Whiteout

A prairie schoolteacher experiences purest terror and loss during the tragic Children's Blizzard of 1888.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of familial loss, missing children, and children in peril. Listener discretion is advised.***

Transcript

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

The tragic winter storm of January 12, 1888, is one of the most infamous in the memory of the Great Plains and of America. Coming suddenly and with little warning, the 150,000-square-mile storm claimed hundreds of lives from the Dakota Territory down into Kansas, from  Minnesota to the Territory of Idaho – most of which consisted of small towns and rural homesteads in the wide and lonely prairieland.

Yet one of the strangest stories from that terrible day remains seldom told and largely forgotten – save among those few who dare to venture into darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Twenty-Five: Whiteout.

(Faint sounds of snow melting, fading out)

(Peaceful, emotive piano and strings music fades in)

NARRATOR

The bright sun of the rarely warm January day sends rivulets of melting snow and ice down the windowpanes of the little white one-room schoolhouse, and distracts the already distractable seven children from Miss Greene’s lesson. Alma Greene, patient and wise beyond her nineteen years, offers only the briefest of muted sighs at the disruption before closing the book in her hands – a biography of George Washington – and announces that they will all go outside to play for a quarter of an hour, taking the morning recess just a little early.

The eruption of general delight at this statement is so exuberant, Alma is unsure if the children hear her added condition that they must all remain on the small school grounds and within her sight.

Still, she cannot help but smile at this outpouring of youthful glee. Though not in truth so much older than her charges, the weight of hard years lies heavily on her heart, aging her prematurely. The early birthing-bed death of her mother, survived but a few hours by Alma’s youngest and unnamed brother, had left all of the “women’s work” of her father’s farmhouse – cooking, cleaning, washing, and caring for her two remaining brothers aged four and seven – solely in her hands at only eleven years old. Then there was the promise of a marriage never fulfilled, to Harold Beecher, whom she had adored since childhood and whose father owns the largest tract of farmland in the county – and the bitter disappointment and heartache when Harold instead married Lucy Halkin, Alma’s best friend from school. Following that were the long nights of studying and hoping, of distress that she would fail to pass her normal school examination and receive her teaching certificate.

And now there are the newer concerns, about her father’s racing heart and growing weakness, about her middle brother Adam’s darkening temper and his continuous indiscretions with girls and with drink.

Yet when Alma is with her students, all of these cares seem to melt away. She is reborn in their innocence, and the waning fires of her weatherbeaten soul are rekindled by the thought she is so blessed as to show them their path to knowledge and to self-improvement – an almost holy mission. And to see their smiles, their eyes brightened by joy or by wonder, to hear their young voices raised in exaltation – it is in these moments as if they were all her own little siblings and her own children, all at once, and her chest feels ready to burst with affection and with hope, as it has only otherwise ever felt in fleeting moments during an occasional rousing Sunday sermon in the Methodist church her family attends.

This is what she feels now, as she and the children ready themselves to go out into the melting snow and fresh mud, slipping on their galoshes and scarves, mittens and caps – at least, if they even brought such winter gear; the morning has been warm enough that some arrived at school without it. One of the girls, Etta Carlisle, begins to hum the tune of Adeste Fideles happily and absent-mindedly, though Christmas is behind them and even New Year’s is almost two weeks past.

For the next quarter of an hour, the children relish the warm midmorning, and Alma is lost in her peaceful vigil. As ever, there are a few schoolyard disagreements and disruptions, but nothing she cannot settle with a few gentle but firm words.

Alma does not know it, is not conceited enough to consider it, but she is the rare and excellent sort of teacher who is obeyed and respected out of admiration and love, by both the boys and the girls, from the seven-year-old first year student, Lois Vernier, to the hulking Neal Shaddock, a farm boy of fifteen.

Checking the Waltham pocket watch her father gifted her after she obtained her teaching certificate, she marks with slight regret that the time for play is over, and calls for them all back inside. As they shrug out of their coats and overclothes in the schoolhouse, which seems so much dimmer after being in full sunlight and reflective snow, Alma chances to notice that the fire in the little potbelly stove that provides all their heat and their midday meals of soup or stew has burnt low.

In a slightly chiding tone, she asks twelve-year-old William if he has forgotten his assigned task of tending the stove throughout the school day, and he ruefully confesses that he has. Eager to redeem himself in her eyes, William hurriedly fetches the old fruit crate filled with an assortment of fuel: dried cow chips, old newspapers, corn shucks and shelled cobs, and even an occasional bit of actual firewood. Before long, he has resuscitated the fire, and as he returns to his assigned seat, he informs Miss Greene that the crate is almost empty. Now it’s her turn to feel chagrined, remembering that he mentioned the same yesterday and that she had forgotten to refill the crate – like most of the items and supplies in the schoolhouse, it is furnished by her own effort or expense.

She gracefully admits her failure, and promises to bring more with her in the morning – an utter necessity, since even with the surprising warm spell, the thin-walled little building will become far too cold otherwise to hold classes.

With markedly dampening spirits, the children return to their lesson, listening as Alma reads aloud from John Marshall’s Life of Washington. Alma, for her part, pretends not to notice how many of her students gaze longingly outside, and is forgiving when they cannot answer the occasional quiz questions she peppers throughout her reading – while also encouraging them to pay more attention.

(Peaceful, emotive piano and strings music fades out)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After the nooning hour and its modest but nourishing fare of hambone and vegetable soup, they are settling into a lesson on arithmetic when little Lois calls her teacher’s attention to the sudden growing gloom outside. Peering through the small window beside her, Alma is alarmed to see that it is true – the sunny brightness of only a few hours prior has given way to an early twilight rapidly approaching full dark. Moving to get a different perspective, Alma sees that a looming wall of deep, frigid blue and purple cloud has gathered in the northwest, and seems to be rapidly descending upon them, blotting out the broad prairie in a rolling tide of ominous shadow. Glancing at her pocket watch, she confirms that it is not yet even two in the afternoon, far too early to be so dark outside. There is a nauseous fluttering between her heart and her stomach, a primal presage to the approach of something truly momentous and awful.

Outside, the wind rises, howling through the minutes gaps of the windows and driving the first few flurries of new snow. Within moments, the snow and wind has intensified so much that she can no longer see more than a few yards outside the window, and it feels like the temperature in the room has dropped almost twenty degrees within the space of five minutes.

Trying to quell the rising terror in her voice, Alma tells the children to put away their books and their writing boards, and to gather whatever winter clothing they have brought and put it on. The children obey, only William daring to ask if everything is alright.

Alma tries to say that it is, but finds that she cannot get the words out. When she tries, they come out as incoherent fragments of word and phrase, and she cannot tell whether it is her distaste for lying that causes this, or whether her suppressed fear is simply “finding the gap” and escaping, just as a corralled calf will when separated from its mother and sensing danger.

At last, she manages to answer that she must think. Gazing out into the intensifying swirl of snow, wind, and darkness, she asks William to stoke the stove once more. When he reminds her that there is almost nothing left in the kindling crate, she wants to scream, but instead she calmly tells him and Neal to break one of the chair and desks into small enough pieces to burn. William hesitates, but Neal sets to the task at once, happy as ever to demonstrate his prodigious strength. Already the large room has become uncomfortably chilly, and everyone sighs with relief as the two boys feed the wooden fragments into the stove-fire.

Shrugging into her own overclothes, Alma performs quick mental calculations, pursing her lips until they have disappeared at her conclusions. The farmhouse where she still lives with her father is only a little over a mile from the schoolhouse, since he himself granted to the county the lot where it was built, but she can now see only about a yard into the blue-white blizzard outside, and there are almost no landmarks between, only flat and treeless open prairie. Though the storm is worse than anything she has seen, worse even than the winter but a year prior that killed cattle all across the country, she knows this land and its weather, knows that to go outside in these conditions spells almost certain death. A soul could become lost only a matter of feet beyond their door, and wander blindly in the snow until they collapse from cold and exhaustion, dying perhaps within spitting distance of where they started, or perhaps many miles out of their way.

A particularly fierce gust of wind screams through the windows, rattling the glass violently in its panes. Even with the freshly fed blaze in the iron stove, the room is growing colder by the moment.

She tells the boys to break to more chairs and set them burning, to build the fire up big. Then she instructs the others to huddle together in the corner near the stove and most sheltered from the dreadful wind.

The children obey, quiet in the way that children only become when they are truly frightened. Lois, Alma notices, is crying, and rapidly wiping away her tears – perhaps because she is afraid that the others will see, or perhaps because she is afraid they will freeze upon her face.

Alma checks her watch. It has been only twenty minutes since the storm began. She looks around the room at the remaining furniture, the small collection of books. All of it, she knows, would burn and keep them from freezing to death – but for how long? And how can she know how long the storm will last, how deep the snow will pile, how many days or even weeks it might be before they might be able to leave this room, if they are snowed in?

Better to leave now, maybe, she muses, and get to a real house with real beds and enough food.

But then she wonders, a little ashamedly, if it isn’t in part her pride in the little schoolhouse that is urging her out into the unnatural night. The books and even much of the furniture came from her own meager belongings, or were things she bought on her paltry monthly salary especially for the school. To lose it all in a single day, she thinks, would be too cruel, like burning her aspirations and her cheerful memories themselves in the cast-iron potbelly.

Things can be replaced, lives cannot, she reminds herself. But even as she does so, she wonders again how long the stove-fire will sustain them, and how dire things might become in the following hours and days, and has to admit that there is risk in both staying and going.

And now, part of a recently read quote of Washington’s, given on the eve of the Battle of Long Island, surfaces in her mind: Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

Washington led grown men who had marched willingly to war, she tells herself, whereas her charges are but children caught by misfortune. Still, the words echo in her thoughts.

Outside, the wind shrieks and the driven snow grows ever deeper.

(Sounds of winter storm)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

It takes about another ten minutes for Miss Greene to reach a decision, but when she does, she feels suddenly lighter, instantly freed of that sickening sensation in her core. She does not know if that is right – she thinks perhaps she should be frightened and uneasy to make such a decision, with these precious, inchoate lives hanging in the balance – but nevertheless, the darkness and cold suddenly seem less immutable with her newfound resolution.

Her voice now clear and steady, she tells the children to form a line. She moves toward the cabinet behind her teacher’s desk and extracts a length of rope she brought to school in the spring, for the children to play tug-of-war. Measuring it with her eyes, she nods in satisfaction and fastens one end of the rope about her waist, then hands the rest of it down the line, telling the children to each wrap it around themselves, gently but securely, in turn. With this makeshift harness line, she explains, they can go out into the storm without danger of getting separated.

Speaking carefully and patiently, she tells them that she will lead them to her father’s home, where they will be safe until the storm passes, and improvises a system where every few yards she will stop and give the line three sharp tugs and wait for a similar response, as should each child do to the length of rope behind them, to ensure that everyone in present and alright. If there is any trouble, they should give two longer, sustained tugs, and Alma will feel her way back down the line to resolve the issue. Two tugs should also be given if there is no response from the person to one’s rear, she finishes, then asks if it is all understood.

The children nod, solemnly, and quiet, slow-witted Boyd asks if she thinks they can really make it in such awful weather.

Yes, she answers, though she can offer no justification for her new confidence.

At the door, she hesitates. Looking back, she asks for a final time if anyone has any questions. No one does. She opens the door and steps out into the blizzard.

The frigid gust is unlike anything she has ever known, and bites through her overclothes almost at once. Still, she walks forward, feeling her way around the school toward the wagon road. If she can find that, she reckons, she can follow it homeward. And while it is dangerous to venture forth, she reasons that she will look back on this moment with pride and gratitude once they are all safe and warm in the farmhouse kitchen.

Their progress is slow, would be even without her program of frequent stops and slow communication through the rope line. Still, it is only after what she guesses to be about ten spare minutes of blind groping and wandering through the snow that she finds the unmistakable deep twin ruts of the wagon trail. She follows its southward branch, leading in the direction of the farm, taking care not to lose it beneath the deepening blanket of obscurant snow. These pains further slow their progress, but are utterly necessary, and so she grits her teeth against the frustration and the soul-freezing wind, and continues on.

The world fades away around her, disintegrating into a blur of meaningless white and hostile shadow, a realm of primordial chaos in which no definite form may exist and wherein space and time are meaningless abstractions. All that is real is the deathly cold, the cold that steals all feeling in her hands and feet, that makes even moving an agony and an unimaginably burdensome task. As her thoughts become more and more disordered by the nebulous shifting of her environs, one of her final coherent considerations is that she thinks it must be at least thirty below and maybe more, a kind of frigidity she has never felt before.

She can see barely more than two feet before her, but the children still answer her tugs on the rope, with torturous pauses. Feeling too exhausted to keep moving, she leans forward, lets the wind push her on her way.

So it goes for a space, perhaps a few minutes, perhaps hours. Her sense of time is so corrupted by then, she cannot say. Then a light flashes in the swirling grey before her, disappears, returns, blossoms. And a few moments later, by its diffuse light, she can just make out the face of her father above it. He mouths something, but the words are lost in the snow and the wind. He draws closer, pulls her into an embrace with his free arm, and speaks into her ear: Alma, there you are, thank God in Heaven.

Tears, blessedly warm for but an instant before becoming stingingly cold, gather at the corner of her eyes, and she longs to simply close her eyes and let the relief of her father’s appearance wash over her. But instead, she speaks back to her father, telling him that she has the schoolchildren with her. When he asks where they are, she gestures to the rope around her waist, and he uselessly raises the lantern. Behind her, the rope disappears, taut, into the whiteout. But when Alma tugs, she has to wait only a few breaths before the answering three tugs come back to her.

Her father nods, seeming to understand, or at least accept that he does not need to know more in this instant. He gestures to a similar rope line tied about his own midriff, tells her that the other end is secured to the door of the farmhouse. Telling her to grip the rope around him, he promises to lead them all back to the house, but that he will need both his hands free – one to hold the lantern, the other to find the line and follow it back.

She shouts an acknowledgement, and they make their way forward. They pause less frequently now, but each time, the three reassuring tugs are returned to her. The darkness deepens, but the snow and the wind do not relent.

Then, at last, she spies the dim outline of the house, sees the glow of a candle through a window, then the face of her youngest brother Caleb looking out anxiously, awaiting their return.

Her father, reaching the door, unknots the line from the post and tugs on a second line, leading off further east – she realizes it must be Adam’s lead, and feels a surge of pride that in this hour of need, her wayward brother put aside his growing rebelliousness and helped their father search for her in the storm. And she feels a momentary prick of interest when she realizes that her father and her had devised the exact same signal, adapted to their differing situations and needs.

Moving toward the doorway, longing for the warmth and shelter inside, she is about to remark upon this coincidence when the line tied about her own waist goes suddenly slack. Stunned, she draws it in, and finds only about three feet of rope, cleanly severed at the other end.

She screams, and her father stares in mounting horror at the short length of rope in her hands. Then he wraps his arms around her, embracing her fiercely, and says into her ear that they will find the children, that he and the boys will search all night if they have to.

Alma clings to her father, at once grateful and despairing, caught between doubt and terror and a wisp of hope that flickers more timidly than the candlelight in the window.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Alma sits beside the stove, drinking hot coffee and wrapped in a blanket. Her feet are still numb, even after warming. Adam and her father, are outside, once again tied to a rope line, searching through the drifting snow in the bitter Arctic chill. The whiteout blizzard has by now mostly subsided, and she thinks bitterly that she was a fool to ever leave the schoolhouse, to expose the children to the dangers of the elements.

But then, she thinks, it was not the blizzard that took the children. What else it might be, she cannot guess, but she keeps revisiting those pauses, and the tactile communications sent through the rope, and knows that they must have made it almost to the door. Yet what could have befallen them so close to the house, and left no sign?

Caleb sits at the table near her, having fallen fast asleep in his chair somehow despite the apparent discomfort of that position. She is glad for his sleeping, glad that he cannot see her crying there, beside the stove, as if she were no older than poor, lost Lois Vernier.

She wonders if such late-night toil in the bitter weather might hasten her father’s decline, put too much strain on his ailing heart, and begins to rise with the intention of going out to aid in the search, but before she has fully gained her feet she is falling to the floor. Her lower legs are like stones, hard and insensate, and she knows then that they are badly frostbitten.

As far as she can tell, though, the fall has done her no further harm, only jostled her already frayed nerves. Caleb, roused by the sound of her fall, helps her back into her seat and fusses anxiously over her for a moment, until she tells him that she is fine.

Then they sit together in silence, and wait.

After many hours, Adam and their father return, their faces weary and grim. Their search has proven fruitless, and the ungodly cold and the dark and their dwindling reserves of kerosene for the lanterns forced them at last to concede defeat, knowing that if the children are still outside, they are likely already frozen.

By the morning, Alma is running a fever, and she sleeps fitfully throughout the day while her father and brothers tend to her as best they may. The roads and paths are thoroughly packed with snow and ice, and yet when she wakes briefly in the evening, the only doctor in the county is tending to her, clicking his tongue unhappily as he looks at her feet.

She remains awake only long enough to realize that either her father or her brother must have made the five-mile walk to the doctor’s house, despite the deep snow, and then darkness reclaims her.

When she wakes again, it is to find her father sitting at her bedside. He looks like he has aged ten years in a matter of days, worn and haggard, and there is deep sorrow behind his eyes and in his voice when he tells her that she will likely lose her feet.

Alma waves that away, unconcerned for the moment, and asks if there is news of the children.

The children, he says gravely, sounding weary beyond endurance, are all lost.

(Haunting strings and piano music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Alma does indeed lose her feet to frostbite and gangrene, and her weakened body almost does not survive their amputation. After that are long weeks of convalescence, waiting to learn more of her students’ fate, but after that final pronouncement of their loss, her father never again speaks of them, and only falls silent if she inquires.

She gathers that the subject troubles him deeply, in some obscure way she does not fully understand, and ceases to broach the matter with him.

Her brother Adam, who has neither touched drink nor looked askance at a girl since the blizzard, is only slightly more communicative. After much coaxing, he at last confides that some signs of the children were found, in the days afterward, here and there: a single mitten, a discarded cap, a scarf half frozen to the ground, its loose end flapping in the wind. There were likewise scraps of rope found along their general course, seemingly torn off bit by bit. But of the children themselves, not a single sighting ever came, even after a brief warm spell melted away much of the snow.

And during the long hours of her solitude, as the males of her household perform their daily labors while she is confined to her wheelchair within the house, she has much time to contemplate what these disparate fragments of information might imply.

From the distances at which these partial clues of passage where discovered, at least as described by Adam, the first of the children must have been taken no more than a quarter of a mile from the schoolhouse. The last, young William who had been closest behind her, seemed to have been taken within their very farmyard, yet not close enough to the house to explain the sudden slackness in the harness line behind her.

And she begins to think that someone, or something, must have stalked them through the storm, seizing the children one by one, and then following the rope and responding to the occasional signal sent through it in kind.

This, mad as it seems, is the only explanation that she can conceive. And it seems to her that no human would be able to perform such a bold and reckless act, themselves as much in peril as their prey in the deadly blizzard.

The unanswered question that troubles her most, more even than what that unseen stalker might have been, is whether its responding three tugs were given in mindless mimicry, or if there was intelligent intent behind them – if the thing deliberately posed as the very souls it stole away.

As winter turns to spring and spring to summer, she acclimates to the wheelchair, and begins to speak of someday returning to the classroom, which seems to pain her father. The tragedy of the storm and what came with it remains in her mind, but recedes little by little, and her thoughts begin to encompass once more the possibility of the future.

It is only during a dinner visit by their neighbors the McCormacks that she hears the rumor, carelessly uttered and soon regretted, of the other clue the searchers later found within the snow: a partial set of footprints, seeming like a man’s, but far too long and narrow and too sharp, somehow – fleshless, but not quite skeletal. And by the space between them, the stride must have been at least eight feet.

Still, time passes, and after her father’s heart finally gives out and he goes to his eternal rest, she does indeed return to teaching. Marriageable age fades behind her, but she feels no unhappiness at her continued singlehood, living under the dutiful care of her brother Caleb, who has grown into a tender-hearted young man. Every morning, he helps her into the democrat wagon and drives her the short way to the schoolhouse, then helps her down into her wheelchair and into the little building. The new pupils love her, just as the lost children once did – even knowing the awful tale of her tragic mistake during the blizzard of ’88.

And for the most part, Alma is happy. But sometimes when the wind rises sharply and moans across the windows, or when the snow falls thickly, she becomes lost in the darkest of ruminations, staring out into the wide plains that have swallowed so many lives without trace.

(Haunting wind sounds, eerie violin and piano music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]