National Park After Dark - The Schoolhouse Blizzard: Homestead National Historical Park

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

On January 12th, 1888 during an unusually mild winter day, a sudden and deadly storm descended onto the American Midwest. Hurricane force winds, blinding snow and plummeting temperatures caught hundreds completely off guard. The historic storm was nicknamed the Children’s Blizzard or the Schoolhouse Blizzard as many of the victims were children attempting to find their way home through the storm from their one-room schoolhouses. While hundreds perished, stories of brave teachers and students alike emerged in the aftermath. COME SEE US ON TOUR - LIMITED TICKETS LEFT! For a full list of our sources, visit npadpodcast.com/episodes For the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials: Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdark Support the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to this week’s partners! 3DayBlinds: For their buy 1 get 1 50% off deal, head to 3DayBlinds.com/NPADBlueland: Get 15% off your first order at Blueland dot com slashNPADAquaOmega: One of the highest-dose omega-3 supplements per serving, no fish burps, and for every bottle sold, removes 1 lb. of plastic and debris from the ocean and coastlines. Usecode NPAD for 20% off at http://myaquaomega.com/NPADCash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/zf2267at #CashAppPodKeeper: Get 60% off personal and family plans at http://Keepersecurity.com/npad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The winter of 1888 had been so cold in Nebraska that Edda Shattuck was out of a job. Edda was 20 years old and supported herself and her parents as a teacher, working at a country school for $25 a month. Most of her students, aged 6 to 16, came from homesteader families. But after weeks of sub-freezing temperatures, parents were afraid to send their kids to school. Some kids walked a mile or more to the schoolhouse each morning. what if they got frostbite or hypothermia? So, Eda decided to close the school for the winter. Now, all that was left was to pick up her last paycheck.

Ironically, as she walked to collect her wages, it was beautiful outside. It was almost 40 degrees warmer than the day before. The nicest day Eda had seen in weeks, with blue skies and a warm winter breeze. As she walked, she thought of the train ride home to see her parents. A devout Methodist, she likely sang hymns as she would. she went and thanked God for the sunshine. Until suddenly, in the distance, a towering wall of clouds appeared. There had been no warning of a storm, but there it was, turbulent white clouds from the heavens to the ground that seemed to swallow the horizon as it went. Trees and houses vanished as it

approached, and it was moving fast. Only a few minutes after it first appeared, the storm rolled over at a. First was the sound, a deafening roar like a hurricane. Temperatures, plummeted 20 degrees in an instant. 60-mile-an-hour winds whipped snow like frozen sand, thick enough to blot out the sun and fast enough to blind Edda as she stumbled to get her bearings. Edda knew she wasn't far from the nearest home, but she couldn't see anything at all. With no better plan, she felt her way along a pasture fence, believing it would lead her to safety, but with each step, the cold seared itself onto her skin.

She had been holding her hands up to shield her eyes from the wind, and they'd long since gone numb. She couldn't stop shivering, couldn't think straight, and couldn't breathe deeply without inhaling snow. Edda was exhausted, and after walking for what felt like miles, she left the safety of the fence post behind. She prayed as she walked, trusting God would lead her to shelter, until out of the violent storm appeared a hay pile. with desperate frozen hands at a carved a hole in the hay and lowered herself in, sheltered somewhat from the wind. As the storm raged on at a shivered, sang hymns, and prayed that she would live to see morning. Welcome to National Park After Dark. Hello everyone, I'm Cassie.

I'm Danielle. Welcome back to our show. We're talking about weather today. Yeah, winter. I'm not ready. It's only September. I know, sorry. I'm clinging on to summer, even though it's really not anymore. Just a few days left. Just a few precious days left. Well, the reason I'm doing this story isn't because of the seasons or anything like that,

but because I was scrolling on our map on the website the other day, the interactive map with all of our episode locations. And there's just a blinding. blank spot in the middle of the United States. Like, we can't do this. We can't have this any longer. No, I can't stand for it any longer. So we're going to be doing a story that takes place not in one specific location, but rather

a swath of area, but primarily it unfolded for this particular story today in Nebraska and the Dakota territory, which was in the 1800s present day, north and South Dakota. So, yeah, I figured we got to show them some love over there. So I'm going to tell a terrible story. Amazing. I love terrible stories. Yes. And I forget what episode I said this in. That I was like, oh, when I reference a book, I want to have it like on a little stand next to me. So I did that. Oh, cute. For this episode. Well, this episode today primarily was I used the book, the Children's Blizzard by D.E. David Laskin. And let me just say, if you love the weather, if you want to know everything there is to know about weather and how weather works and the history of the weather service, and all of that,

this is the book for you. Good to know. So it's not just a straight up like survival story. That's definitely in there. But there's a lot of history in here and a lot to do with the Homestead Act and how people got to this area of the country and how weather works. I'm not putting it down. I'm just saying be prepared mentally. Good to know. But before we begin, just another quick reminder, we are going on tour. You sure are.

It's happening very soon in the next couple weeks to grab your tickets. We are going on tour in October and early November. We're hopping around to a lot of cities. We'll be in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and that's it. And that's it. So come see us. Come C.S.

Okay. Well, to get into it, put you on the spot real quick. No, don't ask me a question. Are you asking me a question? Yeah, I am. Don't ask me. Is this trivia? It's not trivia.

It's more of just like a general, I'm just trying to see where you stand with your foundational knowledge. Because what you know about the Homestead Act of 18th century. I don't know much about it. I'll tell you that. Okay. Me neither. So, or at least I didn't, but let me tell you, I sure do now. And it's, uh, I don't want to like get too into the weeds of it because it's super complicated, but it's pretty pertinent to the story and it's going to serve as foundational knowledge to understand why the people were present where they were when this storm occurred. So we need to all learn about the Homestead Act of 1862 real quick.

Okay. Okay. And we'll get two more thrilling parts of the story. So 20 years before this storm hit, the Homestead Act started transforming the American West. Man or woman, black or white, immigrant or American, the U.S. government would give you 160 acres of land to call your own so long as you promised to work the land for at least five years. If you wanted to secure your future, this offered better. odds than a gold rush at a better price per acre than you could find anywhere else in the world.

It was a pretty sweet deal for some, aside from, you know, the whole glaring fact that it drove the widespread displacement and dispossession of indigenous people by transferring millions of acres of their lands to non-native settlers. So it's like was heralded as this amazing opportunity for millions of people. But on the, as a direct result, of kicking out and murdering millions of indigenous people to free up that land. Yeah, it's like, yeah, we have this land for you. And then it's like, surprise, someone already lives here. Yeah, but don't worry, we'll get rid of them.

So I just needed to make that little point because it didn't come out of nowhere. But that Sweet Deal energy was certainly the argument that railroad companies were hawking to people in different parts of the country. and around the world, advertising it in pamphlets and newspaper ads, basically saying, move west and find your fortune. Settle in the Dakotas, in Nebraska, in Montana, the soil is rich for farming, the air is good for your health, and the land is free for the taking. Never mind that the railroads would turn a tidy profit from all of this, as they owned plenty to sell to these new settlers. And they were pretty successful. By 1900, over 200 million acres across the Great Plains were sold, plowed, and turned into farmland, an area twice the size of California.

And railroads didn't stop advertising this free land to people on the East Coast. They placed ads in newspapers across Europe, including Germany, Norway, and Ukraine. No matter what you struggled with in your homeland, you could have a farm for free in America, a promise that was irresistible to people who were struggling. Norway was stricken with poverty at the time. After farmland had been divided between children and grandchildren over generations, the plots that were left were too small to feed a family. One couple, Ole and Grace Roelag, struggled to make ends meet, and old faced mandatory service in the military. Ultimately, like many Norwegians, they figured they would have a brighter future in America, and they ended up selling a beloved family library collection to

buy a boat ticket. Then there were Anna and Johann Kaufman. They were Swiss-German Menonites, whose ancestors had been driven from their homelands and settled in Ukraine, after the Russian monarchy promised their people religious freedom. Anna's father was a preacher, promoting their beliefs each week to their tight-knit community. However, in 1870, a new czar revoked the rights of Mennonites to own land and practice their religion. So it wasn't an easy decision for this family, especially because Anna and Johan had buried their first son the previous year. And the thought of leaving his grave was pretty torturous.

didn't want to leave, but nonetheless, they sold everything for a chance to start over in the United States, moving with actually their entire community who thought that this was, you know, a shiny, sparkly opportunity that they couldn't give up, especially when being essentially forced out of their home. Right. There are hundreds of stories just like this, describing the reasons immigrants had for leaving and many more stories of hardship from their travels. Oll and Grace Rolag on their journey from Norway were put in damp storage quarters of a small ship across the Atlantic with no ventilation and plenty of lice.

At one point, a storm left the ship stranded at sea for two days before finally limping along to New York, but they were among the lucky ones. During Anna and Johan's crossing, amidst constant storms and close quarters, their baby Peter fell ill and died and they were forced to bury him at sea. other immigrant ships reported staggering death rates. On one ship from Norway, 22 kids and one adult died. Some mothers actually hid their children's deaths on board so that they could bury their child properly on land because they were so afraid of having to bury them at sea. That's really sad. Yeah, it's heartbreaking, especially when you're just, I got the feeling from reading in

this book and other sources that while there were just, you're just, you're just, I got the feeling from reading in this book and other sources that while there were definitely some people who were very excited at this opportunity, by and large, it felt like a really difficult decision and one that they felt between a rock and a hard place to make. So it's already not under the best of conditions. And now they're just going through it in all the worst ways. So once in America, people were funneled through immigration offices at Castle Gardens, which was actually the precursor to Ellis island. A loud, crowded place full of scummy salesmen seeking to take advantage of newcomers, language barriers, and confusion. Six-year-old John Reese had traveled with his family from Norway,

only to be separated from them once in New York. An immigrant officer nearly put him on a ship bound to England before he was reunited with his family. A pregnant Finnish woman who went into labor as her ship arrived was rushed to the hospital and in the confusion, her two-year-old daughter and all of their luggage were left behind and sent back to Europe. So it's just a mess. Like, there's no awful. Yeah. All of your belongings, you just entered a new country, and it's like, just send me back home.

I hate it here. But despite all of this, countless families persevered, chasing the promise of a new future and a farm of their own. They settled across the Great Plains, southwest Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakota territory. For many, it was the first place they would live where no one could see anything on the horizon, no distant mountains, no Norwegian fjords, and in most places, not even trees rose from the hills. So they're just in a completely new environment, new country, new language. You're going from fjords to prairie. Yeah, just like, total shock in all senses of the word. And the tree thing in particular is more than an aesthetic shock or issue.

If you know, that's what you're used to when you find beauty in it, it goes beyond that because it posed its own problem for without wood or the money to buy lumber, how do you build a house? It's like, welcome. Very important question. Here's your free land. Go prosper. Build and prosper.

And it's like, with what? We have no money and there's no. materials here to source from. Sod houses. Yes. We're going to get into sod houses. That's what I built in fourth grade. I built a sod house.

Like a not a real sod house. It was just a tiny replica of a sod house. But yeah. Were you doing a unit on the Homestead Act of 1862? Probably. I don't remember. I've never once come across a sod house in my education, so I'm surprised by that.

After they arrived in Rock County, Minnesota, old Roelagg spent their first summer building a frontier staple. A sod house. A sod house. By plowing up dirt, which... Do I know everything? I think you might. I think...

I'm sorry, get to you. Just hold that sod house win close to the heart from now on. You've got to take them when you get them, you know? Truly, yeah. I've been down. I was down with wrist. Tintin. Now I'm back up. You're back up. I'm back, baby.

Well, by plowing up dirt, which held together well thanks to the long roots of prairie grass, sod could be built into small homes, nicknamed soddies. With packed dirt floors and mud-caked walls, they weren't much to look at. The roofs were known to leak with rain, bugs, or even snakes, but they could keep you warm throughout the winter. And they said about planting crops. Weat, barley, potatoes, and corn, among other things, but they quickly learned that the railroad's promises of beautiful weather were far from honest. Rain was no guarantee and countless lost their harvests to prairie fires and swarms of grasshoppers. But worst of all was the winter.

Many did not own and could not afford enough warm layers. And it was a grueling task to keep a wood stove burning when there was no wood to chop. For many homesteaders, their only choice. was to braid strands of hay together by hand and feed them into the stove for hours. The winter of 1888 had been cold. It fell 40 degrees below zero in December, cold enough to freeze the mercury in old thermometers. And for two weeks after Christmas, that cold stayed put. Families were forced to stay inside twisting hay to stay warm, leaving only to feed their livestock. As it progressed, school teachers like Edda decided between cancer,

canceling classes or canceling school until spring when the weather warmed. And then suddenly, on January 12th, the cold freeze snapped. Temperatures rose to around 40 degrees. So that may not sound warm, but after weeks of sub-zero temperatures, it felt balmy. And like the first beautiful day of spring, everyone rushed outside. Farmers hurried to tackle chores they had put off during the cold. family set off on foot or buy horseback to nearby towns to buy supplies, children walked to school for the first time in weeks, and with this welcome break from the icy weather, few bothered to bring their warmest clothes. That morning, Sergeant Samuel Glenn was hung over. His doctor had prescribed him something for a nagging illness, but the medication was mostly alcohol and he had taken it on an empty stomach. But in time, he put on his coat and went out to measure the weather. Glenn worked for the Signal Corps, essentially the first version of the National Weather Service that was run by the U.S. Army.

Over 100 stations across the country took five daily weather observations, measuring temperature, air pressure, and wind speed, among other things. Glenn's station was in the town of Huron on the eastern side of present-day South Dakota, and he was good at his job. In the seven years since he took the position, he had overseen more than 100,000 observations at this station. He had seen it all. High winds, heavy snow, extreme cold. He thought he had seen everything. On that warm January day, Glenn checked his barometers and found incredibly low air pressure readings, equivalent to the calm before a Category 3 hurricane. A storm was coming. Glenn rushed to the roof of his office eager to measure the wind speed when the storm arrived. He liked watching storms roll in. And as he reached the roof at 1140,

A.m., the air grew still, almost eerily calm, before an ominous cloud rose in the distance. Within a minute, the storm slammed into Glenn's weather station. The wind nearly knocked him off his feet and off the roof, and snow as fine as sifted flower, blinded and choked Glenn as he fought to take measurements. Wind speed, 42 miles an hour and climbing, soon reached 60 miles an hour. Glenn, at first stoked to see this storm, rushed inside for safety. Weather on the Great Plains is severe. Without broad forests or mountain ranges, there's nothing to slow down strong winds. Blocked by the Rockies to the west, cold air from Canada and warm air from the Gulf collide across America's heartland,

leading to sudden storms, tornadoes, and extreme temperature changes. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of The Little House on the Prairie, wrote about this season, in a book called The Long Winter. Recent adaptations of her work depict the drudgery of braiding hay, how families would grind wheat and coffee mills to survive or nervously scan the horizon for a sooty cloud that could signal a coming storm.

But this storm was different. The massive wall of ice raced south from Canada at 70 miles an hour, big enough and fast enough to eventually reach Mexico. Wow. And if that wasn't frightening enough, It carried none of the normal warning signs of a storm that farmers looked for.

There was no green tinge to the sky or telltale clouds to see. Today, this is where the weather forecast would come in handy. And in 1888, there were people like Sergeant Glenn taking measurements, but the Signal Corps failed to send out a warning in time. As to why is long and convoluted, and if you want to know, more you can read the book. but long story short, it was a shit show. And they had earned a reputation for being corrupt and dysfunctional.

It was a mess. One of their forecasters would make up a whole week of observations, then spend the week fishing. Another extorted cash from local farmers in exchange for weather data. The supervisor in St. Paul was a diligent soldier type, but he had also been chastised by the DC office for issuing too many cold warnings. So perhaps maybe as a result of that reprimand, he might have downplayed Glenn's report from the Huron station because his initial prediction for the 12th had been mild weather because there wasn't any of the normal indications of the storm coming. And his rushed warning of the cold wave came too late arriving after the storm had hit. And despite having shortcomings and holes in the way that they operated, and there was definitely things that could have been done differently.

That's not to say that an early warning could have changed everything about what unfolded. Yeah. The Signal Corps sent their forecast by telegraph to railroad stations who hung flags out front if they warned of extreme cold. And on that warm, calm morning, most homesteaders were out tending to their farm for the first time in week. Across the Midwest, children went to school with smiles on their faces and left their thickest layers at home. If they didn't live directly next to a railroad, they wouldn't have seen these warning flags at all. So even if they did make it there. Yeah, they wouldn't. The chances are low that they would have seen it or come across someone who had seen it

with a message. Yeah. Long before Wi-Fi. That's right. But some people didn't need Wi-Fi or see flags because they had a bad feeling. They trusted their intuition. I don't know. I was just picturing mean girls when she like grabs her boobs and she's like, there's a 10% chance. It's already raining. It's already raining. That's the earliest weather singling service. I'm not what all these people are doing. They're like, yeah, some of them had a very ominous premonition type feeling. I feel like that's super common with any type of natural disasters or just big events where a lot of people are involved.

I feel like there's always a group of people in that that couldn't, like, they didn't have, they're not psychic and like knew that something bad was going to happen, but there were something in them that, in intuition that was warning them. there were warning bells going off that in retrospect later you're like, wait a second, I knew something bad was going to happen and I didn't even realize it. Yeah, it's like you can't pinpoint exactly what's going to happen because I think a lot of times people voice that concern or worry and somebody will ask, okay, well, what is it? And it's like, I don't know.

I just know broadly and generally it, the vibes are off. Something's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. John Butchmiller sent something off in the air and refused to let his daughter go to school. Maria Albrecht, one of the Mennonites who emigrated from Ukraine, tried to do the same with her two sons, begging them to stay at home, warning them that something felt wrong.

Her younger son listened and stayed, but her oldest son, Johann, went away. Despite the unsettling feelings, nobody could have ever truly known the horror that was heading their way. In the years after the storm, thousands of people who survived shared their accounts of that day. They told their stories to newspaper reporters, wrote it down in their diaries, or published it in memoirs.

So to understand the storm, we're going to focus on a few of them and their perspectives of what happened next. Walter Allen was a bright eight-year-old boy who lived with his family in what is now South Dakota. Walter loved school. He volunteered to help his classmates organize their shoes and coats and stored his prized possession in his desk, a beautiful glass perfume bottle.

In those days, students used boards of slate like an early chalkboard and needed to wipe it clear with water. So every student had little containers of water in their desks, but Walters was special. It had a little stopper that let him squirt a few controlled drops and he loved it. But at 10.30 that morning, the two-story schoolhouse Walter was in seemed to erupt. Wind, wind, sun slammed into the windows, rattling them so violently as the sun seemed to disappear, and cold air rushed in at every gap. As the storm raged on, the teachers had a difficult choice. They could stay in their schoolhouse, which offered some shelter, but they didn't have enough food or fuel for the stove to last very long. On the other hand, the storm had grown so fierce that they feared their

youngest students could not survive a trip to the nearest house if they elected to leave. In fact, they could hardly see through all of the snow, so they wondered if it was even possible to find their way to safety if they decided to leave the safety at the schoolhouse. Yet all of a sudden, five teams of horses appeared from the snow. Local parents and townsfolk anticipated the stranded students and braved the storm in the horse-drawn sleds to take everyone home. Young Walter eagerly gathered up his classmates' coats and distributed them before his class stepped outside. As the adults hoisted the students onto their sleds and counted to make sure they had everyone, the snow stung Walter's eyes and burned his cheeks. But then he remembered something, his perfume bottle. It still had water in it,

and if it froze, it would explode. So without thinking, Walter hopped off as the sled began to move and ran back into the schoolhouse. When he stepped back outside with his beloved bottle in his hand, the sleds were gone. Walter began to panic. He screamed out for help, but no one could hear him. He could barely hear himself over the roaring wind. He couldn't see anyone or anything. Whatever tracks the horses had just left were already gone. As he marched forward, hoping he was headed in the right direction, snow blew into his clothes and clogged his nostrils. Tears froze his eyelids together, shivering, stumbling, and blinded by ice, Walter eventually, collapsed in the snow and surrendered to sleep.

That same morning, nine-year-old Johnny Chambers was helping his dad Robert bring water to their cows. With their loyal Newfoundland dog, they were out in the fields when the weather began to take a turn. At first, Johnny's dad believed that they could wrap everything up quickly and just rush inside, beating the weather. Worse comes to worse, they thought their dog could lead them into the house if visibility decreased. But in moments, the world around them vanished. They could no longer see the house or even their barn. As they searched, Johnny was wrapped in his dad's jacket and vest for extra warmth, but neither had worn their thick overcoats that day. After what felt like an eternity, Robert Chambers accepted that they couldn't make it back to the farmhouse without help.

He burrowed a cavity in a snowdrift and had Johnny crawl inside of it. It was just big enough for the nine-year-old who watched his dad shout for anyone nearby. Their dog barked too, but no one could hear them. Hours later, Johnny noticed his dad starting to slow down, could feel how cold he was to the touch. He pleaded with his father to get up and look for the line of trees that they had planted near their home, but Robert refused. He would not leave his son alone in the snow. That morning, Maria Albrecht was filled with dread about the weather and begged her two sons to stay home from school. And like I said, her youngest decided to stay back, but her oldest Johan went to school. He was 13 and had made the walk dozens of times and saw nothing but the same

old rolling hills on the horizon that morning because this is happening before any weather is rolling in. It's just the bad vibe feeling. So he was kind of wondering, what is my mom all riled up about? Like, I have no idea what she's talking about. It's fine. It's like you're worrying too much. I'm going to school. And for what really? reason. Like, he was just kind of confused as to why. And there was also the fact that, um, Mr. Cotton, who was their school teacher, was renting a room in their family's house. And he had already gone off to school that day. So he was like, he already went. School's on. I don't understand what the problem is. Like everything's fine. I don't know what you're talking about. I'll see you

later. So he went. He goes off to school. But then at 11 a.m., the storm arrived. The roar of wind, rattle of the windows, snow blown in through each crack of the walls, and like it did elsewhere, the storm forced a decision. Do we stay here or do we go get help? Because in case it wasn't, I don't know if I made it clear before, this isn't happening in one schoolhouse. This is just schoolhouses around the region. This isn't one location. This is kind of in a big area. So he's not in the same schoolhouse that Walter was. Okay. That is helpful. Okay. So like what was unfolding where the storm forced a decision. Do we stay here or do we go off for help? Mr. Cotton was usually a strict teacher, forbidding students with German-born parents from speaking German in school.

But when Johan turned to Mr. Cotton, the teacher could only stare nervously at the windows and eventually asked the oldest among his students what to do. So he was hoping for some advice from the teenagers in the group. Sounds like he's freaking out internally. And he doesn't know what to do. And he doesn't know what to do. Yep, because he's the only adult here. And it's a scary-ass storm, you know. So he's like, like, what do you think we should do? And the students all agreed that they should stay put. That was their unanimous decision. And they reasoned that in the event of a blizzard, it was best to stay where they were. Even if they didn't have enough food or fuel, they could at least hold out into their fathers came to rescue them. They knew where they would be because they knew they were going to school.

They have shelter. Yes. Mr. Cotton, however, had made up his mind. He was convinced that the only way to survive was to leave the school and venture to the nearest house, roughly a quarter of a mile away. There, the teacher insisted they could wait out the storm in the warmth. But grudgingly, the students ventured outside. Hurricane force winds knocked them to the ground. And if you've ever jumped into frigid water, like if you've ever done a polar plunge type situation,

The description feels very reminiscent of that. So just kind of like this sudden shock, you get the breath knocked out of you. You can't take a deep inhalation. So it's all that, but you're also actively choking on snow because of the hurricane force winds that are being blown around you. Mr. Cotton's authority vanished in the wind, but it was too late to turn back. As they walked towards what they believed was the nearest house, Johan and four other students began to pull ahead of Mr. Cotton and their classmates. They weren't much faster, but they didn't need to be in this weather.

To the teacher, it was as if Johan was there one moment and gone the next, vanished into the snow. Mayhun, a teacher from the Dakotas, kept her students at school for four hours after the storm hit. She had seven students, and all of them lived almost a mile from the school, which was too far. And while there was a homestead much closer, about 150 yards away, it was on the other side of a ravine that was about five feet deep. And usually to cross it, it was pretty easy.

There was a little narrow bridge that you could use to traverse it. But with the conditions outside, if one of the kids fell off during the crossing, it was going to be bad news. And there was concern if they could even locate it because they couldn't see. Yeah, there's like a whiteout going on, a ravine. Yeah, the high winds. Not ideal conditions for kids to be traveling through. No.

Luckily for her, May's oldest student volunteered to find the crossing, an 18-year-old named Fred Weeks. While Fred was outside attempting to locate the bridge, May wrapped scarves around the feet of her youngest student, a girl named Addy, whose threadbare shoes offered little in the way of insulation. By the time they stepped outside, they had a plan. Everyone would follow Fred towards the bridge holding hands so that no one would get lost, which worked great until it didn't. Halfway across the bridge, Fred slipped and took the whole class with him into the ravine because they were all holding hands and connected in a line. With all the snow, the fall wasn't enough to hurt anyone on its own, but climbing out was really difficult.

Sweat froze on their skin and the scarves wrapped around little Addy's feet fell away. By the time they made it to the top, they should have been able to see the nearby house, but they couldn't see anything. And the students began to panic, pled for help, and began shivering uncontrollably. While May tried to calm them down, Fred tried to find the house. Finally, he located a bed of straw, and with no better option, the straw could serve as shelter, so Fred and his brother carved out a cave in the straw and the students lowered themselves in. They tried desperately to find the house, confident it wouldn't be too far from this straw pile. The girls tied a makeshift rope out of torn aprons and the boys walked in circles around the pile, shouting into the wind for help and hoping

to run into the house, but they found nothing. So eventually, May ordered all of the children to settle in for a long night in the straw pile. She called roll call every few minutes to keep everyone awake and alert and encouraged them to sing songs and share stories. Fred positioned himself at the mouth of the cave shielding the younger children with his back as the night set in as the wind chill reached negative 40 degrees. Oh my. Oh, that is so cold. Yeah.

I don't know if I've ever felt that level of cold before. I sure haven't. And especially, like, I know I've said it. I know I've said it a couple times now, but they're just so unprepared. They don't have layers. They don't have proper insulated shoes. You know, they just... It's not like a mountaineer who has all of the gear and is ready to face this kind of thing.

They're out there. They could be dressed for like a mild winter day. Yeah. It sounds like. Yep. And they're also kind of like celebrating like, oh, it's warm today, you know, quote unquote warm, you know? So I think they, it's just like really important to keep that in mind of how bad this situation is. Like, yeah, the storm is terrible, but also they just in no way perpetuating.

to face it. And I don't know how things were back then, obviously, but I know when I was a kid and it got cold out, I would kind of rebel on wearing clothes. Yeah. Your child, you're like, why do I need this for? I don't need a jacket. I'm fine. The jacket's ugly. I'm not wearing that. You know, and I used to do that all the time as a kid. And so I'm just imagining that maybe even some kids aren't prepared just because of like silly reasons like that. Yeah, it's just not a good situation. And of course it is difficult to convey just how extreme the storm was, but as a couple of more examples to paint the picture, there were people whose eyes had frozen shut from crying

and in efforts to pry them open had pulled their skin away with ice. That's so sad. Victims of severe hypothermia suffered from hallucinations. or stripped off their clothing, a well-known and poorly understood phenomenon called paradoxical undressing. Cattle died standing up from suffocation before they could even freeze after snow filled their nose and lungs. Several people died in their homes, unable to keep them warm enough, and those lucky enough to be home with plenty of fuel had to decide if it was worth leaving to try and help others or simply stay inside and save themselves.

Hour after hour, the storm raged into the night. Lois Royce, another teacher, was faced with the impossible, freeze at the schoolhouse, or make a run through the snow. She chose to run with her three students, two boys, age nine, and a six-year-old girl. But like others before them, they got lost. They couldn't find a schoolhouse, they couldn't find a straw pile, they couldn't dig a hole in the snow.

Instead, Lois laid down in the open prairie and placed herself between her students and the wind. She cradled them close, covered them with her cloak, and tried to shelter them from the cold, but it wasn't enough. First, it was the boys, one after the other. Silently, Lois felt them stop breathing and grow cold and still. The little girl begged her teacher for more blankets and cried out for her mother that she was cold. She died at sunrise. Left alone, Lois crawled a quarter of a mile on.

her hands and knees to the nearest house to find help. By the morning of January 13th, the worst of the blizzard had passed. It was still cold, but the fierce winds and blinding snow were gone. The night before, homesteaders with horse-drawn sleds had completed a brave rescue of the students from the nearby school. But as they unloaded the children, two parents discovered their son was missing, Walter Allen, the boy who had rushed inside to grab his coveted perfume bottle. But the adults were bewildered. They had counted everyone right before they had started moving.

So what had happened? Where could he have gone? Frantic and desperate, Walter's parents convinced the teams to turn around and to search for their boy. They searched the dark, frigid classrooms and found nothing. They searched around and found nothing even as the storm grew worse. Eventually, conditions force the rescuers to turn back empty-handed, but not everyone gave up. Walter's 18-year-old brother, Will, refused to stop searching for his little brother and slipped off the horse-drawn sled as it went back to town.

Like, they're like, oh, we did what we could. Like, we have to call it. And Will was just like, not on my watch. I'm going to find my brother. And now his parents have two missing sons. Yep. Will had noticed that when he was standing, the wind and snow seemed to be at his strongest. But when he got low to the ground, he could actually open his eyes a little bit,

almost like crawling under the storm. So he dropped to his hands and knees in the snow and began sifting through the drifts for his brother. Until somehow, by some miracle, he found him. After almost six hours in the cold, Walter was still breathing. With every ounce of strength in Will's body, he carried and dragged his younger brother

until they both made it home. When Walter regained consciousness warming by the stove, he had no memory of the rescue. For a while, he struggled to think think of anything as his skin erupted in pins and needles. As he warmed up, he noticed a strange sensation. Water running down the side of his leg. It was his perfume bottle, frozen, shattered, and melting in his pocket. When the sun rose on January 13th, a search party set out to find Johnny and Robert Chambers, the nine-year-old boy and his father who were outwatering their cattle

when the blizzard hit. The rescuers found the family's Newfoundland barking, standing guard over a snowdrift, and at first glance it looked like an unbroken pile of snow until a faint puff of breath emerged from within. Young Johnny was still alive and the warmth of his breath melted a hole for him to breathe from. But beside him, frozen in the snow was his father, Robert, who had died overnight. That morning at 4 a.m., the wind had begun to die down. From the mouth of a cave carved in a snow pile, a frozen and exhausted Fred Weeks saw stars overhead and spotted a farmhouse less than 100 feet away. With frozen hands and feet, the 18-year-old raced to the house and pounded on the door until the owner came out. The rescuer soon brought blankets and lanterns to pull May Hunt and her

remaining students from their makeshift cave. After 10 hours out in the temperatures as low as negative 40, it felt like a miracle. No one in her group died, and this was the group that fell from the ravine. And no one died because the result of Fred's heroism and May's roll calls through the night to keep everyone awake. But as they warmed by the stove, they realized they hadn't escaped unscathed. Fred had some significant frostbite, but that wasn't the biggest concern. Addie, the young girl whose feet May had tried to wrap with scarves, could not stand. It turned out that when they fell into the ravine, Addy scarves had come undone and her shoes filled with snow. When she was lowered into the straw pile, the snow melted and froze, bleeding heat from her feet into the ground all night.

More than frostbite, her feet had turned to solid ice. That sounds so painful. And she's just such a young child and it's just so awful. When Addie's father arrived, May Hunt broke down in tears for the first time. during the entire ordeal, blaming herself for Addy's condition and for everyone's suffering. Some stories took longer to resolve, like that of Johann Albrecht. The night of January 12th, 13-year-old Johan's teacher, Mr. Cotton, decided the best chance they had to survive was to make a run for it. They were aiming for the nearest home, less than a quarter mile from the school, but after setting

out into the wind, they got separated. Johan and four other students walked a little faster than their teacher and disappeared. Mr. Cotton and the remaining students found themselves utterly lost and completely missed the house that they were aiming for. But eventually, luckily, they ran into a row of trees. Turns out they were saplings in a row they knew would lead them back to the house. And they finally made it inside. Cotton expected 13-year-old Johan and his classmates to be waiting since they were ahead of his group. But they weren't there. It took two days to find their bodies poking out of the snow. The five boys had walked three miles from their school, and in their final moments, one of the boys wrapped his arms around his younger brother. They collapsed within 50 yards of a farmer's

home, and it was the farmer that found them by seeing a frozen hand poking out of the snow. Oh, that's so awful. And that's the son of the woman who had a bad feeling about that day. Oh my gosh. An estimated 250 to 500 people died in the blizzard in total. Sergeant Glenn, the weather observer who nearly got blown off the roof, estimated 20% of victims were children. And as it continued south, it decimated cattle herds, down telegram lines, ruined harvest on the Louisiana plantations, and the Colorado River even froze over in Texas. newspapers announced the storm with massive front-page headlines, like the dire storm and its frightful record, and many little children perish. At first, stories largely focused on victims and

deaths, babies frozen in their mother's arms, men dead at their own doorsteps, frostbite amputations were common, young Addie of May Hunt's class lost one foot and the toes on her other. Eventually, Midwest newspaper editors argued that this coverage painted the the plains in a bad light and even argued that the snow would bring great conditions for crops the next summer. So they're trying to spin it in a way that it's like, hey, we're getting bad press and we're trying to get people to live here. We can't be sharing. That's so insensitive. Oh, this will be great for next year's crops. Yeah. It's like, excuse me? So many people just died. but readers too were growing wary of reading about so much death,

especially of young children. Perhaps as a result, coverage of the storm shifted to feel-good stories and heroines. By far the most famous heroine of this chapter in history is Minnie Mae Freeman, a 19-year-old school teacher who led her students to safety. After the blizzard tore the entire roof off of her sod schoolhouse, she guided her pupils through the window and through the storm, to shelter. Newspapers reprinted Minnie's story and her picture, turning her into a celebrity across the nation. She received a gold watch and more than 80 different marriage proposals and

became the subject of sheet music so people wrote songs about her. There were wax figures made in her likeness and later memorials. Money was also raised for Lois Royce in the aftermath, the teacher who tried and failed to keep her young students warm overnight. She suffered severe frostbite in her feet, which needed to be amputated. Three days after the storm, an Irish farmer named Daniel Murphy walked out to his pasture. Most of his animals were killed by the cold, but the bull and a few horses he had left needed to eat. Murphy enlisted some help, as he would first need to dig his hay pile out from under the mountain of snow before he could use it. As they dug, they heard the rhythmic swish of the shovel

in the snow, and then the thump of it finally hitting the hay. But then from within the hay pile, they heard a faint voice asking, is that you, Mr. Murphy? Inside was Edda, the teacher that opened up this entire episode, the 20-year-old who was on her way to pick up her very last paycheck when the blizzard hit, and who had hid from the storm in a hay pile. She spent 72 hours in the hay without food without water and amidst the coldest weather any settler had seen in the area and had survived. Wow. Wow. That's insane. I was not expecting. I know she got lost in the sauce a little bit in everybody's stories. She did, but I figured she'd be just covered in snow and and perish and yeah. Didn't make it especially after all that time. That's amazing. I mean, what a bright light and such a

dark story. By the time the press caught wind of Edda's story, she'd traveled by train back to her parents' home and sewered Nebraska for medical treatment. Like Addie, her frostbite was too advanced to reverse, but she needed to have both legs amputated below the knee. The Omaha Bee launched a national fundraising campaign, which raised the modern equivalent of over $100,000 for her care. They reported on her bravery, her prayers, and at first of her promising recovery. But more than 20 days after the storm, she took a turn for the worse. Sepsis or pneumonia set in and proved fatal. On February 8th, Eta passed away, and her death triggered widespread grief.

Omaha's government donated an expensive casket, journalists paid for an enormous floral display, and a pastor delivered a moving sermon to a gathered crowd at the funeral. It was a grand send-off and thousands of people attended her services. But most funerals for storm victims were not so grand. The parents of Johann Albrecht and the four other boys who froze that day struggled to bury them at all. They had frozen and contorted shapes that made it hard for them to fit inside caskets. And those who couldn't afford a proper casket made ones from scrapwood and boards that they could spare from their barns. And even if you

did have a casket, that didn't mean that you could dig a grave because the ground was so frozen, it could take weeks to dig one out, and it would often immediately fill with snow. For those that survived, the storm left a lasting mark. For one thing, the failures of the Signal Corps to send out a proper warning spelled the end of the military weather service, a job that was transferred to a brand new agency, which is now the National Weather Service. Author David Laskin also argues the storm marked the end of the homesteading boom in the Dakotas. The lofty promises that railroads made about the free land and the rich farmland were pretty out of touch compared to the harsh reality of life on the plains. And this disaster made that plain to see in the national news.

Many families chose to leave after the storm, moving somewhere warmer or less extreme. For those who stayed, January 12, 1888 was burned in. the cultural landscape. Every family had a blizzard story, and some of them, thankfully, had happy endings. Fred Weeks, who'd put himself in harm's way to save his classmates and teacher, made a full recovery from his frostbite. Addy Kinurham, the young girl in the same class who lost a foot and five of her toes to frostbite, received financial support for a wooden prosthetic. With a new foot, she could once again walk unassisted. Walter Allen, the young boy with the perfume bottle who would have died if it weren't for his brother, lived to age 93, working as the director

of Dakota Farmer Magazine. Oh, amazing. What has gone down in history as the schoolhouse blizzard or the children's blizzard is still considered one of the worst blizzards in the history of the area. While it did snow heavily in some areas and large snowdrifts were present, the total accumulations were actually relatively light. Like I think when we think of the word blizzard, We think of just towering snowfall and just like digging yourself out of these big snow piles that the snow just keeps dumping down.

But the snowfall was pretty light, generally measuring between four and 12 inches and some places only had an inch of actual snowfall. Oh, wow. I was definitely picturing way more snow here. No. So what's happening is, or the reason why it was just. so devastating was a combination of things. It was the combination of the plummeting temperature in some areas. It plummeted 100 degrees in the span of a couple hours. That's insane. I didn't even know that could happen. Yes. Right. So it's that number one. Then, of course,

there's the hurricane force winds. There's little to no visibility. And there are snow drifts accumulating because of this whipping wind from the snow that was already on the ground and the amount of snowfall that was coming down. But of course, there was also no warning. They were completely caught off guard. And interestingly, if you are to Google the blizzard of 1888, you need to be a little more specific in your search because you will likely see images of not this storm, but another massive blizzard that occurred on the east coast of this very same year. Known as the Great White Hurricane, that storm was also severe and deadly. Occurring in March of 1888, it paralyzed much of the country from Chesapeake Bay to Maine and killed more than 400 people.

Wow. And that one, you'll see that accumulated a lot of snow. So there's a lot of historic images if you type in blizzard of 1888 without being. specific like January of 1888, you're going to see a lot of these big, the pictures of huge snow piles and people digging themselves out of it. I'll always remember when in New England we had the ice storm. And I forget what year it was. I want to say like 2008. I was just going to say 2008. It wasn't 2009 for sure. It was either 07 or 08. Yeah. In that ice storm, people who remember will remember because it was insane. We didn't get a lot of know, it was just so much ice that all the power lines went out and you couldn't drive because

the roads were insane and everything was absolutely frozen so things didn't work and people went without power for weeks. Yeah, everything was entombed and encased in ice. I remember our house. We did not, we were actually one of the lucky ones because we were only without power for I think four or five days, but we were lucky because we were of our like family and friends that were close by. We were one of the only ones who had a wood stove. And so we would have people who were staying at our house because we could heat our house. And we would literally make dinners on our wood stove because we had an electric oven and a lot of people had electric heat. But we would literally make like big dishes of pasta on top of the wood stove and had people staying for days

because some people literally were there for weeks because of it. Yeah. Yeah, right here. So apparently there's two. But the one we're referencing is December. It said dates, I don't know how specific the dates are, but it says between just maybe it began December 11th and 12th of 2008. Oh yeah, it probably lasted that long. Oh, yeah, I guess it was around Christmas.

Happy 18th birthday, Danielle. You're trapped inside with no power for weeks. Hope you had a great time. Yeah, it's like December 10th, I hope you lifted up because, yeah. No, I do remember that. It was, and even as New Englanders who are prepared for harsh winters, this was in another category. Yeah, we're not prepared to not have election. And to be trapped in our homes. I do know a lot of us stocked up on food because we did have the weather warnings where people were stocking up. But no one was prepared for how long we would be stuck in our homes. We didn't even have school or anything. No. No. We were just stuck home. I just remember looking at my window and every branch of every tree was like touching the ground because it was just everything was so heavy and waded down by the ice.

It just looked like apocalyptic. I've never had seen anything that severe before. So, yeah, it's burned in my memory. So if you would like to learn more about the history of the schoolhouse blizzard, perhaps maybe how the Signal Corps became the National Weather Service and all of those nitty gritty details, of course, there's this book. But there's a park because this is National Park After Dark. Ah, we get the connection now.

So here's the connection. Located in Beatrice, Nebraska, the homestead National Historical Park sits directly in the path of the blizzard. And it has as part of the National Historical Park, a one-room schoolhouse called the Freeman School, which is not named after Minnie Freeman, but it is a strange coincidence, I will say. The one-room schoolhouse survived this blizzard and was the longest running one-room schoolhouse in all of Nebraska, operating from 1872 to 1967. As I mentioned earlier, of course, my primary resource is this book, The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. But if you do want to read more with a different perspective,

there's a couple options for you. One is called In All It's Fury, because after the Blizzard, survivors formed a club, which continued to hold different annual reunions for survivors of the storm. and the club over the years collected stories from the survivors and published them into this book. So it was published a while ago in 1947, but it's a collection of firsthand accounts and experiences from the storm. So it's a cool alternative. But if you're like, yeah, this is interesting, but you didn't really sell me on the like the book angle of it's super detailed and maybe sometimes a slog at times, not saying that all the time.

but it's kind of a lot to get through. There's a historical fiction novel called The Children's Blizzard that has some high ratings online. So if you're wanting to read about it in kind of like a more relaxed way, less history-backed heavy way, Melanie Benjamin authored that book. So I didn't personally read it, but I would. And to close out, Sanford Huntley, a teacher, pastor, and homesteader living in the Dakota the territory who lived through the blizzard said of it, quote, we have been calling every storm a blizzard, but after January 12th, we decided that we have never had a blizzard before

and never wanted one again. And that is the story of the January 1888 children's blizzard. Wow. I had never heard of this one before. I have to say I have because my favorite murder covered this story years ago. So I was familiar with it, but... Yes. I was just in Nebraska, and I could have stopped here if I had known. Sorry. I should have told you. I was prepping it. Yep. So, yeah, I know that one was tough. Of course, hearing about the death of children is never easy, but it's just such a big, I mean, this crazy storm that... is record-breaking in so many different ways and so unique in the way that it unfolded and

happened. I was just kind of surprised it wasn't more common knowledge because it's probably because it's so historic at this point. There have been other storms that have kind of maybe took over the place of, you know, in people's minds. But yeah. So anywho, I don't have a palate cleanser. That's okay. Well, thanks for taking us to wintertime at the end of our summer. We're just preparing to be cold. Well, over the next few weeks here, I know we're in September, but we have started to brainstorm our October episodes and they're really fun. They are fun. They are creepy themed, but not in the way maybe you are thinking. Dun, done, done, done.

Spooky season is almost here. I don't have a ghost in sight in mine, which is startling in the episodes that I want to cover. Okay. I have a little bit of ghosts in sight for mine. Perfect. Perfect. Okay, well, thanks everyone. We will catch you next week.

In the meantime, enjoy the view. But watch you're back. Bye. Bye. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We hope you learn something new. another location to put on your list. If you want more MPAD content, make sure to follow along with our adventures on all socials at National Park After Dark. For more stories just like this one,

with the added bonus of exclusive content, you can join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. If you prefer to watch our episodes, head over to our YouTube channel. And if you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform.