‘Long Winter’ portrays hardships of life on the prairie

Posted

When winter stretched into spring this year, I caught myself thinking often about “The Long Winter,” one of the books in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

I grew up reading the Little House books, but for those who didn’t, they chronicle the early life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who moved with her parents and sisters from the Big Woods of Wisconsin, to Indian Territory, back to Wisconsin, then to Minnesota and finally to De Smet, South Dakota, in the later 1800s. In fact, the Ingalls family was among the first to settle in De Smet.

De Smet celebrates its connection to the Ingalls family with a pageant every summer, as do other towns where Laura’s family lived, like Walnut Grove, Minnesota. De Smet’s and Walnut Grove’s pageants are set for the first three weekends in July. De Smet’s pageant “These Happy Golden Years” takes its name from one of the books.

“The Long Winter” picks up where “By the Shores of Silver Lake” leaves off. 

The Ingalls family spent the winter of 1879-80 in a surveyor’s house, the only humans for miles around. The spring of 1880 sees a flood of people coming to find land as the prairies open due to the Homestead Act and the town of De Smet springs up overnight. Pa files on a homestead claim just outside of town and constructs a store building in De Smet. Laura, then 13, helps Pa with the farm work over the summer, but things change in the fall when there are indications this will be hard winter. 

Those predictions come true when the blizzards start coming in October. School is cancelled until spring due to the frequency of the blizzards that roar down on the town. Snow piles up. The trains stop running from Minnesota because they can’t clear all that snow from the tracks. Food and fuel are running out and some families, like the Ingalls, face the prospect of starving or freezing to death. They all have one chance and it’s a slim one – there’s a rumor about a farmer somewhere miles outside town who has a stockpile of wheat meant for the spring planting. But to get to it, someone will have to risk their lives with open, horse-drawn wagons traveling on the trackless prairie to find the farmer – if he even exists – talk him into selling them that wheat and get it back to De Smet without falling into a snow-covered slough or getting caught in a blizzard. Who will be brave – or crazy – enough to do it?

Even though we had a long winter ourselves, we didn’t face the hardships those early pioneers did. Their food came from what they grew themselves that first summer and what was brought in by trains. Remember, there were no airplanes and no automobiles or even roads to go to a nearby town. Travel was done by foot or actual horse-power and was time-consuming. 

Additionally, they didn’t have weather forecasts, either, so they didn’t get advance notice for days when a storm was coming. Every time Pa went out to the homestead for more hay, which is what they wound up burning for fuel when the coal ran out, he risked being caught by a blizzard and freezing to death. But if he didn’t go, they would freeze to death.

Laura said later she started writing the books to preserve her father’s stories. Charles Ingalls was a compelling storyteller who often acted out parts of his tales. His story about the railroad superintendent who was determined to run a train through solid snow was probably one of the few funny spots in that long, dangerous winter.

De Smet, of course, is just an hour away, but that all-important trainline ran through Volga and Tracy, Minnesota, too; even Huron and Brookings get a mention. If you want to get an idea of how bad it was, Wikipedia has a page for “The Long Winter” that includes an actual photo of a train stuck in snow as tall as the engine itself taken March 29, 1881, in Minnesota.

For more information see The Snow Winter of 1880-81 on Wikipedia as well as other sources, including what happened to Yankton. If you want to find out more about life back in pioneer days, read the Little House series from beginning to end, starting with “Little House in the Big Woods,” and then you can be thankful for the times in which we live.