History shows us it’s not nearly as cold out as we think
In these long, brutal days of winter, when it’s so cold that you need jumper cables just to get out of bed, it’s hard not to curse the weather.
But at least we’re not finding frozen bodies.
In this respect, it helps to look at old newspapers for a proper perspective.
In the winter of 1930-31, for example, Colorado was socked with at least two big storms. The Rocky Mountain News carried a roundup of 16 snow- related fatalities in its March 29, 1931, edition:
“Following is (an excerpt of) a list of the known deaths resulting from storms in Colorado during the last five months:
“John Evans, 80, rancher, found frozen a short distance from his home in the Black Forest.
“Miguel Sebata, sheepherder, found frozen near Thatcher.
“Luis Gomez, a beet tender, found frozen near his home near Ovid.
“Theodore Sanchez, sheepherder, found frozen in his camp 23 miles northeast of Trinidad.”
And 119 years ago this week, a blizzard of near-mythic proportions swept through the country’s midsection, dropping temperatures in Denver to 18 degrees below zero.
The blizzard of 1888 blew in from Canada on the almost-balmy morning of Jan. 12. It killed as many as 500 people and came to be called the Children’s Blizzard because so many rural children were lost in it on their way home from school, especially in Nebraska and the Dakotas. In Denver, temperatures plunged and the wind reached 60 mph, but there was little snow, according to a front-page account in the Denver Evening Times of Jan. 14, 1888, which began:
“Instead of finding the streets knee deep in snow this morning when they left their beds, people were surprised to find but a mere handful of that poetical substance on the ground, and instead the mercury trying its best to disappear from sight, under the heroic influence of a genuine . . . norther. Furnaces and stoves and open-grate fires failed to impart comfortable warmth to houses.”
But the storm story that haunts me – the one I replay in my head when I’m safe and snug under my flannel sheets and can’t fall asleep – is the Towner bus tragedy.
In the frigid winter of 1931, a March blizzard trapped 20 children on a school bus between the rural Colorado towns of Holly and Towner, near the Kansas border. Five children died from exposure, as did the bus driver, Carl Miller.
The makeshift bus, a 1929 Chevy truck with a homemade wooden topper on the back and two wooden benches inside, had no heater. Two of the back windows were broken and patched with cardboard.
Miller was taking the children home when the gray skies turned so white he couldn’t see the hood. The bus hit a ditch and became wedged. Snow poured through one window. Miller couldn’t get the engine to turn over again. He started a fire in the lid of a milk can, but the damp textbooks and benches were poor fuel.
The temperature dipped to 20 below zero, and 70-mph winds persisted.
Miller tried to keep the children moving to prevent hypothermia, but a 13-year-old girl froze to death after 24 hours on the bus. Like many of the children, she wore no coat that day.
Desperate, Miller struck out on foot. Searchers later found his frozen body in a field.
“His hands torn from clinging to barbed wire fences to guide his way, his hat and overcoat gone, and his suit coat unbuttoned, the body of Carl Miller, driver of the ill-fated Towner school bus, was found lying in a field three miles from where he had started to go for help,” the Rocky Mountain News reported.
The remaining children would see a second and then a third classmate expire before rescuers finally arrived, 33 grueling hours after the bus had plunged into the ditch. Two more children succumbed after the rescue.
The tragic tale is told in Children of the Storm: The True Story of the Pleasant Hill School Bus Tragedy, by Ariana Harner and Clark Secrest.
You can’t read the book and news accounts of the time without asking yourself:
What would I have done in driver Miller’s position? Would I have left the bus as he did? Could I have found a nearby hay mound or barn or similar shelter? Could I have found a way to keep the children warm enough to survive? Could I have withstood the ordeal mentally, or would I have gone mad?
It’s fodder for a cold winter’s night – history to help put things in perspective when back-to-back storms, rutted streets and uncollected garbage start to wear us down.
