[Sca-cooks] Harvest times

[Johnna Holloway]

The facts about Laura Ungalls Wilder can be determined from a number of 
other
sources. http://206.212.0.47/~irby1/laura/pub.html helpfully lists a number.
William Anderson's small publications are very good in filling the gaps 
in the
stories.
I have on the shelf here a book titled Snow in America by Bernard Mergen
which was published by the Smithsonian University Press in 1997.
It talks about the terrible storms of the 1880's. The winter of 1879-80
was fierce along the headwaters of the Minnesota River on the South Dakota
border. This would have been the year before what the Ingalls experienced.
The next page mentions the blizzard of Jan 6-9, 1886 when as many 90 per 
cent
of the range cattle died. The blizzard of March, 1888 is the storm that 
paralyzed the Northeastern U.S. for four days.
I think the weather was rough throughout that decade.
Other books regarding winters--
The Children's Blizzard by Laskin. This is a new one that rec'd a lot of 
press.
Review notes say: In 1888, a sudden, violent blizzard swept across the 
American plains, killing hundreds of people, many of them children on 
their way home from school. As Laskin (Partisans) writes in this 
gripping chronicle of meteorological chance and human folly and error, 
the School Children's Blizzard, as it came to be known, was "a clean, 
fine blade through the history of the prairie," a turning point in the 
minds of the most steadfast settlers: by the turn of the 20th century, 
60% of pioneer families had left the plains.

Johnnae