Making Housecalls in a SD Blizzard
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. Folks in South Dakota are used to blizzards; they've been dealing with them ever since the first homesteaders staked their claim in the 1800's.

One of those homesteads was near Doland, South Dakota. In 1902, H.W. Sherwood came out from Ohio to make his living on the frontier as a country doctor. In this archived interview from 1976, his daughter Grace Monroe remembers the treacherous weather he had to navigate while making house calls up to forty miles from their home:

"One time he tells of getting lost in a blizzard and trying to get home - he'd gone on a call not very far from town. But he got lost and he could tell by the way the horse's tails blew that he was going the wrong direction. So he turned around, went back to his starting point again. There was no road, just going across country. And he noted the way the horses tails were blowing and the minute it varied he knew that he was going the wrong direction so he was able to keep his direction straight in that way. Sometimes he'd be called to go down in the country for a baby that was to be born. One time he was called and the baby was three days old before he finally made it down there. He got stuck in a blizzard."

H.W. Sherwood continued to make housecalls until his death in 1942. If you have any old recordings or stories about weather that you'd like to share on The Weather Notebook, contact us by giving us a call, toll free at 1-888-RAIN-001 or send us an email from weathernotebook.org. Thanks to Curt Nickisch of South Dakota Public Radio and to Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive.