The Long Winter

During the terrible winter of 1880 and 1881, which was immortalized in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter." Laura, both real and fictional, was going on fourteen. And the winter she wrote about was a real event.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson. I'm Holly Frying. This episode is
coming out on Christmas Day. We looked around for something

(00:22):
Christmas Eve to talk about. Past hosts have some great
ones in the archive. There's Who Was Good King WinCE's Loss,
There's the Christmas Truths. There's one on whether Oliver Cromwell
really canceled Christmas, and there's even one on Saturnalia. And
thanks to a request from listener Leanne and our earlier
episode this week on Laura Angles and Wilder, this year's

(00:43):
Christmas episode is about the terrible winter of eighteen eighty
and eight one, which was immortalized in Laura Angles Wilder's
The Long Winter. Laura, both real and fictional, was going
on fourteen and the winter that she wrote about was
a real event, and in the book, our first inkling
of how bad this winter was going to be is
while they're cutting hay in hot weather and Laura and

(01:06):
Pap find a muskrat house that has very thick walls,
and Paw says that this is a sign that a
very hard winter is to come. They keep on harvesting
the hay through September, and then they wake up on
October one to a really heavy frost. They rush to
get as much of the harvest in as they can,
and Pa goes to hunt, but he can't find any

(01:27):
geese or other birds anywhere. The first blizzard, that's the
first blizzard hits in October and it lasts for three
days and nights, which is bad enough to stop all
the trains. And on the fourth day they find several
cows outside so heartbreaking with their heads frozen to the
ground thanks to the ice that was formed by their

(01:48):
own breadth, with the moisture in their exhalation froze on them.
Pap saves them. So it's hard. It's so very sad. Uh.
Not long after that, in a depiction that is quite
problematic by today's standards, a Native American man tells a
bunch of folks at the store that a big winter
is coming with seven months of blizzards. His his physical

(02:11):
description and his use of language today people would say
are pretty heavily stereotyped. The Ingalls family moves into town
for the winter, where they hope they're going to have
a little bit of an easier time a bit, and
the blizzards do indeed continue for months and months, with
various alarming adventures and misadventures to go along. Uh. There's

(02:32):
frequent talk about whether the worst is over and when
the trains might be running again. The cover copy of
the book that Tracy used for a lot of this
research is shockingly merry his children having a snowball fight
on it. They're sledding. It looks like the jolliest, most
enjoyable and delightful time ever, But we know that it
was a little bit rougher than that. Um. In reality,

(02:54):
it's really quite oppressive. Coal and food were becoming increasingly
scarce as long as the train can't get through, and
for a while, even when the weather is good in
the story Uh and good enough for school, school is
canceled because they don't have enough coal to heat the building.
Some of the series most memorable tidbits happen during this
hard winter, like having to break the ice and the

(03:16):
water basin to wash their faces in the morning, carrying
flat irons upstairs to warm the beds, mob bringing frozen
washing in from the line, and Almonso, who was not
yet known as manly trying to hide his seed wheats
so that his brothers won't sell it to other people
who run out of food. And as things get worse,
the Engles family has to twist their hay into sticks

(03:38):
to burn. When they have nothing else for fuel, Almonzo
Wilder and Cap Garland make a heroic trip to buy
wheat for families that will otherwise starve. There's also the
thing that everyone mentioned to me when I said we
were doing a little house related episode, and that is
that they had to grind grain in the coffee mill
all day to make enough flour for dinner. This would

(04:00):
have made a flower that was not at all like
bread flower. It was more really more like a coarse
graham flower. And of course, as always happens during the
Northern Hemisphere, Christmas happens during winter. A few days before Christmas,
the mail actually comes through and everyone is overjoyed. The
family gets a letter from a reverend saying they should
expect a Christmas barrel from his church, and knowing that

(04:23):
the odds are long on that barrel actually arriving by Christmas,
they decided to save the church papers and youth companions
that have all come in the mail to open on
Christmas Day. The girls also start trying to figure out
how to get some actual presents. Once they tally up
all their money and go shopping, it turns out there's
really nothing to be bought. They do find some suspenders

(04:45):
for Pa, and Laura decides to give things she's already
knitted and embroidered for herself to her mom and sisters.
Grace also gets a toy, and Ma gets two cans
of oysters, which were basically the last of the provisions
at one of the stores she used to them to
make oyster soup for lunch. Everyone including Laura, gets a
piece of candy that Pa had brought ahead of time,

(05:07):
but that's all that Laura gets. Christmas night, they run
out of kerosene for the lamp, which means the rest
of the winners is gonna be dark and sad. The
blizzards go on and on and on, and it's made
before a freight train brings anything new to the town.
But on the upside, they get to have Christmas again,
complete with turkey and cranberries, and Laura finally gets a present,

(05:30):
which is beautiful yarns and embroidery silks uh and she
can use them up to replace the things that she
gave away to mom and her sister. I'm actually kind
of conflicted about this, this present for Laura, because she
wasn't the fondest of sewing. So in a way this
present is work well, but she couldn't have bought those things.
She is grateful for it and in one of the

(05:51):
many examples of what we might consider good values. So
it's a very sweet story in the end, and in
spite of the danger and oppress in the middle. But
how much of that blizzard after blizzard after blizzard, in
this kind of sense of good gracious, when will the
train come? How much of that is real? There's a
short answer, spoiler. This really was a real weather event.

(06:17):
People during the time called it the hard Winter, and
even the starvation winter. Hard Winter was actually Laura's original
title for the book, A nine four History of South
Dakota reads, the Great Blizzard in the middle of October
eighty was the initial performance of a of a winter
unprecedented and never succeeded in severity in the history of
Dakota or the Northwest. Heavy snows and severe storms came

(06:41):
at frequent intervals, rendering train service unreliable and uncertain, hindering
the removal of crops and the shipment into the country
of supplies of fuel and groceries, and in some places
even the telegraph wires were under snow, so complete isolation
this meant, which is the town on where they were living,
did not start keeping weather records until eighteen eighty nine,

(07:04):
but yanked in South Dakota, which is about a hundred
and ten miles to the south did. Yankton reported lows
as cold as thirty two below zero fahrenheit that winter,
and even though there were days when the temperatures rose
above freezing, they didn't last long enough for a real fall,
and so what had melted within refreeze into ice. The

(07:25):
rotary snow plow had also not yet been invented. This
was a steam engine mounted plow used specifically for clearing
railroad tracks. It was kind of like a vertically mounted
fan carrying scoops that basically threw the snow out of
the way as it moved. The first design came out
in eighteen sixty nine, but it wasn't really viable. Working

(07:46):
version of it didn't exist until eighteen eighty three or
eighteen eighty four. Would have been really, really useful had
that been a couple of years faster and without this
piece of equipment to keep things going. Blowing snow quickly
filled up the cuts through hills and mountains where the
train tracks ran, packing into ice and making them completely impassable.

(08:07):
Plus people's efforts to clear the tracks when the weather
allowed for it just made things worse because they made
these very high snow banks on either side, and that
allowed for more drifting and packing as the wind blew.
The train's inability to get through was really what made
this winter so hard, and it brought the population of
the area so perilously close to starvation. Because the blizzards

(08:30):
had started so early, the harvest was already small, and
no trains meant that there was no way to supplement
that small amount of food people had been able to
bring in from their crops, so the Angles and It's
had even harvested pumpkins that were not ripe yet, just
so that they could get them in before the freeze.
There are archival pictures of trains stuck in the snow,

(08:51):
with the snow on either side of them taller than
the train cars. One of these was taken in March
of one near sleep Beyond, Minnesota, which is the name
Aim that fans of the series and the TV show
will probably recognize, And this meant was also a really
new settlement at this time, so a lot of people
had not cleared as much land or enriched it for
better crops yet, and a lot of the people also

(09:13):
did not have firsthand experience of the weather there. This
terrible weather condition also meant that animals were scarce beforehand,
having having already taken shelter thanks to their instincts, and
they became pretty much impossible to find as the winter
wore on, and the book there's this one moment of
hope when word spreads of an antelope herd near the town,

(09:35):
and that hunt is unfortunately unsuccessful, and it's one of
the very few large animal sightings the whole time in
Laura's account. And as people ran out of fuel for burning,
they broke down their outbuildings that they didn't crucially need,
so fences and bridges too, along with the Ingles method
of twisting haynd sticks, all went towards just keeping a

(09:57):
fire going, yes, saying were having something to cook on.
But communities and families banded together so that they could
ensure that the what they did have was fairly distributed
and to pull their resources as much as they were able.
On February two, a blizzard started that lasted for nine days,
and it dropped so much snow that some buildings were

(10:20):
in snow up to their roofs. People had to tunnel
through the snow in some locations, and people who were
still on their homesteads had to tunnel to their barns
and their other outbuildings. The one thaw started in April,
started in October, and the thaw started in April the
long time. Towards the end of the book, Laura references

(10:42):
the Chinook winds, and these are winds that that go
down the eastern slopes of the Rockies. They warm up
along the way and then they move across the plains
and they're responsible for bringing warmer weather and thawing to
the area. This eventual faw actually led to severe flooding,
and some of the was simply the sheer volume of
water from the snow melt, and some was from ice

(11:04):
jams in bends and narrow places in the rivers, and
several towns actually flooded and the course of the Missouri
River shifted as a consequence. Some of the records that
were set during these floods still stand. They have never
seen a flood comparable. The roads and crops were also
damaged as a result of the flooding, which made the
recovery a lot slower, And even though it was called

(11:26):
the Starving Winter, there actually weren't many reported deaths from
starvation or freezing. Oddly lucky. So we've mostly been talking
about what this winter was like for the predominantly white
settlers out on the frontier, and that's because most of
the written records that survived today are from that perspective.
But this was naturally also an enormously difficult winter for

(11:49):
the Native Americans in the area too, and in some
ways it was even harder since by this point in
American history, many Native Americans had been removed to reservations,
completely altering the way of life and in many cases
robbing them of the means that they had previously used
to sustain themselves through hard winters like this. The Great
Sioux Reservation at this point in history spanned roughly the

(12:11):
western half of what is now South Dakota, and that
wasn't really a fraction of the amount of land that
that that group had lived on before. One piece that
we do have is a ledger book drawn by Lakota
artist and spiritual leader black Hawk, and that was created
after he worked out a deal with William Edward Canton,

(12:32):
who was an Indian trader and what was then Dakota Territory.
And here's how Canton's daughter, whose name was Edith M. Teal,
described this arrangement. Black Hawk, chief medicine man of the Sioux,
was in great straits that winter, having several squaws and
numerous children dependent upon him. He had absolutely nothing, no food,

(12:52):
and he would not beg father knew his condition. He
also knew that black Hawk had a wonderful dream, so
he sent him and asked him to make pictures of
his dreams, offering to furnish paper and pencils and to
give him fifty cents in trade at the store for
each sheet that he brought in. So, after drawing a
couple of the images from his dream, black Hawk moved

(13:15):
on to drawings of other things relevant to his daily
life and the Lakota customs, as well as pictures of
Crow warriors, who were traditional enemies of the Lakoda and
in the end, he made seventy six drawings and earned
thirty eight dollars in trade at the store, although as
we discussed earlier, it's not completely clear how well stocked
the store would have even been, but it probably helped

(13:37):
him out to uh, you know, get some provisions for
his family. Yeah, and this, uh, this lender book actually
survives today. They're scans of it on the on the
internet that we can link to from our show notes.
One industrious person is actually fact checked whether Laura angles
Wilder's description of the weather actually uh adds up to

(13:57):
what the weather was really like, or whether it's a
sort of embellishment. And before we talk about that, let's
take a moment talk about our sponsor. So speaking of Laura,
let's go back to fact checking her story, right, So,
National Weather Service meteorologist and pH d student Barbara Mays
Bapstad fact checked the book. What she did was she
crossed referenced meteorological records from nearby cities including Omaha, Nebraska,

(14:21):
and Des Moines, Iowat. These are not really that nearby,
but they are the nearest by cities that were keeping records,
as well as a few military forts in South Dakota,
and based on historical accounts that she found, this winter
got between eleven and fourteen feet of snow on top
of ice. According to her work, the three day blizzard

(14:42):
that marks the start of the Long Winter in the
book really happened from October fifty and in the book
the children are trapped by a blizzard while at school
on December six. That also seems to have really happened
on December two through the fourth, So pretty close there,
if not. I mean, a couple of days off is
not that much, no, especially when you're reconstructing it from

(15:04):
memory many many years later. There was also really a
blizzard on Christmas Day that year. The trip to get
wheat that al Monzo and Cap took probably happened on
February six, based on the clear night in the full moon.
Bausta did all this fact checking after rereading the book
during a similarly severe modern winter, which also had a

(15:24):
thaw that led to flooding, and coincidentally, they had to
roll out some of the few remaining rotary plows still
in working order during that particular event, and she theorizes
that this winter was caused by the jet stream pulling
Arctic air deep into the Midwest plus an al nemeo year.
That jet stream pattern is called a negative oscillation of

(15:45):
the North Atlantic oscillation. Without the negative North Atlantic oscillation,
it would have been a warmer winter than normal, and
wetter for that matter, rather than wetter and full of
the lizards. She has presentations on all of us at
her website, which you can watch. We will link to
them from our show notes Love a little history and
meteorology coming together. There's also an interesting trivia bit. According

(16:09):
to Bousted, this winter event was actually one of the
things that led to the prevalence of quote blizzard as
the word that means a blinding snowstorm before it meant
a knockout blow, and it was first used in relation
to weather in eighteen sixty two. So I made fun
of the cover of my copy of The Long Winter
because it does not at all suggest my family and

(16:29):
are nearly starved and my future husband almost died trying
to get wheat for the town, and said, it looks
like they're very happy. Let's go play outside winter. And
while that is kind of incongruous with the material that's inside,
it turns out that even though it was a very
lean winter. A lot of the people are on the
frontier kind of thought of it fondly. They were mostly young,

(16:51):
healthy people, which helped them make it through. And according
to the history book that we discussed earlier, they said, quote,
it is the almost universal testimony of the pioneers that
they have never gotten more real enjoyment out of a
winter than they did from the winter of the Big Blockade.
Shortly after the big snow of February, a thought came

(17:12):
of sufficient power to soften the surface of the drifts,
and an immediate freeze followed, forming an impenetrable crust, and
thereafter slaying was superb. This condition continued until the twenty
six of April. I would imagine, if you are having
a horrific, seemingly never ending winter, never ending winter, a

(17:33):
deaf version of slaying sounds great. Yeah. Well, and then
a thing that is kind of hard to remember sometimes
is that being on the frontier um four settlers was
basically twenty four hour day work essentially, I mean not
really twenty four hour day, but was a constant labor
and chore. And if it come to this point that
you were basically snowed in and you couldn't get any

(17:55):
provisions and you couldn't do anything. We had a break
from all the work that was a little it more
substantial than the normal reduction and workload that would happen
during winter from not being planting and harvesting crops. Well.
And it was also a big community building thing because
they did all throw in their resources together and kind
of shape equally. And I imagine it formed some really

(18:16):
interesting and meaningful, you know, long term relationships amongst people. Uh.
This history book is also kind of glib about the
like positive side of all of this flooding um, which
is that most of the frontier towns that were affected
were so new that there was very little to be lost.
When all of it was lost, it hits some more

(18:36):
established cities very hard. But in its tone is sort
of like it was a good thing they hadn't had
time to do a whole lot of work here because
you know, it all got washed away. It's like the
bright sidiest way to look at it. It was extremely
bright siding. So yes, do you also have some listener
mail for us to enjoy? Have some listener mail And
it's a quick one. Uh. It is from Emma and

(18:58):
Emma says, Hi, guys, I really love your podcast. My
name is Emma and I'm fifteen, and I got very
excited listening to your podcast on Audrey Lord because she's amazing,
and because through that podcast I learned that she went
to my high school. Hunter is very different now. We
are no longer an all girls school, for example, but
knowing that someone is inspirational as her went here makes

(19:19):
me feel like all of the stress we are put
under is worth it. The poetry club Audrey Lord loved
is no longer a club here at Hunter, but my
friend and I have decided that we need to remedy
the situation and restarted as soon as we can. Love
the podcast. Thanks for the two great episodes, Emma. Thank you, Emma.
I love an email still much. That made us both
smile a whole lot. It seems like a nice happy

(19:41):
note to end on for this Christmas Day podcast. If
you celebrate Christmas, Mary, Christmas, did you not happy? Whatever
you celebrate, Yeah, happy holiday or specific Holiday'd be hopefully
not horrible with her. You're in a cold climate, yes,
if you're somewhere warm. In summary, happy happy summer Christmas.

(20:03):
I always think of that ten mentions on called Fightline
and the Sunnow, which you may or may not like
depending on how you feel about holiday. Um Yes, happy
holidays to everyone. Feed. If you would like to write
to us about this or anything else, we're History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook

(20:23):
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would like to learn more about what we've talked about today,
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Biggest Snowstorms of All Time. These are all even bigger

(20:44):
than this swamp. They're also individual snowstorms and not an
entire season worth of snow. So do all of that
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
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(21:14):
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