Blizzard of 1888

Minnesota, the Dakota Territory and Nebraska bore the brunt of the Blizzard of 1888, but Colorado didn’t escape the paralyzing cold.

Denver newspaper accounts of the three-day deep freeze included snow-delayed trains, warnings to teachers to keep their pupils inside and pathetic one-paragraph accounts of farmers who froze to death, mainly in neighboring Nebraska.

The storm, which blew in from Canada on the almost-balmy morning of Jan. 12, came to be called the Children’s Blizzard because it ambushed so many rural children walking home from school.

It killed as many as 500 people, including an estimated 100 schoolchildren, and thousands of animals.

On Jan. 13, a front-page headline in the Denver Evening Times summarized it this way: “An Awful Blizzard – The Worst Storm of the Season in the North – Grown Men Lost in the Storm – Little Children Herded with Ropes – Terrible Degree of Cold.”

The story described temperatures of 47 degrees below zero in Fargo, Dakota Territory, and searches for schoolchildren in Huron.

Denver apparently saw little snow from the blizzard, but the low was 18 degrees below zero, with 60-mph wind.

“Downtown the streets were deserted except by those absolutely compelled to be around, and windows of business houses and stores bore thick, frozen coats of icy winter’s withering breath,” according to the Denver Evening Times.

North and east of Denver, many farm families weathered the blizzard in complete isolation.

In All Its Fury: A History of the Blizzard of January 12, 1888 includes dozens of firsthand accounts, including that of homesteader Thomas Ackland, who rode out the blizzard in his earthen dugout 10 miles southwest of Burlington.

Surviving on buffalo chips, bacon and a sack of flour, Ackland, then 21, wrote:

“That load of chips was my salvation, for they made good fuel. I had a small coal oil lamp and enough oil, also a couple of almanacs which I read and reread a good many times. Snow drifted in around the windows and this gave me drinking water.” After more than 48 sunless hours, a neighbor helped dig him out.

Jay Saxton, who grew up in Eaton, recalled: “Just as school let out for noon, on the day of the blizzard, it became very calm for about five minutes. Then the blizzard came with a rush, all at once, from the northwest. We could see no distance.

“The only fuel we had at the schoolhouse was some buffalo chips, so the teacher, Miss Sarah Hill, and the older boys agreed that the best thing to do was to go to our home, about three-quarters of a mile to the northwest. . . .

“The only way we could tell where the road was, was by the weeds sticking up through the snow on either side.”

Saxton’s older brother, William, who lived in Albion, Neb., at the time, was on his way to fill his sled with hay when the storm struck. He dug a hole in the haystack with his pitchfork and climbed in with his dog.

The dog eventually made his way home and led rescuers back to William, whose hands had frozen.

“The doctor had to take off parts of all my fingers,” William wrote.

But by most accounts, the most famous survival story was that of Miss Minnie Freeman. The 19-year-old teacher was huddled with her 16 charges in their one-room sod schoolhouse near Ord, in eastern Nebraska, when the storm blew off the door and the roof.

A story in the Jan. 18 Rocky Mountain News described what happened next:

“The time for prompt action had arrived, but the plucky teacher was equal to the emergency. She gathered her little brood together and, securing a coil of strong heavy twine, began with the largest ones and tied the children together by the arms, three abreast . . .

“Selecting her way carefully, the brave little girl led her charge, through snowdrifts and the blinding blizzard, and after a wearisome journey of three-quarters of a mile the little band reached the threshold of a farmhouse and were taken in.”

Freeman’s fame spread worldwide, resulting in a lifetime of celebrity and about 80 marriage proposals, author David Laskin writes in The Children’s Blizzard.

Such harrowing tales from the Blizzard of 1888 are worth revisiting, if only to remind us how little we really have to complain about weatherwise, even when January’s jaw-dropping heating bill hits.