On January 12, 1888, a monster descended on the northern plains just as country school kids were about to be dismissed. The brute force of that totally unexpected storm did not go unnoticed, even by the youngest children, some of whom began to cry alarmed by all the noise, as if there a train was passing just outside the rattling windows and shaking walls. Those who dared step out, all too quickly learned the barrage iced over man and beast. The Schoolhouse Blizzard put those teachers in a horrifying predicament: should kids be sent home or kept at school? And if they stayed, when would the storm relent? Was there enough coal or corn cobs or stalks--anything?
Not one of the children who stayed died; 200 or so who left did. It's a horror story retold by hundreds who survived in a pointed collection of memories titled In All Its Fury: Great Blizzard, 1888. Eighty years ago, those many survivors wanted their stories told. They published a book.
It's an odd old book, full of instant replays, a thousand tellings of the same story, some end in horror, some in miracle. Being odd and old myself, I loved it. All of it about another January 12, this one in 1888.
That night there was good reason to pray-without-ceasing, but by my count, only a half-dozen survivors even mentioned prayer. Ordinary folks, sodbusters in the earliest years of homesteading, and it's almost as if they didn't pray at all. Lord knows they had cause.
A little girl named Bertha Lawless and two of her siblings stayed alive by holding hands with others through the 50-mile an hour winds and four-foot drifts on her way to a house close by her school. Her father attempted to retrieve his daughters, but his horses refused to face the bitter wind when their eyes froze shut. Imagine the fear those parents felt, alone that night, a locomotive wind finding every crack in the house. Bertha Lawless says when finally all the kids were safe at home, her parents "thanked God for the preservation of their lives." One of the few mentions of prayer.
Will Saxton wasn't at school. He intended picking up a load of hay in town when that black cloud of madness struck. He turned around forthwith, fearful. But the mules wouldn't budge against the torrent and flipped the bobsled. When he couldn't find his way home, he burrowed into a haystack he'd bumped into, where he dug a hole and spent a frigid night. Home alone, Ma and Pa Saxton were "crying and praying God to save her boy. The older ones," one of them remembered, "saw the agony my mother went through." And then, "I never want to go through an experience like that again."
Orah Arnold Borer remembers. "Father and mother were of a deeply religious nature. . . .It was natural therefore to kneel around the stove while Father prayed." His voice, she says, "shivered with emotion while he carried to the Throne of Grace his pleas on behalf of all those who might be suffering on this terrible night." She says, "Never can I forget the earnestness of that prayer."
Grace McCoy was teaching in a school with very little coal. She determined early on to keep the children for as long as the blizzard raged, but when the little ones complained about cold fingers, she told the older boys to take desks apart--break them up--and burn 'em. Somewhere around midnight, snuggled beside her littlest scholars, she gathered all the kids in school, put each on their knees, and prayed together asking God "to keep us through this terrible storm." They were hungry, but they all were there when help arrived.
On September 12, the Schoolhouse Blizzard took the lives of as many as 230 in the sparsely populated northern Great Plains. But thousands lived through it too, thanks often to unimaginable miracles those survivors recorded.
Still, only a few remembered praying? Really? What's left of the old pietist in me couldn't help but furrow a brow.
But I'm often a victim of ancient songs and hymns that get little play these days, and one of those oldies returned, a line or two anyway: "unuttered or expressed." I sang that often as a kid and never really thought much about it. And more too: "the motion of a hidden fire/that trembles in the breast."
I can't believe all those moms and dad, all those teachers in whatever light they could create that night-- a few candles and a glow that arose from that big, hot stove in the middle. And all those kids, children--I can't believe there were no prayers.
Long, long ago, I remember Ralph Waldo Emerson writing somewhere that our most ardent wishes are, in fact, our fervent prayers. That old pietist in me, well developed, had more say when I was 19. Emerson was a transcendentalist. 'Nuff said.
But I liked the guy, and in the late 60s, he stuck too, so today I can't help but think that what that old dreamer said about prayer isn't all that many furlongs away from the title of that old hymn: "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire." And that hymn certainly got official approval.
I don't know much about the theology of prayer, but no matter what this odd old book says or doesn't say with its silences, I can't help but believe the entire northern plains weren't in utterance that night, deep impassioned silence full of the hidden fires trembling in their breasts. Think of it this way--the whole northern plains storming the gates of heaven.
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