Comes now the time of year when North Dakotans of a certain age will tell you stories about the Blizzard of 1966. Which I myself, being not averse to storytelling, might do on a given day, but today I’m going to talk about the significance of this particular tale. It’s a Lutheran question: What does this mean?
My lens for viewing is the Symposium on the Great Plains of North America convened by the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University in April 1964. I have a copy of the proceedings, published in 1967. During this time Seth Russell, a sociologist, was dean of arts & sciences and director of the institute, having succeeded Hans Giesecke, a linguist.
Russell brought in an old friend, the eminent rural sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman, to organize the symposium. They pulled it together as, in some ways, the country around them was coming apart. Things looked good — I mean, look at the third mural in the second-story hallway of the Foster County Courthouse, in Carrington, depicting this generation, Boomer days. People are having a wonderful time, bustling about, doing business, building swimming pools, for pete’s sake!
When a generation later Kathleen Norris wrote her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, from the standpoint of Lemmon, South Dakota, she was exasperated by all the people who insisted what was wrong with the town was that they needed to get back to the 1960s.
Well, that was the decade when UND historian Elwyn Robinson wrote his influential history of North Dakota, identifying six themes he perceived in the history of the state. Take a look at them: every one is a negative, including the famous “Too Much Mistake,” which became the guiding principle of state legislators for a full generation.
Looking at the 1965 symposium from sixty years later, you notice two things right away. No women in it (to speak of), and no Indians in it at all. Indigenous peoples were still considered by social scientists and politicians alike to be on their way out. What I notice right away, however, is something out of place: the publishers of the proceedings chose to insert, early in the text, two documents that were not part of the actual symposium, two narratives of the deadly Blizzard of 1966: one by the state climatologist, Herman Stommel, the other by the Associated Press man in Minneapolis, George Moses. Bear with me, this means something.
Both writers make the point that meteorology had advanced scientifically such that there was good warning to people on the northern plains they were about to be hammered by a blizzard the likes of which they had never seen. Both writers also, however, recount tragic or near-tragic tales of people who should have known better, but went out and got themselves killed.
They tell the story of the three coaches from Fort Yates scouting a tournament in Mandan, buying three sweet rolls to take home--and ending up burning fenceposts in the back seat, eating their caramel rolls, while waiting two days for a snowplow. That one was sort of amusing. Others were pitiful — children lost between the house and the barn, that sort of thing.
What are these narratives, out of their place in time, doing in the proceedings? They are a metaphor. Listen to the scientists, people; take warning, things are going to get bad. The Great Plains, created intellectually as a land of letters, was becoming, scientifically, a country of problems. But don’t worry, the scientists are here!
