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Snow Winter
Mon Mar 08, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Out on the prairie during the pioneer period, settlers named only the really bad winters. The
worst of all was just called the "Snow Winter." Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather
Notebook.
The first storm hit on October 15, 1880, a three-day blizzard that took the settlers of
Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas by surprise. When that autumn storm finally ended, Mary
Paulson King, a child of immigrant Norwegian parents in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota,
remembers opening the door to a wall of snow that "just fell in the house."
Everyone expected it would soon thaw, but everyone was wrong. In some places that first
October snow was still on the ground in May, buried under the accumulation of many subsequent
storms.
As that winter wore on, the novelty of sledding off the roof or shoveling an ever-deepening
channel from house to barn gave way to grim hardship. With no train service for over four
months, store shelves were bare and starvation loomed. Mary Paulson King recalled that her
parents became so desperate for coffee that they improvised a substitute called "knupp,"
brewed from scorched and ground pellets of mashed potatoes.
Today children read Laura Ingalls Wilderís classic novel "The Long Winter" as a thrilling
story of the old days -- but in fact every detail in the book matches up with pioneer memories
of the Snow Winter. There have been colder winters on the prairie and deadlier blizzards, but
for sheer volume and duration of snow, that Snow Winter has never been rivaled.
Commentator David Laskin lives in Seattle. David Laskin brought us today's story. The Weather
Notebook is supported by Subaru of America and the National Science Foundation.
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