The Children's Blizzard
Melanie Benjamin
They came on boats, on trains, great unceasing waves of them—the poor, the disenfranchised, the seekers, the dreamers. Second and third generations of farmers eking out an existence on scraps of farms divided up among too many sons. Political agitators no longer welcome in their homelands. Young men fleeing conscription in a king’s army. Married couples starting out. Bachelors from towns with few women. The poor from tenements with air so stifling and foul there was no room to breathe, let alone dream.
Come to Nebraska! Dakota Territory! Minnesota! Come to the Great Plains of America!
The pamphlets showed up mysteriously in the towns of the countries they’d left. Or in the tenements of the city that was the portal to America. Pamphlets handed about, passed around from family to family until the pages were as soft as fabric. Pamphlets that were read over, prayed over, that led to sleepless nights and days of planning, parsing, calculating: What can I get for this old piece of land that’s worn out from generations of farming? How much will passage cost? How long will it take to get to these Great Plains? Will my old mother survive, will the newborn make it, can I take the cow, my wagon, her spinning wheel?
And they came. Entire villages packed up and left. Tenements cleared out. They disembarked from the boat or walked across town and they got on a train. The train. The great snorting, pawing iron horse, the endless miles of track that led west. They packed themselves tightly into cars with only benches, they brought food for the journey, bread and sausages and cheeses, although they longed for bl?tkake and stollen and kanell?ngd.
They were strong, these immigrants from across the sea, stronger than their traveling companions from the cities whose bodies were bent, skin so pale, lungs so squeezed. The ones who’d first arrived on boats were big and healthy with open faces, Nordic brows, white teeth. Women with abundant braids crowning their heads. Men with red beards. Children with hair so fair it was almost white. Blue, blue eyes.
Other eyes watched them get off the trains, darker eyes set in darker skin. The tragic eyes of the people whose land this had been. But nobody paid any attention; the Indian wars were over. White people lived on their land now.
They came to seek their fortunes, to plow a farm on acres—hundreds of acres!—that would remain in the family for generations. They were the new hope for America. The only way the land would settle, the country would grow, territory by territory, state by state, was if it were settled by immigrants.
They came.
They came full of promise.
They came because of a lie.
What happened to them once they arrived was of little interest to the industrial towns in the East, the government that counted their bodies and took their money, the boosters who cheered them when they got off the trains, and the stockholders of the railroads whose very existence depended on them to keep coming—
And then never gave them another thought.
JANUARY 12, 1888, 12:15 A.M.
SIGNAL OFFICE
WAR DEPARTMENT,
SAINT PAUL
Indications for 24 hours commencing at 7 A.M. today.
FOR SAINT PAUL, MINNEAPOLIS, AND VICINITY: warmer weather with snow, fresh southerly winds becoming variable.
FOR MINNESOTA: warmer weather with snow, fresh to high southerly winds becoming variable.
FOR DAKOTA: snow, warmer, followed in the western portion by colder weather, fresh to high winds generally becoming northerly. The snow will drift heavily in Minnesota and Dakota during the day and tonight; the winds will generally shift to high colder northerly during the afternoon and night.
NORTHEASTERN NEBRASKA,
EARLY AFTERNOON,
JANUARY 12, 1888
CHAPTER 1
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THE AIR WAS ON FIRE.
The prairie was burning, snapping and hissing, sparks flying in every direction, propelled by the scorching wind. Sparks falling as thick as snowflakes in winter, burning tiny holes in cloth, stinging exposed skin. Her eyes were dry and scratchy, her hair had escaped its pins so that it fell down her back, and when she picked up one of those pins, it was scalding to the touch.
Everything was hot to the touch, even the wet gunnysacks they were using to beat out the flames were sizzling. When Raina glanced back at the house, she saw the dancing, hellish flames reflected in the windows.
“To the north,” her father called, and she ran, ran on bare legs and bare feet that stung from earth that was a fiery stovetop as she beat out a daring lick of flame that had jumped the firebreak with all her might. Just beyond the hastily plowed ditch, the emerging bluestem grasses hissed; some exploded, but the fire did not look as if it was going to cross the break.
“Save some of that for the others, Raina,” her father called, and even from that distance—he was at the head of the west break—and through the sooty air, she recognized the twinkle in his eyes. Then he turned and pointed south. “Gerda! Go!”
Raina watched her older sister leap toward another vaulting flame, beating it out before it had a chance. It was almost a game, really, a game of chicken. Who would win, the flames or the Olsens? So far, in ten years of homesteading, the Olsens had come out victorious every time.
Gerda smiled triumphantly, waving back at Raina, the outside row of vulnerable wheat, only a few inches tall, between them. At times like this, when the air was so stifling and smoky, Raina didn’t feel quite so small, quite so inconsequential as when the air was clear. On a cool, still early summer morning, the prairie could make her feel like the smallest of insects, trapped in a great dome of endless pale blue sky, the waving grasses undulating, just like the sea, against an unbroken horizon. But Gerda, Raina knew, never felt this way. Gerda was stronger, bigger. Gerda was untouchable, even from the prairie fires that flared up regularly in Nebraska, spring and fall. Gerda would know what to do in the face of fire, or ice. Or men. Gerda—