“The sudden freeze of ’36 came with a vengeance. It was like a wild prairie fire which snipped everything in its way. And woe to him who was far from human habitation, for its bite was ferocious. I was in the country at the time, and I tell you young man, you will never see such weather if you live a thousand years,” said an unidentified old pioneer reminiscing in the Bloomington Weekly Leader newspaper on Feb. 19, 1885.
It was the afternoon of Dec. 20, 1836, less than a week before Christmas. Sometime around two o'clock in the afternoon, a mass of cold air blew into Central Illinois — but not just any cold front.
“It's a cold front really worthy of the Old Testament, chapter and verse. It's described by McLean County pioneers as a raging, roaring, bellowing sound…‘shaking and pervading the firmament akin to distant and heavy cannonading,'" said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
As the raging, dark, even-to-blackness clouds approached, the temperature plummeted. Reports in western Illinois and elsewhere indicate sunrise temperatures were about 40 degrees, a little warmer than average for the period. By 2 p.m. that afternoon, temperatures had plummeted to about zero. Or below, if you listen to some McLean County early settlers.
“Who were off to exaggerate, right?" Kemp said. "Pioneer legends and lores were well-known, right? They will tell us somewhat dubiously that the temperature dropped about 60 degrees in 15 minutes or so. Now, whether that's true or not, I can't really say, but from this climatological event known as the sudden change, or the sudden freeze, because it sweeps through a great swath of Central Illinois."
There are reports of the sudden freeze from as far north as Ottawa, Illinois, and as far south as Paris, Illinois.
“The snapping of the forest trees could be heard for three miles. The bark of the dogs froze in solid chunks and fell to the ground while the lowing of the cattle, the grunting of the hogs, and the distressing cry of fowls filled the air full of icicles,” said the retrospective a half-century later in the Weekly Leader. “There was death in the barnyards of the pioneer farmers and upon the wild prairies of the young state, the sudden freeze left its deadly sting.”
In the days before the sudden change there had been a heavy snowfall. Then the weather warmed. By the day before, the landscape was slushy and muddy.
“Therein lies the danger to unsuspecting settlers," Kemp said. "Oftentimes, they're working in fields or traveling hither and yon and find themselves wet. Then these plumping temperatures become a matter of saving life and limb."
It’s hard, though, to separate tall tales from fact — and exaggeration was the rule of the day.
“Three of my horses were found dead," an old pioneer reminisced. "One of the animals was in the act of drinking and when I discovered my loss, I noticed the water pail was frozen to the animal’s nostrils. Two cows froze stiff in their tracks and towards night when I drove them into the barn to milk them, they were dead. I’ll tell you what! It was a stunner. The weather was absolutely so cold that even the fire almost refused to burn."
Similar whoppers were told about the "winter of deep snow" in 1831. There are many settler accounts of pioneers freezing to the saddle and having to be wrenched off their horses when they made their difficult way home. Some stories are clearly apocryphal, given away by a particular lack of specifics.
“Benjamin Wheeler, who was a settler in Hudson Township, tells a story of a father and daughter somewhere in McLean County who had succumbed to the cold just a few miles before reaching the safety of their home," Kemp said. "Wheeler never takes care to mention the name of this father and daughter and other settlers. Other settlers tell the same story, yet we never get the names of the father or the daughter or the exact location where this occurs. I suspect this is a robust exaggeration."
Some of the stories also appear in the volume The Good Old Times in McLean County, published in 1874. Most are true and some are not, Kemp said.
“That compiler noted that the stories and incidents related to this sudden change are never-ending and made very curious and strange by the pioneers who tell those stories,” he said.
Some of the most fantastical tales are much like a fictional episode in the George Lucas Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back 150 odd years later.
“Two men who were on their way to Bloomington were in the neighborhood of Little Vermillion Creek when the sudden freeze hove in sight,” said the old settler in the Weekly Standard. "They hastened to the creek, but it was high and filed with moving ice. The men were 12 miles from any house and rather than freeze to death they determined to kill their horses, cut them open, crawl into them and keep warm. The scheme, very unfortunately, was not successful and both men lost their lives."
In the movie version, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker survived after using the same scheme with their "Tauntaun" mounts as Resistance forces hid from the Empire on the ice planet Hoth.
One typical account read, “the wind and its fury and power blew the water into little, sharply defined waves, which froze as they stood. One horrific story is undoubtedly true, Kemp said.
It’s about Andrew Heredith from the Springfield area in Sangamon County. He was driving more than 1,000 head of hogs to market in St Louis and was caught out on the open prairie that day. They fled and found refuge in a nearby cabin, but left the hogs in the open.
“The hogs piled on top of each other as hogs are wont to do to seek warmth," Kemp said. "The next morning Heredith, and his men found a pyramid of 500 dead hogs that had suffocated."
Some of the stories of the sudden change we can believe and some we have to give a serious side-eye.
McHistory is a partnership between WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History bringing you the words of people from times gone by.
