Folklore or Forecast?
Pa Ingalls might have trusted the muskrats, but science has given us more reliable winter outlooks.
On a prairie in east central South Dakota in 1880, Pa Ingalls paused his haying work to study the muskrat houses with his preteen daughter, Laura. With a shake of his head, he showed her that the homes were especially thick — that he had never seen muskrats build such thick houses, in fact. Over dinner, Pa eyed the flocks of geese hastily migrating south without resting in the lakes of the prairie potholes region. The signs from the animals around him put his guard up even on mild fall days and certainly on the chilly ones.
As many a Laura Ingalls Wilder reader knows, these harbingers preceded one of the hardest winters since European-descended settlers reached the Great Plains. Documented faithfully in Wilder’s The Long Winter, the winter of 1880–1881 brought long-lasting cold and likely some of the deepest snows in the region in recent history. The October blizzard in Wilder’s story struck the first blow of a relentless winter season, following closely on the heels of the muskrat home building and the geese exodus.
As with much folklore, there may be a kernel of observation at the core, but the tales are typically not absolute… and a few sticky sources of lore are absurdly inaccurate! Who can you trust when it comes to winter look-aheads, and which ones…
