By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
“They Came to Stay” by Greg Todd, Sherman County Courthouse, Goodland.
THEY CAME TO STAY
As last week’s winter storm began to move across the state, my mind returned to a trip I took to northwest Kansas last fall.
Traveling I-70, it was around Russell that I began to notice the hinged barricades at the entrance ramps, gates used to close the highway during blizzards.
The gates caught my eye because we don’t have them on the interstates in eastern Kansas. Their existence says, “We’ve had blizzards here before. We expect more.”
When I think of pioneers, my mind tends to land in the northwest region of Kansas. The ones who settled there must have been incredibly tough people. Winter hits northwest Kansas first. And it hits there hardest.
“There is no doubt that once you get west of the 100th meridian, blizzards become much more severe, the wind becomes higher and there are fewer trees and hills to slow the wind,” Mark Bogner, meteorologist with KSN-TV in Wichita, told me via e-mail.
Bogner mentioned a couple of previous storms at Goodland, the kind of blizzards that likely also struck when pioneers lived in sod houses, rustic homes or even dugouts. A November 1983 blizzard “produced 21.7 inches of snow with a peak wind gust of 49 mph,” Bogner said. Another, in November, 1975, “had 13.2 inches of snow with a peak wind gust of 68 mph!”
Because of the intensity of storms and the wide-open landscape, it is in northwest Kansas that I find it easiest to contemplate the vulnerability of those early settlers and feel the lingering presence of pioneers.
Colby, which calls itself “The Oasis on the Plains,” pays tribute to its pioneer heritage in various ways. In front of the Thomas County Courthouse is a sculpture called “Spirit of the Prairie” by Charlie Norton. The statue is of a pioneer woman gazing to the horizon, a toddler on her hip, her other arm raised high waving her bonnet.
The public library in Colby is called Pioneer Memorial Library and near the interstate is the fabulous Pioneer Museum of Art and History which shows and tells about life on plains. There is even a sod house on the grounds, which is actually a very homey structure and seems like it would make a decent fort against the elements.
Fascinating first-hand narratives about those early settlers can be found in “Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier” by Joanna L. Stratton. It’s a collection of writings by women who were among the first to set up residence in Kansas. Those stories recount not only the viciousness of winter on the plains, but also other forms of danger, such as Indians, prairie fires, the difficulties of plowing virgin soil, droughts, rattlesnakes, grasshoppers, wolves, isolation and exhausting winds.
The early days on the Kansas prairies were certainly challenging, but many survived those tests of will and strength.
In the book, Stratton quotes an unnamed writer, “‘It may seem a cheerless life,’ mused one woman, ‘but there were many compensations: the thrill of conquering a new country; the wonderful atmosphere; the attraction of the prairie, which simply gets into your blood and makes you dissatisfied away from it; the low-lying hills and the unobstructed view of the horizon; and the fleecy clouds driven by the never failing winds. The pioneer spirit was continuous in our family.’”
The environment can be harsh. Wind at 30, 40, 50 mph turns a regular snowfall into a deadly storm. Drifts can close highways and county roads day after day.
In the 1800s, many settlers began new lives on the High Plains. They didn’t find Kansas an easy row to hoe. Some fled, of course, and returned to the East. But many made it their home. Kansans, by nature, seem to be independent and resourceful, and in the sparsely populated northwest region, they have to be.
During that October trip, Goodland was also one of my stops. On the Sherman County Courthouse lawn is a life-size sculpture by Greg Todd.
The bronze piece portrays a man and a woman standing next to a plow. And for me, the four simple words of the sculpture’s title summed up the lives of those hardy pioneers: “They Came to Stay.”
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
When one of our whirlwind tours of Kansas took my husband and me near Russell, we were immediately drawn to the barricades, too. A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon a photo of shopkeeper standing inside the 7-foot-tall tunnel he just shoveled to his front door. Then I wondered what it must have been like that have that kind of snow piled up on and over your sod house. I can’t even imagine the level of grit it took to want to live through more than one winter like that.
A drift over a sod house would in fact create insulation from the storm and cold. I often think of the indigenous peoples before eastern Europeans even set foot here. Good seasonal column, Cheryl.
It takes a special kind of person to be a Kansan, no doubt. I’m proud to be one of the many…thanks for the wonderful column!
In SW Kansas as a child I remember one blizzard that piled a drift at the front of our house that reached clear up over the top of the front door–which was up on the front steps, not at ground level. We had to use the back door for quite some time.
There is nothing to stop the wind out there, and if there is, in a blizzard that is where the snow piles up. I can imagine those sod houses getting completely buried. You would just have to hunker down and wait. It must have been pretty much the same for the native Americans who were there originally, too.