The Children's Blizzard

It was the age of confidence. Arrogance was epidemic.

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

hot and dry early that year, and by the Fourth of July the grass was parched and brown and stubby. The young Teddy Roosevelt, traveling through the north part of Dakota Territory on the way to his ranches near Medora, told a newspaper reporter in mid-July that “Between the drouth, the

The ambitious and restless, the poor and desperate, the gullible, the land hungry, the exile from oppression, the start-over dreamer, the Go West! hothead, the get-rich-quick drifter--all were spellbound by the mystique of Dakota in the 1880s.

Or should one condemn an economic system that gave some families mansions on Summit Avenue and left others so poor that they would risk their children and their own lives for the sake of a single cow? They called it “The School Children’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were so young—but in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children’s disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for.

The Minnesota State Weather observer at Pine River Dam recorded a minimum temperature of 46 below on December 29; observers at Pokegama Falls and Leech Lake Dam were unable to take temperature readings that day because the mercury inside their government-issued thermometers froze solid. It's hard to find vocabulary for weather this cold. The senses first become sharp and then dulled. Objects etch themselves with hyperclarity on the dense air, but it's hard to keep your eyes open to look at them steadily. When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast from 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs of your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens. If the wind is calm and your body, head, and hands are covered, you feel preternaturally alert and focused. At first. A dozen paces from the door, your throat begins to feel raw, your lips dry and crack, tears sting the corners of your eyes. The cold becomes at once a knife and, paradoxically, a flame, cutting and scorching exposed skin.