But you and I got out. It still mystifies me. It was the storm, of course—it blew us out of there, in a way. You because you did the right thing; me, because I didn’t.
I don’t know what you are doing now, Raina. I move around too much to ever get a letter back, and I have little hope that my previous letter got to you. I have even less hope that this one will. I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to you finally. Oh, don’t worry, I am not dying!
I just feel less and less of this world somehow.
Maybe we will meet again, dear sister. But I don’t think we will. You wouldn’t recognize me anyway. You would pass me on the street. No, you would look at me and ask yourself, “Who is that poor excuse of a woman? That ghost in tattered clothing, stringy grey hair, a pain in her heart that makes her press her hand to her chest now and then to ease it?”
Up here in the mountains, higher and higher—maybe I will touch God one of these days, after all!—nobody cares. There are so few people, anyway. And they all have their own versions of hell to contend with.
I do hope you are happy, Raina. You deserve it.
Goodbye from your loving sister,
Gerda
Occasionally, in the years to come, Raina would receive odd gifts in the mail. A packet of eagle’s feathers. A few stones of turquoise. A cowboy hat with silver disks stitched along its brim. Pebbles washed smooth by spring water.
A yellowed news clipping about a madwoman in the mountains whom no one has ever seen, but who sends presents to the schoolchildren in the nearest town.
The last thing she ever received, no return address like the others, was just a list, scrawled in a weak hand on brown paper, in pencil: Minna, Ingrid, Hardus, Johnny, Johannes, Karl, Walter, Sebastian, Lydia.
To that list, Raina added in her own precise, schoolteacher’s hand:
Gerda.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD OF 1888—sometimes known as the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard or the Schoolhouse Blizzard—has long been known to me by its name, although I didn’t truly grasp its scope and terror. But when my editor at the time and I were looking for a new idea for a novel, and she mused that it might be interesting to write about children, I replied, “The Children’s Blizzard!” And when she asked what that was, I admitted I didn’t exactly know.
I set off to do the research, and almost immediately, I started to construct a story around it.
For the first time in my career as a historical novelist, I wanted to write about an actual historical event, but invent the people caught up in it. My other books have all been created around real people—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the real Alice in Wonderland, Truman Capote, Mary Pickford, etc. I was looking for a new challenge as a writer, and this subject, so vast with possibility, ignited my imagination. So I stuck to the actual timeline of the blizzard but invented most of the characters, basing many of them on the oral histories of those who remembered the storm and the newspaper articles about it.
The facts: In 1888, there was no National Weather Service. Meteorology didn’t quite exist as a science. But the Army Signal Corps did have a branch of weather “indicators,” career soldiers who had been selected to train, as much as the science of the time allowed, to try to indicate the weather. （They did not use words like predict or forecast then.） The Signal Corps was, at the time of the blizzard, under the command of Brigadier General Adolphus Greely, who had famously commanded a tragic expedition to the Arctic; most of his men perished, but he and a handful survived. The expedition was known as the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. Despite controversy, he returned home a hero, and President Grover Cleveland appointed him chief signal officer of the army.
At the time, weather indicating consisted of an array of stations, many at army forts and railroad depots, each manned by a member of the Signal Corps whose job it was to take weather readings—barometric pressure, wind direction and speed, temperature—and telegraph the readings, at various intervals during the day, to Washington, D.C. There, soldiers would map out all the readings and indicate the weather for the next few hours. The time it took to gather the readings, form an indication, then telegraph it back out to various stations and newspapers, meant that the indications rarely got to where they should be in a timely manner. Too, there was much corruption in the Signal Corps: false readings, mismanagement, unmanned stations. In 1887, Greely felt pressure by the railroads to open up a western branch, to better serve the railway west of the Mississippi and, to a far lesser extent, the homesteaders there. He opened an office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas Woodruff.