willow was harvested to weave hurdles. Timber was cut into logs. Trees were felled. Trappers were lured out into the cold by the promise of thick winter pelts.
It’s romantic to imagine that people just withdrew into their cozy interiors to wait for the arrival of spring, but even for those who didn’t hunt or trap, there were all manner of activities that made venturing into the cold a necessity: going to school, going to church and stopping in at a local watering hole on the way home, burying the dead, stocking up on supplies, and providing support to neighbors and relatives. The health of animals, which had to survive the winter, had to be watched. As early as January, lambs were born and had to be protected. Helpers were always needed in the communal effort to remove snowdrifts and shovel paths. When people set out across the snow-covered landscape, they took the most direct route as, for the most part, the usual trails were entirely lost. The trials and tribulations of winter helped cement social bonds. Even though life was dictated by the weather and people suffered under the burden of winter, they were happy they could assist each other and they parted with stories to tell for a long time to come. Winter was beautiful even though, or maybe precisely because, it was hard. Could this be the time when people found their true friends? Do summer friends melt away like summer snows, but winter friends last forever, as an old saying goes?
Sleighs drawn by animals, usually horses or oxen, were practical modes of transportation. Dogs were also sometimes pressed into service. In Syrup Pails and Gopher Tails, John C. Charyk tells of six-year-old Walter Viste, who relied on a large German shepherd named Buster to pull him over a mile across the snow so he could get to school in Alberta in the 1930s. During school hours, the dog was tied up in the barn along with the horses, and it received a lard sandwich at noon. Most of the time, the ride only took six minutes, but every day there was a different challenge to be met. “Buster had a weakness for chasing rabbits, coyotes, cars, or any other moving thing that captured his fancy. When these sudden and unexpected forays occurred, Walter experienced more than his share of spills and thrills. If he fell off, Buster paid no attention whatsoever to his master, but continued the pursuit. It wasn’t until the dog had satisfied his chasing urge that he would eventually stop and wait for the boy to catch up.”
There were certainly advantages to sleighs, no matter what animal was pulling them. When the car became a mass commodity in the 1920s, precautions had to be taken to prevent chaos on the roads in snowy and icy conditions. Salt of one kind or another—not necessarily sodium chloride—has the advantage of being able to quickly thaw snow and ice, but it poses a danger to the environment because it enters and pollutes streams and groundwater. That’s why sand and other substances are used where possible to provide friction on smooth surfaces, minimizing the risk of accidents. And in remote places where it’s not practical to clear snow and ice, people now use tracked vehicles, from snowmobiles to snow coaches.
Railways, like cars, came with their own unique challenges. Across the western plains of the United States and Canada, snow fences did little to stop windblown snow from drifting over the tracks. In the mountains, roofs were erected to keep off the snow in avalanche-prone areas. This still left the issue of what to do when large quantities of snow fell. In January 1890, a dozen westward-bound trains in Reno, Nevada, were delayed and hundreds of people had to wait for more than two weeks in a town with only a handful of hotels and restaurants until the tracks over the Sierra Nevada were cleared. Delays such as these remained a problem until the end of the nineteenth century, when a rotating snowplow mounted to the front of a locomotive was introduced to supplement the standard wedge-shaped plow.
And how did winter affect humans out on the sea? During the cold season, maritime traffic often came to a standstill. While searching for the Northwest Passage, numerous ships were trapped in the ice, and crews were forced to spend the long winter months there. But they could be considered the lucky ones, because there were others that got crushed in the ice and did not survive the winter. Finland was excluded from international trade for up to six months out of the year because the Baltic Sea froze. In the nineteenth century, when economic pressure increased to keep open ports and bodies of water for ships to pass through, the first icebreakers were developed.
Transitioning from the cold outdoors to the warmth indoors had to be handled carefully. The pain in one’s ears and hands, which often feels like a burning sensation, could be minimized if one did not enter a warm room directly when coming inside, but rather waited a moment in a less well-heated area. Cold foot baths were a common household remedy for hypothermic limbs. During winter, the parlor provided a cozy refuge, and it was in this room that people often saw to small repairs and sewed. A massive old tiled stove could often be found here, fed with a carefully gauged amount of wood; if heated too intensely, the tiles might shatter.
From their heated living quarters, people peeked out at the bitter cold through windowpanes coated with frost. The room might smell of cinnamon, cloves, candle wax, and Swiss stone pine, mingled with smoke and an assortment of unpleasant odors that could not be driven out because of the restricted ventilation. Window recesses were often stuffed with hay or straw to keep out the cold, the second, protective winter windows having long since been fitted into the frame. If the house was likely to be buried in snow, it would be well insulated, and the roof would be sufficiently sturdy to withstand the weight.
In order to benefit from the warmth, people in farming households brought their animals into their homes, stabling them in a ground-floor area built for this purpose. And whenever possible, people moved upstairs to rooms facing the sun. The rooms above the kitchen were especially popular, because a small flame was often kept burning in the stove overnight.
North American Indigenous peoples had their own ways. The Sioux, for example, adapted their tepees to the season. When it was extremely cold, they built a framework around the tent and hung blankets over it, which provided additional insulation and prevented heat from escaping. Some Indigenous nations of what is now the southwest United States moved with the seasons, while others stayed on or near their traditional lands, yet in special winter homes. Winter Navajo homes were built at lower altitudes, and in farming communities, they were centered around animal wintering and hibernating areas, as opposed to summer homes, which were located near fertile, flat growing areas and water.
In the Pacific Northwest, coastal peoples built huge communal longhouses from split cedar logs. The pitched roofs were low to make the space easy to heat, and the fire at the center was kept burning to warm the sleeping alcoves along the walls. Some of these have survived, and on Vancouver Island new ones are still being built and used for community events. In the central plains, the Hidatsa and Mandan constructed earth lodges partially buried in the ground with conical peaked roofs to shed snow and a central hearth for heat. In the forested lake and hill country farther east, Iroquois longhouses were covered in water-repellent birch-bark siding and their arched sod roofs were strong and resistant to snow and rain. In rocky landscapes where wood was in short supply but sun was plentiful, in the Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, for example, people turned to rugged cliffs for security and warmth. Bandelier National Monument is a good example of a complex of living quarters where stone, both natural and worked, did an excellent job of trapping heat.
In Britain, as in many other countries, a blazing fire offered a warm welcome when members of the family returned home or guests arrived. Architect Herman Muthesius once warned that “to remove the fireplace from the English home would be to remove the soul from the body.” The American essayist Washington Irving was certainly much taken with the comfort of an English hearth and left us with this description of a visit he made to a country home around 1815: “The grate had been removed from the wide overwhelming fireplace, to make way for a fire of wood, in the midst of which was an enormous log glowing and blazing and sending forth a vast volume of light and heat . . . It was really delightful to see the old squire seated in his hereditary elbow chair, by the hospitable fireside of his ancestors, and looking around him like the sun of a system, beaming warmth and gladness to every heart.”
Because most houses long ago were poorly insulated, on very cold days once people left the fire, they had no other choice but to get into bed—either that or withdraw into an alcove or bed recess built into the wall. The curtains on a four-poster bed helped keep warmth inside. Nevertheless, knit caps, jackets, socks, and even on occasion shoes were still required. Poets supposedly wrote in bed by