Translations:Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Nature/Weather - Advanced/29/en

The winter of 1880–81, was referred to in the Dakotas for many years afterward as the "Hard Winter". Author Laura Ingalls Wilder devoted her book The Long Winter to the telling of that winter's story, a narrative of one successive blizzard after another, and the effects on her family and those around her. The book is only slightly fictionalized, as far as her descriptions of the weather. Her tale of two men from the town of DeSmet, South Dakota going after some wheat rumored to be stored some miles south of DeSmet in February of 1881 is true (Ingalls later married one of the men, Almanzo Wilder). It was speculated at the time that if the two men had not found and brought back the wheat, the residents would have starved before the eventual thaw in April of 1881 which allowed the railroads to resume service. The snowbound locomotive pictured above was photographed on March 29, 1881 in western Minnesota, not far from DeSmet.