The Blizzard of 1949

Tin Horn Ranch - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

In was too warm over Christmas, 1948. At age five I had received a new snow sled from Santa. On New Years Day, 1949, it was seventy degrees in Harrison, Nebraska, elevation 4880 feet on the northwestern corner of the Nebraska panhandle.

Every day I complained, and every day my mother repeated her warning: “This is a weather breeder. Watch out what you pray for.” She took my sister Sheila and me with her to DeKay’s grocery to fill in a few empty spots on the food storage shelves in the basement. Dad had the car, but he was at work on a ranch south of town. A block to the store was no problem, with me pulling the wagon. We passed Great granny Ida Larson’s house and she rocked on her porch and commented: “ Ay yuss need a few tings.” Mom added them to her list.

The town waited. The weather forecast called for snow, but not for what happened on January the third. I remember awakening to the moan of wind and the whiteout conditions. At times, I couldn’t see Great granny’s house. I expected it to stop that day. It went on for two more, with winds to seventy miles an hour, a temperature of minus twenty six, and three feet of snow. One of the windows to the side yard was blocked by a drift built around a wire to the radio antenna on the roof. On the third day, my mother bundled up to go check on great granny, who had no phone and burned wood for warmth and cooking. I watched as she made it off the porch and down to the street. Clinging to the picket fence, she made it fifty feet north. The wind caught her and she was rolled back to our house. We helped her out of her clothes, coated with ice. She wept from the pain and waited until the fifth day to make it across the street to see Great granny, who had baked a pie.

We had no word from my father, but knew most ranchers lost their herds. Cattle run before the wind and die in creeks or draws, or against the barbed wire fences. The Sioux warned us, before we drove them away. Buffalo faced the wind behind their massive heads and thick fur, and lived. We were fresh out of buffalo. On the twelfth day dad hiked in ten miles or so. There were no cattle left to save. He took a hammer and chisel to clear the wall opposite a north facing upper floor window. Through a storm window the brutal wind had encased the wall in ice. Our fuel oil ran out about then, but we kept bundles of newspapers and wood in the basement. Before the Army Corps of Engineers brought a relief train in three weeks after the storm, we were completely cut off. I remember the sound of dynamite as they cleared the last cut east of town, where twenty feet of snow had buried the last train from Crawford.

By then we were back in school and I was sick with tonsillitis. We had no doctor, and the Army needed at least a week to cut open the roads into Wyoming, so they sent a helicopter to bring a doctor to me. I remember the long needle and the burn of the penicillin. Several storms that winter and spring kept snow on the ground until June. I remember lilacs drooping in the wet snow on Memorial Day.

The summer grass was high and beautiful that year, but the ranchers mostly sold out and went somewhere warmer. Even today there are no buffalo, but I understand the Sioux plan to reintroduce them sometime soon, when white people come to their senses and leave Sioux County.