During the Dakota winter of 1937, farm boys Charles Almos and Clayton Week, who lived with their parents on the Coteau des Prairies eight and ten miles west of Sisseton and shared room and board in town during high school, set out on foot one Friday to try to reach home after snowdrifts as high as telephone poles had blocked Highway 10 west of town for more than a month. After four miles of breaking through drifts, they were cold and exhausted and thought only of lying down to rest, but on the coteau, where winds along the hillsides whipped the snow into sudden blizzards, they recognized the danger of losing their way and urged each other onward through the stinging snow. Their good fortune brought them to the homestead of Tobias and Bertha Herigstad, where they were given food and warm beds until their parents could pick them up, and the boys later remembered the Herigstads' hospitality as the act that saved their lives.