Above the Fortieth Parallel: Technology and Winter Security on the Northern Plains, 1854-1949
By winter 1914-1915, the auto age had come to rural eastern Montana. A Ford Model T glided across the snows bearing Orland Eittreim Esval and his sister Gladys to the town of Scobey so that they could catch a train back to school. A scene of early-twentieth-century human triumph over nature? Not exactly. The sound this journey made was not the rumbling of an engine but a soft whooshing and clip-clopping, for the automobile was mounted on a sled driven by the children’s uncle. Along with taking them to the station, he was returning the vehicle to its owner, who had abandoned it when deep snowfall rendered it useless.
Esval and his party butted up against heavy snow accumulation, just one of the security threats presented by the winter environment of the Northern Plains of the United States, the region comprising the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana, often known by its early generations of Euroamerican residents as the Northwest. Northwestern winters are one of the most forbidding environmental obstacles in the United States for other reasons, too. They are intensely cold, with temperatures often reaching below zero degrees, Fahrenheit. Frequent high winds increase the level of perceived cold and blow snow into mountainous drifts. Temperatures can plunge rapidly. All of these threats come together in the region’s frequent outbreaks of blizzards: sudden storms of windblown snow that can create conditions so blinding that people have become stranded out in the open.
Hundreds of thousands of European- and American-born settlers like the Esvals were willing to face these threats because the region offered land with potential for either farming or stockraising in vast acreages – through the defeat and confinement to reservations of the region’s Indian tribes between the 1850s and 1870s. Between the territorial organization of the Northern Plains in 1854 and the mid twentieth century, these first generations of settlers tried to build enough winter security to get established and remain in their new homes in the region. If they were going to enjoy the security of surviving, preserving their property, and enjoying at least some comfort, they needed shelter from the cold and storms, a way to move people and goods, and the ability to communicate. Otherwise, they faced death, ruin, or conditions that were just too miserable to make living here worthwhile.
Technology held out a possible solution. Automobiles were but one of many potent new technologies introduced between the early nineteenth and the mid twentieth centuries, especially the years between 1870 and 1940. They also included mass-produced nails and lumber, central heat, and electricity for the home; steamboats, railroads, and airplanes for transportation; and telegraphs, telephones, and radios for moving information. Historian Robert J. Gordon has written that, thanks to all of this new technology, which he called “the ‘Great Inventions,’ ” “No other era in human history changed the life of ordinary citizens so rapidly in so many different dimensions.” The technological developments from this era that aided European and American expansion by allowing empires to overcome bristling native peoples and natural obstacles also helped settlers to endure Northwestern winters. But the relationship between new housing, transportation, and communication technologies and winter suggests not only the power but also the limits of the Great Inventions. The new technologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped the first generations of Euroamerican settlers in the Northern Plains to find much more security in winter than they had enjoyed before. But, as Orland Esval and his companions knew, flaws in the Great Inventions and the choices of their users limited the security these tools could provide during Northern Plains winters.
Keeping out the cold and warming the indoor air was a pressing matter in a region where winter temperatures often fell below zero. Housing innovations both helped and hindered the work of finding indoor security. Between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, the introduction of steam-powered milling, band saws, and the mass production of nails reduced the price of nails and lumber. These materials were the ingredients of frame houses, which ranged from small shacks to balloon-frame homes of greater volume and thicker walls. First built in the 1830s, balloon-frame houses, which were easier and cheaper to build than earlier “mortise-and-tenon” wooden homes, were themselves a new technology. But frame houses were dreadfully unsuited to the Northwestern environment. Even the home of Dakotan Mary Dodge Woodward, a balloon-frame house with thick walls, let in streams of cold air. Woodward recorded in winter diary entries that ink froze, “wind came in at every crevice,” and she once made breakfast in a “hood, shawl, and mittens.” Such homes were also prone to letting in snow. As Northern Plains Indian tribes that lived in toasty earth lodges knew, earth, not wood, was the best building material for staying warm during a Northern Plains winter. The settlers who lived in sod and dugout houses knew this, too. One South Dakota child wrote home to his father back east that “a sod house is so warm that mama says she wishes we could live in sod houses in Mo.” But, despite their winter deficiencies, settlers were far more likely to replace earth homes with frame houses than the other way around. Outside the winter, earth homes had their own deficiencies. They were prone to leaks and to letting in insects, mice, and snakes. They were also thought to detract from one’s social status. One settler recalled that the widespread construction of frame houses in the 1880s made it “almost a disgrace to live in log or sod houses.” Explaining the same change near her home, a Nebraskan wrote that neighbors saw them as “a step up from soddies and they stood for progress.” But, she admitted, those who built such homes were accepting the pain of extreme heat and cold. Technological development helped Northwestern settlers to choose housing that improved their lives in some ways but reduced their winter security.
Other new technology did make housing more secure against winter’s blasts – though its effects were not strictly positive. In the nineteenth century, American innovators improved the affordability and fuel efficiency of the iron stove, making them superior to the open fireplace, but they did not figure out how to make them distribute heat evenly throughout rooms. But central heating, introduced around 1800 then refined in ensuing decades, offered a solution. Central heat meant heating air, steam, or water with a single furnace then piping it throughout the home. Between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, it became widespread, first among the urban wealthy but eventually among country folk and the lower classes. By 1950, more than half of Northern Plains homes possessed it. It was far less common in farmhouses, but access to it rose so that, by midcentury, it ranged from 16 percent in Wyoming to 39 percent in North Dakota. It kept homes substantially warmer and helped to reduce the problem of indoor freezing. “What a comfort!” recalled Agnes Reiten Hared, a North Dakotan whose wealthy farm family had acquired central heat by 1920. “Radiators in every room, no more cold corners . . . no more rushing down the stairs in my nightgown to dress in front of the heater, my face hot and my back cold.” Hared’s centrally heated bedroom became warm enough that she started to take baths in there. A home with central heat could even become uncomfortably overheated.
Between the 1880s and 1950, electricity also became widespread in the Northern Plains, first in the urban areas and then among farmers. Electricity gave Northwesterners another source of light for their short winter days. It also gave them power that they could use to respond to winter-related crises. A southeast Wyoming family was able to thaw out its frozen stove during a 1949 blizzard by using an electric heat lamp, for example. While energy that came from kerosene or coal could run out if deep snow or blizzard conditions cut off travel, people who received their power through wires were literally tied to their energy source, and, unlike humans or vehicles, those ties scaled drifts and did not feel cold. But access to power could lead to the unlearning of how to live without it. This mattered because winter storms sometimes knocked out power. People who forgot life before electricity were left in a pathetic predicament. The Murphys, a North Dakota farm family that acquired electricity in 1946, exchanged their battery-powered radio for an electric one. But, when an April 1948, a blizzard knocked out power, they were left without the connection to the world that they usually enjoyed in the evenings. “We all went to bed early,” Helen Murphy wrote, “as there wasnt [sic] anything to do but listen to the storm outside.”
Another of the wonders of technological development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the dramatic rise in the speed of transportation in the Northern Plains. Keelboats, which moved upstream by the power of sails or men pulling with ropes or straining at oars, went but fifteen miles per hour up the Missouri River. Steamboats, which became common on the river the 1830s, could go fifty to one hundred miles per day upstream. The fastest land travel, the Pony Express, went but nine miles per hour, but the networking of the Northern Plains with rails between the 1860s and 1920 allowed people and goods to move faster than the Pony Express or the steamboats. Trains not only averaged twenty to twenty-five miles per hour by the 1870s but also moved goods more cheaply than steamboats or wagons, so they cut deeply into boats’ market share by 1880. Automobiles did even better. Far faster than horses, they could travel at a comparable if not superior speed to trains and offered drivers far more independence than railroads, with their rigid schedules and routes. Farmers, especially Northwestern farmers, loved them. By 1930, nearly 90 percent of North and South Dakota farm households owned one, compared with 58 percent of farmers nationwide.
But winter weather hindered all of these technologies. Transportation interruptions mattered because they sometimes resulted in deprivation of mail, shortages of food and coal, and inability to reach medical care. The annual freezing of Northwestern rivers prevented winter steamboat travel. Deep snowdrifts in or just east of the region often delayed trains or halted them altogether for periods ranging from one or more days to weeks. Automobiles also were overwhelmed by the snow, as Orland Esval experienced, and they were also unsuited to the cold. Ninety percent of automobiles manufactured in 1919 lacked roofs. Water was widely used as an engine coolant before the introduction of antifreeze in the 1920s and even in its early days, when use was apparently not widespread. Water-filled radiators had to be drained after use in freezing conditions, and, in the Northwest, they sometimes froze even when the engine was running. Cars were also hard to start in the winter. While horsedrawn sleds could have their own snow problems, they handled deep snow better than trains or automobiles and often were used when trains or automobiles could not move or when automobiles’ problems were seen as more trouble than they were worth. Parker, Dakota Territory, went without a train between January 30 and at least the first week of March in 1881, but, around March 1, a train of pack mules reached the town, bearing navy beans, cranberries, coffee, flour, cornmeal, and graham. “A man on foot, not to say anything of the oldtime buckboard mail carriage,” commented the town’s newspaper in response to a snow-related interruption in rail service earlier in the winter, “is much more reliable in winter than those powerful . . . railroad engines.” Many Northwesterners also found horse-powered conveyances to be superior to automobiles in the winter. Because automobiles were so unreliable in the winter, many Northwesterners in the early twentieth century put them away either for the entire winter or during a period when roads were blocked by snow and relied on horse-drawn sleds instead.
Because of their winter weaknesses, choosing to turn to the new technologies of railroads and automobiles created needs for further technological development and government activity. These developments helped to resolve these problems – but not completely. In the 1880s, Canadians invented the rotary snowplow to clear the rails. By grinding up and throwing snow from the tracks, it handled hard or deep snow better than the old methods of snow removal: gangs of shovelers or wedge-shaped plows affixed to the front of locomotives that slammed them into the drifts at high speeds. On the roads, states and localities did not plow snow before the late 1910s, but many Northwesterners’ choices to adopt cars, which were useful but vulnerable to snow, sparked desire for a new government service. Fortunately, the same internal combustion engine that powered cars that floundered in deep snow could also power trucks and rotary snowplows that could allow year-round road travel. In the 1920s and 1930s, states and localities across the Northern Plains began plowing, largely to accommodate the automobile. When snowplows went through, rural people often soon started up their cars and made trips to town to shop or pick up mail.
But there were also limits to the power and availability of snow removal technology. Railroads held on to early snow removal methods even after adopting the rotary snow plow. Shovelers and wedge plows remained a significant part of railroads’ snow removal fleets, likely because of the slowness of rotary plows, which worked at about twelve miles per hour, and because of the expense of acquiring them. In addition to slowness, their blades could be badly damaged by debris buried in the snow, such as telegraph poles or frozen livestock corpses, or by exceptionally hard snow and ice. Even after snowplowing began, auto travel was often stymied for periods lasting between hours and days, partly because of the slowness of some equipment, such as bulldozers, and partly because of the small size of fleets. In early 1949, for example, Bartlett, Nebraska, was cut off from road access for a week, and nearby ranches went more than three weeks without being able to use the roads.
The introduction of another of the profusion of inventions around 1900, airplanes, offered yet another solution to snow blockages in the Northern Plains. In addition to traveling far faster than any form of ground transportation, they could also overleap the snowdrifts by adding a third dimension to travel. This possibility was not lost on Northwesterners. In early 1936, with deep snow clogging the roads, a South Dakota newspaper noted that the area was home to “a man who owns an airplane[.] [W]hy not put the ship to service, bring in mail and passengers and serve as a transportation line until conditions change.” By the late 1930s, airplanes alleviated snowbound conditions by carrying food, fuel, animal feed, doctors, and other passengers. And, yet, for all their potential to overleap the drifts, they, too, were limited in what they could accomplish. Trucks were far more efficient at moving supplies – if the roads were open. During a 1949 snow blockade, Wyoming’s governor said that “airplane service cannot hope to be adequate” to meet stockowners’ feed needs. Like the other inventions that sped up travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – steamboats, locomotives, automobiles, rotary snowplows – they were vulnerable to Northwestern winters.
Advances in communication technology also helped to promote Northwesterners’ winter security, but, as with domestic and transportation developments, human choices and the technologies’ flaws limited their effectiveness. The telegraph spanned snowdrifts by allowing messages to be sent in Morse Code over electricity bearing wires. In early 1881, a town in South Dakota that was suffering a flour shortage because deep snow had severed its rail connection was able to get a telegram about its plight to Sheldon, Iowa, prompting a merchant to try an alternative to the railroad by sending seven teams pulling sleds to the stricken town. The telegraph could also quickly centralize far-flung weather readings, which allowed the initiation of forecasting by the federal Weather Bureau in the early 1870s. But the telegraph was far more useful for centralizing a small number of readings that provided a snapshot of the nation’s weather than broadcasting forecasts. Because the telegraph was not a household item, the Weather Bureau was unable to reach individual farm households in the Northern Plains with forecasts when a blizzard was bearing down on them. The Weather Bureau correctly forecasted bad winter weather would strike the Northern Plains on January 12, 1888, but it could not get word to individual farmhouses. Consequently, when the day began with good weather, many of them went about their business – including sending their children to school. A sudden blizzard swept down later in the day, killing 250 to 500 people in Dakota Territory and Nebraska – perhaps a quarter of them aged eighteen or under.
By contrast, the telephone, invented in 1876, was a household item, and those who adopted it found it even more useful than the telegraph for responding to winter. It became widespread in the Northern Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its users found it even more useful. More than three quarters of all Nebraska farmers and 59 percent of South Dakota farmers had them by 1920. Telephones not only carried forecasts to individual homes but also allowed Northwesterners to stay in social or business contact when blizzards or deep snow hindered travel. They also allowed people to summon help or coordinate an effort to solve a winter-related problem, such as a person going missing in a blizzard. In March 1913, riderless horses arrived at a western South Dakota ranch during or right after a blizzard. This was read at the ranch as a sign that people had gotten lost in the storm. But telephones had their own limitations. Bad weather could knock out the lines, many lines in the early twentieth century were only local, meaning that they lacked access to forecasts, most farmers in Montana and Wyoming did not have telephones by 1920, and many Northwestern farmers jettisoned their phones in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, only 43 percent of Nebraska farmers still owned them. The introduction of radios in the 1920s and 1930s helped to fill the void left by the abandonment of the telephone. By 1940, with more than 90 percent of the region’s urban and rural households owning one, they were far more popular than the telephone had ever been in the Northern Plains. Radios allowed people in the region to enjoy news, sports, and religious programming even when winter’s cold, snow, and blizzards made travel difficult or dangerous. They also carried weather forecasts. But radio, too, had its limits. Unlike telephones and telegraphs, it did not allow two-way communication. During an early 1949 blizzard, travelers stranded at a Wyoming ranch were put in the uncomfortable position of hearing themselves described as missing over the radio but being unable to announce their whereabouts because the phone line was down. Human error also limited the good the telegraph, telephone, or radio could do. The Weather Bureau sometimes got forecasts wrong or did not word them clearly. Some people disregarded the Bureau’s forecasts. Even though it broadcast a forecast of a winter storm in March 1941, people in Rollette County, North Dakota, were out on the streets when it hit.
The technological developments of the nineteenth century and up to the mid-twentieth century, especially between 1870 and 1940, were so remarkable that they helped Northwesterners to become more secure during vicious winters, but, despite their potency, they were flawed. Furthermore, humans still faced decisions about how to use them wisely and whether to accept the tradeoffs that came from adopting them. The technologies with which the first generations of Euroamericans faced their first decades of Northwestern winters suggests the aptness of several of Kranzberg’s Laws. One, technology that settlers used to meet winter was neither good, bad, nor neutral. For example, adopting electricity came with the unintended consequence of dependency. Second, adopting one technology created needs for other developments. The adoption of the automobile led to a need for snow removal. Finally, the quest for winter security in the Northern Plains involved people. This included their unwise decisions, problem-solving through communal activity and imagination, and grit to weather the storms and cold waves of this hard region.
1 Orland Eittreim Esval, Prairie Tales: Adventures Growing Up on a Frontier (Banner Elk, N.C.: Landmark House, 1979), 83.
2 Norman J. Rosenberg, “Climate of the Great Plains Region of the United States,” Great Plains Quarterly 7 (Winter 1987): 23, 29; Christopher C. Burt, Extreme Weather: A Guide & Record Book, climate change ed. (New York: Norton, 2007), 68-69; Jill S. M. Coleman and Robert M. Schwartz, “An Updated Blizzard Climatology of the Contiguous United States (1959-2014): An Examination of Spatiotemporal Trends,” Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 56 (January 2017): 174-185; Stephen J. Lavin, Fred M. Shelley, and J. Clark Archer, Atlas of the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 40; Melvin E. Kazeck, North Dakota: A Human and Economic Geography (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1956), 49; J. Sanford Rikoon, ed., Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, trans. Jacob Calof and Molly Shaw (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 62.
3 Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2, 173.
4 Daniel R. Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 51 (June 1979): 231-263; Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931).
5 Fred W. Peterson, Homes in the Heartland: Balloon Frame Farmhouses of the Upper Midwest, 1850-1920 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 1, 5-8, 9 [quotation], 14, 54, 56, 58; Mary Dodge Woodward, The Checkered Years: A Bonanza Farm Diary, 1884-88, ed. Mary Boynton Cowdrey (1937; reprint, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989), 72, 114 [quotation], 141, 143, 161 [quotation], 162, 170, 208; Arthur Gibbs Draper, ed., My Ever Dear Charlie: Letters Home from the Dakota Territory (Guilford, Conn.: TwoDot, 2006), 76-77, 94, 104 [quotation], 109; Molly P. Rozum, “It’s Weathered Many a Storm: The Enduring Sod House in Northwestern South Dakota,” South Dakota History 47 (Winter 2017): 355-356; Grace Snyder, as told to Nellie Snyder Yost, No Time on My Hands (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1963), 177 [quotation]; Kazeck, North Dakota, 5.
6 John Stark diary, Dec. 29, 1948, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula; Sean Patrick Adams, Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 3-10, 14-15, 19-37, 69. 95, 97-98, 121-122, 131-135, 138-141; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 44, 95, 120, 126; Agnes Reiten Hared, The Naked Prairie: Pioneer Life in North Dakota (New York: Vantage, 1992), 61 [quotation], 114; Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Housing: 1950 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), vol. 1, pt. 4, pp. 26-11, 27-12, pt. 5, pp. 34-11, 41-12, pt. 6, p. 50-11.
7 Census of Housing, vol. 1, pt. 4, pp. 26-11, 27-12, pt. 5, pp. 34-11, 41-12, pt. 6, p. 50-11; Helen Murphy diary, Nov. 7, Dec. 3, 16, 1946, Jan. 7, 1947, Jan. 22, April 7, 1948 [quotation], Helen Normand Murphy Papers, OGLMC 1249, Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks; Claribel [also spelled Clarabell] Kane to her niece, Jan. 30, 1949, in The Blizzard in Black and White: A Scrapbook Album of Photographs and Stories as Told by the Survivors, Book Three, ed. Loretta Jewell (Carpenter, Wyo.: Our Family Circle Press, 2004), 15.
8 David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807-1840: A Geographical Synthesis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 84, 86; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 138-140, 150-151; Gary S. Freedom, “Moving Men and Supplies: Military Transportation on the Northern Great Plains, 1866-1891,” South Dakota History 14 (Summer 1984): 116, 123-131; Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 117, 120; James Richard Smith, Geography of the Northern Plains and Other Essays (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Augustana College Press, 1990), 71; Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 379; Michael L. Berger, The Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893-1929 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979), 52; John Stark diary, Nov. 27, 1925, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula.
9 “The River,” Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, D.T.), Nov. 20, 1880, p. 4; “Snow Bound in Dakota – a Pioneer’s Explanation of Recent Conditions,” Bismarck [N.D.] Daily Tribune, Feb. 13, 1907, p. 3; Pamela Smith Hill, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 212-213, 217, 219-221, 225; Lloyd A. Svendsbye, I paid all my debts. . . . : A Norwegian American Immigrant Saga of Life on the Prairie of North Dakota (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2009), 59; Edward J. Bell, Jr., Homesteading in Montana, 1911-1923: Life in the Blue Mountain Country (Bozeman, Mont.: Big Sky Books, 1975), 38; “Family Bus Used to Go in Winter Storage, But Not Now; Montana Roads Are Kept Open,” Great Falls [Mont.] Tribune, Nov. 19, 1939, p. 3; Snyder, No Time on My Hands, 420-421; William B. Meyer, Americans and Their Weather, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148; “Special Notices,” New Era (Parker, D.T.), March 5, 1881, p. 1; Parker New Era, reprinted in “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, D.T.), Feb. 1, 1881, p. 4 [quotation].
10 Gerald M. Best, Snowplow: Clearing Mountain Rails (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1966), 53-76, 106-110, 113; “Blizzard Sweeps Montana,” Producers News (Plentywood, Mont.), March 19, 1920, p. 1; E. E. Duffy, “Pavement Aids Winter Driving,” Billings [Mont.] Gazette, Jan. 22, 1928, p. 22; “What Some of the Farmers Say about Need County Snow Plow” [sic], Havre [Mont.] Daily News-Promoter, Nov. 27, 1927, p. 1; “State Prepares for Quick Snow Removal,” Billings Gazette, Nov. 29, 1928, p. 2; A. C. Tilley, “Winter Maintenance on Nebraska State Highways,” Roads and Streets, October 1930, p. 85; Murphy diary, Feb. 8, March 18, 1939, Jan. 7, 30-31, March 21, 29-30, 1941, Jan. 18-19, Jan. 31, Feb. 9, 21, March 12-13, 1946, Nov. 29, Dec. 21, 29, 1947, Feb. 3-4, 21-22, March 3, 14, 22, April 14-15, 1948; Lewis McLouth, “Fighting Snow-Drifts – for Midsummer Reading,” Cosmopolitan, August 1897, p. 366.
11 “Anything Can Happen,” Roads and Streets, September 1948, p. 66; Basil C. Raffety, “Casey Jones May Take Back Seat,” Beatrice [Neb.] Daily Sun, Feb. 20, 1949, p. 1; “Snow Prisoners Given Supplies As Pleas Mount,” Missoulian (Missoula, Mont.), Feb. 16, 1936, p. 1; “Heroic Work of Highway Crew Ends Isolation of Bartlett,” Lincoln [Neb.] Star, Jan. 27, 1949, p. 1; Ray Robinson, interviewed by Larry Sprunk, April 13, 1978, tape #14, State Agency Records, Transportation Oral History Transcripts, #31049, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, 16; Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 158; Steven R. Hatch, “Mother Nature vs. the Model T: The Problem of Snow Removal in the Adoption of the American Automobile (M.A. thesis, Lehigh University, 2006), 27, 47-48, 60; H. E. Fowler, “North Dakota’s Cooperative Snow Removal Plan,” Highway Engineer and Contractor, Sept. 1, 1930, p. 45.
12 A. G. Crane to R. J. Hofmann and Russell Thorp, Jan. 9, 1949, box 220, folder 5, Wyoming Stock Growers Association Records (collection 00014), American Heritage Center [AHC], University of Wyoming, Laramie [quotation]; Headquarters, Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History, Fifth Army Disaster Force Snowbound: Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, January to March-1949, Omaha, Neb., March 16, 1949, p. 18; “Of Local Interest,” Freeman [S.D.] Courier, Feb. 20, 1936, p. 1 [quotation].
13 “Gate City Items,” Canton [D.T.] Advocate, Feb. 17, 1881, p. 2; Jamie L Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 97-100; David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 2, 6, 252; “109: Total Number Lives Lost in Dakota,” Mitchell [D.T.] Capital and Weekly Republican, Feb. 24, 1888, p. 2.
14 “Locals,” Freeman Courier, Feb. 11, 1909, p. 4; “Family Is Frozen to Death,” Aberdeen [S.D.] Daily News, March 18, 1913, p. 1; U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture: 1950 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952), 2:211; Bureau of the Census, Census of Housing, vol. 1, pt. 4, pp. 26-11, 27-12, pt. 5, pp. 34-11, 41-12, pt. 6, p. 50-11; Murphy diary, Jan. 20, 28, Dec. 31, 1937, Jan. 28, Feb. 4, 1938, Feb. 10, 14, March 2, 1939, Jan. 1, 24, Nov. 11, 1940, March 9, 15, 17, 20, Dec. 7, 1941, Feb. 15, March 27, 1942, Jan. 29, Feb. 12, 19, March 19, 1943, March 13, 27, 1944, Jan. 7, 21, Feb. 25, Dec. 1, 30, 1945, Jan. 19-20, 27, Feb. 3, 5-6, 16, Dec. 24, 1946, Jan. 14, 31, Feb. 7, 9, 20, 24, Dec. 7, 1947, Jan. 1, 18, 25, Feb. 27-28, 1948; David F. Cook, “The Blizzard of Forty-nine,” 2-5, box 2, folder 22, David F. Cook Papers (collection 9858), AHC; “Herald Mail Bag,” Grand Forks [N.D.] Herald, March 28, 1941, p. 2; “More Than 70 Perish As Blizzard Sweeps Over Midwest; North Dakota Hardest Hit,” Turtle Mountain Star (Rolla, N.D.), March 20, 1941, p. 1; “Watching Weather Report,” Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln), March 19, 1913, p. 3; Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 49-50, 53, 94.
15 Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’ ” Technology and Culture 27 (July 1986): 544-560.
