1888

__________

 

“We Americans have no commission from God

to police the world.”

 

Benjamin Harrison

__________

January 12: In the Dakota Territory, the weather is unusually warm. Some of the children from the village of Huron arrive at their one-room schoolhouse without any coats. But a blizzard, driven by fierce winds is moving south from Canada. George Duernberger, a farmer in Faulk County, in eastern Dakota, was driving his tram,

 

With an old mare and several colts trotting alongside, to get water from a well about half a mile from his homestead. No breeze stirred; smoke went straight up from the chimney of his house. “The animals had been drinking,” he later recalled, “when ‘Old Bawly’ threw up her head and snorted. She jerked the halter rope from my hand, nipped one of her younger companions, and started for the barn as fast as she could tear. … I straightened the tram toward home and muttered a prayer. Then the wind came. Everything was blotted out, the trail disappeared, the horses’ heads were not visible. …

 

In the school yard near Huron, the coatless children looked up to see something rolling toward them like big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver. A rainbow-tinted halo rimmed the sun. The teacher clanged the bell. The last child had barely rushed to shelter when the wind nearly blew the frail building from its foundation.

 

At 11:00 a.m. in Lisbon, Dakota, the postmaster noted that the thermometer went to zero “and the snow flew so no one could see across the street [even] with a bright light burning.” (Smithsonian magazine, March 1988, “At 100, Still the Champ of Winter’s Snowy Olympics” by Ezra Bowen, 72-73)

 

In Huron, temperatures fell below zero, a drop of more than fifty degrees in just twelve hours. Near,

 

O’Neil, Nebraska, schoolmarm Grace McCoy and her charges at first treated the blizzard like a lark, piling coal into the stove and gobbling their lunches while they watched snow sift up through a knothole in the floor to form a small, white volcano. As night wore on, the older boys had to break up desks to keep the room snug against the mounting storm.

 

Little Charlie barred, a Nebraska boy of 8 or 9, got caught at the far edge of the furrowed cornfield beside his school. Wind and whirling sleet knocked him to the earth, where he lay, unable to get up or to open his eyes. With a country boy’s presence of mind, he started to worm along the ground groping from one furrow to another, taking his direction from the set of the ragged corn rows. After perhaps 20 minutes that must have seemed like as many hours, Charlie bumped into the side of the school building, felt along to the door and pounded until it was jerked open and he tumbled inside. (73)

 

Orrin Hayes, who lived near Parkston, headed for his feedlot, to rescue his cattle and coax them into a shed. The blizzard was so bad, that he finally took shelter in his barn, where he was now marooned. His family realized they’d have to get him back inside.

 

His wife tied a clothesline to their 18-year-old son and payed out the rope as the youth staggered off in a rescue attempt. By blind luck the boy fetched up against the barn and made the line fast at that end. Then he and his father overhanded themselves back to the safety of the house. The cattle still caught in the feedlot stood immobilized by the cold, snow caking their muzzles and swiftly building in drifts around their flanks. Soon they would be stiff as ice, dead of cold or suffocation.

 

Through the night the wind and cold intensified. Schools, farms, villages and, finally, major cities found themselves completely cut off.

 

In Nebraska, the blizzard caught two Omaha Indians, Charley Stabler and Rough Clouds, out with their dog, Bear Claws, and they all took shelter in the lee of a tree and huddled together.

 

By morning the men were trapped in an ice cave formed by drifts whose inner surface had at first melted from their body heat, and frozen solid into a thick, hard wall. Rough Clouds wrapped himself in his robe and lay down to sleep – forever. Charlie kept active, stamping his feet and rubbing his body, trying to break out. Near midday on the 15th, Charlie heard the dog whimpering, digging hard at the snow. Suddenly Bear Claws broke through, and with his help Charlie struggled out. Two weak to walk, he literally crawled through drifts all afternoon, the dog at his side, until, at nightfall, he reached a farmhouse, where the family heard him thump against the door. They warmed him, fed him. Charlie not only survived intact, but lived another 22 years…

 

Grace McCoy and her students had been trapped in their school. “After midnight,” she was to recall, “it seemed to me we would all die, for we were getting cold, and the storm was howling as fiercely as ever. I told the children we would all kneel and pray God to keep us through the terrible storm. Our prayers were answered,” she continued, “and about 3 o’clock the wind went down.”

 

When the sun came up, the children could see the lantern glow from a farmhouse not far away. McCoy got them organized and they headed for safety, were welcomed and fed at the house, and not too much worse for wear.

 

Others were not so lucky. A Bon Homme County teacher tried to lead her sixteen students to safety at a farmhouse only a quarter-mile away. In the howling snow they missed their safe haven. None survived. By January 15, the Omaha Herald was already reporting more than a hundred dead. In a history of South Dakota, written later, it was estimated that 112 died there. More hundreds perished in Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa. Some ranchers lost 90 of their cattle. As far east as Michigan, fierce winds blew a railroad train off the track and buried it in snow.

 

One young Nebraska teacher caught the fancy of the nation: Minnie Freeman, 18. When the storm threatened to rip the roof off her one-room, sod, schoolhouse, she led her class to safety somehow. Songs were written about her, and her picture was sold by newspapers, $1 each, or $8 per dozen. Admiring strangers “deluged her with gifts.”

 

The blizzard itself acquired a name: “The schoolchildren’s storm.”

 

*

 

If school children weren’t freezing to death, they might read from Hinman’s Eclectic Physical Geography, published in 1888. 

Say what you will, in 2023, about “critical race theory,” Hinman’s discussion of what he calls the three races of mankind leaves much to be desired. This is what could pass for geography in that era: 

Classification of mankind.– Varieties of men are usually distinguished by differences in the character of the hair, formation of the language, color of the skin, and shape of the skull. The formation of the hair, and to a lesser extent the color of the skin, seem to be more strictly hereditary than the form of the skull; and from more or less conspicuous differences in these features, all mankind may be divided into three broad classes, or types: (1) the woolly-haired and brown-skinned type; (2) the straight-haired and yellowish-skinned type; and (3) the wavy-haired and whitish-skinned type.

 

The woolly-haired type is characterized by its woolly or kinkled hair, and by the brownish color of the skin, which ranges from almost black to a light brownish tint. The peculiar character of the hair results from the fact that each hair, when duly magnified, is found to be flat, or tape-like. As a rule the head in this type is very long from front to back in proportion to its width, and the jaws generally project forward, giving the profile of the face a backward slant from the mouth to the low, receding forehead. This peculiarity is stronger in some tribes than in others; it is still stronger in the monkey tribe, and is most strongly marked in the quadrupeds. The mental development of this type as a whole is lower than that of the other types. No native woolly-haired race has ever had a written history. All races of this type are native in the southern hemisphere, which is thus characterized in its human, as well as in its animal inhabitants, by a relatively low state of development.

 

The straight-hair type of mankind is characterized by its coarse, straight black hair, each hair being cylindrical, – that that is, having a circular section. The color of the skin varies from brown through yellow to a reddish, but generally a yellowish tone is present. Many of the races of this type are round headed, the length and width of the skull when seen from above being nearly equal. The forehead is generally less receding, the jaws less protuberant, and the mental development is higher as a rule than in the woolly-haired type. One race, however – the Australian – is classed with this type on account of its straight, coarse hair; but it has the dark color, slanting face, and protruding lips of the woolly-haired type, and is considered to represent one of the lowest states, if not the lowest state, of mental development in living man.

 

The wavy-air type of the human family is distinguished by hair much softer than that of either of the other types. It is neither lank nor kinked, but usually is inclined to be wavy whenever allowed to grow long. The section of each hair is elliptical in shape. In this type the beard grows much more freely and thickly than in either of the others. The face is oval in shape, the forehead high and prominent, and the jaws do not protrude; hence, the general profile of the face is nearly vertical. The color of the skin varies, as in the other types, but in the vast majority of cases is so much lighter as to be called white in comparison; but it is usually tinged with pink, and in some instances is a dark brown. The type includes races which vary widely in mental development, but as a whole it may be said to have reached a decidedly more advanced state than any other type.

Hinman adds, “The present population of the world is estimated at about 1,450 millions of individuals.”

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Ask students what they think the population of the world is now. Few will have any idea. The world passed two billion around 1915. The world passed four billion around 1976. The world should pass eight billion soon.

*

 

According to Sports Illustrated (undated article, “How to Win at Poker Always”) P.J. Kepplinger, also known as “The Lucky Dutchman,” invents a new way to win at cards, what would become known in certain circles, including manufacturers of gambling paraphernalia, as the “Kepplinger holdout.”

 

Basically, a holdout is any device used to secret cards during a game. Many of them, before and after Kepplinger’s, served to store a marked or prestacked deck until the sharper wanted to substitute it for the legitimate deck; it might be used only once during a session. But Kepplinger’s device worked so well that it permitted the cheat to hold out and ring in cards on almost every deal. It could be used to accumulate a good hand – four aces, say – but Kepplinger apparently used it only to hold out one card, which he considered part of his regular poker hand: in effect, Kepplinger was playing six cards to his opponent’s five.

 

Other holdout devices had required tell-tale moves above the table; but even the pros could not figure out Kepplinger’s tricks. Finally, one night, the other players ganged up on the Lucky Dutchman.

 

Pretending to quit, one gambler excused himself from the table, put on his hat, got behind Kepplinger, and suddenly had a bear-hold on him. The others grabbed for an arm or a leg. Kepplinger put up a mighty struggle but the gamblers eventually subdued him.

 

What they found was an elaborate contrivance of wheels, tubes, pulleys, strings and other mechanical parts strung under his clothing from his knees to his wrist. Thus rigged, all Kepplinger had to do to work card-copping pincers in and out of his cuff was to spread his knees a bit. It turned out to be the world's most unerring holdout.

 

Rather than beat Kepplinger up, his opponents forced him to outfit them with similar machines. In years to come, gambling houses advertised the device for sale, as, “The latest sleeve holdout.”

 

Holdouts fell out of favor over the years, because if found, they were incontrovertible evidence of cheating. As late as 1962, however, one cardsharp known as Smoky Joe is said to have clipped a gambling house in Lexington, Kentucky for $270,000, while using a Kepplinger device at the blackjack table.

 

*

 

Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings square off for a game against the Toledo Mud Hens, then a major league team. The Mud Hens plan to play Moses Fleetwood Walker, an African American. Anson and his team refuse to take the field if Walker does and the Mud Hens bow to pressure.

 

Walker rides the bench, and the color line is drawn for the first time in major league baseball.

* 

McMaster describes the first use of the secret ballot in this country: 

The purpose of this system of voting, first used in Australia, is to enable the voter to prepare his ballot in a booth by himself and deposit it without any one knowing for whom he votes. The system was first used in our country in Massachusetts and in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888. So successful was it that ten states adopted it the next year, and by 1894 it was in use in all but seven of the forty-four states.

 

Six of the seven were Southern states where negroes were numerous. (97/417)