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Summary
Summary
"David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand." -- Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City
"Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller." -- Entertainment Weekly
The gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.
January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.
By the next morning, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.
With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.
The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
Popular historian Laskin (Partisans, 2000, etc.) gives an engrossing if speculative account of a brutal 1888 blizzard that signaled the end of optimism on the Great Plains. "The tragedy of the January 12 blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population," asserts the author. Laskin shrewdly takes a broad historical view, arguing that the snowstorm--which killed hundreds, including numerous schoolchildren--demonstrated the folly of settling the Dakota and Nebraska territories. In his telling, scores of Germans, Scandinavians, and persecuted Ukrainian Mennonites found irresistible American railroad agents' promises of free grassland prairie homesteads in "one of the most beautiful climates in the world." Though the land was indeed spacious, it proved capricious and unforgiving of the immigrants' naivetÉ, besetting them with locusts, fires, snowstorms, droughts, and other seeming "acts of God." Still, nothing compared to the 1888 blizzard, as its stoic survivors' awed narratives make clear. Precursor storms arrived throughout 1887, devastating the open-range system of cattle management. (Theodore Roosevelt's losses were particularly severe.) When temperatures rose unaccountably on January 12, the hapless settlers, unaware of what such oddities portended, assumed the warmth was more than momentary. Laskin intercuts between their recollections and the fledgling weather forecast service provided by the War Department's Signal Corps, headed by notoriously incompetent martinet Adolphus Greely, who serves as the primary villain here. Clearly fascinated with forecasting's infancy, the author leaves open the question of whether quicker communications or less interference by Greely might have helped save the far-flung settlers. Some children owed their lives to plucky schoolteachers who sequestered them in one-room schoolhouses overnight, burning desks for warmth; many others perished, snow-blind, only yards from inhabited structures. The blizzard's toll provided fodder for the nation's newspapers, which highlighted maudlin tales of heroism and tragedy; it also forced the transfer in 1891 of forecasting responsibilities to the Department of Agriculture. A suspenseful disaster narrative. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
