The Blizzard of Eighteen Eighty-Eight and the Drought That Dried the Plains
Near Aberdeen, South Dakota
The blizzard that struck the Northern Plains on January twelfth, eighteen eighty-eight, became known as the Schoolchildren's Storm, and the name is not an exaggeration.
The morning had been unseasonably warm, warm enough that children across Dakota Territory walked to school without heavy coats. Then, in early afternoon, a wall of ice-laden wind arrived from the northwest with no warning. Temperatures dropped forty degrees in minutes. Visibility vanished. Schoolteachers across Brown County faced the same impossible choice: send children out into a storm where they could become disoriented and freeze within yards of the schoolhouse, or keep them inside with dwindling wood supplies.
The death toll across the region reached at least two hundred and thirty-six people, possibly more. Many were children who tried to walk home. Survivors described the storm's roar as something they never forgot. L. Frank Baum would not arrive in Aberdeen until that July, about six months after the blizzard hit.
The drought that followed lasted from eighteen eighty-eight through eighteen ninety, one of the worst multi-year dry spells in the recorded history of the Northern Plains. Crops failed entirely in some counties. Wells went dry. Families who had staked everything on homestead claims simply loaded their wagons and left. Aberdeen lost roughly a third of its population between eighteen eighty-seven and eighteen ninety-three.
Baum watched all of this from inside his failing store and then from behind his newspaper editor's desk. The gray, lifeless landscape Dorothy sees when she steps outside in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the desiccated world where nothing is green and the wind never stops, is widely understood as Baum's distillation of those Dakota years. He wrote the book in eighteen ninety-nine, nearly a decade later, but the sensory memory of a drought-stricken prairie, and a blizzard that could arrive out of nowhere and kill, sat at the center of the story he needed to tell.
