Government, Technology, Neighbors: Comparing the Experiences of the Winters of 1880-1881 and 1948-1949 on the Northern Plains

In December 1948, central Montana sheep rancher John A. “Del” Stark wrote in his diary that he and his brother “both curse the winter fervently for we dread the cold and how I hate to get out in the snow and the cold but no way to get out of it but to leave here.” Winter was one of several formidable environmental obstacles for the Starks and for the other members of the first generations of non-Natives to live on the Northern Great Plains, comprising the Dakotas, Nebraska, and eastern Montana and Wyoming. Winter on the Northern Plains meant months with a high probability of intense cold, deep snowdrifts, and blizzards. This weather challenged the region’s ability to move people, goods, and information that residents needed for survival and comfort. But people like the Starks also benefitted from more support for dealing with winter than previous generations had enjoyed. At the same time that the first generations of Americans were moving into and then trying to remain in the Northern Plains, technology improved rapidly, and the activity of local, state, and federal government increased.

Two particularly harsh Northern Plains winters, 1880-1881 and 1948-1949, offer an opportunity to assess what these changes meant for the winter experiences of the people of the Northern Plains. Studying these winters reveals that the changes that went on between them provided the people of the Northern Plains with greater comfort and security during the winter than they had enjoyed before. In both winters, however, local activity remained important for survival as well. And despite all the changes of the seven decades between the two winters, the people of the region never came close to taming nature.

By 1880, a quarter-century since large-scale white settlement of the Northern Plains began, the region had multiple ways to maintain connection by moving goods, people and information. The venerable technology of animal power (not to mention foot travel) remained available, of course. But remarkable new means of moving things and information had been developed in recent decades. Steam began to propel first boats then trains. The telegraph allowed information to begin to move far faster than any earthbound vehicle. In 1870, the federal government took advantage of its potential by founding a weather observation and forecasting service, eventually known as the Weather Bureau. Weather Bureau observers across the country collected weather data simultaneously three times per day. The telegraph allowed the rapid centralization of this information at the Bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., which in turn allowed for the creation of weather maps that revealed a snapshot of the nation’s weather at a particular moment and for forecasting based on current surface weather. The telegraph also allowed these forecasts to be distributed quickly.

Winter 1880-1881 tested the ability of the Northern Plains, particularly Dakota Territory, to handle bad weather. One Dakota settler recalled it as “almost one continued blizzard.” Southern Dakota Territory received much more snow than usual, and deep snow remained into April.

The heavy snowfall caused particular problems in southeastern Dakota Territory, where the transportation system largely failed its test. Winter steamboat shutdowns because of the freezing of the rivers were expected, but in the winter of 1880-1881, problems went far beyond that. Drifts in Minnesota, Iowa, and Dakota Territory threatened the ability of the railroads to keep serving Dakotans. The railroads fought back with a combination of shovelers and ship’s prow-shaped Bucker plows that were slammed into the drifts at high speed. Despite their efforts, the railroads were blocked for much of the winter. The most famous blockage occurred along the line of the Chicago & North Western Railway. In January, a deep drift at Tracy, in western Minnesota, led to the closure of the line for the rest of the winter. Along the line was De Smet, home of Laura Ingalls, who later novels about her pioneer experiences under her married name, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Without the railroad, Wilder recalled: “we knew we could expect no help from outside. We must depend on ourselves.”

More primitive forms of transportation proved more reliable than the railroads during winter 1880-1881. They included snowshoeing, walking, and using animal-powered vehicles. That winter, the Parker paper regretted the Postal Service’s decision to begin hauling mail to town by train instead of by road, writing that “A man on foot, not to say anything of the oldtime buckboard mail carriage, is much more reliable in winter, than those powerful . . . railroad engines.” But the winter also impeded these more traditional forms of transportation. Weak crusts atop the snow that broke under the weight of vehicles were one problem. Stagecoach travel between Pierre and Yankton took twice as long as usual because of the deep snow, and a newspaper report said that crusted snow on that stretch gave horses “cut and gashed” legs.

With the transportation system snarled, southeastern Dakota suffered shortages of key goods. “We are getting somewhat hard up for supplies,” wrote a correspondent in snowbound Sioux Falls. “There isn’t a pound of butter or a bushel of potatoes or a ton of coal to be had at any price.” Some merchants used shortages as an opportunity to jack up prices. In De Smet, the price of a pound of flour rose from three cents to a dollar. Many Dakotans improvised. Some began to burn hay. Some grew so desperate that they began to burn their own property and pieces of property belonging to blocked railroads, such as the water tower or railroad ties. Dakotans also needed alternatives to flour. Many, including the Ingalls family, became small-scale millers by grinding their wheat in coffee mills.

In addition to innovating, local relationships provided Dakotans with important help. While price-gouging showed weaknesses in this local cohesion, the region also manifested diligence, local concern, and a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, all elements of the republicanism that historian Jon Lauck has found in the region. One way of serving was hauling supplies for the neighborhood. Two young men from De Smet, one of them Wilder’s future husband, risked getting caught in a blizzard when they ventured out to bring back wheat for the town. Wilder said that they made the trip “for the sake of the community.”

Meanwhile, government support was scarce during the winter, though it made some contributions. Yankton County helped a small number of people who were reduced to poverty by the weather. Food from Fort Sully helped to see Pierre through. The Weather Bureau gave those with access to its forecasts or weather observations some warning of what was to come.

That winter, the most successful technology at handling deep snow was the telegraph. It carried messages right across the drifts to those who had access to it. Cut off from trains, the town of Mitchell telegraphed Sheldon, Iowa, that it was out of flour, prompting one merchant to send out seven teams of animals to haul a supply. The problem with the telegraph is that it did nothing for people outside of towns. It was not a technology that reached masses of individual households. Many people thus remained disconnected from forecasts. Unsurprisingly, one Northern Plains woman, recalling a major blizzard from later in the 1880s, did not even know that weather forecasting was done at that time.

In barely more than half a century, the technological and governmental setting of the Northern Plains changed dramatically. Even by 1880, what historian Robert J. Gordon has called a “flood of inventions” that “utterly transformed life” in the late nineteenth century and deep into the twentieth had already begun to appear in the United States. In ensuing decades, these inventions achieved wide distribution on the Northern Plains, transforming the connectivity of the region. Many people acquired radios and telephones, which allowed for the easier movement of information. Tractors provided new means to work and to move goods, while airplanes began to soar over the region. Automobiles sped trips to town. And the means of keeping the transportation routes open changed. Rotary snowplows, which allowed railworkers to grind and blow snow from the tracks instead of bashing or shoveling it, came into use later in the 1880s. They were later adapted for use on the roads. And the acquisition of automobiles led to demand for snow removal on the roads, which states and counties met with fleets of plows powered by gasoline engines. Another enhanced source of government aid was the military and National Guard, which were more active in disaster relief in the mid-twentieth century than they had been in the late nineteenth.

By 1948, the Northern Plains had tools and organizations with great potential to increase its security during winter. It needed all the help it could get because the winter of 1948-1949 brought bad weather reminiscent of the winter of 1880-1881. On January 2-5, 1949, a massive blizzard brought heavy snow and high winds of up to seventy miles per hour to much of the region. While this storm was the most memorable weather event of the winter, high winds, cold, and additional snowfall went on for weeks. The Weather Bureau’s Monthly Weather Review called the winter of 1948-1949 “the most severe on record in the northern Great Plains.”

The people of the Northern Plains threw their new technologies and programs against the threat. These sources of help cushioned the hardness of the winter but did not eliminate it. Just as in 1881, the weather badly disrupted the transportation system. Often, much of the road system was almost if not totally unusable because of snow blockages. Wind often blew snow right back onto plowed roads. Some people went weeks without access to the outside. State highway departments spent far more money than usual, but neither they nor counties could keep the road system clear. Deep snow blocked ranchers’ paths to get more feed to their stock in town and barred the paths between many stock and their feed out on the ranch. The automobile was more vulnerable to deep snow than the horse. The Saturday Evening Post observed that in the Minot, North Dakota, area: “a truck or a tractor couldn’t get through the snow. A horse or an ox could have, and many people were trapped on their farms by progress.” Given the usefulness of animal travel, some people turned back to it. For example, one western South Dakota rancher used a bobsled drawn by four borrowed horses to take hay to his cattle because the snow was too deep for his Jeep.

Railroads were often blocked by the terrible weather. They fought the snow with a combination of rotary and bladed plows. While rotary plows handled deep, hard snow better than the blade plows, they were no panacea. According the Associated Press, snow, dirt, sand, and ice often formed “veritable glaciers” in cuts, and, often, when rotaries encountered these masses, “their vanes disintegrated.” Many in the railroad industry, including one official with forty-five years of experience, said that the winter of 1948-1949 was the hardest that they had been through.

Shortages appeared, though they seem to have been less acute than in the winter of 1880-1881. It is possible that roads were cleared often enough that people were able to get to towns before the situation became dire. No one twisted hay or ate flour ground in a coffee mill, though, like the sufferers of the winter of 1880-1881, people in the Moenville, South Dakota, area ate a more restricted diet. By mid-February, because of transportation problems, Casper, Wyoming, had on hand barely a tenth of its normal daily milk consumption. Some people showed desperation in their fuel choices. Somme people burned fences, henhouses, furniture, and corn.

By 1949, the Northern Plains had access to new tools to overcome snow blockages. The Saturday Evening Post was right about new transportation technology but too hard on tractors. Tractors did not eliminate the crisis of the winter of 1948-1949, but they did mitigate it a bit. Some people used tractors to allow travel despite deep snow. Tractors also gave individuals the power to take on some of the herculean task of snow removal. The Wyoming Hereford Ranch used a caterpillar tractor with a bulldozer blade to clear animals’ paths to food and water. “I really don’t know how we could have pulled through the big blizzard without it,” wrote the ranch manager.

Airplanes were an even more useful tool. Like telegraph or telephone wires or radio broadcasts, they could go right over the snow, but they could also move objects. Private and military planes were both involved in winter relief. They carried food, animal feed, medicine, and passengers, such as doctors or those who needed medical care, and they allowed pilots to reconnoiter the ground. While they were helpful, neither tractors nor airplanes could solve the transportation problem of the Northern Plains during the winter of 1948-1949. They could not match trucks’ efficiency. The governor of Wyoming said in early January that “airplane service cannot hope to be adequate” for meeting stockowners’ feed needs.

New communications technology performed better than new transportation technology. The radio could now bring forecasts into far-flung households. The forecasts were not always accurate, but their warnings did allow many people to brace themselves against oncoming bad weather. “Sure glad we got the blizzard warning over the radio,” wrote Del Stark of Montana, “so I was about half ready for it when she came.” In response to the warning, he moved feed into convenient position to get it to his stock. Radio also kept people in the region abreast of news and could even stand in for the telephone. From Pierre, popular broadcaster Ida McNeil informed one western South Dakota woman over the air that her husband and son were safe there from a blizzard that began while they were on a trip to town. The trouble with the radio was that it allowed only one-way communication. That left some people in the uncomfortable position of hearing themselves described as missing when they were actually safe.

The telephone complemented the radio by allowing two-way communication. Party line phones, on which everyone on the line could hear everyone else’s calls, also gave telephones a little bit of radio’s broadcast potential. And the telephone helped people to coordinate their efforts, as when a group of western Nebraskans joined their tractors to clear a path to a nearby town to shop.

But communications technology could not clear the roads or the drifts that separated stock from their feed. To solve the problem, in late January, President Harry Truman authorized a military relief effort called Operation Snowbound, which eventually served the eastern half of Wyoming, western South Dakota, and the majority of North Dakota and Nebraska. Maj. Gen. Lewis A. Pick was given command of the effort, comprising National Guard, Fifth Army, Air Force, county government, and civilian personnel. At its largest, the operation’s military, Red Cross, and hired strength was 6,237 personnel operating 1,646 pieces of equipment. But two themes of these intense winters on the Northern Plains remained important across the years from 1881 to 1949 despite the presence of this centralized federal effort that had not been available during the earlier crisis. One was the importance of local involvement. While local governments’ snow removal efforts were largely unsuccessful at alleviating the crisis, local involvement was important. It included the people in southeastern Wyoming who helped their neighbor who had suffered a heart attack by getting to where a phone call for help could be placed to Cheyenne and then by guiding and clearing a path for the ambulance. The Fifth Army also acknowledged the importance of county commissioners and local emergency committees, which were made up of a combination of figures inside and outside government. They provided Operation Snowbound with local knowledge in the form of maps and guides. They helped Operation Snowbound to know who needed help and which requests for help to prioritize. Their help was “practically indispensable,” the Fifth Army said. Operation Snowbound also displayed the continued limitation of humans in the face of nature on the Northern Plains. While it cleared the region’s roads by mid-March, it was hampered by cold and especially by wind that blew snow back onto cleared roads. It was reliant on good weather to make progress. Snow removal was, as the Wyoming State Tribune put it “entirely dependent on the whims of the weather. Nothing much can be done anywhere until the winds stop so roads can be kept open.” Between 1881 and 1949, the people of the Northern Plains obtained many resources to keep them safe and comfortable during winter, but by the mid-twentieth century they still remained highly subject to their rugged climate.

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1 John Stark diary, Dec. 4, 1948, ser. 1, box 10, folder 4, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula [all entries in this paper from the same folder]. Stark’s nickname is rendered “Del,” by the Archives West finding aid, and it is short for Delbert, so the spelling with one “l” seems correct.

2 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931); Julie Courtwright, Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); David B. Danbom, Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the Nineteenth-Century Plains (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 42-44.

3 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 294-295; Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 58-59.

4 “Gate City Items,” Canton [D.T.] Advocate, Feb. 17, 1881, p. 2; “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, D.T.), March 16, 1881, p. 4; “Indications,” Omaha [Neb.] Daily Bee, Oct. 14, 1880, p. 1. On the early years of the Weather Bureau, see Charles C. Bates and John F. Fuller, America’s Weather Warriors, 1814-1985 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 10-13; Donald R. Whitnah, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 12-60; Patrick Hughes, A Century of Weather Service: A History of the Birth and Growth of the National Weather Service (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970), 21-27; William B. Hazen, History of the Signal Service, Army of the United States, and Special Catalogue of the U.S. Signal Service Exhibit at the International Exhibition of Electricity (Paris: N.p., 1881), 12.

5 A. W. Appleby, “Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Turner County,” in Turner County Pioneer History by W. H. Stoddard (1931; reprint, Freeman, S.D.: Pine Hill Press, 1975), 204 [quotation]; Report of the Governor of Dakota made to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1881), 11; “Precipitation,” Monthly Weather Review, February 1881, p. 10-11; “Precipitation,” Monthly Weather Review, April 1881, p. 11. For the Dakotas’ average annual snowfall, see Christopher Burt, Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book, climate change ed. (New York: Norton, 2007), 75

6 “Gate City Items,” Canton Advocate, April 14, 1881, p. 3.

7 Press and Daily Dakotaian, Feb. 25, 1881, p. 2; “Blockade Raised,” Canton [D.T.] Advocate, March 31, 1881, p. 3; “Corn in Egypt,” Grant County Herald [Big Stone City, D.T.], April 8, 1881, p. 1; Pamela Hill, ed., Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Biography (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2013), 207, 209, 212, 213 [quotation]; Gerald M. Best, Snowplow: Clearing Mountain Rails (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1966), 38-42.

8 “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, Feb. 16, 1881, p. 4; “Special Notices,” New Era (Parker, D.T.), March 5, 1881, p. 1; New Era, reprinted in “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, Feb. 1, 1881, p. 4 [quotation].

9 Hill, Pioneer Girl, 217, 219; “From the Upper Missouri,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, March 1, 1881, p. 4.

10 J. H. Bottum to his parents, Feb. 8, 1881, J. H. Bottum Letters, 1880-1881, Faulk County Papers, collection H2012-067, box 6240, South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre; Hill, Pioneer Girl, 213n; “Home and Other News,” Brookings County [D.T.] Press, March 24, 1881, p. [3?].

11 Appleby, “Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Turner County,” 205; “Gate City Items,” Canton Advocate, March 3, 1881, p. 2; Hill, Pioneer Girl, 213; Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter [1940], rev. ed. (New York: Harper Trophy, 1971), 185-191, 196.

12 Jon K. Lauck, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 5, 24, 39, 45.

13 “Gate City Items,” Canton Advocate, March 3, 1881, p. 2; Hill, Pioneer Girl, 220, 221 [quotation].

14 William Rhoads, Recollections of Dakota Territory (Fort Pierre, S.D.: N.p., 1931), 26; “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, March 8, 1881, p. 5; “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, March 16, 1881, p. 4; “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, Jan. 4, 1881, p. 7.

15 “Gate City Items,” Canton Advocate, April 7, 1881, p. 3; “Local Laconics,” Press and Daily Dakotaian, March 1, 1881, p. 4; “Gate City Items,” Canton Advocate, Feb. 17, 1881, p. 2.

16 Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 2-3, 6-7.

17 Jessie Eva Star Patton Cravin, “The Big Blizzard,” Jessie Eva Starr Patton Cravin Reminiscences, RG 1639.AM, NSHS.

18 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), 4.

19 Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 563-464; James Richard Smith, Geography of the Northern Plains and Other Essays (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Augustana College Press, 1990), 71; Clinton Warne, “The Acceptance of the Automobile in Nebraska,” Nebraska History 37 (September 1956): 222-229, 235; Michael L. Tate, The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 216; Patrick Allitt, “How the Railroads Defeated Winter,” Invention and Technology 13 (Winter 1998): 63; Best, Snowplow, 53, 55-56; “State Planning System to Keep Roads Clear of Snow,” Fargo [N.D.] Forum, Dec. 26, 1926, p. 11; “Keeping the Roads Open,” Fargo Forum, Dec. 21, 1926, p. 12; S. S. Sternberg, “Keeping Roads Open for Winter Traffic,” Roads and Streets, August 1927, p. 357; “Rotary Snow Plow Attacks Highways,” Bismarck [N.D.] Tribune, Dec. 21, 1927, p. 4; “Fighting Western Blizzards,” Roads and Streets, May 1949, pp. 63-64.

20 “Severe Local Storms for January 1949,” Monthly Weather Review, January 1949, pp. 26-27; “Climatological Data for January 1949,” Monthly Weather Review, pp. 21-24; “Climatological Data for February 1949,” Monthly Weather Review, February 1949, pp. 58-61; “Severe Storms for February 1949,” Monthly Weather Review, February 1949, p. 63; L. H. Seamon, “The Weather of 1949 in the United States,” Monthly Weather Review, December 1949, p. 325.

21 Chamberlain, Blizzard of ’49, 51; “Fighting Western Blizzards,” 59, 61, 68; 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, pp. 2, 7; “Severe Local Storms for January 1949,” 26; “Severe Storms for February 1949,” 63 Clinton A. Branum, “Condensation of Report from Federal Works Agency,” in Love, Report of Wyoming’s Operation Snowbound, 57-58, 61; “ ‘Operation Snowbound’ Largest Relief Mission in History,” Fifth Army News Letter, Feb. 28, 1949, p. 9, blizzard of 1949 vertical file, SDSHS.

22 Stark diary, Feb. 1, 1949, box 10, folder 4; Chamberlain, Blizzard of ’49, 22.

23 Mark Murphy, “Minot, North Dakota,” Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 12, 1949, p. 156 [quotation]; Gary D. McGinnis, “Snowbound in ’49 – Through the Eyes of an Eight-Year-Old,” in Faith Country Heritage, 1910-1985, eds. Lavonne R. Butler and Ethel Schrader (Faith, S.D.: Faith Historical Committee, 1985), 116-117.

24 S. L. Fee telegram to W. F. Roberts, Jan. 19, 1949, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad – Lines West – Records, RG3913.AM, ser. 4, box 89, folder 1 [hereinafter CBQ Records; all documents used in this paper are from the same folder], NSHS; S. L. Fee, telegram to Val Peterson and W. F. Roberts, Jan. 24, 1949, CBQ Records; Basil C. Raffety, “Casey Jones May Take Back Seat,” Beatrice Daily Sun, Feb. 20, 1949, p. 1 [quotation]; “Union Pacific Railroad Report: ‘The Blizzard of ’49,’ ” in Report of Wyoming’s “Operation Snowbound,” 1949, ed. Louise Love (N.p.: Wyoming Emergency Relief Board, [1949]), 62-64; Perry Buckle, “C. B. & Q. Railroad Report on ‘Operation Snowbound,’ ” in ibid., 65-66; “Report from Chicago and North Western Railway System,” in ibid., 67.

25 Esther M. Tomlinson and G. H. Wade, “Airlift in Nebraska,” Disaster: A Red Cross Publication Devoted to Relief and Prevention, December 1949, p. 3, box 2, ser. 1, subser. 6, folder 9, January 12, 1888, Blizzard Club Papers, RG3658.AM, NSHS; Chamberlain, Blizzard of ’49, 48, 63; “Winds Delay Road Crews,” Casper [Wyo.] Tribune-Herald, Feb. 16, 1949, p. 1; “Casper Food, Fuel Supplies Dwindle,” Wyoming State Tribune (Cheyenne), Feb. 16, 1949, pp. 1, 13.

26 Donald and Ileen Smith, “The Milk Cow Went Berserk,” in The Blizzard in Black and White: A Scrapbook Album of Photographs And Stories as Told by the Survivors, Book Three (Carpenter, Wyo.: Our Family Circle Press, 2004), 73; [Robert W. Lazear] to [G. C. Lazear], Jan. 8, 1949, [Robert W. Lazear] to [G. C. Lazear], March 25, 1949, box 131, correspondence G. C. Lazear, Wyoming Hereford Ranch Records, University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center, Laramie [hereinafter AHC].

27 Chamberlain, Blizzard of ’49, 5, 16-18, 32, 34, 45, 47, 60; “Fliers’ Rescue Job in Storm Area Complex,” Omaha [Neb.] World-Herald, Jan. 7, 1949, CBQ Records; “C-47 Off To Minot For ‘Haylift,’ ” Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Feb. 3, 1949, p. 1.

28 A. G. Crane to R. J. Hofmann and Russell Thorp, Jan. 9, 1949, box 220, folder 5, Wyoming Stock Growers Association records, AHC [quotation]; Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History, 18.

29 John Stark diary, Jan. 8, 1949, box 10, folder 4, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula. Mrs. J. H. Chamberlain, ed., Blizzard of ’49 (Rapid City, S.D.: N.p., 1949), 47-48.

30 David F. Cook, “The Blizzard of Forty-nine,” 3-4, David F. Cook Papers (collection 9858), box 2, folder 22, AHC.

31 Cook, “Blizzard of Forty-Nine,” 4-5; Roy V. Alleman, Blizzard 1949 (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1991), 21-22; Polly Spence, Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman’s Life, ed. Karl Spence Richardson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 171.

32 Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History; Headquarters Fifth Army, History, “Operation Snowbound,” 29 January-15 March 1949 (Chicago, April 12, 1949), Blizzards vertical file, SDSHS; “ ‘Operation Snowbound’ Largest Relief Mission in History,” 1-10; Lewis A. Pick, “Condensation of Report on Fifth Army’s ‘Disaster Force Snowbound,’ ” in Love, Report of Wyoming’s “Operation Snowbound”, 47-49.

33 Dona Gale, “Running to Save a Life,” in Jewell, Blizzard in Black and White, 12; “Walk Right Over the Fence,” in ibid., 12; “Memorable Trip to Big City,” in ibid., 11; Stout, “Here’s My Blizzard Story,” in ibid., 4.

34 Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History, 4 [quotation], 5, 9, 18 [quotation], 19

35 Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History, 6-7, 16-17, 20, 24-25, 29; Branum, “Condensation of Report from Federal Works Agency,” 57-58, 61; “Report of Commanding Officer, Fort Francis E. Warren and 3450th Technical Training Wing,” in Love, Report of Wyoming’s “Operation Snowbound”, 51, 53; “ ‘Battle of Drifts’ Begins Again,” Wyoming State Tribune, Feb. 8, 1949, pp. 1 [quotation], 13; “Nature [Lends?] Helping Hand to Help Fifth Army Operations in Snow-Busting; Work Speeds Up,” Lusk [Wyo.] Free Lance, Feb. 17, 1949, pp. 1, 10; “Operation Snowbound [Ends?] in County; Army and Private Equipment On Move; Mud Conditions Now Becoming Problem,” L.usk Free Lance, Feb. 24, 1949, p. 1.