Many of us grew up reading the remembrances of Laura Ingalls Willder, author of the Little House books. Wilder was elderly when she wrote them, and many details are fiction. So how closely did the account follow her actual life? There’s been a lot of research done into the documents of the time: newspaper accounts, deeds, historical records. And now scientists are getting into the act. For example, the volume The Long Winter described a particularly blizzardy year in which people began to starve to death. Was it really that bad? Meteorologist Barb Boustead set out to determine the real weather of 1880-81.
Those in other scientific disciplines have looked into Wilder’s life story. Read about a a medical student who investigated why Mary Ingalls went blind, and a physics teacher who measured Wilder’s family’s journeys by a horse’s footsteps, at Smithsonian.The winter of 1880-81 was relatively well documented for the time. Compiling records on temperature, precipitation and snow depth from 1950 through 2013, she developed a tool to assign a relative “badness” score to the weather recorded at one or more stations in a geographic area. The Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index (AWSSI, rhymes with “bossy”) assigns an absolute severity grade for how the weather compares with the entire country, and a relative severity grade for comparing regional weather. It can also track year-over-year trends.
Boustead applied the tool to records at weather stations from the 1800s. Every site Boustead investigated in Laura’s region in that year falls into the “extreme” category rating on the AWSSI scale, marking it as a record year for snowfall and temperature lows. The season covered in The Long Winter still ranks in the top 10 worst winters on record for South Dakota, as well as other regions of the country.