Predicting blizzards has come a long way
After weeks of cold frigid weather January 12, 1888, started off on the mild side. Warm air was moving northward across the Dakota-Nebraska prairie chasing away the cold air that had lingered way too long. The nice mild morning prompted children leaving for their walk to school to shed some of their heavier clothing. A mild morning was rare during the long winter and many wanted to enjoy it.
School was located in a small building outside the settlement and away from any other homes or farms. Many families simply lived in earthen homes called 鈥渟oddies鈥� which were dug into the earth and provided shelter until a proper home could be built. The children walked on small paths through the prairie grass. There were no trees or signs to show the way, just prairie grass. There also were no weather forecasts as we know them today at that time.
The Army Signal Corps was responsible for weather observations and using wind direction, temperature and barometric readings, they put out 鈥渋ndications,鈥� which were then telegraphed to the railroad and newspapers, but individual settlements and families had only their wit to guide them. The mild weather was odd and if they would have had access to the observations from Montana and further west, they may have had a clue that some very cold air and dangerous weather was on the way.
The Children鈥檚 Blizzard is a story of life and death on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie in the late 1880s. It鈥檚 about immigrants coming from Norway in search of the better life that so many of our own people in Southwestern Pennsylvania sought. The immigrant life has always been difficult and the prairie life was no different with crop failure, plagues of locusts, and of course, the weather.
The mild morning on that January day quickly turned into disaster as a quick moving and unexpected weather system caught the prairie by surprise with rapidly falling temperatures, increasing winds and driving, blinding snow. Temperatures fell some 15 to 25 degrees in a matter of minutes and several hours later, were below zero. The 50-mile per hour winds piled the snow into large drifts. Children struggled to get home from school and worried parents struggled to find their little ones. The calls of the parents and the cries of the children were lost in the roar of the blizzard.
By the next morning, more than a hundred children lay dead and frozen across the prairie. Small children were found cradled in the arms of older brothers and sisters. Many adults were also killed by the extreme cold and wind as they became lost. Many animals also perished in the extreme weather. Native Americans who had lived in the area suffered many casualties.
There was also a cruel aftermath to the blizzard. Funerals had to be put off due to the frozen ground; surgical operations to remove fingers, toes, feet and legs that had suffered from frostbite were performed;, and lingering deaths due to disease were caused by the exposure to the cold. The storm came with no warning, unlike today where we have constant weather information days if not weeks in advance.
Two months after the prairie blizzard, the Army Signal Corps botched another even deadlier blizzard when on March 12, 1888, more than 400 people were killed in the city of New York. In those days, the Signal Corps offices were closed on Sunday. The storm came without warning and the heavy rain that was falling quickly changed to heavy snow with 21 inches in the city and 40 inches in the outlying areas. Quickly falling temperatures, increasing winds and blinding snow piled up in massive drifts, downing telegraph wires, poles and bringing to a quick halt all trains in and out of the city. With no power, America鈥檚 largest city was paralyzed and would be for days.
Out of the storm came some changes. Signal Corps offices would be open seven days a week and telegraph lines would go underground. In 1889, weather responsibility was moved to the Department of Agriculture and called the Weather Bureau. Today, it is the National Weather Service and is part of NOAA.
A thousand storms of dust and ice, and poverty and despair have come and gone since the Children鈥檚 Blizzard of 1888, but this is the one remembered. After that day, the sky never looked the same.
The Internet has a lot of information about the blizzards of Jan, 12, 1888 and March 12, 1888 and he book by David Laskin, 鈥淭he Children鈥檚 Blizzard is also very interesting.