Jan. 1888 – Winter’s Fury Strikes Great Plains
January 12, 1888, in Dakota Territory started out almost too good to be true. Six days earlier, a snowstorm had howled in, leading a 5-day bout of subzero daily high temperatures.
But on January 12th, the sky was clear and it was unseasonably warm. Farmers and ranchers who had been cooped up headed out to check on their livestock and work in their barns and yards. Others headed to town to run their errands or check in with friends. Children embarked on their walk to school, some without jackets, as the walk was pleasantly warm in what felt like springtime sunshine. What they didn’t know is that the warm temperatures preceded a low-pressure system dropping in from the north/northeast, one that would bring a howling winter storm.
Its timing and suddenness caught hundreds of school children and farmers outdoors. In the Dakotas, people began seeing a dark wall of clouds around noon that day. They didn’t have more than a few minutes before snow and high wind gusts reduced visibility to zero, and the temperature began to plummet. The abovefreezing, snow-melting temperatures that homesteaders were enjoying in the morning plunged in mere moments. To get a grasp of how sudden this was, NOAA gave some of the recorded data gathered that day across the Great Plains. When
the front passed through Stutsman County, the temperature dropped upwards of 18ºF in 3 minutes, and the wind chill grew deadly just as fast. In Huron, the mercury fell to -2ºF by 2 p.m., when the morning had been graced with temperatures around 20ºF. Later in the afternoon when the storm hit Lincoln, Nebraska, the temperature was slashed by 18º in less than 3 minutes. A town in Iowa recorded a 55º drop in just 8 hours. And it wasn’t just cold. David Laskin researched the January
12, 1888 storm and wrote a narrative nonfiction novel entitled The Children’s Blizzard, which quickly became a national bestseller. He writes of the suddenness and sheer power of the blizzard.
“Out of nowhere, a soot gray cloud appeared over the northwest horizon,” Laskin writes. “The air grew still for a long eerie measure, then the sky began to roar and a wall of ice dust blasted the prairie. Every crevice, every gap and orifice instantly filled with shattered crystals, blinding smothering, suffocating, burying anything ex
posed to the wind.”
When the front overtook what today is eastern North Dakota, school children and their teachers were caught in tiny, one-room schoolhouses with little insulation, farmers and their livestock were stranded outside, those traveling to and from town finding themselves lost in a suddenly foreign landscape.
Visibility was reduced to zero instantly, once the forces of snow and wind combined. There were accounts of people getting lost between their homes and their barns, others dying just a few steps away from
safety, unable to see that they were so close to shelter.
In his book, Laskin notes that many witnesses who survived the blizzard recalled visibility so poor that they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces, quite a dramatic claim.
“It’s tempting to dismiss this as hyperbole or a figure of speech—but there is in fact a meteorological basis for these claims,” Laskin writes. “The snow that day was as fine-grained as flour or sand...The air was so thick with find-ground wind-lashed ice crystals that people could not breathe.”
When they first spotted the dark storm clouds barreling in from the northwest, teachers made decisions about whether or not to send the kids on their way, in hopes they’d get home before the weather turned. It was a fast decision, and some decided to send their students home. Others didn’t have time to do so, the sudden onset of the storm forcing them all to hunker down in the schoolhouse, hoping they had enough to keep the stove burning until the weather moved on.
It’s because of the large number of school children who perished
after being caught outside that this storm came to be known by the names “Schoolhouse Blizzard” and “Children’s Blizzard.”
The blizzard raged for 12 to 18 hours, with wind chills in some places at or blew -60ºF. When the storm began to let up, folks began to emerge from where they’d taken shelter to survey the damages, and the true weight of the tragedy began to unfold. Families, neighbors and friends came across the frozen bodies of those who had been unable to get to shelter when the sky exploded.
On January 13th, the Omaha Daily Bee printed a couple of lines marked as a special telegram from Duluth, MN on the 12th:
“Minot, Dak., reports the storm raging there 124 hours and the temperature 15 degrees below. All railroad travel is suspended.
Jamestown, Dak., reports no trains moving on the main line of the Northern Pacific.”
The Boston Daily Advertiser and Indianapolis Journal printed word on the 13th and 14th that there were still no trains moving at Minot and the temperatures were still bitter: reportedly -38ºF. They also delivered the news that a Minot man and his two sons were missing: “James Smith and two sons, aged fifteen and seventeen, started for a load of hay, six miles from town, on the 11th, and have not since been heard from. Search parties are out to-day. Several other persons are missing but are supposed to have taken refuge in claims shanties [Indianapolis Journal, Jan. 14, 1888].” Another newspaper later named Smith and his two sons in a list of the missing, in addition to a man from White Lake and four school children, all of them from Minot.
There is information to conclude for certain that at least 9 people died in areas of what is now North Dakota. In what would become South Dakota, between 145 and 155 people perished, and in Minnesota, it’s estimated the fatalities numbered anywhere between 70 and 200 (all of these numbers are based on newspaper accounts, personal accounts and other records).
While there were reports that fatalities in northern Dakota Territory stated that as many as 20 were either missing or dead in the blizzard’s aftermath, these are the nine that were confirmed in numerous reports from that time.
Cass County, Pontiac Township Mr. Mann was traveling with his 14-yearold son and 10-year-old daughter when they ran low on fuel. They tried to get to Mann’s sister’s home, walking the halfmile through the valley toward shelter, but only one of them made it there. Mann’s 14-yearold son, after being lost in the whiteout, caught a glimpse of the top of the house between wind gusts. He was alive, but he lost both of his hands to frostbite. The bodies of Mr. Mann and his 10-year-old daughter were found within 25 feet of the barn.
Grand Forks
County, Bachelors Grove
B.S. Holland had gone on foot to Larimore to retrieve medicine for his ill wife. He was caught in the storm on his return and froze to death.
Sargent County,
Delamere
Miss Cora Curtis was walking home from the school where she taught when she was lost in the storm. Logansport Journal, IN, wrote on January 17, 1888, that she “was not seen until this morning, where her body was found in a drift at the roadside.”
Ward County, Near Minot
James Smith and his two sons, ages 15 and 17, had started a six-mile journey out of town for a load of hay. They never returned.
Stutsman County,
Near Windsor
M.A. Ryan, a local farmer, was found on January 17th about 8 miles from Windsor. This was one of the accounts newspapers printed about him:
“St. Paul, Jan. 17— News reached Jamestown, Dak., this afternoon of the freezing to death of M.A. Ryan, a farmer living near Windsor, where he had a claim. His body was found by a searching party to-night near a haystack about eight miles from Windsor. He had been in the haystack, and had come out, unbuttoned his coat, and laid down on top of a snow-drift near the stack. His hands were in a position indicating that he met death while praying. His horse was found alive. He had matches in his pockets when found, and friends wonder why he did not set fire to the stack and warm up. Mrs. Ryan is nearly crazed.”
(As to the search party’s confusion, medical research has since found that hypothermia causes disorientation and lack of self-awareness. Also, in 20-50% of lethal cases, victims actually remove their clothing, known as “paradoxical undressing,” because they experience what feels like extreme heat.)
Traill County,
Mayville
Judd Robinson was found frozen to death near Mayville by search parties. According to the Jamestown Weekly Alert, he left behind a wife and two small children.
There were reports of an unknown male who was found dead near Lisbon, a mail driver who was missing between New Salem and Stanton (later all carriers from Bismarck were reported to be safe), and four people dead or missing from Pembina County.
Across the states affected, a total of 235+ people died as a result of the January 1888 blizzard, though that number remains only an estimate. It’s hard to know what the real number is, especially considering that some of the victims weren’t found for days, weeks and even months, while others later died from wounds or illnesses.
In those years, weather forecasting was young, communication was limited. Blizzards that killed hundreds of people, freak temperature drops that froze swaths of livestock—those things just…happened. They were a hard part of a hard life.
But today, Laskin writes, “a ‘surprise’ storm that killed over 200 people would instigate a fierce outcry in the press, vigorous official hand-wringing, and a flood of reports by every government agency remotely involved, starting with the National Weather Service. But in the Gilded Age, blame for the suffering attendant on an act of God was left unassigned.”