In 1888, throughout Siouxland countryside, what habitation existed for homesteaders was all relatively new and, well, in its very own way, primitive. The northwestern counties of Iowa, for any number of reasons, were the last region of the state to be "colonized" by white folks, at least in part because of the lack of woods and forests. People used what they could use to create a home, and what was immensely available--and amazingly cheap--was sod. There were no trees, except a few along the rivers. Some felt exposed, even lost their wits in a world where the horizon seemed always forever away.
Wait a minute. You're thinking that insulation in the soddies couldn't have been better. Walls a foot thick kept folks balmy in January and refreshed in August. But in wintery gales could pull a chorus of tea kettles from a soddy's walls. With some luck, you could keep zero temps at bay, but keeping the wind outside was another story altogether.
Those who remembered the 1888 blizzard often compared the snow behind the front like flour. It had been feathery early in the morning, but once that black cloud people couldn't help but notice swept over them, what came down was icy flour, sharp as cut glass and capable of finding every last mousehole in whatever "out of the storm" place people took shelter. Lots of families awoke to drifts that lay before them like sleeping pets. Snow and ice spread quickly over the windows outside and frosted up completely inside. If some curious grandpa wanted to see what was going on outside and cracked open a door, the snow the barrage thus welcomed made closing that door a two or three-person job.
Schools--some of them made of sod, some not--weren't much better. Don't think "air tight." No ma'am. Sometimes older kids were assigned the job of trying to stay ahead of the snow that constantly drifted in.
There's no record of what Siouxland's Native populations thought of all those white folks building soddies up on the flat, treeless eastern plains, but they must have chuckled. Of course, they didn't know any better. Come winter, the Winnebagos found their way to straps of trees along the Missouri River, for good reason--wood, lots of it, for fuel, but also for fortification from the fearful winds in the flat land.
In late November, most western Sioux bands headed off to the Black Hills for nature's own protection. Somehow, with temps far lower than any basement could be dug, life was simply better in the nest created by the savannahs of the Paha Sapa. Wigwams created downright cozy shelters, some of them big enough to hold as many as four fires. Sometimes they built bark cabins around the tipis, for even better insulation. The truth is, some more modern Native clans built frame homes, but some of those families walked away from cabins in January and went back to blankets and bark and the Black Hills.
Among the Santees, those who remembered the blizzard couldn't recall any deaths, with the exception of a half-dozen horses who were simply--hard as it may seem to believe--buried beneath a drift, some of which were twenty feet tall, so tall they didn't disappear until mid-May.
It's hard to imagine that some of the First Nations didn't shake their heads and giggle a little at what seemed the madness of making a go of winter on nothing but flat land. It might have been helpful for all those immigrant people, many of them squatters, to observe those who had lived through the trials and tribulations of many Siouxland winters. But then, they were savages, weren't they?
No comments:
Post a Comment