It’s going to snow — a lot …

Our ancestors did not have the advantage of modern weather warning systems to prepare for things like bitter, raw, sub-zero temperatures, blizzards and ice storms. The Upper Ohio Valley was settled during some of the coldest winters of the Little Ice Age. The wintry weather that could be remembered might have been blended from the stories told in front of a hearth with a roaring fire and a black bake kettle and a bean pot, from a forbear of my mother’s side of the family.

It was a time when youngsters were put to sleep in their feather beds to gobbler tales of the 18th-century frontier villain Simon Girty, who would come to get them if they misbehaved, and whose homestead was near Fort Henry in Warren Township in Jefferson County.

The glacial winter of 2025-26 is like the one captured in a letter from Joanna Rosseter Cotton on Feb. 11, 1670 “This is so bit(t)ter a snow winter …” not far from her mind as she set down her thoughts was the knowledge that Wabanki indians had struck four winter raids not more than 30 miles from her remote cabin.

The Rev. Pike, meanwhile, recorded 22 snows, and while a moon shone on the snow outside and the north wind battered the house, the family stayed snug and warm inside.

Those born after the memorable season 1697-98 would find the bench mark century snow and cold of 1740-41 the most talked about old-fashioned winter of the 18th century, rivaled by a snow and cold 39 years later , during the bone-chilling year of 1779-80. As it is recalled, that winter set in early, lured by an exceptionally mild autumn, and remained the center stage of the drama endured by pioneers that left them freezing until spring.

The commanding officer at Fort Pitt write to Gen. George Washington on Feb. 11, 1780: “Such a deep snow and ice has not been known at this place in the memory of the eldest natives; deer and turkies die by the hundreds for want of food, the snow on the Allegheny and Laurel is four feet deep.”

My father’s mother’s family, the Magees, lived in a backwoods cabin, and had seen snow before when Grandma Traubert was 4 years old in 1884, an old-fashioned arctic blizzard whiteout on Jan. 8-9, with more than 18 inches falling on Jan. 8, and drifts higher than she had grown. Her Pa would run a rope to the barn from the house, then to the chicken coop.

During the hard winter of 1880-81, young women in bonnets wore parried calico patterns like those Laurel Ingalls Wilder recalled in the Little House book series.

The pages of history are filled with events like the tragic events associated with the Great School House Blizzard of January 1888. The Wilder books, were, of course, adapted for the TV series “Little House on the Prairie,” and the third season episode “Blizzard” that originally aired on Jan, 3, 1977, is based on this winter storm event.

We have lived through tough times before, born from pioneer stock, and that is something to be proud of if you close your eyes for just a moment. Imagine a cold, cutting, icy, freezing snow mix that batters the house, as well as the sounds of a wolf pack howling and scratching at the walls of your isolated frontier cabin, all while the roof creaks from the weight of the snow.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, with his renowned 1893 Frontier Thesis, which was presented in Chicago at the Worlds Exposition, believed it was the frontier that made American democracy unique.

(Traubert is a resident of Wellsburg)