The Blizzard Of '88 Chapter Two dren set out for school wearing light wraps, but many of the adults also decided to go to town, or to haul feed or wood from points some distance from their homes. All in all, the blizzard caught an unusually large number of people out on the prairie or in inadequately heated schoolhouses and homes. The storm came up so suddenly that it literally "struck without warning." The children and teachers inside the little schoolhouses were unaware a storm was upon them until a strange roaring sound suddenly surrounded them and the sunlight was all at once blotted out, leaving them in an eery gray darkness. For the most part those who elected to stay in the schoolhouses until the storm blew itself out were the safest. Where this was impractical due to lack of fuel, or where a teacher, unacquainted with the severity of Nebraska blizzards, unwisely chose to dismiss school, tragedy struck. Across the frontier portion of the state a number of school children and several teachers froze to death. Holt County had fewer deaths but many near misses. Cora Riley, a sister of Mrs. John Morsbach of the Inman vicinity decided to dismiss school and go home. Some days after the storm she was found face down near the South Fork of the Elkhorn. George Ezra Moor, a lad of sixteen, found the unfortunate girl's body and helped take with shamrocks, is emblematic of the carrying out of his dream.

In the beginning the General had envisioned homes for the Irish where they could enjoy their religion by and to themselves, but landseekers had come out of Iowa and elsewhere, people of every shade of belief, until there were, mingled with the Sulli-vans, the Brennans, the McCaffertys, the Biglins, the McCanns and the Hagertys, the Pfunders, the Gatz, the Schrams and the Macks. All of them together building the prosperous community John O'Neill had planned. On the front of the imposing shaft was engraved: General John O'Neill Hero of Ridgeway Born in Ireland March 9, 1834 Died in Omaha January 8, 1878 By nature a brave man General O'Neill was forty-four s years old.

it home.

In the same South Fork Valley Peter and John Hoffman, good sized boys, were in school when the storm struck. There was little fuel in the schoolhouse and, when that was gone, the boys went outside to get more from the pile nearby. The thick, fine snow was like a wall before their faces. They could see nothing and the wind snatched words from their lips, whirling them away into the roaring void. They were soon lost and separated. Peter drifted with the storm to a sod house on the north bank of the South Fork and there spent the night in safety. John, the younger boy, stumbled on through the storm for about a half mile, then bumped into the hog shed on the Henry Kiltz homestead. There was one large hog in the shed but it ran out, to John's regret for he needed the warmth the hog could have provided him. However, he survived the long cold night and returned to his own home the next day. When the children of Syrenus Deming of northern Holt County set out for school that morning the sun glistened on brilliant ice particles on the weeds and grass. By recess time the coal shed, ten feet southeast of the schoolhouse, was invisible. The older boys managed to find it and start back, carrying large chunks of coal. Although they missed the schoolhouse door, they bumped into the side of the building, then 10 followed the wall back to the door. At noon two of the big boys (almost young men) went to the Berry farm and two others to Demings. They tried to bring a team and wagon from the Berry place but the horses would not leave the barn and the boys struggled back to the schoolhouse. At four o'clock Syrenus made it to the school with food for all the children. At midnight, as the storm began to let up, the boys went to Demings and returned with a team and sled, then took the smaller children to the Berry place. At four that morning Syrenus came for the rest of the pupils. All these trips to the school were made by following the fence lines. By morning the weather was clear but very cold, anywhere from thirty to forty degrees below zero, according to the various accounts.

Bernard McGreevy, a young settler near O'Neill, was teaching a nearby country school that January. His school was down to its last few lumps of coal but a fresh load was due that day. The storm arrived first and the young teacher feared that he could not keep the children alive without a fire, so he sat down at his desk and figured out his problem. The nearest house was the Joyce's, a half mile away. McGreevy figured out how many steps he should walk south and how many east to reach shelter, then tying the children together, the little- est ones next to himself, they started out.

When he had counted and walked the right number of steps there was still no sign of the house. Fearfully, he took one more step— and bumped into the wall. With the Hanley, Joyce and Welch children all safe, he spent an easy night.

Steven E. Hicks was an eighteen- year-old student in the Leona community school on Blackbird Creek. When the storm struck, Steven and the teacher, Hamp Hall, discussed their uneasy situation. To stay in the poorly heated schoolhouse, without food, for an indeterminate period was more than they thought the sixteen girls could stand. They solved the problem by deciding that Steven should escort the girls to the Pete Nelson home, eighty rods distant, while Hall stayed in the schoolhouse with the thirteen boys.

Young Hicks and his charges made the journey to the Nelson home in safety but found the house empty and out of fuel. (The Nelsons had gone after fuel and were unable to get back until after the storm.) Steven tore down an old shed, sawed it into firewood and kept the girls warm. The boys spent a most uncomfortable night in the schoolhouse.

James Gunter lived a mile and a quarter from Ewing and went to school in the town. Knowing that his father had gone to Neligh for flour, the boy was determined to go home so his mother would not be alone in the storm. He crawled a good part of the way, hanging onto a barbwire fence that extended past the Gunter house. All that afternoon and night they worried about the father. He, however, had gotten back to Clear-water before the storm, and made it on home after the weather cleared. Eli LaRue, in southern Holt County, went to the schoolhouse to guide the children to his home, three-quarters of a mile away. By holding hands in a long que, they all made it to safety, although one of Mr. LaRue's small nieces froze her wrist on the way. Mayme Coffey, daughter of John Coffey, remembers the storm well, although she was only four years old. Children from the McNichols and Ryan families managed to reach the Coffey home from the schoolhouse, and spent the next two days there. "To get from our house to the pump," Mayme wrote, "we had to climb over a twenty foot snow drift. My father cut steps in the snow to make it easier. There were thirteen steps up to the top of the drift and thirteen down the other. side.

At the Napier school, east of Ewing, the teacher tied all the children in a line, using scarves and whatever could be found, and led them along a fence to the nearest farmhouse. But among those who spent the blizzard hours in a schoolhouse were the teacher and pupils of Sunnyside, in the Amelia area. Theirs was a bleak unplastered frame building and their salvation lay in the fact the school-board had, the day before, piled a load of hay (for the hay-burner stove) in one corner. It lasted through the night— and for light they had a coal-oil lamp without a chimney. Northeast of O'Neill another teacher and her pupils broke up and burned the benches and desks for fuel.

At a school in the northern part of the county the wood pile was out in the schoolyard. The teacher had the children form a chain by holding hands. Those at the end next the woodpile passed the chunks down the line to the schoolhouse, thus getting in enough to keep the fire going. Even so, they had to play games and dance all through the night, as there was barely enough wood to keep a low fire until daylight, when they were able to go home. Little Daisy Garwood froze her feet on that bitter walk home and, although she did not lose them, she suffered from chill- blains the rest of her life.

Twelve-year-old Minnie Zurheide lived only a quarter of a mile from the schoolhouse. With the storm full-blown by noon, the teacher would not allow anyone to go outside, and so Minnie could not go home for dinner. They melted snow, scooped up at the door, for drinking water and had enough coal to keep a fire going until morning. By leaving the stove door open a little way they had enough light to see by during the long night. At sunrise the hungry children scattered to their homes, walking on top of the frozen drifts.

The Skrdla children, too, were forced to stay all night in the schoolhouse in District 169, southwest of Atkinson. They, too, broke up desks for fuel and went without food until morning, when neighbor John Norris came across the frozen drifts with a great kettle full of mulligan stew. In District 90 the children of John Harris and C. E. Ernst were among those who spent the night in the little red school- house. North of Atkinson in the Celia community, the teacher, James Morgan, who later became county judge of Holt County, kept all thirty-five of his pupils at the schoolhouse all night. The next morning a Mr. Stovik who lived a quarter-mile distant, came with a washboiler full of breakfast for the prisoners of the storm.

One of the horrors of that experience was that the families of most of those children had to live through those frantic hours not knowing whether their youngsters were safe in a home or schoolhouse or out in the howling storm, wandering helplessly or perhaps already clad in a shroud of ice. Many a father was out at daybreak, heading for the schoolhouse— and fearing the worst. John Kellar, his wife and his six children, William, May, Eva, Johnny, Anna and Bertha, and his unmarried brother Thomas, had come from Illinois in 1883. They had settled in Chambers Township, south of O'Neill, and prospered for the next five years. Ten days after the storm Mrs. John Kellar wrote the following sad letter to her husband's sister, back in Illinois.

"My Dear Sister: I sit down this Sabbath morning to convey the mournful intelligence that your brother, Thomas, is no more. He died the 12th of this month. Perished in that terrible storm never to be described. I cannot give you any idea of the terrible force of it; the air was so dense with snow you could not see ten feet. It came like an electric shock, without a moment's warning. He (Thomas) was not forty rods from the house when the storm struck, but was unable to find his way back. Johnnie was just a few rods behind him and called to him, but he could them in but could do nothing with them. They had turned them out to clean the stables. John did not reach home until the next evening. Your affectionate sister. Ann E. Kellar." That same black Friday Lewis Lambert, who lived near the postoffice of Little in the southeast corner of the county, had gone with a neighbor, Bill Porter, to repair the schoolhouse windows (which was why there was no school there that day). His sons, George, nineteen; and Frank, seventeen, had fed the cattle and returned to the house when the storm struck. A little later neighbor Charley Porter who, just ahead of the storm, had left the nearby home of Bill Lell, drifted into the Lambert place. Four times that day they managed to get to the barn and back with hay for the "hay burner" stove, and all the while they worried over the fate of the father, Lewis Lambert.

The elder Lambert, however, came safely home the next morning in thirty-three degrees below zero weather, after spending the night at a neighbors. George Lambert and Dick Porter, out early that morning to see what damage the storm had done, soon came upon a frozen body. The face was bearded and they first thought it was that of Bill Lell. But when Lell himself came on the scene he thought the frozen man was Charlie Porter. But, since Charlie had spent the night in safety at Lambert's, the identity of the dead man was a mystery.

The body was hauled to a shed on the Lell farm, where it remained for a week, until the coroner could reach the place. It was then identified as that of a Swiss emmigrant named Kohler, who had no known relatives in the United States. The man had drifted for nineteen miles in the storm, before falling for the last time. Another man had drifted from the South Fork River until he struck a clothesline in a farm yard on the west side of the present Gribble section, a distance of several miles. He clung to the line and shouted, bringing help from the occupants of the nearby house, and so survived.

Still another casualty of the storm was Joe Bellar of the Emmet community. Mr. Bellar had been on the road with a team and sled. Caught by the blizzard, he had tried to overturn the sled and take shelter under it. Unable, for some reason, to get under it, he froze to death beside it. Jack Gordon of the Rock Falls vicinity was one of the fortunate few. Also caught on the road by the storm, he did manage to turn his wagon box upside down and crawl under it, where he survived. The team, which also survived, stayed by the wagon. not hear for the roaring of the storm. Johnnie was lost a long time (but) his pony finally brought him in, feet and hands frozen.

Before he came in one of our men started to look for Uncle Tom, and was gone so long that Willie went to look for them. Then Johnnie put on more clothing and went out again, thinking he could guide them to the house. Oh the bitterness of that hour! God grant that I may never pass another like it. For two hours I watched, Eva and I alone.

John had gone to O'Neill the day before, and I knew he had started home. I thought they were all lost. The search was unavailing. Tom was not found until the next morning at seven o'clock. The storm raged from eleven o'clock Thursday morning until four o'clock Friday morning. The horses (he had gone after a load of feed) had stayed by him and were badly frozen. The weather was intensely cold and he was not buried until the next Tuesday.

John was two miles from O'Neill, on the way home, when the storm burst upon him. He turned and whipped his horses against the storm and reached O'Neill nearly frozen. He could not have gone much farther. His eyes were covered with ice and snow and he ran against a man in the middle of the street, who guided him to Charlie Moore's house, which he had left an hour before. God in his mercy saved my husband and children, while so many perished. So many not found yet, such immense drifts.

John was out (after the storm) with many others, searching for one of our women neighbors. Her husband had started for the barn and she became alarmed and went after him, leaving two children, two and five years old, alone in the house. They never found the barn. She was found two miles away, dead, and he in a haystack, badly frozen.

Charley Moore's mail carrier was only forty rods from the Shamrock postoffice when the storm met him. He couldn't find his way, so turned his team loose from the sleigh. They were found the next morning, dead. The man's hands and feet were so badly frozen that amputation was necessary and it is not thought he can survive. The wires were all down so we could not telegraph you, and the roads blocked so that no mail could reach you.

In addition to John's loss of his only brother, we have been fearfully scourged. Four years of hard labor swept away in a single night.

Between 150 and 175 head of fine cattle lie dead around the place. The boys periled their lives trying to get Three young women school teachers perished in Nebraska in the great storm. One was Miss Etta Shattuck of Inman, who sent her children home safely when she became uneasy about the weather, then lost her own life while wandering over the prairie in the blinding holocaust. She had finally stumbled into a haystack, where she managed to pull out some hay and burrow into the stack. She was unable, however, to get far enough into the hay and her legs were badly frozen. When found, three days later, she was in frightful condition. Although her legs were amputated at Seward, Nebraska, she died a few weeks later.

In the Atkinson area ten-year-old Joseph Schaaf was sent on an errand to a neighbor's, that mild morning. When the blizzard so suddenly came down upon them the father, Joseph Sr., hurried off to look for the boy. He became hopelessly lost, bumped into a haystack and took shelter. He survived, but little Joseph's body was not found until February 19, more than a month later.

Postmen are not the only ones who make their appointed rounds in spite of the weather. Newborn babies do it, too. In the Amelia area a man named Thorton lost both his wife and the babe born while the storm raged and no help could be had. Neighbors came as soon as they could— but all that was left to do was fashion a crude coffin from boards taken from the side of the house and bury the dead beneath the snow. William Pierce, of the same neighborhood, was more fortunate. His daughter Minnie put in her appearance that same day, with only her father to oversee her arrival.

With the whole family confined to the small house by the storm and the stork about to land, the Pierces put their son Frank and the other children in the cellar beneath the floor, where they played contentedly until they heard a baby crying— and were invited topside to meet their new sister. Far to the southeast, near Wilber, Nebraska, John and Effie Brady's first child, a boy, also chose to arrive in the midst of the blizzard. Early that bright, warm morning, while doing his farm chores, John Brady fell and broke his arm. Effie's brother Frank then headed for Wilber, six miles away, to bring the doctor for both John and Effie. Although, because of the storm, the doctor did not get home again until three days later, the broken arm was repaired and the birth successfully accomplished. A year later the Bradys moved to Holt County.

In the Deloit community Mrs.

Bohling, one of the neighborhood 12 midwives, was at the Buhal home to help with the birth of a baby. When the storm broke she said she must go home as her own little girl was at home alone. Through the howling blizzard she followed the fence line the half mile to her own place— and knew she had reached it when she came to the fence post with the milk bucket hung on the top of it, where she had put it that morning, only a few feet from her own door. The mitten on the hand she had held on the fence was shredded to rags but she had made the trip in safety. Drusilla (Boshart) Reichert, whose family lived eleven miles north of O'Neill, was eight years old at the time of the blizzard. "It was a beautiful, calm morning," she wrote of that experience. "We (the parents, John and Barbara Boshart, and several children) were in the sled on the way to the Mennonite church for the funeral of my mother's sister, Katie Oesch, who had died in childbirth. When we got to the Grebe place, two miles away, Dad stopped and left us children with the Grebe children who were older, picked up Mr. and Mrs. Grebe and started on. About a mile from there the weather looked so threatening they turned around and came back.

"The Grebe boys had just turned their little bunch of cattle into a small pasture. Mr. Grebe told them to bring them back and Dad tried to disuade him, but to no avail. Soon the storm broke in all its fury and Dad said to Mr. Grebe, 'You have seen your boys for the last time.' This frightened Mr. Grebe and he wanted Dad to go with him to hunt the boys. Dad said, 'No, but I will go out as far as I can see the windmill. You go as far as you can hear me holler.' "The boys soon came back with the little bunch of cattle, but we had to stay at Grebe's for a couple of days. The next forenoon it was still very cold and dusky. Then they saw something in the road to the north. They walked there and found a young man nearly frozen under his overturned sled. He had unhitched and turned his horses loose. The men got him up and Dad put his heavy overcoat and wool mittens on him. Holding him up, they marched him to the Grebe house and did what they could for him. His home was near the Niobrara River and he had been on his way to O'Neill. That afternoon, with a heavy horseblanket pinned like a shawl over his head, Dad walked to our place to look after the cattle he had left in the corral. They were hungry but alive. The next day he came back and got the rest of us." *At this writing Margaret (Oesch) Benash, left m *Wilfred Funk, Inc. 1940, New York, N.Y. John Grutsch, neighbor to the Bosharts and Grebes, recalled that, among others in the neighborhood, his parents had also started for the funeral. They had gone only about eighty rods, he said, when the storm came, with winds fifty-five to sixty miles an hour, and the temperature dropping to thirty-five below zero. They turned back at once and several other people, including some of the Erb and Gerber families, had to stay out the storm at the Grutsch place. "My aunt," concluded Drusilla, "was buried without the church services a few days later. Her baby lived and was raised by Grandmother Erb."* The Adam Goodsell family lived still farther north of O'Neill in the Midway vicinity. The neighborhood school there was out of wood, so no one went to school that day, leaving the two Goodsell boys free to walk to the post office, ten miles away, to get the mail. They hadn't been gone long when the storm roared out of the northwest. Alarmed, the father took the dog and set out to lok for them. None of them would have made it home without the aid of the dog, which found the boys in a cornfield, came back to the father and led him to the boys, then guided them all home. The boys' boots were frozen to their feet but they recovered without permanent damage.

The following day, after the wind had died and the snow stopped, some men came by the Goodsell's, searching for a Mrs. Teresa Beitz who had been lost in the storm. Mr. Beitz was not at home when the blizzard broke and the poor woman, having no comprehension of the ferocity of a Nebraska norther, had left the children alone in the house while she ran out to roundup their cattle and bring them to the barn. In her hurry, and expecting to be gone only a few minutes, she did not stop to put on wraps or overshoes. She found the cattle but was quickly lost in the blinding snow. Helplessly, she followed the cattle as they drifted before the storm. Toward the last she was following only one big ox, and when it fell she doggedly kept on. Finally, blown against a fence, she managed to follow it until she fell in the freezing mire of a hog-pen. Struggling up, she bumped into a shed and found her way inside, where she fell, utterly exhausted, among some oxen. That morning the three Mullen boys, Jim, Bob and Arthur, had overslept at their farm home on Blackbird Creek, well to the north of O'Neill. Their father, James, Sr., had left for O'Neill on horseback the afternoon before, so was not at home to see that rless in 1888, is now living in the O'Neill Senior C they were up and at their chores as usual. This proved fortunate, for the Mullen cattle were still in their barn when the storm began. They were hungry, however, and bawling to be fed.

"We were shoving hay down to the moaning cattle," Arthur wrote in his book, Western Democrat * when I heard a noise like the crying of a dog. I said . . . I thought it came from the shed where we were keeping two teams of oxen, ready for sale. I went to the shed— from which the roof had already been blown! There, almost under the hooves of the oxen, I found a woman. The first thing I saw were her feet, sticking out, almost bare, from wet woolen stockings. I could not see her face, so frozen was it with ice and snow, but I could see she had black hair. For an instant I thought it was Tillie (his sister). 'It's a woman,' I called." By the time the boys got her into the house she had fainted, and didn't recover consciousness for a long time. Mrs. Mullen applied first aid, (which in those days meant rubbing frozen flesh with snow) until the poor woman's legs began to show signs of life. When the woman came to, she told them her name, how she came to be out in the storm, and that she lived nearly seven miles away. She later lost some toes and was unable to wear anything but carpet slippers on her feet for a long, long time. But doubtless she was well aware that she was very lucky to be alive. Young Arthur remembered the storm as a "wind that roared with a noise like no other noise, a swooping, scooping, blasting sound," and that none of the Mullen family slept that night, they were so dreadfully worried about Mr. Mullen, probably caught in the storm on his way home. His horse, however, had been unable to fight its way through the twenty foot high snowdrifts, so the pair had found shelter in a sod house before night. He reached home about eight o'clock the next morning.

Years later William Hagensick, who lived near the Mullens, told the following story of the blizzard. He and several of his neighbors had gone to O'Neill to get coal and provisions and were on their way back. The day was so warm that the men had taken off their coats. Said Mr. Hagensick, "A jackrabbit jumped up and I called to the others to kill it. One threw an empty bottle at it. He missed and I raised my gun, but the shot was never fired because the storm let loose." The group drove on a little way and reached a home, where they stayed until the storm blew over. If they izen's Home.

13 The Michael Gallagher family was maintaining two places at the time of the blizzard. Jim, a well-grown boy, was at the farm southeast of O'Neill with his mother and the smaller children. Agnes and her father were on the south ranch. Jim was at school and the teacher told all her pupils to stay in the schoolhouse, but in his anxiety over his mother's safety, Jim went out the window and headed for home. He made it to the farmyard but could not find the house. In his search he fell into the open cellar, but finally managed to climb out and find the house. Mr. Gallagher lost all of his cattle in the storm, and was one of the men who found the school teacher in the haystack.

There were countless other close brushes with death that treacherous day. Bill Dickerson and his cousin were hauling hay when the storm enveloped them. Unhitching the horses, they ran toward the home but missed the barn, corn crib and chicken house. They would have missed the house, too, had they not stumbled onto the woodpile at one corner of it.

Most homesteaders in that storm- torn plains country put lights in their windows that night, and such a light in the Lawrence Casey home guided a near-frozen footman to their door. The Caseys spent the rest of the night treating his frozen hands— and all the while worrying about their own son, Christopher, who had not come home. The next day they learned that he had spent that night in the James Mullen home.

Harry White and his cousin were loading hay when Harry looked up to see a strange grey-white wall moving toward them across the prairie. "What is that?" he asked, and his cousin exclaimed, "It's a blizzard. Come on." They jumped on the wagon but had barely started when they were overtaken by the howling wind and smothering snow. They reached the cousin's place, put the team in the barn and followed the fence three quarters of a mile to the White house. A brother, Earnest White, groping his way from the barn to the house, was within six inches of death when he bumped into a corner of the building. But for that he would have missed it entirely, to take his chances on the empty prairie beyond.

Several survivor stories had to do with horses and dogs. One mother and her children, caught on the road, managed to reach an empty sod house. There she unhitched the horses, took them inside and, with her children, drove them around and around throughout the night, and so lived through the storm. Another woman went to a field a quarter mile needed fuel, or water from the well in the yard, the one who volunteered to go for it tied a rope around his waist. The men at the house held onto it and guided him back.

Dozens of other stories of near tragedies survive the big blizzard. Pulaski Reed managed to find his way to the barn to feed his stock, but on his return to the house he lost his way and would surely have perished had he not wandered into a small tree that he had planted near his house. From the tree he knew the way to the house. The little tree grew big, and in afteryears he pointed it out to his grandchildren as the tree that saved his life.

Jack Gordon of O'Neill was working for a farm family that January. That morning his employer started him to town for groceries. Before he reached town he heard a noise "like a woman screaming." From the west came what looked like a black blanket spreading over the sky. A minute more and he was in the midst of it. The horses could not face it and Jack was soon lost. As did so many others that day, he unhitched the horses and turned his sled upside-down. He took the blanket he had with him and crawled under the sled. The family located him the next morning by the horses, still tied to the sled.

They dug him out and carried him home, where his mother couldn't stand to hear him scream from the pain as his circulation came back. She spent two days at the home of her daughter— until the screaming stopped.

Charles Primus was out hunting when the storm caught him. He found his way to a neighbor's home and took shelter. The family used a hay burner stove and when the supply of hay in the house was gone Charles, being a strong young man, volunteered to go to the barn for more. He followed the clothesline part way, found the barn and started back with the hay twists, but missed the clothesline. He went on in what he thought was the direction of the house and came to a high rise of ground. Stopping there, he began to figure where this rise might be, for he knew the place well. He thought then that he heard voices, and decided he must be standing on the cellar at the corner of the house. Stretching out his hand he touched the building.

Charles was with the group of men who found another missing school teacher near Rosa Lake. She was frozen to death and snow was packed between each layer of clothing she wore, blown there by the tremenduous force of the wind, fashioning for her a veritable shroud of ice.

from her home to pick a sack of corn. Her two dogs went with her. On her way home she heard a screeching noise and turned to see where it came from. Across the prairie came that famous rolling wall of wind and snow. Except for the dogs she would never have found her way home. A family five miles southwest of Stuart had only recently moved onto their homestead and were still living in a tent when the blizzard descended. To save their precious team of horses— and to utilize their warmth— they took the animals into the tent with them and, together, survived. John Steskal was one of the worried fathers who attempted to reach the schoolhouse and bring his children home. It was only three-quarters of a mile and he thought he could make it. The family dog, which had never