The Children's Blizzard

I don’t know a lot about the Upper Plains, although I’m aware of the immigration from Northern Europe and the challenging weather in the Dakota territories. The information about the effects of severe cold on the human body was awful but not surprising. All in all, a very interesting book.

My first reaction to Chapter One of David Laskin's "The Children's Blizzard" was impatience. "Let's get on with the blizzard," I thought;"Let's get to the singular event of the story." Not until a few chapters later did I realize the motive behind Laskin's emphasis on the trials of the European emigrants, the hardships and heartaches they experienced leaving their own countries only to be met by a harsher life in a new land. Laskin's intent, of course, was to highlight the role the prairie children played in the tragedy caused by the Great Blizzard of 1888. By focusing on the difficulties these immigrant homesteaders faced in child bearing and the raising of children in remote prairie settlements in the 19th Century, the author sets the stage for the catastrophe that befell so many young school children. In the Old Country many of these immgrant families had lost children in childbirth and to childhood disease only to lose their surviving offspring in transit or in the New Country. (One mother, Anna Kaufmann, had only one of her first four sons survive into his teenage years and then lost that son to the Great Blizzard.) In short, Chapter One of the book stresses the fact that prairie children were a precious and tenuous commodity, thus enhancing the pathos of Laskin's account.In his meticulously researched book, Laskin relates the role of the U.S. Signal Corp, the prototype of the U.S. Meteorological Society in the forecasting of the storm, how bureacratic bungling and infighting thwarted vital communication with the prairie communities that lay in the path of the blizzard. The author discusses, as well, the railroads and their telegraph networks, how they contributed to this fractured communication. Fascinating, too, is Laskin's portrayal of the anatomy of the storm, how high and low pressure systems commingled to create the awesome meteorological event of January 12, 1888, and left "...more than a hundred children...dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie"; how so many deaths were a matter of bad timing:children in the wrong place at a very wrong time.The stories of so many young victims is epitomized in the poignant account of five boys, three of them brothers, pitting themselves against a killer storm, ultimately succumbing to it. Drawing on the expertise of doctors and other authorities, Laskin creates an horrific scenario (albeit hypothetical) of the boys' ordeal and final moments: their thoughts, actions, and the physiological effects of cold on their bodies as their core temperatures drop. Using a quote from an Emily Dickinson's poem "After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes," Laskin sums up the boys' ultimate fate with the line: "First chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--". When the five bodies were recovered, the three brothers, the Kaufmanns' sons, were discovered clasped together as one, a siamese triplet of frozen flesh. (The three had to be thawed to separate them. (Because of rigor mortis it was difficult to fit many of the young victims into their coffins.)I think what impressed me most about "The Children's Blizzard" was Laskin's obvious connection, though a century removed, with the victims of the Blizzard and their unfortunate families. His pilgrimage to the grave of the castaway child/young woman Lena Woebbecke to pay his respects to her memory I found particularly moving. With the exception of the descendants of the victims and survivors of the Great Blizzard that struck the Midwest with such fury on January 12, 1888, I'm sure many Americans today are unaware of this tragic storm. Thanks to David Laskin's informative and enlightening narrative more will learn of the hapless settlers of this harsh, inhospitable new land, their valiant, but in many cases futile efforts to tame it, and the Great Storm that for many was the death knell to their dreams--and their beloved children.

A great book! As one who has lived some years on the plains, the Great American Desert,as it was called in the nineteenth century, I have come to know how severe the weather here can be, how changeable, and on occasion, how fatal. But this is not simply a book about weather on the plains. It is a book about the American immigrant experience, about perseverence and overcoming obstacles that would daunt the bravest soul. It is the story first of people leaving everything behind in Europe for the promise of free land in America in the nineteenth century. These were families who left farms and families and traditions and all that they had known in order to travel thousands of miles and try to make it in one of the harshest places on earth, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Montana. Their toils are enormous, and Laskin does a good job of describing just how enormous they were. In an area clearly not suitable for agriculture they painstakingly cleared the sod, built houses with it, tried to hang on until a crop could be planted and harvested, and were very hard up against it for years.And then there is the storm of 1888. In a freakish event, the weather in January of that year suddenly gave promise of an early spring. On the day of the storm the little ones went off to school wearing spring clothes, many with no coats. Then by midday the temperature dropped like a stone, and that event was quickly followed by a horrendous blizzard so thick with ice crystals that nothing was visible for more than a few feet. Teachers debated holding the little ones in the school until help came or letting them go home on their own. Some teachers tried to accompany the students. Some let them go. In case after case the little ones were quickly disoriented and soon froze to death. It was as awful and as simple as that.Laskin describes hyperthermia and frostbite, and shows why these can be fatal. He does his best to show how and why this storm was such a surprise, and therefore so fatal, to those who endured it. He drives the miles (and miles...and miles) across the prairie where the events occurred to interview the descendants of the families who suffered it all. Many still live in the region.In the end, it's difficult to cast much blame in any direction, though many tried to do so. This is a great read. If I were teaching a course on the Great Plains I would include this as required reading along with Ian Frazier, Mari Sandoz, Ken Haruf, and Jim Henderson. It is a window on the prairie and on an America now gone, and well worth the tale.

This is more a course in meteorology than a real history. The storm gets much more attention than the people. It's a sad story and there are heroes and villains but not really worth the trouble. You know how it ends before it starts and I'm not sure you learn much beyond that.

If you're A fan of American history and disasters this book could be for you. The descriptions of the victims, storm and family histories are excellent.