Cow Behind the Wall, Manure in the Stove: At Fifty-Four Below, the Neighbors Came to Get Warm

Manitoba, Canada, the open prairie right on the border with the United States. Christmas Eve, eighteen seventy-nine. That night the weather station in Winnipeg records fifty-four degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and it is still the city's all-time record. A Scotsman named Duncan MacRae burns his last stick of firewood, the water in the bucket freezes solid, and he hitches the horses to take his wife and children two miles across the snow. To the long house of the Penners, a Mennonite immigrant family from near Zaporizhzhia, in the south of the old Russian Empire. MacRae had laughed at that house louder than anyone: the cow lives on the other side of the wall, under the same roof as the family, and the stove burns manure. "That's how you live in a barn, not in a house." That night the Penner house is warm. One brick stove in the middle heats four rooms at once, fired once in the morning and once in the evening. In this video: how Mennonites from the Russian Empire ended up on the Canadian prairie, how a house-barn under one roof works, why a brick stove fed with dried manure beat an iron stove fed with wood, and what happened to the man who laughed. The cold of that night in Winnipeg, the Mennonite settlement of Manitoba and their house-barns are real. The characters and dialogue are a dramatized reconstruction. 0:00 Canada, the province of Manitoba, the open 1:37 How a family of immigrants from near 4:50 In eighteen seventy-four, Russia introduced 7:54 They dug houses into the ground 11:04 The semlin held through that one, too 14:22 One day Peter came home from Emerson red 17:30 The second secret was the barn on the other 20:37 By the fall of eighteen seventy-eight 23:51 At the MacRaes', the stove never went out 27:02 "Let us stay until morning," MacRae said 30:14 MacRae did not sit idle that week 33:25 MacRae sold half of his famous woodpile