—sometimes known as the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard or the Schoolhouse Blizzard—has long been known to me by its name, although I didn’t truly grasp its scope and terror. But when my editor at the time and I were looking for a new idea for a novel, and she mused that it might be interesting to write about children, I replied, “The Children’s Blizzard!” And when she asked what that was, I admitted I didn’t exactly know.

  I set off to do the research, and almost immediately, I started to construct a story around it.

  For the first time in my career as a historical novelist, I wanted to write about an actual historical event, but invent the people caught up in it. My other books have all been created around real people—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the real Alice in Wonderland, Truman Capote, Mary Pickford, etc. I was looking for a new challenge as a writer, and this subject, so vast with possibility, ignited my imagination. So I stuck to the actual timeline of the blizzard but invented most of the characters, basing many of them on the oral histories of those who remembered the storm and the newspaper articles about it.

  The facts: In 1888, there was no National Weather Service. Meteorology didn’t quite exist as a science. But the Army Signal Corps did have a branch of weather “indicators,” career soldiers who had been selected to train, as much as the science of the time allowed, to try to indicate the weather. (They did not use words like predict or forecast then.) The Signal Corps was, at the time of the blizzard, under the command of Brigadier General Adolphus Greely, who had famously commanded a tragic expedition to the Arctic; most of his men perished, but he and a handful survived. The expedition was known as the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. Despite controversy, he returned home a hero, and President Grover Cleveland appointed him chief signal officer of the army.

  At the time, weather indicating consisted of an array of stations, many at army forts and railroad depots, each manned by a member of the Signal Corps whose job it was to take weather readings—barometric pressure, wind direction and speed, temperature—and telegraph the readings, at various intervals during the day, to Washington, D.C. There, soldiers would map out all the readings and indicate the weather for the next few hours. The time it took to gather the readings, form an indication, then telegraph it back out to various stations and newspapers, meant that the indications rarely got to where they should be in a timely manner. Too, there was much corruption in the Signal Corps: false readings, mismanagement, unmanned stations. In 1887, Greely felt pressure by the railroads to open up a western branch, to better serve the railway west of the Mississippi and, to a far lesser extent, the homesteaders there. He opened an office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Woodruff.

  The Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln, encouraged the settlement of what was then known as the West—primarily Nebraska, Minnesota, Dakota Territory, then later Montana and Wyoming and Colorado. Anyone who could afford a small filing fee was given the opportunity to own one hundred and sixty acres of land. All that was required was to live on the land continuously for five years and prove it up—build a livable structure on it—and then the land was theirs. Of course, this land came at the expense of the Native Americans who had roamed it freely for thousands of years; this, and the discovery of pockets of gold and silver, ignited the post–Civil War Indian Wars, the genocide at the hands of the U.S. Army that resulted in relocating Native Americans to reservations.

  The railroads were the great investment and marvel of the age, and they, along with the territories and states in this area, needed people—white people—to settle there. Territories wanted to become states; railroads needed people and goods to move up and down their lines. So a great propaganda—“fake news,” if you will—campaign was waged to get people to homestead. Many of those targeted were northern Europeans eager to leave their homeland and go to this allegedly bountiful new land of milk and honey. They were sold a false bill of goods to get them there—the character of Gavin Woodson is not based on anyone in particular, but he represents those who engaged in this fake news and propaganda. But conditions in the countries of Germany and Norway and Sweden, or in the slums of New York, too—many homesteaders were from the crowded cities of the East—were difficult. Farms in Europe were generally divided up among all the children of a family so that in each succeeding generation, there was precious little land left to farm. And there was forced conscription in the army, as well. Thus, at the time, immigrants were welcomed to this country; the country needed them, their bodies were needed to grow the population, prove up the land, and make the railroads a profit.

  During the 1880s, the weather in the Great Plains was especially daunting; this was what was known as the Little Ice Age. The weather there was both severe and wildly unpredictable. And it had hardly turned out to be the land of milk and honey that was promised; it was actually—it still is actually—a desert. The land could not be tamed by the methods the immigrants brought with them from their homelands. The crops they were used to planting simply wouldn’t grow.
There were prairie fires, grasshoppers that rained down, floods in the spring, tornados in the summer. And terrifying blizzards in the winter. Eventually, the homesteaders who persisted adapted their methods and crops; the introduction of dryland farming, and then the discovery of the Ogallala Aquifer, eventually turned this region into the breadbasket of America.

  Many immigrants didn’t stay for these advances; in the 1880s and 1890s, over sixty percent of homesteaders abandoned their property.

  That left forty percent who did stay.

  English was not the native tongue for most of the homesteaders who staked their claim. But their children were forced to speak the language in school—school so often taught by children themselves. One of the things that most intrigued me about this tragedy is that life-and-death decisions were made by young women, for the most part, barely out of school; teachers only sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years of age.

  When the blizzard struck on January 12, 1888, no one had any advance notice. The weather indication for that day did not call for any unusual warnings, and of course, even if it had, most homesteaders lived far from the stations that would hoist these weather flags. And most did not get the city newspapers like the Omaha Daily Bee, which ran the indications. Even if they had received the papers, they wouldn’t have been able to read them.

  Blizzards were not unusual on the prairie, of course, especially not during the Little Ice Age. What made this one different was the fact that the morning of the twelfth was unusually balmy after an extended period of below-zero cold. Homesteaders were able to leave their homes for the first time in weeks, and they did. Farmers took their livestock out for exercise, people went to town to get supplies. Children went to school for the first time in days.