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The Cattleman’s Blizzard

Editor’s Note: On Oct. 4-5, 2013, western South Dakota was pummeled by one of the worst blizzards in the state’s history. Winter Storm Atlas was unexpected and deadly. It began as rain, but then temperatures plummeted and winds began to howl. When the clouds cleared 2 to 4 feet of snow blanketed the Black Hills and surrounding prairie. Ranchers lost cattle, horses and sheep in the tens of thousands. We toured the storm-ravaged West River Country just weeks after the blizzard. Here are stories from the men and women we found struggling to recover.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Molly Reinhold looks for survivors in the snow, following the heart-wrenching blizzard that befell West River. Photo by Rachel Reinhold

LARRY REINHOLD watched the darkening clouds while hurrying to plant a field of wheat on Thursday, Oct. 3. He could almost taste the rain. Quickly jumping off the tractor to check the planter, he nearly landed on a big prairie rattler, but the snake didn’t seem to care. Maybe it sensed that bigger trouble was looming.

Larry Reinhold called his family together for a prayer as they began the task of recovering from the blizzard.

Reinhold and his family ranch 20 miles north of Rapid City. Before sunset that Thursday, they brought their cows and calves to a windbreak below a big dam near their house and barns. Many of their mares and colts were sheltered behind a barn in another windbreak. The Reinholds raise and sell quarterhorses, and they also saddle them every summer for 400 youngsters who attend Rainbow Bible Ranch, a camp started by Larry’s parents in 1979.

Further north in Meade County, Dallas Basel was hauling hay from the fields to the yard on that fateful Thursday. He and his wife, Tammy, watched weather reports on television when he came indoors for supper. Rain was forecast, so they locked the sheep in the corral. The Basels’ cattle were about two miles away, still on summer pasture. After years of drought, rains had fallen in 2013 and the grass was still green; cows and calves were getting fat.

On that Thursday afternoon, the Cammacks were moving cattle.”They’d predicted 4 to 6 inches of snow, which you can handle. Most folks had cows 20 or 30 miles away from their home place and that wouldn’t be unusual at all in early October,” said Gary Cammack.

Like most West River ranchers, the Cammacks have many irons in their proverbial fires. Gary and his wife, Amy, bought the Stoneville General Store in 1973. Sales were just $10,000 a year but they hoped it would supplement Gary’s construction jobs. He worked on the local missile sites, the Rapid City Civic Center and een the Alaska Pipeline.

Six years later, business had multiplied 10 times, so they moved from Stoneville — a veritable ghost town, even then — to Union Center, which was only slightly bigger but happened to be on Highway 34, a main West River corridor.

Through the years, the Cammacks added a restaurant, post office, branch bank and beauty shop. But the anchor of Union Center remains the original store, now known as Cammack Ranch Supply, a destination for men and women who spend their days with horses and livestock. The store doubles as a museum; hanging on the walls are harnesses from the Fort Meade cavalary, the headmount of a steer that starred in a Marlboro commercial and fossils unearthed in the neighborhood.

Two of the Cammacks’ sons, Reed and Chris, also run businesses in the town. Reed builds wood cabinets and Chris is a world-class taxidermist.

Union Center, population 50, has a community gymnasium with basketball courts shared by six rural schools, a new fire hall and a Baptist Church landscaped with massive boulders brought from the Black Hills, 30 miles to the west. By Friday morning, Oct. 4, the churchyard looked like a Christmas card as big, wet flakes of snow began to fall.

~

LARRY REINHOLD’S wife, Robin, is a weather observer for the National Weather Service. Her moniker is Hereford 12 SW. She noticed on Friday morning that her measurements were far exceeding the local forecasts. Snow was falling at the rate of an inch an hour. At 2 p.m. on Friday, the lights flickered out in her family’s old ranch house, which was built by Larry’s grandparents in 1929. Power lines across the region were already heavy with snow, and being whipped by winds gusting to 70 miles per hour.

Tammy Basel was worried about the sheep.”Being a nervous person, I kept walking around outside on Friday. At one point it was snowing, lightning and thundering. Dallas was worried that I’d get hit by lightning.” The Basels moved a tractor out of a barn, where it was sheltered, to make room for the ewes and their lambs.

The Cammacks made their way through snowdrifts to the store, but the electricity was dead and nobody was moving on Highway 34. Chris Cammack and a friend, Ben Meyer, decided to try to drive a four-wheel tractor six miles to nearby Enning so they could mount a snow bucket on it and be ready when the storm stopped.

Cautiously, they made their way along Highway 34, both watching for a sign of the road ditch in the white-out of the storm. They arrived and were able to get the bucket mounted. But visibility was next to zero when they started back. Fortunately, they’d tracked their route by GPS so they were able to follow the same path back to Union Center without seeing the road. Driving the tractor was like piloting a plane in dense clouds and fog.

~

DALLAS AND TAMMY BASEL awoke Saturday to a 6-foot bank of snow at their ranchhouse door. But they climbed over it and walked 100 yards to the sheep corral, where they discovered that the storm was a killer.

“We don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, pictured with her husband Dallas and their sheep herd after the storm. She meant that ranching is a life, not a job. Their ewes’ thick wool was washed snow white from the three-day storm.

Thirteen sheep were lying frozen in a snowbank in the corral.”It was still blizzarding hard,” Tammy remembers. Later that morning, she saw a lone cow come into the yard. If she was theirs, it had traveled 2 miles in the storm. That couldn’t be good, but the weather was too wild to begin a search.

Meanwhile, more than 100 cows showed up in little Union Center. The Cammacks had no idea where they’d come from or who they belonged to, but they herded them into a cattleyard and fed them hay. The highway remained empty of cars and trucks; the world was white and cold.

Larry and Robin Reinhold looked out their windows Saturday morning and saw a scene that looked as if a tornado had blown through. Trees were stripped of branches from the wind and heavy snow. Huge snowdrifts stretched between the house and barn.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, the wind and snow began to subside so the Reinholds made their way through the drifts; soon they had their first inkling of the devastation. Four horses lay dead in the shelter of the corral.

The two oldest Reinhold children — Rachel, 19, and Molly, 17 — began to search beyond the yard and saw an unusual sight — a line of mule deer mixed with antelope, walking single file, making their way through the deep snow.

The dam seemed like a surly ocean. It was filled to the brim from the precipitation, and waves were beating against the eastern bank. The family’s wily Hereford herd bulls had come into the yard. One stood on the porch of a little cabin.

A Hereford bull took shelter on the porch of a cabin in the Reinholds’ yard.

Darkness came before they or hundreds of other ranch families could assess the situation. They went to bed hoping that the cows and horses that were miles away might have survived, but most had seen enough to fear the worst.

Most ranchers couldn’t tune into the evening news that dismal night because their power was off, so they didn’t hear that the National Weather Service had named the storm Atlas. In Rapid City, NWS was staffed by dedicated meteorologists who’d walked through drifts to get to their stations, even though they were on unpaid leave due to a government shutdown in Washington, D.C.

~

SMALL CHURCHES are scattered across the West River countryside. Tiny Milesville is down to just one residence, and the post office closed last year, but it still has two churches.

Roads were impassable so the pews were empty Sunday morning, Oct. 6. Ranchers climbed into the cabs of their biggest tractors and started trails through the deep snows so they could search for their stock. As the sun rose, the snow took on a blue glow because it was so heavy with preciptation. County and state highway workers began to clear the roads, and they were sickened by the number of dead cattle they were finding.

Electricity was still off, but REA linemen were immediately in the country, replacing poles and reconnecting broken wires.

The Basels and their neighbors rounded up 700 cows and began the task of sorting them by brands. Their tiny grandson was just beginning to string words together; his first phrase was”dead cow there.”

Cammack is a state legislator, one of three who represent District 29, a big swath of West River that was in the heart of the storm. His fellow district lawmakers, Dean Wink and Larry Rhoden, also ranch near the center of the storm. All three had cattle to find, but they spent time on the phones, consulting with state and county authorities about the recovery.

Words are seldom the measure of a man in rural South Dakota, especially not the quantity spoken. In hard times, a South Dakotan is likely to speak even less than normal so the three rancher/lawmakers filled a vacuum, and became spokesmen even though they had their own sorrows to sort through.

The national media was calling. The blogosphere erupted both with sympathy and stupidity.”Why didn’t they get the cattle indoors,” asked one urbanite. Comments like that were read and heard by the struggling ranchers who already were dealing with myriad emotions.

ìIt’s one of those things when if you come over the hill and you see dead cows dotted over the prairie, your first thought is it’s your responsibility to take care of those livestock,” said Cammack.”I don’t think there’s one person whose first thought was about their equity. Their first thought was that they’d failed their stewardship responsibility to those animals.”

Cammack told the New York Times and other reporters that ranchers mustn’t blame themselves.”That’s easy to say and hard to do,” he added.”There is not a producer who didn’t question himself 20 times a day.”

In the days following the storm, Gary Cammack had his own ranching disaster to deal with, but he also had responsibilities as a state legislator.

Cammack said one of the best livestock lessons he ever heard came years ago from Robert Funnel, a neighbor and the father of Tammy Basel.”I’d lost a couple head of cattle and Robert told me that one of the things that kept him in business was ëyou got to step over the dead ones and take care of the live ones.'”

At the Reinhold ranch, the parents and six children tried to keep a perspective. At one point, they stopped the search to reflect on what had happened.”We prayed that while the horses’ and cows’ paths had ended, ours must continue on,” Larry said.

And then they continued to look for survivors. They found live cows, buried to the neck in wet, cold snow, and they dug them out by hand and shovel. Twenty-five horses were nowhere to be found.”In our heads we knew they were probably gone,” said Rachel. But you search with your heart.

Finally, on Wednesday morning she and Molly found the last bunch. They were strung out in a long line on the prairie, a few hundred yards apart, for several miles.

It’s one thing to lose cows with numbered ear tags, said their father, but it can’t compare with losing horses named Cocoa, Sweetheart, Marigold, Okey and Rosie.

ìThey were like our best friends,” said Rachel, Rainbow Ranch’s head wrangler.”We lost 21 really good saddle horses.” One of them was Champion, a 6-year-old given to her brother Caleb for his birthday.

Rachel, the eldest of the Reinhold children, led her horse Pocokota through deep drifts as she looked for missing cows and horses. The four-day search ended with a heart-breaking discovery.

The final count was 91 horses dead, and 140 still alive. But the living horses also suffered.”They looked dazed, just like us, walking around kind of staring even weeks later,” said Larry.”Some of their bunch aren’t there. They had their buddies and they’re gone.”

One month after the storm, State Veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven reported that 13,977 cattle had been confirmed dead, along with 1,257 sheep, 287 horses and 40 bison. Some cattlemen think the losses might be twice that number, but it’s likely that a lot of ranchers won’t report their numbers unless the federal government approves a disaster relief program.

Oedekoven also said that while some of the livestock drowned in swollen creeks and dams or were simply buried in snow, many died from hypothermia. The cold rain and biting wind, followed by a two-day blizzard was three strikes.

Hypothermia eventually stresses the cardiovascular system to the breaking point. Before that happens, however, it can cause a creature — man and beast — to become confused and disoriented. That may explain why cattle and horses left shelter and drifted for miles before collapsing, usually in stride with their hind legs stretched out behind them, still pushing onward.

~

THE AFTERMATH OF the Cattleman’s Blizzard won’t be written for a long time. The impacts, both financially and psychologically, are impossible to predict.

Most of the ranchers who suffered losses are third or fourth generation stockmen, and while they’ve never experienced a deadly blizzard like 2013, they have perservered through decade-long droughts, depressed prices, diseases, floods and grass fires.”Quit” is a four-letter word they don’t know.

ìWe don’t know any better than to ranch,” said Tammy Basel, over coffee at her kitchen table six weeks after the blizzard.”I say that in the most sincere and joking way. Most of us would hardly know what to do with ourselves if we had a 40-hour, $40,000 a year job in town.”

A number of ranchers lost two-thirds of their cows, and for some that was the bulk of their net equity because many lease land from the government, from relatives or from strangers who’ve invested in cowboy country, sometimes for the hunting rights.

Everybody feels badly for the youngest ranchers who were just beginning to build a cow herd in an era of record-high prices for cows. But most ranchers can also point to a neighbor nearing retirement who doesn’t have much land and probably lacks the time or energy to start over.

ìThe effects will be felt 10 years from now and we will lose families,” said Cammack, the state legislator.”The biggest hope is with all the folks in Washington that represent us.” In the blizzard of 1996-97, when losses were far less, cattle and sheep producers received payments that covered about 65 percent of their losses.

ìThere’s only so much a bank can do with today’s regulations,” he said.”From a state perspective, there are some things we need to consider, maybe some loan guarantees or interest buydowns. If we can only help six or 10 families that’s still something.” Six or 10 families in Meade County covers a lot of territory.

The most immediate aid sprang from a Rancher’s Relief Fund organized by farm groups and the Black Hills Community Foundation. Donations neared $1 million by Thanksgiving week, and even though losses are probably 20 or 30 times that amount the generosity of strangers buoyed the spirits of the cattlemen. (The Rancher’s Relief Fund closed on May 31, 2014, having accumulated $5.4 million in donations).

Daily life was also returning to some sense of normalcy. Union Center’s basketball gymnasium reverberated in late afternoons with ball dribbling. Livestock auction barns at Faith and Philip were selling the spring calves that survived the storm, usually for more than $2 a pound — a thousand dollars a head.

The churches were open again on Sundays, and for weddings and funerals. When life turns abnormal, the normalcies are safe refuges.

Larry Reinhold, who had Bible School training before he returned to the family ranch, is a regular speaker at churches and religious gatherings. He once conducted a burial at the Piedmont Cemetery for an old neighbor who had a limestone quarry. Quoting Laura Ingalls Wilder, he reflected that the prairie has already claimed our blood so it might as well take our bones.

Reinhold recalled that particular eulogy as he talked about the October storm. Wilder was an East River farmer’s daughter, but she must have also endured some losses to so aptly describe the sentiments of the survivors of the Cattleman’s Blizzard.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Carcasses in the Creek, Noem in a Box

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I don’t spend snowy spring nights shoulder-deep in cows’ hindquarters trying to save balky calves. I’m not spending this October trying to get a tractor through a muddy, washed-out pasture to drag fifty rotting carcasses that used to be my mortgage payment out of a poisoned creek.

But I am being asked by Congresswoman Kristi Noem, as are you, to pay for a “safety net” to make sure blizzards and other bad fortune don’t put West River ranchers out of business. That makes their business our business.

It’s hard to read the numerous accounts of ranch hardship following the pummeling, freakish West River blizzard of the October 4 weekend and not want to leap to the aid of our neighbors who saw their livelihood turn to horrible scenes of animal suffering and death. The urge to help is all the greater because the people suffering fit the South Dakota self-image in which we all look like Ronald Reagan in Cattle Queen of Montana.

But why should we want to increase federal spending on (call it what it is) welfare when our Congresswoman has urged us to spend less on other needy Americans? She voted against federal assistance for people who lost homes and businesses in Hurricane Sandy last October. Silly New Jerseyans — they shouldn’t have built so close to the ocean, right? Rep. Noem has stalled the Farm Bill because she wants to cut food stamps, a program she claims (erroneously) is rife with waste and fraud.

If we’re really worried about waste and fraud, let’s consider the case for the livestock indemnity program that Rep. Noem advocates. Suppose a thousand ranchers lost livestock in this month’s blizzard and would apply for federal assistance. Would we not find among that thousand at least a few who find themselves in dire straits in part because of their own choices, say, a decision to leave their cattle out on fall grass a week longer or to switch to fall calving? Would we not find, say, 12 out of 1,000 ranchers (that’s the SNAP overpayment rate due to recipient “error”) who would take advantage of Rep. Noem’s generosity and round their losses up from 95 head to 100, or 150 to 300?

Dare we expand the welfare state and risk rewarding a few bad actors and bad choices?

When we look at the carcasses in the creek, and the honest tears welling in a rancher’s eyes, the answer is simple: heck yes! Help our neighbors; write the checks.

But if we try to take Congresswoman Kristi Noem’s words and votes seriously, we end up in a Republican box, where we can’t spend money we don’t have on lazy takers who should have known better than to try to raise cattle in South Dakota.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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Finding Support After the Storm

By Laura Andrews

Last week’s blizzard was devastating to South Dakota’s cattlemen and women, with livestock losses estimated in the tens of thousands. It’s hard for outsiders to understand the impact — both financial and emotional — that this will have on West River ranchers. Joan Wink of Howes, South Dakota said,”There are no words to describe the devastation and loss. Everywhere we look there are dead cattle. I’ve never seen so many.”

Here are a few sites that offer insight into the impact as well as concrete ways to help those affected:

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Lost in South Dakota

By Katie Hunhoff

A woman and two men spent the night in the Badlands this summer when they lost their way in the Sage Creek Wilderness Area. The hikers, all in their twenties, called 911 on Sunday evening after becoming lost in the rocky crevices and peaks.

The park’s search and rescue team headed to the Pinnacles Overlook to look for the hikers. They spotted them by air from a mile away. After a texting conversation, the hikers and rangers decided the safest option was for them to sleep in the wilderness. The rough terrain is dangerous to traverse in the dark, and the sun was setting fast. Early the next morning, the rangers rendezvoused with the hungry trio.

The mishap had a happy ending, but it was a reminder that although sometimes it feels like there isn’t much room for exploration or discovery, South Dakota has some big wide open spaces. Kim Ode, a Sioux Falls native who now writes for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wrote some tips to traversing the Badlands in a recent issue of South Dakota Magazine. First, she advised that you should bring a compass, but not depend on it. She recommends keeping a recognizable point in front of you and behind you so you can know your position at all times.

“It’s amazing how the landscape blends into sameness once you’ve hiked over a few ridges,” she wrote. “Stay focused.” The easy ability to find yourself lost in the Badlands is also the reason it is worth visiting, according to Ode. “Enjoy the Badlands for the respite they provide from modern life. You are walking amid the bones of an ancient land. If you can, give them a couple of days — the first to get the buzz out of your head, the second to let in the silence.”

Dale Korslund, an Irene farmer, also spent a night in the wilderness after getting lost while hunting with his uncle in the dense Ponderosa pines in the Black Hills. It was November of 1965 and Korslund was tracking a deer in Rifle Pit Canyon, southwest of Cheyenne Crossing. By 5 p.m. the sun had sunk over the mountain horizon and he realized he was lost.

“They say I was walking in circles,” Korslund recalls. “I finally found shelter under a couple of fallen trees.” The next morning, after a grueling night of temperatures near zero, a team of game wardens and forest rangers found him.

He was reunited with his uncle, who joked that he was about to put Korslund’s face on a milk carton. “That wouldn’t have done any good,” Korslund was in a good enough mood to joke in reply. “Most of the guys out there drink Jack Daniels.”

Stay safe as you explore South Dakota. Our population is already too sparse. We’d rather not lose anyone.

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The Winds of Destruction

By Katie Hunhoff

Sharon Weron was riding a horse home from a neighboring farm near Bowdle in 1955 when she got caught in the middle of a tornado. She heard a noise like an oncoming train and her horse began to run in panic.

Sharon doesn’t remember much after that, but neighbors reported that the tornado lifted Sharon and the horse off the ground and she was found in a ditch one thousand feet away. She was remarkably unharmed, except for some bruises and swollen ears, but she didn’t speak for several days. The horse survived, too, and both were fast celebrities. News people came from across the country to write the story. Sharon even became the star of a film that re-enacted her wild ride for a British cable TV channel. “It’s shown every tornado season,” she told South Dakota Magazine a few years ago.

Sharon’s impromptu tornado ride also garnered her the bragging rights for being transported the longest distance by a tornado by the Guinness Book of World Records. That lasted until 2006 when a teenage boy in Missouri was sucked out of a mobile home and propelled over 1,300 feet.

Tornadoes are not far from most South Dakotans’ minds whenever our summer days turn dark. On average there are 28 tornados per year in our state. The most tornadoes reported in a single day happened on June 24, 2003 when 67 funnels blew across our prairies in an eight-hour period. South Dakotans remember the record-breaking day as Tornado Tuesday.

The Fujita scale estimates the strength of a tornado based on damage wreaked by the storm. Most of the tornadoes that day in 2003 were weak, ranking as F0 to F1 on the F0-F5 scale. But one registered as an F4 and demolished Manchester, a tiny Kingsbury County town. Luckily there were no casualties.

Another storm in 1992 hit the tiny town of Chester. Citizens were evacuated for 19 hours after a tornado with winds measuring 113 and 157 mph damaged infrastructure, including a 12,000-gallon ammonia tank. Residents returned home after the gas dissipated.

The devastating May 1998 twister that leveled the town of Spencer and killed six people was one of the deadliest our state has endured. One hundred and fifty people were injured.

A June 17, 1944 Wilmot tornado claimed 8 lives, and injured 43. That storm is not listed on official records but is the deadliest in South Dakota history.

Seven died, all in the same home, on May 27, 1899 near Bijou Hills. A twister struck the Peterson farm, killing the father and six of the eight Peterson children. Neighbors rushed to help and found Mrs. Peterson in a muddy field, confused and injured. At first sight, rescuers thought she was an animal of some sort. Eleven-year-old Earl Peterson was found a half-mile away, alive but pinned in mud by a stick that had pierced through his clothing. Another son, Alvah, survived by seeking shelter in the storm cellar, huddling alongside a huge bull snake.

The editor of the Chamberlain Register wrote that seeing the wagons loaded with coffins on the day of the Peterson funerals “made even the most hardened persons contemplate the uncertainty of life, and the certainty of death” in South Dakota.

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Prepare for Hot and Dry in South Dakota

By Bernie Hunhoff


The summer of 2012 was the hottest and driest on record, and a Rapid City weather expert advises South Dakotans to prepare for more of the same in 2013.

Darren Clabo, the state fire meteorologist, told firefighters and emergency personnel in Yankton that the drought remains widespread and shows little sign of abating. “We could definitely see continued drought across the region,” he said.

Yankton officials are especially wary of fire conditions in the residential developments that have sprung up in the cedar-thick hills above Lewis and Clark Lake. Many of the neighborhoods are only accessible by narrow roads that have but one outlet, and that creates risky conditions both for homeowners and firefighters. Thick grasses and trees in the hills are extremely dry. Tree branches often obstruct large emergency vehicles. And many homeowners have made matters worse with propane tanks, shake shingles, piles of firewood and trees too close to the homes.

The hills rise above the state’s largest campground, where campers at the lake gather nightly to roast hog dogs and marshmallows. One fireman noted that if a campfire gets out of control and reaches Highway 52 it will race through the hills like a hot flood. “Fire is the only thing in nature that runs faster uphill than downhill,” noted Jim Burk, a 23-year veteran of the South Dakota Wildlands Fire Division.

Yankton County Sheriff’s Deputy Clint Clites said his office has prepared an evacuation plan, but he recommended that every family have a personal plan. “Don’t wait for us if you see smoke,” he said, “because on those one-way roads you may have only one chance to get out.”

Jay Esperance, state director of the SDWF, added that families should prioritize pets in the plan. He has counseled many families who have lost homes. Obviously, human life is the most precious concern. But he said pets are sometimes forgotten in the process, and that is usually a family’s biggest lament in a fire loss — outranking pictures and other physical belongings.

Larry Nickles, deputy chief of the Yankton Fire Department, noted that farmers and ranchers are especially vulnerable to wildfires during hot and dry cycles. Hay fires were once considered little more than a nuisance, but a big stack of bales can be worth nearly six figures today, as alfalfa hits $300 a ton.

Nickles said farm fires often are sparked from something as simple as a mower or combine header hitting a small stone. Machinery should be kept clean of dry debris. Bearings should be inspected, and farmers should always be vigilant when working in dry conditions — especially on warm and windy days.

If you live in the country, take a hard look at your yard before the temperatures get any higher. Move firewood and other kindling away from buildings. Keep haystacks, fuel barrels and other inflammatory materials in spacious areas that can be reached by fire trucks. Keep the grass mowed and trim the trees so if a fire does start it is containable.

South Dakota’s fire danger could all but disappear with timely rains and moderate temperatures. But firefighters are planners. It’s part of their nature. And in South Dakota they are preparing for the worst in 2013.

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A Somber Winter Read

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin revisits the deadly blizzard of January 12, 1888, in which more than 200 people lost their lives.

By John Andrews

There are few more comforting things than a hot cup of coffee and a good book to read while waiting out a South Dakota snow storm. Those are luxuries the characters in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard didn’t have. They were simply trying to make it through the day alive.

I recently noticed a copy of The Children’s Blizzard on our shelves, and was ashamed to admit that I had never read it. Most Dakotans have at least heard of The Children’s Blizzard, which hit on Jan. 12, 1888, and know that ranks among our worst natural disasters. More than 200 people died, most of them children walking home from school in southeastern Dakota. So I thought that in advance of the 125th anniversary of the devastating storm that I should read the book, and I highly recommend that if you live here, or grew up here, or have any ties to South Dakota whatsoever, that you read it too.

I’ve often seen book reviewers claim that a work of nonfiction “reads like a novel.” Then I read the book and wonder if the reviewer and I read the same thing. But Laskin’s book honestly fits that description. You can almost feel the harsh wind and subzero temperatures numbing your fingers as he describes the plight of the children caught in nature’s ferocity. You find yourself hoping that the children walking blindly through the snow are discovered alive, but in most cases you’re left feeling hollow when rescuers find the frozen bodies strewn across the Plains days later.

The day dawned mild for January in Dakota. Some parents took advantage of the unseasonable weather and kept children home from school to help with farm chores. Those who attended that day walked to school wearing light clothing. Laskin traces the cold front as it raced down from Canada, across Montana, Dakota, and Nebraska. Eventually it affected people as far south as Galveston, Texas. The story was the same in every school house: lessons came to an abrupt halt when teachers and students heard the first gust of wind slam into the northwest wall of their tiny schoolhouses. There are stories of teachers who kept students inside. They kept warm by burning everything they could find. They told stories and held recitations throughout the night. But Laskin’s stories are mostly about the teachers and students who chose to brave the elements, thinking they could walk a mile or less to the nearest farmhouse or barn.

They nearly all end in tragedy. One exception is the story of 8-year-old Walter Allen, who attended school in Groton. When the storm struck, fathers drove teams of horses pulling sleighs to the schoolhouse just west of town. Students piled on and they headed into the blizzard. But then Walter remembered his prized possession: a tiny glass perfume bottle of water that he kept in his desk for cleaning his slate. Walter knew it would freeze and crack if left in his desk, so he jumped off and headed into the school to retrieve it. When he emerged the sleighs had disappeared. The boy tried walking back into town but soon became disoriented. Only a heroic rescue mission by his father and older brother saved his life.

Also fascinating is the description of meteorology in 1888. Members of the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps were responsible for taking daily observations and filing “indications” reports, which were fairly crude forecasts transmitted via telegraph. They had a pretty good idea of how weather behaved, but a combination of errors and laziness on the parts of certain observers resulted in citizens hearing the first warnings of the pending storm just minutes before it struck.

Good writing makes you feel something, and Laskin’s work does just that. Back in September we sought help from Watertown bibliophile Donus Roberts in publishing a list of books every South Dakotan should read. Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard didn’t make Roberts’ final cut, but I’d happily add it to the list.

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Historic Ranch Turned to Ash

By John Andrews

The Williams Ranch had survived many a Black Hills wildfire. When we first explored the ranch in 1992, the most recent blaze had been extinguished just one hill away. The 18 buildings — all built by hand from Black Hills pine by Albert Williams in the 1890s — were safe.

Then last week, the metal blade of a road grader smoothing one of the Hills’ many twisting, gravelly paths sliced a rock in half, flinging sparks into the dreadfully drought stricken grass. The resulting Myrtle Fire, which has burned 16 square miles near Pringle, consumed the Williams Ranch on July 20.

“It’s hard to deal with,” says Michael Engelhart, an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service who has worked to preserve the ranch.”This was a part of my life for five years. It was a pretty sad day when I heard it had gone.”

The Williams Ranch, nestled 3 miles south of Pringle in peaceful Shirttail Canyon, was one of the oldest remaining homesteads in the Black Hills. Albert Williams felled Black Hills pine trees and milled them at his personal sawmill to build his house, which he finished in 1896. Over the next decade he added a smokehouse, outhouse, root cellar, granary, workshop, garage, corral, barn and other miscellaneous outbuildings.

“They did a little bit of everything,” Engelhart says.”They raised pigs, cows, sold cream for cash. For a while Emma ran a telephone station out of their house in the 1930s. It’s a wonder that they did everything they could to make it from 1896 to 1944, living off the land and taking care of themselves and their neighbors because it can be really harsh out there. Emma used to raise gooseberries and apples, and people wondered how she did it because it’s so dry and inhospitable down there.”

Trees and lilac bushes planted by the Williamses survived 115 years until the fire swept through last week. Engelhart says firefighters tried valiantly to save the ranch. Fires in the corral and barn were extinguished and a line had been drawn to protect the other buildings.”They thought they had it,” he says, exasperation evident in his voice.”They put a lot of resources into protecting it. But they turned their back for a second and the whole thing just went up. They were shocked and saddened because they were winning the battle. They thought they had beat it.”

Albert and Emma Williams lived on the ranch until 1944, when poor health forced them to move to Hot Springs. The ranch held other occupants until 1984. The next year, federal authorities made one of the largest drug busts in state history there. The ranch changed hands several times until the U.S. Forest Service took possession in the late 1980s.

Forest Service personnel had grand plans for the Williams Ranch. Archaeologists rebuilt the porch and did other rehabilitation work. There were dreams of turning it into a living history ranch and creating a trail system. Engelhart escorted dozens of school and service group tours. It was only a step or two away from inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

As devastating a loss as it is to the Black Hills and South Dakota, it’s worse for the family. The Williamses’ youngest daughter Betty and her family were actively involved in rehabilitating the ranch in the early 2000s.”I felt bad to have to break such news to them,” Engelhart says.”They really cared about that place. It was history to us, but it was their personal history.”

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Tragedy at Amsden Dam

By Lee Schoenbeck

Amsden Dam near Andover is a pretty little lake with humble roots. The 235 acre lake sits behind a Works Progress Administration dam. The dam was started in 1934, while South Dakota was in the grip of the Dust Bowl and the nation was mired in the Great Depression. Work was scarce and WPA jobs made it possible for the farmers of southwestern Day County to feed their families. The dam was completed in 1936 and the lake was full by 1937. The dam holds back water from Pickerel Creek and Mud Creek, both tributaries on their way to the Jim River. Lurking beneath the lake’s surface is an old gravel pit that provides its deepest holes — 27 feet. Those holes have provided Amsden with its most popular current use, muskie fishing, and its darkest day — less than one year after its birth.

The New Lake Held Hidden Dangers

In 1937 there weren’t community swimming pools, Red Cross swimming lessons or long road trips for entertainment. On August 15, Leo, a local farmer, and his wife Pearl, a country school teacher, gathered their 6 children and the rest of the Happy-Go-Lucky 4-H Sewing and Garden Club of Southeast Andover at their farm for their 4-H meeting. When the meeting was over, the kids begged Leo and another father, Herman Wenck, to take them to the new local lake to cool off. Pearl had lunch ready, but put it on hold for them to eat after a quick trip to Amsden. The group happily went down the hill for swimming and games on the southeastern shore. To the immediate west of the picnic area shore, hidden below the surface, were the now water-filled gravel pits.

Leo lived just up the hill from the dam and had worked on its construction. Because so few people had the opportunity in those times to learn to swim, Leo put a rock on the shoreline to mark a point that the bathers were not to venture past. Dilleen Ninke Wenck was 10 at the time and still remembers vividly the admonition:”Don’t go north of that rock.” The warning was needed because about ten feet out, and north from that point, the lake dropped off into the old gravel pit. As the day progressed the group enjoyed wading and playing waist-deep in Amsden — until an unusual event occurred, with fatal consequences.

False Teeth Led to Tragedy

Mrs. Simonson and her friend, Mrs. Miller, waded into the lake to cool their feet, near the forbidden limits. While leaning over, Mrs. Simonson lost her false teeth into the lake. As she searched about for them, she slipped into the gravel pit depths and began screaming for help. Leo, one of the few swimmers in the group, swam to her aid, but the screaming led to pandemonium. Family members focused on their screaming, drowning loved ones and not the warning about the pit ran to assist — and found themselves quickly in peril, thrashing in water over their heads. As the confusion and the tragedy unfolded, Leo swam and retrieved and swam and retrieved the neighbors thrashing in the lake. His youngest son Maynard, only 10, had an inflated inner tube that his older brother, Leo Jr., 16, swam out with to pull his father’s retrieves to shore. The news accounts of the day describe Leo as a”strong swimmer” and Leo Jr. as a”fair swimmer.” Sr. kept returning to the deep waters and retrieving bodies. Jr. split his time between pulling the saved to shore and punching others who were trying to get back into the water to help their screaming, drowning loved ones — and creating more work and danger for Jr.’s now tiring father. Helping Leo Jr. that day was his teenage friend, a non-swimmer, Orville Simonson.

But, in what seemed like just minutes, there was silence. The screaming from the lake stopped. Leo Jr looked about — his Dad was gone. As the families hugged and gathered, the magnitude of the tragedy was soon evident — five families would not go home from the picnic intact that day. Four bodies were recovered before the dragging equipment could arrive from Webster: Leo Sr. (age 36), Herman Wenck (age 42), Ruby Miller (age 12), and Mildred Simonson (age 13). That night a fifth body, Irene Wahl (age 13), was recovered, and the last, Mrs. Clarence Miller (age 42), the mother of deceased Ruby, was found floating across the lake the next day.

Leo Sr.’s body, clawed beyond recognition, was recovered with his last rescue effort wrapped around his head.

Leo Jr. was credited with saving a half dozen young 4-Hers that day. Dilleen Ninke Wenck was one of those children. She still recalls, just before she was pulled to safety, telling her father”Dad, I want to go with you,” and hearing her father’s last words,”You can’t go with me today,” as he slipped under the waves. Another of those children, Carolyn Schoenbeck Pooley, was 8 and recalls her father Leo’s last words being”Go to shore, Kelly” as he put her on the inner tube for Jr. to pull in, before swimming back out into the deep waters.

Lessons to Take Away from the Amsden Tragedy

There are lessons to be learned from the tragedy at Amsden Dam. The most obvious is, of course, the value of young people taking swimming lessons, so they have some ability to function in and appreciate the risks of a substance that covers over seventy percent of the earth’s surface. Also, as every student of a lifesaving class has been taught, a drowning victim is dangerous and presents special risks that only those who have been trained can safely manage.

Leo Sr.’s a special story. He was a strong athlete, the pitcher on the town team. His strength and commitment to survival manifested itself already as a young man in ways that were not so socially acceptable, but maybe not so uncommon in the Great Depression. He had already assaulted two people trying to repossess his family tractor, and earned another felony conviction for selling mortgaged grain, a likely product of the need to feed his young family. Today, Leo Sr. would likely have been sentenced to the state penitentiary, which would not have made him available to rise to the challenges of saving lives that tragic day at Amsden Dam. His story is one of redemption, a feeling surely shared by the families of the eight individuals that he saved that day.

Leo Jr., the 16-year-old average swimmer, never swam for fun again after that day. He would take his own family to the public beach at Blue Dog Lake to learn to swim and take lessons before his community of Webster ever had a pool. He even has granddaughters swimming in the state swim meet here in South Dakota this month, and several of his kids swam competitively. But water loses its attraction when it takes your father away far too early in life — at least that’s the way my father, Leo Jr., felt after that tragic day at Amsden Dam seventy-five years ago this August 15.

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Remembering the Flood

Unanswerable cries for help, narrow escapes and the raging, ice-cold waters of Rapid Creek sweeping away everything in its path — no one who lived in Rapid City in 1972 will ever forget the horrors of June 9, when 238 people lost their lives in South Dakota’s greatest natural tragedy. On the 40th anniversary of the flood, Rapid Citians are remembering the disaster with theater performances, a pow wow, art exhibits, photos and, most importantly, stories. We featured some of those stories in our May/June issue, but former Rapid City mayor Don Barnett had more to share in a recent interview with South Dakota Magazine publisher Bernie Hunhoff and Grant Peterson of Brookings Radio. Click below to hear their three-part conversation.

Grant and Don Barnett continued their conversation on May 22, 2012. Rapid Citians Dean Reichart and Larry Lytle joined in to share their memories of the flood.