Howell County's Worst Winter
Tue, 01/14/2025 - 3:57pm
admin
By:
Lou Wehmer
Each year, the first measurable snowfall brings to my mind one of the worst winters in South Central Missouri's recorded history. The details of its severity and consequence are in the letters and diaries of both sides stationed in the area during the Civil War. The majority of the civilian population had already left Howell County, and the town of West Plains, according to one Union soldier, "existed in name only," having been burned to the ground that fall.
Something was up weather-wise that summer. Confederate Captain John J. Sitton, living and recruiting on the Howell County line near Mammoth Spring, Arkansas, wrote of frost occurring there for the three nights beginning August 25th, 1863. The remainder of his diary in that period tracks with events that can be verified, but these entries left me scratching my head as to how frost occurs in late August. Fall into early Winter 1863 seemed normal, though mild.
December 25th, 1863, featured unseasonal sixty degree weather during the day, with nothing to make anyone think they were having anything other than an exceptionally mild winter. We know this from accounts of soldiers engaged in a battle on Christmas Day near the Oregon/Ripley County line. In a very successful surprise counter-attack, Union troops captured a whole company of Confederate troops who were outdoors in the sun enjoying the day and making pants from some tents they had captured. Things settled down and a journey north of the troops and their prisoners began.
Then it hit. In the week between Christmas and New Year, the central United States experienced a brutally cold Arctic assault that kept the Midwest in a sub-zero icebox for two weeks of the new year of 1864. The temperature dropped a record eighty degrees in two days.
The Confederates captured were marched overland out of Ripley County to Pilot Knob in Iron County and eventually taken to prisons in St. Louis and Illinois in railroad box cars. Exposure left several dead, with additional deaths occurring from pneumonia in the months to come. At least one man from Howell County was in the group.
The Ozarks Central Plateau on which we live is open to the rapid arrival of cold fronts from Northern Canada and the Arctic because there are no large mountain ranges or obstructions between us. our location in the middle latitudes of the mid-continent location is a moderating factor and most of the time we don't often see this kind of extreme. But it happens, as we have seen from the polar vortex in recent years. From a 60-degree afternoon on Christmas Day to 22 degrees below zero right after New Year is by anyone's estimation extreme!
Today, with the benefits of advanced weather forecasting, central heating, insulated homes, heated transportation, freeze-proof water systems, a surplus of insulated clothing, and a generous supply of food for ourselves and livestock, it is hard to imagine the impact of a storm of this nature, coming as a total surprise to the inhabitants already living a very marginal existence here.
January 1864 was a coup de grace for many families who had suffered through 1863 with constant raiding of their crops and livelihood by both sides and the guerrilla element in the field. The storm was also accompanied by large snowfall events, putting additional strain on anyone trying to hide in the woods. Not only was the bitter cold making fires necessary, but the snow allowed easy tracking of anyone moving and smoke from campfires and cabin chimneys were a magnet for military and guerrilla patrols.
Primary sources written in this area for this period are extremely rare, even the troops stopped writing in the cold. Captain Sitton, however, was hiding in a log cabin on English Creek weathering the storm and keeping his diary.
He wrote of being inside by the fireplace and when federal patrols arrived hunting him he was forced into the woods. He avoided use of his horse and spent time brushing snow into his tracks to cover them. He set multiple fires in the woods to keep patrols busy hunting in the wrong place, and even so, barely evaded capture.
On New Year's an overnight snow of seven inches made rabbit hunting inviting, despite recording in his diary it was "a dreadful cold day." Though he got four rabbits, he was rewarded with a frostbitten toe for his effort. Snow continued for the next two days and by January 5th, Sitton recorded, "so very cold that I scarcely left the house during the day." On January 8, the snow was over a foot deep. Relief for the extreme southern Missouri border came on January 10, 1864, with a front of warmer air that began a gradual temperature climb above freezing. Further north the cold air held the Midwest another full week.
On New Year's Day 1864, the Friday St. Louis Daily Republican wrote, "A wild storm - the severest snowstorm that has been known in this country for many years visited us yesterday, commencing at 12 o'clock Wednesday night, and continuing, with unabated violence throughout the day Thursday. The snow was not of that broad flaked, beautiful and poetical sort, that always makes the heart leap in admiration, and generally melts away the first warm day that follows; it was the small, grainy, cutting and cruelly pelting fall, which, when it commences with a gentle descent, and gradually increases in volume, may well strike terror to the houseless, and the wayfarer for it bodes vigorous weather. This last was the character of the storm yesterday."
The article described drifting snow in the city, filling streets and alleyways and blowing into homes, stopping streetcars and collapsing roofs. Two days later the focus was on the cold with an article documenting a low temperature the day before of minus 22. The article stated, "such a degree of cold is without parallel here for at least thirty-one years. But at no time before this year has it indicated so intense a degree of cold as on the 1st Instant (New Years Day 1864). Probably, considering together with the extreme cold the furious snow-storm which accompanied it, the weather here has never been more intolerable than for the last two or three days."
The storm was especially devastating further north in Missouri. The North Missouri Railroad reported thousands of hogs and other livestock awaiting shipment in stock yards frozen to death before they could be loaded. At St. Clair, Missouri, snow drifts over four feet high were reported in the village streets and on the adjacent rail line the snow piled barricades of over six feet, shutting down all train traffic. The St. Louis Republican told its readers, "on a farm near the city, water had frozen in a well sixteen feet down."
The St. Joseph Missouri Herald reported, "Neither (Confederate General) Price nor any of his minions have taken Missouri South. That was settled yesterday by the thermometer. Ah! this is a blessed cold snap. Patient old Job may have seen colder weather, but he never undertook to walk up Sixth street, facing such a wind as we felt yesterday (New Years Day). Not he. His reputation for patience would have been blasted. God help the shivering poor."
The storm was national news for days, the New York Times regularly reporting stories of trains being stranded throughout the Midwest endangering passengers, with all suffering frost bite. Throughout the Mississippi Valley, deaths from the storm were reported, often discovered only after the thaw.
Confederate Griffin Frost, held prisoner in St. Louis' Gratiot Street Prison wrote in his journal of conditions there, "The weather continued intensely cold, up to Thursday the 7th (January), when a few ladies could be seen on the streets, but only such as were called by business seemed to venture out; it was awfully rigorous on the post gang in the yard and them locked up without fire. I suffered on New Year's day, as near the fire as I could get, wrapped up in my shawl and blanket; had a terrible time, and would have complained of my condition if there had not been hundreds in the house in a worse fix. Prisoners are being brought in all the time; over a hundred on the 6th, about a dozen officers with them. Gratiot occasionally gets very much crowded, and when such is the case there are many and just causes of complaint. The prisoners are poorly fed, worse bedded, and nearly suffocated in the impure air. It is said there has been as many as seventeen hundred men at one time in these lower quarters. That number could scarcely find standing room, sleeping would be out of the question, of course they must suffer, sicken and die."
Over a hundred of the prisoners Frost described were from southern Missouri, shipped there from Pilot Knob in unheated rail cars during the storm. As a consequence, many were sick upon arrival and died at Gratiot Street Prison or the Alton, Illinois Prison, where they were transferred. As mentioned, the majority of deaths were from pneumonia, and a smallpox outbreak resulting from overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
The storm that would have been quite difficult for a settler in southern Missouri in peace time was an impossible hardship upon the women and children clinging to existence here. With a minimum of three additional months of winter facing these pioneers it is a wonder any of them survived. I often think of them when a cold blast greets me as I step outside in our little cold spell, and marvel at the tenacity of those pioneers who lived in this especially cruel part of the war.