Neighbor’s Laughed When He Built a Second Wall Around His Cabin — Until It Kept His Cabin 21 Degrees

The story traveled beyond the county lines too. Men who moved westward wrote to friends and families and to county papers and to other lonely posts on the plain. The method was adapted and tested in other towns with other materials. Where straw was abundant, they used it. Where sawdust existed and men had access to mills, they paid the price and enjoyed longer stretches between maintenance. The principle remained the same: moving air steals heat; trapped air holds it. The outer skin takes the weather while the inner stays calm.

There is a kind of quiet heroism in the exchange—an emigrant borrowing from indigenous wisdom, adapting a maritime mechanism for inland cold, and the resulting survival of neighbors who had been too proud to accept help until the cold made their pride pointless. This is perhaps the last and truest lesson of Eirik Olsen’s work: that survival in extremity is often not about who stands tallest in winter but about who is willing to listen, to learn, and to change.

Years later, a school exercise assigned by Martha’s grandchildren asked the students to write about a person in the township who had helped the community. A boy named Thomas wrote about a Norwegian who made a fence for a house and kept a ledger of temperatures. He drew a picture of an outer wall with battens and an inner log house and labelled the muslin windcheck neatly. He said in a sentence that made his teacher grin that Eirik’s house kept the cabin twenty-one degrees warmer than its neighbors in the first storm, and that made his mother sleep better.

Eirik’s ledger sits in the town’s small museum now, behind glass and with the numbers written in a hand that is no longer living. People come to see it on cold days as much for the story as for the artifact. They stand and read his notes and feel the curious mixture of science and gentle stubbornness that it represents. Often they leave to make a pot of tea. They warm their hands and talk about how the world had felt like a furnace and then, because a man measured and wrote and taught, became a little more habitable.

For all the diagrams and circulars and extension publications that followed, the simplest image remains the most moving: eleven people crowded into a small house while storm winds shrieked beyond the outer planks and a single inner wall held warmth like a secret. The grandfather’s breath eased. The baby slept through the night. The mothers who had worried through that year would tell their grandchildren how a fence around a house saved them, and the children would look at Eirik’s bench and scratch the knuckles of their hands where wood had splinters, and someone would laugh and say, “He was stubborn, yes. But look what came of it.”

The final page in the ledger is not remarkable. It holds a figure scratched neatly, then washed by time. But sometimes at dusk, when the wind comes down from the ridge and the plains bend into shadows, the town feels a warmth that is not only from fire. It is a warmth forged in shared knowledge, in borrowed practices made local, in the small, stubborn dignity of preparation. Eirik’s name is maybe not in a book of heroes, but in Red Willow his story is the kind that keeps mothers knitting and men measuring twice and teachers recording the weather. When children ask why they close their shutters tightly and stuff their vestibules with thick blankets each winter, grandparents point toward the old house and say, “Because Tom’s father learned from a Norwegian and a Lakota woman, and we learned not to call each other fools when a better way came along.”

And the wind, which is patient and ever-testing, seems a little less ferocious when a town knows how to meet it.