The 1888 Blizzard--Willie Holst

Snow fell that morning, early, even before children left for the schoolhouse, two miles away for some, occasionally more. Kids loved the morning's fleecy stuff, coming down over their shoulders like feathers, crashing, even splashing against caps and jackets or just sitting there like some crystalline pin until before it slowly melted away. They were accustomed to the sharp stuff that rode in on a bitter northwest wind and threatened to remove your face if you didn't turn away from its sting. The morning of the great 1888 blizzard, "the Children's Blizzard," was warm and lovely and unlike anything the children had ever seen.

In a rural school near Hartington, Nebraska, the teacher and the older kids met quietly up front to map out a strategy for the monster howling away just outside the door. Together, they decided it was too dangerous to send the anyone home, that, instead, they should just simply focus on keeping them all at school until the snow would finally abate, which meant until the next morning. That meant--an overnight in the schoolhouse.

By noon, the snowfall was no longer pretty or delicate. Whatever fell before the temperature did, laid a sloppy blanket over everything, a mat that froze solid on sopping wet caps and gloves and winter coats. By late morning, the snow was fine as flour, people said later, so Willie Holst, who lived no more than a stone's throw from school, suddenly realized his eyelashes were frozen shut.  

He hadn't figured on frozen eyelashes. What had sent him out on a heroic relief mission just before were bawling children who missed their moms and dads, claimed they were hungry, and just did their own kind of howling for no particular reason. Willie Holst told Miss McNeal he would brave the monster outside, run home, and pick up some victuals for the little ones. But when he realized he was blinded by the blizzard's barrage, he stopped, then simply turned around--going anywhere was just too big a risk. Not a one of those children was going to die of hunger, not in just one night, he told himself. You best not chance it. 

Like so many others right then throughout the plains just then, he grabbed a line fence to guide him slowly back to the schoolhouse, hand over hand. Try as he might, Willie Holst didn't find the schoolhouse, just couldn't see it in the wind and snow. He kept his wits about him, measured ten wide steps to the left of the fence and found nothing, switched to other side, measured ten more to the right, but still found nothing. With that guiding wire back in his hand, he tried those same fifteen steps forward. "I had taken just a few steps," he says, "when I smashed against the schoolhouse with such force that I was knocked backward and got a bad bump on my head."

He never saw it. He was that close and that far away. Blinding snow fell so thick that what seemed across the section was an arm's length from him, and he still couldn't see. The blizzard of 1888 endangered the lives of hundreds, even thousands of children. Hundreds died, some of the bodies weren't found until spring. There would not be another Blizzard of 1888. 

Willie Holst, just kid himself, saved his own life by making the right choice, turning around and going back to Miss McNeal. By the time the storm had broken early the next morning, not a one kid had suffered from hunger; but all around, late that afternoon and early evening, hundreds hadn't reached home and never would.

So what happened to the big kids?--what happened to Willie Holst? "That was my last day of school," he says at the end of his memories of January 12, 1888.