Morning Thanks--Country school teachers

“ONCE more the country is appalled at the reports of widespread death and misery in the northwest; but in its range and destructive intensity this cold wave surpasses all hitherto recorded.”

So wrote Will A. Wells, the editor of the Alton Democrat on February 4, 1888, just three weeks after an immense January blizzard people began to call “the Children’s Blizzard.” In a column titled “As to the Blizzard,” he looks back on the storm that, on January 12, killed hundreds of people, many of them children, “over all the plains and prairies from the Rocky Mountains to the timbered hills along the Mississippi.” That monster storm turned beast and killer. “Travelers buried under the snow, farmers dying within a few rods of their own doors, children frozen stiff on the way home from school, and domestic animals dying by thousands; and following the cold in western Kansas there is starvation, till whole families are said to be perishing in their frail cabins.”

It was a huge and horrible story. People--many of them children--perished. Some bodies weren't recovered until spring. From Nebraska to North Dakota, from the Black Hills to the Iowa prairie, hundreds of one-room school teachers were faced with a decision that threatened the lives of their children, their "scholars," as people called them then.

They're all gone now, a entire multitude of young women, largely untrained, most of them still teenagers, who taught rural kids in one-room schools in the era when farms of 160-acres were huge, a time when more families peopled the land, more big families, and lots more kids. Every couple of miles there'd be a little schoolhouse, most now long gone, as are the teachers, and often enough even children.

But the Children's Blizzard put those young women at the heart of life-and-death drama played out throughout the region, and Editor Wells couldn't help but reflect on their heroism, not simply in the horrifying white-out of a Great Plains blizzard, but in the sometimes thankless tasks they took up, day after day, teaching kids aged five to fifteen years old--and sometimes older--in a single room out in the country, the one-room school. Here's what Editor Wells wrote.

The bone, sinew, brains, courage, love, light and hope of the country are embodied in those dear little blue-eyed girls, who in many instances have given up good homes and refused to live idle lives, in order that they could teach school and enlighten the minds of thousands of children who will someday be men and women, and who are paid a miserable pittance for so much hard work.

Historians fairly get enthusiastic over brave deeds of brave men; poets grow wild in praise of "the charge of the gallant six hundred," and people are enchanted by songs of knightly courtier, but in all the world—in every clime there are no class of persons so true and brave, nor so honest and good and devoted to duty as these little school teachers we see almost every day of our lives, and if we were a singer, our songs should be sung in every home throughout our land to their honor and beauty; if we were a poet, our commemorations of those brave little angels should be in every book; and if we were a historian, our annals would chronicle the bravest deeds of the century, performed by these maidens who are making our world brighter and better and purer by their lives and good examples. 

From the time the writer was a wicked and mischievous lad attending school in the long ago, the patient little blue-eyed lady, whom we annoyed, disobeyed and got spanked for it, is the same little lady we now see in sunshine and in storm, happily tripping to the school house, where she is molding the minds of the rising generation to be good men and true women. There will be a grand re-union someday, across the mystic line that divides mortal life from the beautiful one beyond, and when the Good Superintendent calls the roll, every school ma'am that ever whaled a refractory pupil will answer to her name. The devil never got a school ma'am, and never will.*

Okay, he may be laying it on a little, but I couldn't help but love those words Editor Wells couldn't help but write. My mother was one of them. She wasn't even born in 1888, but once upon time fifty years later, in a one-room school in Wilson Township, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, she held forth to a passel of country kids, a few of whom--boys!--were a good deal bigger and a lot meatier than she was.

Just about all of those schools are gone now, long gone. But even today, years later, those young teachers deserve every bit of the thanks and praise our Editor Wells gave them a century and more ago.
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Alton Democrat, February 4, 1888.