Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Plus Telegraphs, Telephones and Radios: Connection, Security, and Winter on the Northern Plains, 1920-1949
Col. Philippe Régis de Trobriand and the three companies of the Thirty-First United States Infantry under his command at Fort Stevenson in what is now North Dakota found winter 1867-1868 a trial because of the fort’s insecure connection with the outside. Its distance from populated areas contributed to the problem, but so did winter weather. Ice blocked steamboats from plying the Missouri River. Deep snow and blizzards made travel to and from the fort difficult and dangerous. All this led to shortages of information and goods. The fort’s mail delivery was at least twice interrupted, including a spell of more than a month without a mail delivery from its primary depot. By March, Trobriand was fed up with winter’s privations. He raged at having “no news of our relatives” and “no correspondence with our friends.” Lack of steamboats and inability to hunt kept the soldiers from being able to eat “fresh vegetables, eggs, fowl, veal, mutton, and even game.” Such a diet, Trobriand said, “brings scurvy to the soldiers and takes the edge off the appetites of the officers.”
In the Northern Plains, the region once often known as the Northwest that comprises the home state of Trobriand’s post, plus South Dakota, Nebraska, and eastern Montana and Wyoming, the winter security situation changed a great deal over the next half century, but the problem of the unreliability of communication and transportation in winter still remained by 1920. Between the 1860s and 1920, hundreds of thousands of settlers from the United States, Canada, and Europe moved to the region. By the end of that period, they had gained access to new technologies of moving goods, people, and information in winter that the men of Fort Stevenson lacked: the telegraph and telephone, the locomotive, and, lately, even the automobile. But the installation of these new technologies still left significant gaps in the region’s winter security. This was partly because the Northern Plains was (and is) one of the most forbidding winter climates in the United States. Winter weather was often extremely cold. Snow drifted deeply, threatening travel. It was highly prone to blizzards, storms of windblown snow that could freeze people to death by drastically reducing visibility so that they got lost then blasting them with snow and wind. And conditions changed fast, raising the chances of being caught in a blizzard. Other gaps were the result of flaws in their communication technologies and lack of services to make the technology useful.
Between 1920 and 1949, the adoption of new technologies and services improved the region’s security by further safeguarding the movement of things and information during the winter. But, because of flaws in these technologies and services or in the way they were used, winter security in the Northern Plains remained severely constrained.
Fort Stevenson’s access to information would have been much safer if its garrison possessed the tools that Northwesterners had by 1920. A relatively young invention during winter 1867-1868 and as the Northern Plains were being settled, the telegraph kept the region’s towns connected under bad winter conditions by carrying messages in Morse Code that was written by making gaps in an electrical current carried by wires. The great speed of telegraphed messages made it possible for weather readings from all over the country to be centralized and then mapped, allowing the founding of a federal weather forecasting service in 1870, soon known as the Weather Bureau. The telegraph remained an important means of communication in the Northern Plains into the twentieth century, but its usefulness for winter communication such as carrying a blizzard forecast was limited because it never became a household appliance. To get a message to a rural home, someone still had to personally take it the last leg of the journey.
Northwesterners found the telephone, invented in 1876, far more useful for winter communication than the telegraph. Like the telegraph, it sent messages through a wire-borne electric current that was generated by battery, meaning that users did not need access to an electric power plant, and it could carry messages over snowdrifts and through blizzards and cold. Unlike the telegraph, it required no special training in Morse Code, and it became a household item among Northwestern farmers. By 1920, 76 percent of Nebraska farms and 47 percent of North Dakota farms had them. Between 1920 and 1949, Northwesterners made great use of them to stay in touch during winter. By phone, they asked for help and kept up with neighbors about how they were doing or the state of the local roads. The phone could alleviate a sense of isolation. North Dakota farmer Helen Normand Murphy called it “so much company” on a day when a blinding blizzard raged. By telephone, Northwesterners got quickly weather forecasts directly from the Weather Bureau or through neighbors. But the telephone had its limitations. Some, at least around 1920, were only connected to local networks, not to towns, meaning that they could not give their users quick access to a weather forecast. Furthermore, in 1920, a large proportion of the region’s many farmers also did not have telephones – 83 percent in Montana – and, partly because of the Great Depression, the proportion shrank over the next two decades, including by thirty-three percentage points in Nebraska.
After the introduction of federally licensed stations in 1920, radio, which could also run on batteries, secured winter access to information in ways telephones could not. For one thing, Northwesterners preferred radios to telephones. By 1940, radio ownership among rural and urban people was much higher than telephone ownership had ever been, and ownership only rose further over the next decade to the point where it was almost universal. Radios helped the Northern Plains to stay in touch with the rest of the world even during a season when weather could hinder the movement of information. While the party line telephone, which allowed households sharing a local line to hear each other’s calls, could sometimes be useful for allowing multiple people to hear the same message at once during the winter, radio had a much stronger broadcast capacity that allowed the whole Northern Plains to hear the same messages in bad weather. “Even in blizzards we could get thirty or so stations,” said one western South Dakota woman. Helen Murphy and her family kept up with the news and were entertained by their radio during the winter months. They listened live to hockey games, the funeral of Pope Pius XI, and the second inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt. As with the telephone, Murphy called the radio “so such company.” The radio could also quickly deliver weather forecasts to many people at once, and many Northwesterners used forecasts carried over the radio to guide their behavior in winter. Helen Murphy reported that her family went into town to sell their cream and eggs and buy supplies in response to hearing “a storm warning over the radio.”
But the radio also had its weaknesses. Unlike the telephone, it did not allow conversation, so one could not use it to call for help. It also mattered what messages people put into radios and how they responded to them. A one-night blizzard led to the deaths of forty North Dakotans in March 1941. On the one hand, the Weather Bureau understated just how bad the storm would be, but, on the other, many people failed to act on the information they did have, which made clear that bad weather was on the way.
The other side of building winter security in the Northern Plains was safeguarding the ability to move people and goods. Between the 1860s and the early twentieth century, transcontinental and branch railroads crisscrossed the region. Technological development and imaginative engineering helped to make their ability to function in winter more secure in the decades between the snow blockades of winter 1880-1881, which were immortalized by novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the 1920s. Railroads planted trees along their lines to act as snow fences to reduce the chances of snow blowing onto the tracks. They widened cuts through elevated terrain and whittled down the steepness of the slopes alongside them, reducing the chances that great drifts would pile up in them. And they supplemented the work of shovelers and the brute force of slamming the drifts with V-shaped bucker or wedge plows by adopting the rotary plow, invented in the 1880s, a machine that could grind and blow away the snow and was better at handling hard or deep snow than using brute force. By 1922, a report claimed that officials of Northern Plains railroads agreed that “The day of blocked railroad lines in winter due to huge snow drifts is gone.” This was going a bit far. Service interruptions ranging from delays lasting hours to, sometimes, blockades lasting days – including a two-month service interruption in Albion, Nebraska, in early 1949 – were still a common part of life on the Northern Plains. Still, given the improvements to the railroad system, there was no doubt some truth to this triumphalism too.
In the early twentieth century, just as railroads completed steps to improve their winter reliability, they were being supplanted by automobiles, which brought with them multiple winter security challenges. For one thing, in response to the widespread adoption of automobiles, some railroads cut back service or abandoned their lines, removing a potential alternative way of getting around when deep snow blocked the roads. Furthermore, automobiles were poorly suited for winter travel. Not only were they subject to breakdowns caused by blowing snow or cold, but they also handled snowy roads far less effectively than horse-drawn sleds. Many Northwesterners opted for the older form of transportation during winter, but, by the 1920s, this would also no longer do for many of them. By the 1920s, as automobile ownership mounted and rural Northwesterners increasingly desired a more urban lifestyle achieved through more reliable access to town than they had had even with sleds, many started to pressure state or county government to clear the snow. Between 1920 and 1940, the Northern Plains states and many counties complied with their wishes and began to provide snow removal. Part of the reason they were able to do this was that using gasoline-powered engines to operate snow removal equipment provided the speed and power to make the work possible. These snow removal services were certainly useful to Northwesterners. When plows came through, cars quickly followed. Helen Murphy said that after the snowplow passed through on a March morning in 1939 more than twenty cars passed her house during the following afternoon, more than she had seen in a long time. Northwesterners put a lot of trust in the plows. Responding to their car purchases and maybe to the introduction of snowplows, many got rid of or quit maintaining their sleds and gave up the practice of stockpiling supplies before winter. But snow removal was not a source of complete transportation security. Deep snow often made the roads unuseable for automobiles for periods ranging from a day to weeks. These blockages cut people off from mail, medicine, and medical care, and the worst of them sometimes led to shortages of coal, food, and animal feed.
In the face of snowblocked roads, Northwesterners had a mix of archaic and modern alternatives to which they could turn to find the security of mobility – though none of them were as good as an automobile on a plowed road. Many did retain their horsedrawn sleds and use them in bad conditions – though this meant losing the speed of the automobile. Another option was snowmobiles, which were often built and designed by Northwestern residents themselves. One mailman’s vehicle, consisting of a canvas pod mounted on skis and driven by a propeller, would “roar over the frozen drifted countryside,” according to a report in the Saturday Evening Post. An increasing number of rural Northwesterners acquired tractors in the first half of the twentieth century, and they used them to pull out stuck cars, travel, and even do some of their own snow removal. Best of all was the airplane, which added a third transportation dimension to snowbound landscapes by soaring over the drifts. In 1936, a Freeman, South Dakota, newspaper grasped its potential when it heard that a plane had been used to carry yeast into snowbound Sioux Falls, South Dakota, recently. “Freeman has a man who owns an airplane,” the paper said, “why not put the ship to service, bring in mail and passengers and serve as a transportation line until conditions change.” During the decades after 1920, pilots often did what the paper suggested by carrying mail, food, and doctors to snowbound places. But, despite the wonders of being able to overleap the drifts, trucks were far more efficient.
Despite these developments, the remaining limits of the security of the transportation system of the Northern Plains were displayed when the region was pummeled by blizzards in early 1949. Deep snowdrifts on roads and railroads cut people off from supplies and, combined with deep snow on ranches, barred many livestock from feed. At the behest of state leaders, the Army led a joint military-civilian effort involving more than 1,300 bulldozers to clear the roads. This military intervention marked yet one more milestone in the construction of a winter safety net under the Northern Plains. But even the Army’s eventually successful campaign was, for a while, stymied by the blizzards. It was, according to the Wyoming State Tribune, “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 1920 and 1949, new inventions and government initiatives helped to increase the security of the Northern Plains by enhancing its wintertime transportation and communication ability. But limitation is one of the great themes of the history of this region. And, at the middle of the twentieth century, even the Army and 1,300 bulldozers struggled to overcome it.
1 Lucille M. Kane, trans. and ed., Military Life in Dakota: The Journal of Philippe Régis de Trobriand (St. Paul, Minn.: Alvord Memorial Commission, 1951), xxiv, 22, 49, 58-59, 120-121, 123, 158, 176-273.
2 Norman J. Rosenberg, “Climate of the Great Plains Region of the United States,” Great Plains Quarterly 7 (Winter 1987): 22-23; William Rhoads, Recollections of Dakota Territory (Fort Pierre, S.D.: N.p., 1931), 35; David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 173; F. J. Bavendick, “Blizzards and Chinooks of the North Dakota Plains,” Monthly Weather Review, February 1920, p. 82; Thomas Pederson, “Some Recollections of Thomas Pederson,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 21 (March 1938): 319; 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.
3 Canton [D.T.] Advocate, April 7, 1881 p. 3; 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; Donald R. Whitnah, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 4, 12-13, 15-30, 43, 63; Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 97-100.
4 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), 181-182, 189; U.S. Bureau of the Census, United States Department of Agriculture: 1950 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952), 2:211; “Radio Flashes,” Norfolk [Neb.] Daily News, Jan. 7, 1924, p. 6; Louise G. Blakenship Diaries, Nov. 10, 1927, North Dakota State Historical Society, Bismarck; 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; Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 94, 103.
5 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; Dorothy Dean Van Leuvan, “A Doctor’s Wife in Gumbo Country, 1931-1933,” South Dakota History 34 (Summer 2004): 145 [quotation]; 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, 29 [quotation], 31, Feb. 7, 9, 20, 24, Dec. 7, 1947, Jan. 1, 18, 25 [quotation], Feb. 27-28, 1948; Roy V. Alleman, Blizzard 1949 (St. Louis: Patrice Press, 1991), 21-22.
6 David F. Cook, “The Blizzard of Forty-nine,” 4, box 2, folder 22, David F. Cook Papers (collection 9858), American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie [hereinafter AHC]; “Forecast,” Fargo [N.D] Forum, March 15, 1941, p. 1; “Victims Had Little Storm Warning In Weather Forecast,” Fargo Forum, March 17, 1941, p. 1; W. P. Davies, “Observations,” Grand Forks [N.D.] Herald, March 23, 1941, p. 4; “60 Perish in Storm,” Fargo Forum, March 17, 1941, pp. 1, 7; Langdon Woman Dies As Result of March Storm,” Turtle Mountain Star (Rolla, N.D.), April 3, 1941, p. 1.
7 Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 40, 45, 60, 64, 68; John R. Borchert, America’s Northern Heartland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 51, 53, 55; Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter (New York: Harper & Row, 1940); Gerald M. Best, Snowplow: Clearing Mountain Rails (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1966), 39, 41-43, 46-48, 53-76, 110, 113; S. L. Fee telegram to W. F. Roberts, Jan. 19, 1949, ser. 4, box 89, folder 1, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad – Lines West – Records, RG3913.AM, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; Robert DeC. Ward, “The Railroads versus the Weather,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 70 (no. 2, 1931): 142-143; “Trees as Windbreaks,” Casper [Wyo.] Sunday Morning Tribune, June 3, 1923, p. 22; J. T. Derrig to John C. Cluff, Dec. 30, 1929, box 11, folder 17, University of Wyoming College of Engineering Records (collection 550000), AHC; “Officials Say Day of Snow Blocked Railroad Is Gone,” Grand Forks Herald, Dec. 7, 1922, p. 11 [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, pp. 23-24.
8 James Richard Smith, Geography of the Northern Plains and Other Essays (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Augustana College Press, 1990), 71; “Judith Basin Has Bad Storm,” Great Falls [Mont.] Tribune, Feb. 15, 1929, p. 4; Robert E. Bader, “The Curtailment of Railroad Service in Nebraska, 1920-1941,” Nebraska History 36 (March 1955): 27, 30, 32-37, 40-41; Bob Lantis, “Ordeal at Eastertime,” in The Truth about Montana Winters, 2nd ed., eds. Paul Husted and Pat Gudmundson (Miles City, Mont.: Star Printing, 1978), 40; “38 Perish in N.D., 28 in Minnesota,” Grand Forks Herald, March 18, 1941, p. 1; Orland Eittreim Esval, Prairie Tales: Adventures Of Growing Up On A Frontier (Banner Elk, N.C.: Landmark House, 1979), 83; “Keeping the Roads Clear All Winter,” Roads and Streets, October 1927, p. 463; A. C. Tilley, “Winter Maintenance on Nebraska State Highways,” Roads and Streets, October 1930, p. 85; “Novel Snow Plow Opens Up Roadway,” Great Falls Tribune, Feb. 4, 1918, p. 5; Murphy diary, March 18, 1939; “Keeping the Roads Open,” Fargo Forum, Dec. 21, 1926, p. 12; E. E. Duffy, “Pavement Aids Winter Driving,” Billings Gazette, Jan. 22, 1928, p. 22.
9 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; Ivan Dmitri, “Dakota Winter,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 20, 1940, pp. 14, 15 [quotation]; John Stark diary, Feb. 5, 1949, John A. “Dell” Stark Papers, Mss 046, University of Montana, Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, Missoula; “Of Local Interest,” Freeman [S.D.] Courier, Feb. 20, 1936, p. 1 [quotation]; Fifth Army Disaster Force Snowbound, History, 18.
10 “ ‘Battle of Drifts’ Begins Again,” Wyoming State Tribune (Cheyenne), Feb. 8, 1949, p. 1; S. L. Fee telegram to Val Peterson, Jan. 18, 1949, ser. 4, box 89, folder 1, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad – Lines West – Records, RG3913.AM, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; “Distress in McLean Area Said Critical,” Fargo [N.D.] Forum and Daily Republican, Feb. 3, 1949, p. 1; “Army Enters 6 More N.D. Counties,” Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Feb. 14, 1949, p. 1; Fifth Army Disaster Force “Snowbound,” History, 2-3, 7, 11, E-I; “Parents, Tot Lost in Snow At Atkinson,” Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln), Jan. 28, 1949, p. 1; “Snow Fund ‘Unlimited,’ ” Sunday Journal and Star (Lincoln), Jan. 30, 1949, p. 1.
11 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1931).
