Nellie Weston and the Great Plains Blizzard of 1888

The morning of January 12, 1888, began like any other on the Nebraska plains. The sun rose pale and cold, but the air was calm, and Nellie Weston thought it might even be a fine day. She was thirteen years old, with her father's brown eyes and her mother's stubborn jaw. Her two younger brothers, Thomas and little Eli, had already run ahead on the trail to the one-room schoolhouse a half mile from home. Mama tucked a biscuit into Nellie's coat pocket. "Be home before dark," she said, the way she always did. Nellie nodded and set off across the wide open grass. The schoolhouse was warm that day, heated by a small iron stove in the corner. Their teacher, Mr. Aldrich, read them a poem about winter and led them through their arithmetic. Nellie helped Eli count his sums on his fingers under the desk. Thomas bragged that he already knew all of them. Then, just after noon, the sky changed. It did not change slowly. It changed all at once, the way a door slams shut. One moment there was pale winter sunlight. The next, a wall of blue-black cloud rolled in from the northwest like something enormous and angry was pushing it. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in minutes. Nellie felt it through the wooden walls before she saw it through the window. Mr. Aldrich pressed his face to the glass. His voice came out quiet and careful. "Children," he said, "we need to stay right here until this passes." But some of the older students from farther farms were already pulling on their coats, saying their families would worry. Two boys slipped out the door before Mr. Aldrich could stop them. The wind screamed in and snow came with it, fine as flour and just as blinding. Nellie grabbed Thomas by the collar and pulled him back from the door. Eli clutched her hand and would not let go. "We are staying," she said. The storm lasted three hours that felt like three days. The stove burned through all the wood. Mr. Aldrich burned the spare bench. Then he burned the wall boards he could pry loose from a back corner. The children huddled together under coats and everyone's scarves. Nellie wrapped her coat around Eli entirely and sat with her arms around him, rubbing her hands up and down his small arms to keep the cold away. She told him a story about a bear who found honey in the middle of a blizzard and ate so much he slept straight through till spring. Eli laughed once, and that felt like a victory. When the wind finally softened to a moan instead of a roar, Mr. Aldrich tied all the children together at the waist with a length of rope he kept under his desk for just such a danger. Nellie had heard her father talk about teachers who did this. Smart ones, he said. The ones who kept the children alive. Nellie walked at the back of the rope line, right behind Thomas, watching the gap between every child to make sure no one stumbled and fell. The snow was past her knees in places. She could not see the schoolhouse behind her after six steps. She could not see anything except the back of Thomas's coat and the wide white nothing in every direction. She counted her steps the way Papa had taught her. She kept her eyes on Thomas. She kept her breathing slow and steady. Then she saw the orange glow of the lamp in their window. Mama had known. She had set the lamp high and kept it burning. The door opened. Mama pulled all three of them inside at once, pressing them close, not saying a word. That night, under quilts, Eli asked Nellie if she had been scared. "Every single step," she said. "Then why did you keep walking?" She thought about it for a moment. "Because you were walking too," she said.