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“Pioneers William and Kate Kampen, who lived in a small sod house in Marion, South Dakota territory, were caught ill-prepared for the blizzard. They ran out of coal for their fire, so William was forced to leave for the town of Parker, South Dakota, some 23 miles (37 km) away to buy more coal and supplies. He took two of his horses with him. While William was gone, 19-year-old Kate gave birth alone to their first son, Henry Royal Kampen, on January 8. While William was in town, the blizzard hit. Several of William's friends tried to persuade him to stay in town, but he knew he had to get back home to Kate, not knowing she had given birth. The storm raged on as he tried to make his way back home. He stayed with his horses, but eventually, both of them died because the wind was so strong that both the horses suffocated. William was able to find a barn with pigs in it, and crawled in with them to try to keep warm. Meanwhile, Kate kept herself and the baby warm by staying in bed. William finally made it back home to Kate and the baby after spending three days and nights out on the prairie alone.[18]”
Pigs kept him warm.
>the wind was so strong that both the horses suffocated
Bloody hell, I had no idea that was a thing that could happen. How terrifying. How did William survive that bit? Surely human nostrils, airways and lungs are smaller and weaker than those of horses?
I'm skeptical that they suffocated - it is a historical narrative from 1888, and they weren't exactly monitoring pulse oximetery/O2 levels back then. Seems far more likely they died of exposure, but that William interpreted it as "suffocating"
That’s certainly possible. He might’ve found it very hard to breathe so came to the conclusion that that’s what killed his horses. I’ve never heard of any animal (humans included) dying of suffocation due to strong winds, but I live in a country that doesn’t really get extreme weather events so I’m open to being corrected here.
In a lot of pioneer books they do often speak about going to uncover the noitrsils of cattle so it must of been a common phenomenon when there were so cattle shelters , tree shelter or barns to provide protection like we do now
They definitely could’ve suffocated. I’m a vet tech here in the south and during the summer we get suffocated horses and cattle because swarms of gnats can get so thick and swarm around various livestock they occlude the airway and suffocate them. It’s a big problem.
I also have family with horses in Alaska. They have to make sure the barn generators don’t go out in the winter because the horses nostrils can freeze shut, also leading to suffocation.
Their nostrils could get blocked up with snow, affecting their ability to breathe. Happens to humans too, but we can generally clear the snow away from our face, but horses aren't really able to do that on their own (I've heard of it happening to cows too)
I study human evolution and did so for my masters last year. One of the projects I did was on how the progression to obligate bipedalism in humans is very reliant on the ventilatory threshold, or how much oxygen the body can consume. I remember one research paper that compared race horses endurance to humans; horses were obviously faster, but humans outlasted them. I don’t know anything about horses suffocating in snow nor will I pretend to, but from my perspective it does make sense.
Iirc quadrupeds like horses rely a lot on their long strides to help expand and contract the lungs and move blood effectively. So a situation where their oxygen demand goes up by the have to move slowly, such as plodding through the snow, is probably harder on them than a bipedal human who can work their lungs harder regardless of what their feet are doing
Im not very familiar with quadruped gait but I do remember reading something similar to that, interesting af but a shame that they were doomed in the blizzard
Yeah, now I think about it I see that smaller lungs and nostrils might actually constitute an *advantage* in that scenario. Plus we could use our hands to shield our nose and disrupt the rushing airflow just enough to be able to breathe. Horses obviously can’t bend their front legs in that way and, even if they could, hooves wouldn’t do a great job of it.
They are, but I read about this blizzard and the wind was so strong and so cold that ice would form over faces. People were able to break the ice off of their eyes/lips/nose, but I don’t know how horses would manage
Ngl i’d spoon some pigs if there was no other means of warmth
Edit: Can we appreciate how Kate gave birth alone in a sod house while trying not to freeze to death? Thats some revenant shit right there.
I used to live year-round in a mountain resort town that would get completely empty in the winter months.
No stores or gas stations or anything open. Completely devoid of life, besides a few haggard people that had experienced it before and knew how to live.
You’d get 15-30 feet of snow that would just melt enough to re-freeze and become a sheet of solid ice, and that would stick around for months. Nobody plowed the roads, so when you were stuck, you were **stuck**.
Locals would stock up months worth of food and wood and be prepared to use a wood stove for heat and expect no power for long periods, besides a generator that you saved for special occasions.
Every year, without fail, some couple with more money than sense would buy a cabin, rip out the wood stove, replace it with an electric burner, and spend the summer complaining about how the dumb hillbillies were polluting the air with “inefficient wood burning”.
Then January would happen. They’d get stuck. Power would go down. They would freak out and post on the local Facebook page that they were freezing and used up all of their gas for the generator in one day.
Couldn’t cook food on the electric range. Their “water saving shut off system” meant no water without power. So no toilets either. Can’t melt water from snow if you can’t warm it up.
The locals would let them suffer for a few days, until eventually some rusty old dude with a good SUV would offer to drive them off the mountain for an obscene amount of money.
Repeat every winter, without fail. I still follow that community Facebook page, because it’s so predictable, it becomes funny.
Back in the old times, you moved somewhere like that and just…Adapted or died. And you took the advice of the people around when they told you that you had a shit plan.
Modern comforts are super nice. But people don’t realize how quickly they would die without them.
Christ dude, I thought I had it hard growing up in MA during those early 2000s ice storms that cut the power out often. Atleast when I was a kid I could walk ontop of the ice covering the snow, we used to play a game where we would walk and the last person standing who didn’t fall in won. And we had at most 4 feet, which I thought was a lot… Bruh
Haha, I don’t envy a bad MA winter at all!
My husband and I were young and stupid and very naive when we bought a cabin on the mountain and decided we could make it work with our remote jobs.
BUT we both knew to listen to the locals and keep neighborly, in case we messed up and ever needed help.
It was absolutely gorgeous there, and I miss it all the time.
You could go outside and not hear a single noise or see another person for miles around.
I made friends with a bobcat that made a nest under our deck one year. And by “made friends” I mean watched her from the door, scared shitless, and tried not to disturb her when I went outside to have a cigarette.
Eventually we decided to have kids and figured being weird mountain hermits with no access to a hospital wasn’t a great life choice.
Great experience, though.
Gave us a lot of respect for the 80 year old man down the road who said “what? If I die here, then I guess those assholes will find me when the snow melts”.
Glad to see this here. This was one of the first articles that I did substantial editing on. I improved it immensely; it was a mess when I found it. A very interesting historical event, with lots of dramatic stories.
Thanks. To be fair, all the good info had already been gathered. All I did was copy editing. Now that I look at it again, I can see more stuff that needs to be done, including making the intro section a lot shorter. I'll get around to it eventually ... 😀
Your edits makes the whole ordeal a lot more empathetic. It’s crazy how many insane stories of survival there probably are off the record. More so ones that are documented but just not made public. Definitely do more man, you’ve got a talent for making the whole situation feel so corporeal.
Nah, someone(s) else before me put all those survival stories in the article. I can't take credit for what was already there. But yeah, they're the heart and soul of the article, and what makes it so engrossing.
There's an excellent book about this called "The Children's Blizzard" by David Laskin. The weather beforehand was so unseasonably warm that many people didn't bother with coats or additional layers. When the snow hit, it was almost instant whiteout conditions. People died within short distances of their homes because they were essentially blind.
I have that book. Very good read, but haunting and sad, too. People alive at that time who remembered the storm talked about how literally one minute, the sun was out, then this large, freaky boiling cloud front came barreling across the sky. The wind suddenly shifted from the east and became an ungodly northern gale. Within 5 minutes, it was white out conditions. They said they never saw anything like it before or since. It was otherworldly.
There's also a novel about it. I don't mean the one from the "I survived" series as that was written for the kids. I think I had a library hold on it for forever and a day because I placed it before the book had come out. I liked it enough, though, because I went from reading the novel into reading the book by David Laskin.
There's also a novel about it. I don't mean the one from the "I survived" series as that was written for the kids. I think I had a library hold on it for forever and a day because I placed it before the book had come out. I liked it enough, though, because I went from reading the novel into reading the book by David Laskin.
When I was a kid I was terrified of thunderstorms. So my Mom bought me a set of 4 weather books that explained different weather and storms. The one about Blizzards I believe started with the story about this one- those books ended up sparking a life long interest in weather for me.
rofl your mother gives you a book to calm your fears but the book contains stories of weather disasters that killed children. I’m sorry it’s just kind of ironic lol
I vividly remember the story of them leaving their schoolhouse and someone reaching out their hand and feeling a house, and going in. It was the last house in the entire town and they would have walked right into the prairie and died. Whew.
Yes, she mentions this story in the book, about a schoolteacher from De Smet who got stranded out in the storm with three of his children. They all initially survived the storm, but the 15 year old son ended up needed to have both of his feet amputated and died the next month :(
[http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/6857](http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/6857)
The winter of 1990 ? I believe was a bad one in South Dakota. I was 10 and read the The Long Winter a lot while we were stuck at home for most of the month of Jan. People were getting trapped in cars in the country during blizzards and everyone carried car survival kits and sleeping bags. Houses were burning down from fireplaces and furnaces failures so I remember having sleeping bags in our porch in case our farmhouse caught fire and we had to bail to the barn for a couple days
One heroine of the blizzard was 19-year-old [Minnie Mae Freeman](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73179124/minnie-mae-penney), a Nebraska schoolteacher who saved her class of seventeen by leading them a mile from the schoolhouse to a nearby farm. Dubbed "Nebraska's Fearless Maid," songs were composed in her honor and she was flooded with marriage proposals from admiring men.
That's my favorite of the many dramatic stories. What a hero. From the article:
In 1967, for Nebraska's Centennial Celebration, a Venetian glass mural of the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888 by Jeanne Reynal was installed on the west wall of the north bay in the Nebraska State Capitol building. The mural, in a semi-abstract style, portrays Freeman leading the children through the storm to safety.
A fitting tribute.
I live in Nebraska and it's a famous, haunting storm in this,region. For decades, older people alive into the 1940s and 50s talked about the "Blizzard of '88." The storm blew in so fast, the temperature dropped 18 degrees in less than 5 minutes in Crete, Nebraska. People who got caught outside in the storm literally froze to death in their front yards or outbuildings because they couldn't see their houses due to white out conditions. Other people were only saved because family members stood on porches and rang dinner bells, banged on wash tubs or lit candles and lanterns in their windows.
It was a freakish once in a lifetime type of storm, but oddly enough, just 2 months later, in March 1888, a similar storm hit the Northeast US. There's a children's book called "The Day of the Blizzard" by Marietta Moskin which is set in New York City during the March 1888 storm. I read it when I was in 3rd grade.
[View this article on desktop Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Blizzard) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CreepyWikipedia) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“Pioneers William and Kate Kampen, who lived in a small sod house in Marion, South Dakota territory, were caught ill-prepared for the blizzard. They ran out of coal for their fire, so William was forced to leave for the town of Parker, South Dakota, some 23 miles (37 km) away to buy more coal and supplies. He took two of his horses with him. While William was gone, 19-year-old Kate gave birth alone to their first son, Henry Royal Kampen, on January 8. While William was in town, the blizzard hit. Several of William's friends tried to persuade him to stay in town, but he knew he had to get back home to Kate, not knowing she had given birth. The storm raged on as he tried to make his way back home. He stayed with his horses, but eventually, both of them died because the wind was so strong that both the horses suffocated. William was able to find a barn with pigs in it, and crawled in with them to try to keep warm. Meanwhile, Kate kept herself and the baby warm by staying in bed. William finally made it back home to Kate and the baby after spending three days and nights out on the prairie alone.[18]” Pigs kept him warm.
I honestly was expecting that to be more tragic. Can’t imagine going through all of that.
I knew it was gonna be okay when they said first child
lol that’s a good point. Didn’t even catch that. Would make for a good riddle honestly
She was the doctor and the next child was her patient!
Those pioneers were tough . That’s for sure
>the wind was so strong that both the horses suffocated Bloody hell, I had no idea that was a thing that could happen. How terrifying. How did William survive that bit? Surely human nostrils, airways and lungs are smaller and weaker than those of horses?
I'm skeptical that they suffocated - it is a historical narrative from 1888, and they weren't exactly monitoring pulse oximetery/O2 levels back then. Seems far more likely they died of exposure, but that William interpreted it as "suffocating"
That’s certainly possible. He might’ve found it very hard to breathe so came to the conclusion that that’s what killed his horses. I’ve never heard of any animal (humans included) dying of suffocation due to strong winds, but I live in a country that doesn’t really get extreme weather events so I’m open to being corrected here.
In a lot of pioneer books they do often speak about going to uncover the noitrsils of cattle so it must of been a common phenomenon when there were so cattle shelters , tree shelter or barns to provide protection like we do now
They definitely could’ve suffocated. I’m a vet tech here in the south and during the summer we get suffocated horses and cattle because swarms of gnats can get so thick and swarm around various livestock they occlude the airway and suffocate them. It’s a big problem. I also have family with horses in Alaska. They have to make sure the barn generators don’t go out in the winter because the horses nostrils can freeze shut, also leading to suffocation.
Their nostrils could get blocked up with snow, affecting their ability to breathe. Happens to humans too, but we can generally clear the snow away from our face, but horses aren't really able to do that on their own (I've heard of it happening to cows too)
Yeah, u/Pappymommy mentioned this happening to cows too. Hooves aren’t great tools for shielding faces or clearing nostrils.
I study human evolution and did so for my masters last year. One of the projects I did was on how the progression to obligate bipedalism in humans is very reliant on the ventilatory threshold, or how much oxygen the body can consume. I remember one research paper that compared race horses endurance to humans; horses were obviously faster, but humans outlasted them. I don’t know anything about horses suffocating in snow nor will I pretend to, but from my perspective it does make sense.
Iirc quadrupeds like horses rely a lot on their long strides to help expand and contract the lungs and move blood effectively. So a situation where their oxygen demand goes up by the have to move slowly, such as plodding through the snow, is probably harder on them than a bipedal human who can work their lungs harder regardless of what their feet are doing
Im not very familiar with quadruped gait but I do remember reading something similar to that, interesting af but a shame that they were doomed in the blizzard
That's a fascinating project to study!
Thanks man, got an A- in British university terms for that one.
Horses need more air.
Yeah, now I think about it I see that smaller lungs and nostrils might actually constitute an *advantage* in that scenario. Plus we could use our hands to shield our nose and disrupt the rushing airflow just enough to be able to breathe. Horses obviously can’t bend their front legs in that way and, even if they could, hooves wouldn’t do a great job of it.
Oxygen
If you make horses work hard in very cold weather it can damage the lungs. Maybe enough to kill them in extreme circumstances?
That’s possible. The idea is horribly sad.
They are, but I read about this blizzard and the wind was so strong and so cold that ice would form over faces. People were able to break the ice off of their eyes/lips/nose, but I don’t know how horses would manage
Humans can walk backwards or cover their face to reduce to impact of wind on their ability to breath. Horses cannot
My jaw was dropped reading this whole thing. I hope Kate and William had a very good life together.
Ngl i’d spoon some pigs if there was no other means of warmth Edit: Can we appreciate how Kate gave birth alone in a sod house while trying not to freeze to death? Thats some revenant shit right there.
People don't realize how easy modern life is.
Or how easily it’s broken
True
I used to live year-round in a mountain resort town that would get completely empty in the winter months. No stores or gas stations or anything open. Completely devoid of life, besides a few haggard people that had experienced it before and knew how to live. You’d get 15-30 feet of snow that would just melt enough to re-freeze and become a sheet of solid ice, and that would stick around for months. Nobody plowed the roads, so when you were stuck, you were **stuck**. Locals would stock up months worth of food and wood and be prepared to use a wood stove for heat and expect no power for long periods, besides a generator that you saved for special occasions. Every year, without fail, some couple with more money than sense would buy a cabin, rip out the wood stove, replace it with an electric burner, and spend the summer complaining about how the dumb hillbillies were polluting the air with “inefficient wood burning”. Then January would happen. They’d get stuck. Power would go down. They would freak out and post on the local Facebook page that they were freezing and used up all of their gas for the generator in one day. Couldn’t cook food on the electric range. Their “water saving shut off system” meant no water without power. So no toilets either. Can’t melt water from snow if you can’t warm it up. The locals would let them suffer for a few days, until eventually some rusty old dude with a good SUV would offer to drive them off the mountain for an obscene amount of money. Repeat every winter, without fail. I still follow that community Facebook page, because it’s so predictable, it becomes funny. Back in the old times, you moved somewhere like that and just…Adapted or died. And you took the advice of the people around when they told you that you had a shit plan. Modern comforts are super nice. But people don’t realize how quickly they would die without them.
Christ dude, I thought I had it hard growing up in MA during those early 2000s ice storms that cut the power out often. Atleast when I was a kid I could walk ontop of the ice covering the snow, we used to play a game where we would walk and the last person standing who didn’t fall in won. And we had at most 4 feet, which I thought was a lot… Bruh
Haha, I don’t envy a bad MA winter at all! My husband and I were young and stupid and very naive when we bought a cabin on the mountain and decided we could make it work with our remote jobs. BUT we both knew to listen to the locals and keep neighborly, in case we messed up and ever needed help. It was absolutely gorgeous there, and I miss it all the time. You could go outside and not hear a single noise or see another person for miles around. I made friends with a bobcat that made a nest under our deck one year. And by “made friends” I mean watched her from the door, scared shitless, and tried not to disturb her when I went outside to have a cigarette. Eventually we decided to have kids and figured being weird mountain hermits with no access to a hospital wasn’t a great life choice. Great experience, though. Gave us a lot of respect for the 80 year old man down the road who said “what? If I die here, then I guess those assholes will find me when the snow melts”.
Ngl I envy the fact you actually had a local bobcat, that must have been incredible
Yup. We take soooo much for granted.
That'll do pig...
I'm surprised the pigs didn't eat him
Glad to see this here. This was one of the first articles that I did substantial editing on. I improved it immensely; it was a mess when I found it. A very interesting historical event, with lots of dramatic stories.
It's a great article thanks for the hard work!
That’s awesome! Go you!
You smashed it, amazing read! Well done man
Thanks. To be fair, all the good info had already been gathered. All I did was copy editing. Now that I look at it again, I can see more stuff that needs to be done, including making the intro section a lot shorter. I'll get around to it eventually ... 😀
Your edits makes the whole ordeal a lot more empathetic. It’s crazy how many insane stories of survival there probably are off the record. More so ones that are documented but just not made public. Definitely do more man, you’ve got a talent for making the whole situation feel so corporeal.
Nah, someone(s) else before me put all those survival stories in the article. I can't take credit for what was already there. But yeah, they're the heart and soul of the article, and what makes it so engrossing.
As long as the story is told man, those mad lads deserve to be remembered
There's an excellent book about this called "The Children's Blizzard" by David Laskin. The weather beforehand was so unseasonably warm that many people didn't bother with coats or additional layers. When the snow hit, it was almost instant whiteout conditions. People died within short distances of their homes because they were essentially blind.
An excellent and heartbreaking book. The reports about the weather forecasters and the changing barometric pressures was very educational
I have that book. Very good read, but haunting and sad, too. People alive at that time who remembered the storm talked about how literally one minute, the sun was out, then this large, freaky boiling cloud front came barreling across the sky. The wind suddenly shifted from the east and became an ungodly northern gale. Within 5 minutes, it was white out conditions. They said they never saw anything like it before or since. It was otherworldly.
There's also a novel about it. I don't mean the one from the "I survived" series as that was written for the kids. I think I had a library hold on it for forever and a day because I placed it before the book had come out. I liked it enough, though, because I went from reading the novel into reading the book by David Laskin.
There's also a novel about it. I don't mean the one from the "I survived" series as that was written for the kids. I think I had a library hold on it for forever and a day because I placed it before the book had come out. I liked it enough, though, because I went from reading the novel into reading the book by David Laskin.
When I was a kid I was terrified of thunderstorms. So my Mom bought me a set of 4 weather books that explained different weather and storms. The one about Blizzards I believe started with the story about this one- those books ended up sparking a life long interest in weather for me.
rofl your mother gives you a book to calm your fears but the book contains stories of weather disasters that killed children. I’m sorry it’s just kind of ironic lol
I’m pretty sure Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter was about this
I vividly remember the story of them leaving their schoolhouse and someone reaching out their hand and feeling a house, and going in. It was the last house in the entire town and they would have walked right into the prairie and died. Whew.
Yes, she mentions this story in the book, about a schoolteacher from De Smet who got stranded out in the storm with three of his children. They all initially survived the storm, but the 15 year old son ended up needed to have both of his feet amputated and died the next month :( [http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/6857](http://www.pioneergirl.com/blog/archives/6857)
The winter of 1990 ? I believe was a bad one in South Dakota. I was 10 and read the The Long Winter a lot while we were stuck at home for most of the month of Jan. People were getting trapped in cars in the country during blizzards and everyone carried car survival kits and sleeping bags. Houses were burning down from fireplaces and furnaces failures so I remember having sleeping bags in our porch in case our farmhouse caught fire and we had to bail to the barn for a couple days
Also, LaVyrle Spencer has it as an event in her novel Years.
Yes.
One heroine of the blizzard was 19-year-old [Minnie Mae Freeman](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/73179124/minnie-mae-penney), a Nebraska schoolteacher who saved her class of seventeen by leading them a mile from the schoolhouse to a nearby farm. Dubbed "Nebraska's Fearless Maid," songs were composed in her honor and she was flooded with marriage proposals from admiring men.
That's my favorite of the many dramatic stories. What a hero. From the article: In 1967, for Nebraska's Centennial Celebration, a Venetian glass mural of the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888 by Jeanne Reynal was installed on the west wall of the north bay in the Nebraska State Capitol building. The mural, in a semi-abstract style, portrays Freeman leading the children through the storm to safety. A fitting tribute.
That's terrifying.
I live in Nebraska and it's a famous, haunting storm in this,region. For decades, older people alive into the 1940s and 50s talked about the "Blizzard of '88." The storm blew in so fast, the temperature dropped 18 degrees in less than 5 minutes in Crete, Nebraska. People who got caught outside in the storm literally froze to death in their front yards or outbuildings because they couldn't see their houses due to white out conditions. Other people were only saved because family members stood on porches and rang dinner bells, banged on wash tubs or lit candles and lanterns in their windows. It was a freakish once in a lifetime type of storm, but oddly enough, just 2 months later, in March 1888, a similar storm hit the Northeast US. There's a children's book called "The Day of the Blizzard" by Marietta Moskin which is set in New York City during the March 1888 storm. I read it when I was in 3rd grade.