From Ground to Wires to Air: Winter Communication by Telegraph, Telephone, and Radio on the Northern Plains, 1854-1949
In 1897, on a homestead claim in northeastern North Dakota, Rachel Calof’s pregnancy was in its final days, but spring had not yet arrived and her mother-in-law, the person she and her husband, Abraham, most trusted to see her through the birth, was in the town of Devils Lake. At any time, a barrier Calof described as “thirty miles of flat, open prairie, totally lacking in guiding landmarks” separated the Calofs from the town. Since it was winter, Abraham would also have to contend with deep snow and a raging blizzard to carry the message that his wife needed help. Rachel tried to convince him not to go, but Abraham went anyway.
The Calofs and others among the first generations of Euroamericans to inhabit the Northern Great Plains in large numbers faced the problem of how to communicate during the region’s harsh winters. Between territorial organization in 1854 and the winter crisis of 1949, these largely rural inhabitants of the region comprising the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana, often known to residents as the Northwest, benefitted from rapid developments in communication technology from telegraph to telephone to radio. But none of these technologies could completely remove the insecurity associated with winter communication in the Northern Plains. The technologies were hindered by their weaknesses, limits on who had them, and how they were used.
Information can come in multiple forms that all require a human bearer: a handwritten letter, a printed newspaper, or a verbal statement, such as a request for medical assistance. As Abraham and Rachel well knew, relying on a human to move information was risky, for the Northern Plains have – and had – one of the most forbidding winter climates in the United States. Temperatures often sink well below zero. The region is one of the most blizzard-prone sections of the country. Blizzards, storms of wind-whipped snow, make it hard to breathe and cause white-out conditions that could disorient travelers in the early Northern Plains. Conditions change fast, meaning that blizzards like the one Abraham ventured out in can catch a person by surprise. Happily, Abraham made it to Devils Lake alive and returned home with his mother in time for her to help Rachel give birth, but many winter travelers during the first century of settlement on the Northern Plains were injured or even killed by exposure to the cold. If winter did not take out messengers, barriers of deep snow sometimes made it impossible for them to reach their destinations, leaving places bereft of personal correspondence or information. Well into 1881, deep snow kept mail from the Fort Clagett area of central Montana, leaving at least some of the area ignorant for months of who had been elected president the previous fall.
But the Northern Plains were settled during a period of rapid technological development, meaning that the region would not have to rely only on people traveling by train, horse, or sled or on foot to move information. The introduction of the first of these new technologies, the telegraph, just predated the beginnings of Northern Plains settlement. In 1844, telegrams, messages written in Morse Code by mixing long and short breaks in a wire-borne electrical current, began to move. This was the first significant means of separating messages from messengers and the fastest way to move information.
The telegraph benefitted the Northern Plains in winter. Its speedy transmission allowed the introduction of weather forecasting by the federal government in 1870. Every day at set times, dozens of stations around the country made simultaneous weather observations then wired them to central forecasting stations, allowing for the creation of nationwide maps of current weather from which forecasts could be made. The forecasts of what came to be known as the Weather Bureau took some of the shock out of Northern Plains blizzards. The telegraph also offered an unprecedented ability to communicate in winter. The wires, of course, did not feel pain from subzero cold or howling blizzards, and, raised high off the ground as they were, they could not be blocked by snowdrifts. While they were subject to being knocked down by winter storms, they were, on the whole, much less vulnerable to winter than a human messenger. The telegraph helped the Advocate of Canton, Dakota Territory, to publish on April 7, 1881, when a snow blockade was keeping trains from reaching it with the mail.
But the good the telegraph could do for rural people was constrained by its poor distribution. It was no household item. Never was this more starkly apparent than on January 12, 1888. Thanks to the telegraph, Weather Bureau forecasters could see a blizzard bearing down on the Dakotas and Nebraska, and it produced correct, if blandly and obscurely worded, forecasts for high winds, warm temperatures that would give way to cold, and snowfall. Some children in Codington County, Dakota Territory, who happened to be near a telegraph station on the way to school were warned not to go by someone who had received a message from two hundred miles to the northwest that there temperatures were falling fast and a north wind was picking up. But most rural people in the Northern Plains lacked access to the telegraph. Without a forecast or reports of conditions, they went about their business because the day’s weather started so nice. Many were caught in vulnerable positions, such as in school or out working, by the violent storm that followed. About 250 to 500 people died in Dakota Territory and Nebraska. The telegraph was good at communicating with a few key points but not many widely scattered points. The head of the Weather Bureau saw the problem. A few years after the 1888 disaster, he wondered, “how can we tell the isolated overseers of cattle ranges in Wyoming of the approach of a blizzard?” Around the same time, a desperate Weather Bureau staffer based in South Dakota suggested using balloons or kites to hang signals in the sky warning farmers of oncoming winter storms.
Invented in 1876, the telephone offered a solution. Like the telegraph, it carried electrical impulses by wires and could be run on batteries. Unlike the telegraph it carried voices, meaning that it took no special training in Morse Code to use, and, better still, became widely distributed among rural Northwesterners in the early twentieth century. By 1920, more than half of the farms in South Dakota had them, and a whopping 76 percent of Nebraska farms owned them.
The telephone kept Northwesterners connected in the winter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While telephone lines, like telegraph lines, were prone to being downed by bad weather, they still were, on the whole, a more effective means of staying connected during bad conditions than sending a messenger. The telephone could prevent situations like the one the Calofs ran into by carrying a call for help. In February 1949, snowbound neighbors in central Montana who wanted to go to town for supplies summoned a county snowplow by telephone. Telephones also helped Northwesterners to act on their tight local social bonds and helped to alleviate the sense of isolation during bad winter weather. The telephone could be used to quickly round up a group to solve a local problem. In January 1916, a phone call summoned a whole northeast North Dakota neighborhood to clear a path through the snow for the mailman. The phone allowed people to feel connected to their neighbors during bad weather, too. Many phones were on party lines, local connections that allowed all users to hear each other’s calls. While such connections were detrimental to privacy, they did have a minor broadcasting function. Those on the line could get news and check on their neighbors by listening in. Telephones also helped to resolve the problem of getting forecasts to farmers. By the early twentieth century, Weather Bureau forecasts were being distributed by phone. The telephone’s ability to carry messages and weather readings allowed an effective response to a threat similar to the January 12, 1888, storm. In January 1912, a resident of Courtland, Nebraska, received a telephone call that a blizzard was heading toward town. The person delivered the message to the principal of the local school, who dismissed the town children and had the country children telephone their parents to come get them.
But widespread telephone use still left gaps in the winter security of the rural Northern Plains. On March 15, 1920, a blizzard killed seven rural western North Dakotans, six of them children. The telephone on its own could not resolve the winter security problem. Many early telephones only provided connection to neighbors, not to town, leaving open the problem of forecast access. Despite the telephone boom, 53 percent of North Dakota farmers did not have telephones in 1920. It mattered what messages were sent through the telephones. On the morning of March 15, the Weather Bureau rightly foresaw snow and falling temperatures but incorrectly did not call for blizzard winds until the next day. And it mattered how people responded. Those who died or lost children in the storm may not have received a forecast, but, if they did, they failed to imagine that, in a region prone to dangerous winter weather, the high wind might arrive early and create a deadly storm.
In the decades after 1920, when federally licensed radio stations began broadcasting, many rural Northwesterners acquired radios. Like telegraphs and telephones, they ran on batteries, meaning that the many rural people who were disconnected from the electrical grid could still have access to an information network. During the 1920s and 1930s, farmers’ telephone ownership declined as radio ownership soared. Radio costs fell into farmers’ price ranges, and they offered advantages over telephones, such as a lack of a perpetual service charge and programming that was more interesting than the party line. Well over half of the region’s rural residents owned them by 1940, including 87 percent of North Dakota farmers, and rural ownership was almost universal by 1950.
Radio had immense utility for winter. Its broadcast function meant that many people could receive messages from the same place, far more than could access a message over the party line. Broadcasts could travel long distances. While storms could interfere with reception, radio waves were, like wires, far more suitable for carrying messages in isolating winter conditions than human messengers. In winter, radio was good for keeping rural Northwesterners informed, entertained, and free of loneliness. The Murphys, a farm family in eastern North Dakota, knew this well. During the winters, they listened to Franklin Roosevelt’s second inauguration, the funeral of Pope Pius XI, sporting events, such as basketball games or hockey matches, and news about winter storms hitting the region. The Northern Plains had come a long way from when the Fort Clagett area waited months to learn who the next president would be. When deep snow kept the Murphys from attending mass one Sunday in 1941, they were able to listen to a message from a local bishop. “The radio is so much company,” wrote Helen Murphy one day when her family was snowbound. Its ability to entertain allowed Northwesterners a measure of escape from winter. A South Dakota farmer who, during a spell of awful weather in early 1936, endured painful chilblains, hours of hauling water in the cold, and the nasty job of chipping frozen manure with a pickaxe found the radio his “time out” at the end of the day. “It is a treat these frigid snowbound nights,” he wrote, “that we can enjoy radio programs from near and far. From frigid and from balmy climes.”
Radio had more serious uses than escapism, though. Considering its ability to broadcast and its wide distribution, it outdid telegraphs and telephones at reaching large numbers of people quickly with forecasts. Many rural Northwesterners prepared for bad winter weather because of forecasts they heard on the radio. Helen Murphy said that when her family received “a storm warning over the radio,” on January 29, 1947, they responded by quickly completing a trip to nearby Larimore, where they sold cream and eggs and bought supplies.
But the radio had its weaknesses as well. A flaw built into the technology was that, unlike the telegraph or especially the telephone, it was not useful for conversation. Travelers who took shelter at a southeast Wyoming ranch after their journeys were stopped by an early January 1949 blizzard endured the discomfort of hearing themselves listed as missing on the radio. Rancher David F. Cook recalled, “we couldn’t answer back.” Not until he fixed his broken telephone line during a lull in the storm was he able to get a call in to nearby Cheyenne to seek help for the injured travelers. In March 1941, well after many rural Northwesterners had radios, an exceptionally violent blizzard swept down and killed thirty-nine North Dakotans in one night, many of them rural people. The incident suggested the importance of what people did with their technology. The Weather Bureau deserved blame for failing to see just how bad the storm would be and not wording its forecast very clearly. One critic wrote, “There is a considerable difference between a ‘strong northerly wind’ and . . . a ‘blinding blizzard of terrific velocity and subzero temperatures will sweep this section tonight.’ ” And it mattered what people did with the light they were given. The flawed forecast had called for snow, falling temperatures, and high wind, but many farmers made their Saturday trips to town anyway.
The history of the relationship between communication technology and winter security on the Northern Plains on the one hand suggests the power of what a recent historian has called “the ‘Great Inventions’ ” developed between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. The telegraph, telephone, and radio made winter less isolating and safer in a region where great distances from where news was being made could seem even longer because of the presence of uncomfortable or deadly weather. But this chapter in the history of the rural Northern Plains also suggests that the great inventions were not without their weaknesses, and, of course, neither were humans. Technology was not a force that acted on its own. Despite the power of these new tools for communication, it still mattered what messages people sent through them and what they did with those words.
1 J. Sanford Rikoon, ed., Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, trans. Jacob Calof and Molly Shaw (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 62-63.
2 Norman J. Rosenberg, “Climate of the Great Plains Region of the United States,” Great Plains Quarterly 7 (Winter 1987): 23; 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): 174-180, 185; Rikoon, Rachel Calof’s Story, 62-63; Lee Jorgensen, “1888 Blizzard Still Chills 2 Dakotans Who Cheated Death,” Sioux City [Iowa] Sunday Journal, Jan. 10, 1965, blizzard of 1888 vertical file, folder 1, South Dakota State Historical Society, Pierre; “News from Fort Clagett,” River Press (Benton, M.T.), Feb. 16, 1881, p. 8; William Rhoads, Recollections of Dakota Territory (Fort Pierre, S.D.: N.p., 1931), 35.
3 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, 691-692, 695-696; Elliott West, “Wired to the World: The Telegraph and the Making of the West,” in Elliott West, The Essential West: Collected Essays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 78-80. H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 14; 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), 172, 204.
4 Donald R. Whitnah, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 4, 12-16, 20-30, 43, 63; “General News,” Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, D.T.), Feb. 8, 1881, p. 1; “Gate City Items,” Canton [D.T.] Advocate, April 7, 1881, p. 3.
5 “Weather Indications,” Omaha [Neb.] Daily Bee, Jan. 12, 1888, p. 1; David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 2, 6, 122, 252; Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 97-100. For an example of children who survived the storm but were caught by surprise by it, see Steven R. Kinsella, 900 Miles from Nowhere: Voices from the Homestead Frontier (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006), 137-139.
6 Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone, 1890 to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 89, 91, 119; U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture: 1950 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952), 2:211.
7 “Stock Is Suffering,” Grand Forks Daily Herald, March 23, 1894, p. 1; Alice Cowles Bliss Diaries, Jan. 28, 1916, MSS 10892, North Dakota State Historical Society; John Stark diary, Feb. 24-26, 1949, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield, Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula; Helen Normand Murphy diary, Feb. 19, 1948, Helen Normand Murphy Papers, OGLMC 1249, Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks; Roy V. Alleman, Blizzard 1949 (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1991), 21-22, 52-53; Grace Snyder, as told to Nellie Snyder Yost, No Time on My Hands (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1963), 463-464; “County Correspondence,” Beatrice [Neb.] Daily Express, Jan. 19, 1912, p. 6; Catherine McNicol Stock, Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 9-11, 42-43.
8 “8 Deaths Is Total of Blizzard Toll,” Grand Forks [N.D.] Herald, March 22, 1920, p. 3; “Four Lives Reported Lost, Older Children Make Supreme Sacrifice,” Washburn [N.D.] Leader, March 19, 1920, p. 1; “Five North Dakota School Children Freeze to Death during Terrible Blizzard,” Bismarck [N.D.] Tribune, March 17, 1920, p. 1; “I See by the Tribune,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, March 15, 1920, p. 9; “Worst March Storm in Years Is Raging,” Grand Forks Herald, March 16, 1920, p. 1; Fischer, America Calling, 94.
9 Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 564; Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Housing, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), pt. 3, p. 991, pt. 4, pp. 16, 523, pt. 5, pp. 105, 957; Bureau of the Census, Census of Housing: 1950, vol. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1953), pt. 4, pp. 26-11, 27-12, pt. 5, pp. 34-11, 41-12, pt. 6, p. 50-11; Steve Craig, “ ‘The More They Listen, the More They Buy’: Radio and the Modernizing of Rural America, 1930-1939,” Agricultural History 80 (Winter 2006): 2; Katherine Jellison, “Women and Technology on the Great Plains, 1910-1940,” Great Plains Quarterly 8 (Summer 1988): 152.
10 Dorothy Dean Van Leuvan, “A Doctor’s Wife in Gumbo Country, 1931-1933,” South Dakota History 34 (Summer 2004): 145; “Alladin,” Times (Sundance, Wyo.), Feb. 11, 1926, p. 1; 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 [quotation], Feb. 27-28, 1948; Peder L. Phillips diary, Feb. 10 [quotation], 16 [quotation], 1936, Peder L. Phillips Collection, collection #30173, Center for Western Studies, Sioux Falls, S.D.; Grace Snyder, as told to Nellie Snyder Yost, No Time on My Hands (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1963), 489-490.
11 Murphy diary, Feb. 13, March 2, 1939, Jan. 5, 1940, March 23, 1942, Feb. 24, Dec. 6, 1945, Jan. 4, Feb. 19, Oct. 10, Nov. 15, 1946, Jan. 13, 29 [quotation], 1947, Feb. 4, 6, 26, March 1, 1948; Hugh Redington, letter to the editor [March 22, 1941], Bismarck Tribune, April 14, 1941, p. 7.
12 David F. Cook, “The Blizzard of Forty-nine,” 3, 4 [quotation], 5, David F. Cook Papers (collection 9858), American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; “Langdon Woman Dies As Result of March Storm,” Turtle Mountain Star (Rolla, N.D.), April 3, 1941, p. 1; “Herald Mail Bag,” Grand Forks [N.D.] Herald, March 28, 1941, p. 2 [quotation]; “Forecast,” Fargo [N.D.] Forum, March 15, 1941, p. 1; “60 Perish in Storm,” Fargo Forum, March 17, 1941, p. 1; “More Deaths Send Storm Toll to 75,” Grand Forks Herald, March 19, 1941, p. 1.
13 Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2 [quotation]; Elwyn B. Robinson, “The Themes of North Dakota History,” North Dakota History 26 (Winter 1959): 6.
