Imagine yourself as a settler again. You've read the brochures of the town builders and the railroad. You know the federal government is making free land available, but what about the weather on the Great Plains? Weather dominates the discussion of farmers in the East. It's a good bet the weather will affect your life on the “new land” — and it still does.

Ball Family, Woods Park, Nebraska, 1886. Photo by Solomon Butcher.

When they got to the plains, some early visitors thought the weather was worse then they had experienced before. John T. Gibson was a traveler on the Oregon Trail in 1859, and he wrote in his diary about "the father of all the thunderstorms" that he encountered on May 26, 1859 near present day Kearney. He said, "the full force of the rain storm fell upon their devoted heads and drenched them to the skin."

Earlier, Gibson had compared storms on the Plains to those he was familiar with:

“Talk about your eastern rainstorms. They sink into utter insignificance when compared with what can be got up on short notice along the Platte. The lightening flashed almost simultaneous with the clashing, deafening, reverberating reports of heaven's artillery. The wind howled a perfect tornado, leveling one tent in company, and forcing the inmates to scamper in their shirt-tails and seek shelter in ours.”

Mrs. John Grosvenor lived through the Easter Blizzard of 1873. Sixty years later, she told an interviewer for the WPA how her father moved the horse in the house with the family and the cow and calf into the lean-to kitchen to keep them alive.

Ice skating at Simeon, Custer County, Nebraska, 1900.

Since Nebraska is in the middle of the continent, there are extremes of weather here that are not experienced on the coasts. Every group of people who have lived here have had to find ways to cope and even thrive — because the same storm that produces a blizzard can leave behind a natural ice rink on one of the many sand hills lakes.

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