Surveyor Charles Wood Irish and the Hard Winter of 1880

A Conversation with Author Cindy Wilson

Surveyor Charles Wood Irish, His Iowa City Connection, and the Hard Winter of 1880: A Conversation with Author Cindy Wilson

Author Cindy Wilson will be joining us for a presentation about surveyor Charles Wood Irish, who was tasked with mapping a route for the Chicago & North Western Railroad from Tracy, Minnesota to Deadwood in Dakota Territory. The work was both challenging and rewarding as the crew determined the route that is still in use today. Using photography, historic documents, and drone images, this talk finishes with a particular research odyssey involving the campsite where the men were caught by the October 1880 blizzard that kicked off the historic Hard Winter.

Cindy Wilson is the author of The Beautiful Snow: The Ingalls Family, the Railroads, and the Hard Winter of 1880–81, which was awarded gold in the category of Midwest—Best Regional Non-Fiction for the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards. It was also a 2020 finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. In the early research stage for The Beautiful Snow, Cindy read the diaries of surveyor Charles Wood Irish. She found them fascinating, knowing they held a fantastic story. The result is We Suffered Much, which won a National Indie Excellence Award in 2024 and a 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, her second.

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