A Dakota Blizzard

— As the time for blizzards comes round again, I propose to invite the Club to meet at our camp in Rosebud Agency, southern Dakota. To prepare the minds of the members, let me recall our experience of last January. We knew before we got out of bed, in this little government schoolhouse, that the most awful storm we had ever witnessed was imminent. Lilia drew the curtain back from the window by the bed to see if it were time to get up, and her exclamation brought me to the window at once. The sky was inky. In a few minutes the storm began, and in half an hour from this time it was at its height. Lilia ventured a few yards out of the front door at its beginning, and was near not getting back. The wind struck her with such violence as to bring her head down to a level with her knees, and take away her breath. She said she was near falling on her face, and she knew that if she fell she would not get up again. She got to the house, bent at the angle into which the wind had forced her. The storm raged, without one moment’s abatement or lull, during the whole day and far into the night, when we fell asleep. At first the little frame building creaked and shivered like a ship at sea, and we wondered how anything constructed by the hand of man could stand against that wind. After the first half hour, it was impossible to distinguish the sound of groaning timbers, for the ears were filled with the rush of the elements. It was like the roar and surging of a mighty ocean. Being in the house, we could see out a few yards on one side, — the side from which the storm did not come. On the other three sides, the snow beat and came in (though the house is close and tight), and went half-way across the school-room. It hung in a beautiful fringe, several inches long, from the drying-rope stretched across the room, and festooned the maps on the walls, and finally blocked up the windows till they were as impenetrable as snow-banks.

We were glad that we were not the first inhabitants, for we should have thought the earth had slipped her orbit and was rushing through space, or that the Last Judgment was about to be ushered in.

It was a comfort to us to believe, as we then did, that this greatest of all the blizzards had set in as early in other camps as in ours, and that no human being was exposed to its fury. No sun had risen over our heads on that day, and we had rung no school-bell; we could not know that bells were ringing from many a prairie school-house, and that the fair promise of the day was luring men, women, and children to their doom. We were gazing, awestruck but calm, from our window, and saying that we wished for a photographer to picture forth the arctic interior of a government school-house in a Dakota blizzard, and for an artist, great in portraying Nature’s moods, to immortalize on canvas the tempest-tossed prairie without.

On the afternoon preceding this destructive day, no snow fell, but the force of the wind was so great that it lifted up from the boundless prairie the accumulated drifts of weeks, and carried them along in great waves, so that the whole earth seemed in motion and rising heavenward. The outline of these vast billows and the intervening troughs, as seen against the horizon, was the most impressive sight that had ever met our eyes.

On the morning of the 13th, the mercury registered twenty-five degrees below zero, and the wind was blowing cruelly. The drifts between us and the village were so deep that we thought it unsafe to ring for the children. But they came over the half mile, through drifts waist-deep to large children, and the two faithful policemen, Stiff Arm and Cut Foot, came to see how we had got through the blizzard. (Cut Foot’s name was a sore trouble to us when first we came to these Indians. When I called him or spoke of him, Cut Throat seemed invariably to slip off my tongue. Lilia objected seriously, but it was not till after some very plain words and several private rehearsals that I finally got the right name fixed in my head.)

The school-room was not to be thought of on that bitter day, and we brought the children and the policemen into our bedroom to thaw out. We run the mercury up to one hundred and ten degrees within two feet of the stove ; at a distance of eight feet, it was ninety-five degrees lower. Not one of the children uttered a sound of complaint, but the big tears rolled silently down the swollen cheeks of one of the little girls when the genial warmth of the room began to make her comfortable.

Presently the third policeman, One Feather, rode up from the Agency, fifteen miles distant. His nose was badly frosted, and his usually thin face was swollen past recognition. As he had assured us, on our first coming, that he wished to be a “ sister ” to us, we put him in the warmest corner.

Our fifteen-mile-off neighbor, the young teacher at the next camp, stepped in one evening to ask if we could give him a bed for the night. He had been trying all day to get to his camp, and had consumed four hours in traveling one mile and a half. His plucky little Indian pony dragged the wagon through the heavy drifts by main force, the wheels not turning, and the horse waddling where he could not walk. The faithful creature was quite exhausted. A sheet of ice inclosed his nose, and an icicle more than a foot long hung from it. This gentle animal, during the blizzard of the 12th, not only broke his halter, but pawed down a thick stable door, with hinges a foot long. His master went out into the storm to see how he was faring. He spent two hours in looking for him, though he was only a few yards from him. When found, he was a mass of ice, his eyes nearly closed by it, and a giant icicle hanging from his nose. Mr. Warner’s own eye lashes froze every time he winked, and he had to hold his hand to his face and send the hot breath up to them before he could open them again. We hear this is common enough in Dakota, but Lilia and I don’t stay out long enough to wink.