Mary Frances Earp Tells about Blizzards in Nebraska

 They Have Weather

We had blizzards every winter, but the worst one

was in January of 1888, maybe the most terrible blizzard of all time. They called it the Schoolhouse Blizzard cause of all the kids got trapped in school. We learned later that it had covered the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and the territories of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, on down to Oklahoma Territory and Texas. It hit unexpectedly right in the middle of a warmish day when kids were in the one-room schoolhouses and adults out working.

They said the mercury fell within twenty-four hours from 74 degrees above zero to 28 below it in some places, and in Dakota Territory it went down to 40 degrees below zero. In fine clear weather, with little or no warning, the sky darkened and the air was filled with snow, or ice-dust, as fine as flour, driven by a wind so furious and roaring that men couldn’t hear each other at a distance of six feet. Men in the fields and children on their way from school died before they could reach shelter; some of them not frozen, but suffocated from the impossibility of breathing the blizzard. They said the Colorado River in Texas was frozen with ice a foot thick, for the first time in the memory of man.

If the teachers had the sense to keep their kids in the school room, they generally lived, but if they tried to get them home they generally died. The death toll, I read later, was 235. A girl named Minnie Freeman was teaching school in a sod house near Ord in Valley County just west of us when the blizzard struck. After the roof of the school was blown off, Minnie tied her thirteen pupils to a single strand of rope and led them by that rope through the storm to safety. Now the amazing thing about this story is that in a blizzard you couldn’t hear and you couldn’t see, so how did she know how to get where she needed to go? 

It was just God’s mercy was all it was. Millie was a true hero, and newspapers far and wide covered her story. They even made up a song about it, “Thirteen Were Saved, or Nebraska’s Fearless Maid.” That was in Valley County right between Custer and Greeley. They also had a mighty hard time of it in Boone County where Pa was living, and we worried about them for weeks before we finally got word from a passing stranger.

[Editor's P.S.] Info and photos of Millie Freeman can be found online https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/obituaries/minnie-mae-freeman-penney-overlooked.html