Subzero temperatures like the ones we’ve been experiencing transport me to the New York-Canadian border in the 1860s and the winter of 1880-1881 in the Dakota Territory.
The first is the scene of Farmer Boy, the third volume in the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” series; the second, The Long Winter. The former retells Wilder’s husband’s childhood and though the temperatures are frigid, the setting is idyllic. The Long Winter is a whole different ballgame.
Faced with a winter that has gone down in the annals of US weather history, the Dakota pioneers were snowed in for months, unable to receive basic supplies, forced to burn their entire hay stores for warmth.
Starvation became such a threat that the pioneers ground their precious seed wheat in coffee mills to make bread.
The severity of that winter was due to the weakening of the polar vortex, something we are currently experiencing. Researchers at China’s Lanzhou University say warming temperatures in the Barents-Kara seas shift the vortex in part to North America. Environmental activists tie this back to climate change, to the warming of Earth’s core temperature.
To better understand Ingalls Wilder, during the pandemic I read Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires, which seeks to uncover the role of Laura’s daughter in Laura’s writings. What fascinated me most about Fraser’s book was her exploration of weather patterns and climate change in the American West. I came to understand that the Dust Bowl originated in settlers destroying nutrient-rich grasslands to plant grain, and that Midwestern fires were partially the result of too much logging.
I also saw the role of weather patterns that are beyond human control — cyclones, droughts, hail storms — which destroyed crops and livelihoods, but then led settlers to double down on planting, thereby leading, unknowingly, to that Dust Bowl.
There were also disasters of biblical proportions, which no human could either predict or withstand, such as three years of locust swarms, the most severe one in 1874, when $3 million worth of crops were destroyed in one month.
Here’s where extreme weather ended up helping: A severe frost in 1875 killed most of the eggs the swarm in 1874 had laid.
Fraser also lambasts the country’s financial institutions as well as the federal government, who almost set these settlers up to fail by giving them bad advice and providing almost no support when things went belly up.
Any good history book should cause a reader to reexamine. While Fraser’s book made me see settlers, including Laura’s family, more critically, it also enhanced my deep respect for the risks they took, and what they endured.
When the temperature dips below zero, I think of them and that Long Winter, and stop myself from complaining.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]
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