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The Childrens Blizzard

by David Laskin (Goodreads Author)

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 · rating details · 3,459 ratings · 498 reviews

Thousands of impoverished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered "land, freedom, and hope." The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled, and America's heartland would never be the same.This P.S. edition featu...more

ebook, 336 pages

Published May 8th 2007 by HarperCollins (first published November 9th 2004)

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Sep 27, 2007 Anne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a powerful story, of an event little known outside the Upper Midwest. This is the story of a freak blizzard of incredible intensity, that left hundreds dead, many of them school children trying to make their way home from country schools.

I've always been interested in the late 1800's, perhaps because of reading Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was young. The stories of the families told here are very moving. The technical information about the formation of the weather system occasionally made...more

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May 06, 2012 Penny rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, favorites

I loved this book. It's one of my favorites, despite many grotesque incidents. These are unavoidable, seeing that is is about the Blizzard of 1888, called the Children's Blizzard for school was in session. I've lived in a cold place, skied on more than a few mountains, but have never been in a real blizzard. 1888 was one for the record books.

The author shows us the state of the national weather service at the time, and its short-comings (I would not have expected much anyway). Also, many stories...more

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Feb 15, 2009 Kathleen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Another danger that the early settlers to the plains had to worry about---blizzards. Laskin lays out the historical groundwork, and fills it in. Some parts are painful to read, realizing how little was known about frostbite and hypothermia in the 1880's, let alone communications. I was touched by the help and support that families gave to one another. The book especially interested me since I lived in South Dakota in the late 70's, but knew nothing about this particular blizzard.

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Aug 06, 2007 jessica rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: someone who is thinking of moving to the great plains

i bought this at the sale section in wall drug, south dakota. not wanting to spend $500 on a fake buffalo rug, i thought a $6 book would be a more intelligent choice. i still stand by that theory, however, i have to say, if you find this book for more than $6 outside of wall drug, i probably wouldn't suggest it.

the fact that this blizzard actually occurred was fascinating. following the stories of the families in the plains was interesting, though the author tends towards jumping from one thoug...more

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Mar 13, 2009 Elaine added it · review of another edition

I love reading non-fiction books. Especially about disasters - does that make me sick?? I didn't know about this story...it was an okay book but interesting to read.

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Jan 13, 2009 Carrie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have come to realize that, while most of what I read is fiction, that one of my favorite kind of books are non-fiction stories that are written like novels, particularly stories about unknown or underreported events in American history. I'm fascinated by books such as Stewart O'Nan's The Circus Fire, the story of the 1942 Hartford Circus fire and Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven about the fringe extremist Mormon groups. This book was along those lines, and I gobbled it up.

It tells the...more

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Dec 06, 2008 Peggy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The children's blizard of 1888 is a well researched and well written book. On Jan. 12, 1888, the sun came up on a beautiful day with moderating temperatures in the Dakotas and Minnesota. Many children went to scholl without their boots, hats, gloves and warm coats. Mary farmers ventured out to work on projects away from the farms. In the early afternoon, the weather made a dramatic change, from warm and sunny to a blizzard. Many children were either trapped at school or caught in the blizzard as...more

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May 16, 2013 spoko rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Talk about a page-turner. This is one of those books where you read the blurbs (which say things like "terrifying but beautifully written" and "reads like a thriller") after you've read the book, and you think "Yeah, that's about right." This is a non-fiction account of the blizzard that swept over the Great Plains on January 12, 1888. It was an event that defined the consciousness of a broad area of the nation, and continues to define it to this day. The story itself is heartrending: the first...more Talk about a page-turner. This is one of those books where you read the blurbs (which say things like "terrifying but beautifully written" and "reads like a thriller") after you've read the book, and you think "Yeah, that's about right." This is a non-fiction account of the blizzard that swept over the Great Plains on January 12, 1888. It was an event that defined the consciousness of a broad area of the nation, and continues to define it to this day. The story itself is heartrending: the first warm, mild morning in weeks turned instantly into one of the coldest, deadliest blizzards of all time. Farmers were caught in their fields, ranchers were caught tending to their animals. Worst of all, children were caught in schoolhouses, many of which could not provide adequate shelter through such a storm. By the time January 13 rolled around, the prairie was scattered with hundreds of dead bodies, many of them children (thus the name given to the blizzard, from which the book takes its title). A telling excerpt:

Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyards and the occasionial roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888 remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school.

[Emphasis his.]

Laskin does a remarkable job with the book. The reasons for the blizzard's power and deadliness are complicated, bound up not just in the weather itself but in the history of the region (and the U.S. in general), in patterns of European migration, in military affairs, even in religion. The author weaves these lines together into a gripping story; it's difficult to put the book down, even as the text moves in and out of such disparate subjects. I should add that his writing was good enough to make the story of a blizzard tangible to me even as I read it on 90° days in June.

This is one of the two best books I've read all year, and one of the best I've ever read period. It's books like this that make me love the historical-nonfiction genre. And it's stories like this that, in spite of themselves, bind me to the Great Plains.(less)

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Feb 23, 2013 Deanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I did not read this PS edition with the extra 16 pages but an earlier version--
This is about a blizzard in Nebraska and South Dakota , also Minnesota , Iowa, and Kansas and a bit of Missouri, in which some 20,0000 Americans were caught outside in 1888. It took the lives of thousands of unprepared pioneers, many of them children sent home from school when the storm started or worse, after the young schoolteacher , who needed only a high school diploma to teach, bunked down with her young charge...more I did not read this PS edition with the extra 16 pages but an earlier version--
This is about a blizzard in Nebraska and South Dakota , also Minnesota , Iowa, and Kansas and a bit of Missouri, in which some 20,0000 Americans were caught outside in 1888. It took the lives of thousands of unprepared pioneers, many of them children sent home from school when the storm started or worse, after the young schoolteacher , who needed only a high school diploma to teach, bunked down with her young charges in the schoolhouse for hours of the storm then ran out of fuel and furniture to feed the fire so tried to walk the group home at the storm's worst moments. The Children's Blizzard is one of those books that give so many hundreds of pages (295)of absorbing material that I carry it around to immerse myself in quickly wherever I am stuck with nothing to read or I should say absorb with television and internet here. There is a problem with it ,though. Having a non-fiction book coming out next month, I know the process by which author David Laskin wrote this factoid account. And the book has seams where he folds some dry ingredients in without stirring. For me his 5 or so forays into explaining the weather and how our bodies react to being frozen are 5 pages too long and don't adhere to his manner of presentation, giving chronological stages of the blizzard's effects on many different children as that day and night unfolded in stages in the book--, and also chronicling in stages the suffering the family had already been through to get to the midwest from the Ukraine or to stay alive. In four or five places He displays a misguided effort to explain what is happening to the people who's lives we are now immersed in, with none of what has been carrying the book--the children's actual diary accounts. These are all over every page of the rest of the book and only a few times does the book go off its head with information about something else in huge blocks without any covering of the many families we are quickly following. He seems to have lost command of his material which was apparently an inexhaustible collection of sources he was able to chop into installments-- these 39 families before the storm, during the storm, after some children were lost, when the bodies were found, etc. But when he goes into the weather and the body he stops all accounts of the children and goes into long boring description of planet formation,the science of meteorology, the reason we see our breath, explained well by Marilyn von Savant in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade last week in 2 sentences (to Laskin's 45), how blood circulation and muscles work -- and don't work when 40 below zero--- for dull, scientific, hard -to-follow page upon page with only the back stories of a few adults who are predicting weather for the government. It is like two different books, or a fiction gimmick I've never enjoyed, different narrators for each chapter. So I found myself leaving pages unread throughout the book as I skimmed for more on the children he'd left off about after they'd dug into haystacks for the duration or were lost and walking about their fenceline all night confusedly. He also tells us too much about what a child who in actuality was never seen alive again to explain what he or she thought, was going through when he or she died alone. He is really using his scientific learnings as source material--knowing that people rip off their clothes as they freeze to death he takes the liberty to tell us that this dead child or that one thought he was too hot or went through specific hallucinations, when he doesn't really know. It matters because he keeps us reading by hinting at catastrophe in store for many of the children and you are trying to guess which survived and immediately assume those whose thoughts are presented after they'd "disappeared" to everyone else, must have survived for you to be reading what they thought. He gives so many witness accounts from pioneers' diaries you also assume he's presenting more of this same when he tells you the child sang hymns all night while freezing in a haystack. You expect this to be more fact backed up by the people experiencing it; don't expect the author to invent the unknown adventure this child had coming to his fate. He has so many notes to get into the book, Laskin repeats a lot of stuff, introducing some people multiple times as if the first, and in two places telling us a few words a boy's diary had attributed to his mother, but so many times, we are left with the impression she was a parrot not a person and said the phrase over and over and over that day."O where is my child? My heart is going to break." He needed to edit when he'd gotten the entire book written and forgot. Otherwise the book is a can't put-it-down number. Although he hasn't quite command of it's bulk, either, and introduces many characters several times: on page 73, "Ten days into January, Etta decided to close the school. ...she was going back to live with her family in Seward. She,too, had had enough of Holt County. Before she left, Etta had on piece of business to attend to in order to get paid for her last month of teaching... she had to have an order signed by the school district superintendent which she then would present to the district treasurer...without a signed order, the treasurer could not pay her." on page 143 we read" Etta had made her plans clear before she left the house late in the morning. She had already closed her school. Tomorrow she was heading back to Seward to rejoin her family. Once she collected her final wages, she would go. That was why Etta had walked out of the house that morning, to get her order signed so she could be paid her $25." We know Etta as a nineteen-year-old we are with when she gets left alone in the storm and then as if we haven't accompanied her for some 15 minutes of real time the author again introduces her. Laskin says things such as " They prayed for 19-year-old Etta Shattuck who was stuck in a haystack in Holt County, Nebraska"... when we already know her as both Etta Shattuck sole provider of her parents and 4 siblings and as simply Etta, and have spent time with her. Reading such stuff one is to be forgiven for thinking the settlers knew Etta had taken cover in a haystack (I think text should have read, "They prayed for 19-year-old Etta Shattuck who had taken off that morning to get her last paycheck and leave Holt County for good", which was all the survivors knew about the missing girl, but then we'd have had it three times. ) Laskin accidently refers to a boy he names as one of the "unlucky ones" as "who unlocked the school, then ran away", but hasn't yet told us about that event so we don't get it . Laskin usually tells such things in steps accumulating with the discovery of the child or his body and we first hear this particular story (after the puzzling words above) only after the storm stops and people begin shoveling and finding their spouse's body under the snow. A family finds a teacher and 7 children, two with frostbite, in their haystack the day after the storm; we've accompanied the teacher here but don't know at all about the group that overpowered their teacher yet. A father in hearing his sons are missing sets off to kill the young teacher when a neighbor who has heard what really happened from his own children stops him by telling him that it is his sons' fault they are lost or dead, not the teacher's--she'd locked all the children in when she saw that the older boys were bent on giving her trouble, and they had overcome her, got the key, and run off. Laskin wants to surprise us with this one which is how he messes it up (I can read minds, too), telling us that a particular man's sons are "the boys who unlocked the schoolhouse and ran away" before telling us anyone has done such a thing. And we sure don't get what he means by "run away", how did they run in snow so deep all the other people fell down in it? And what is wrong with them going home, didn't many teachers cut their charges loose to do that very thing? But we are most likely to think we missed an earlier reference to this particular group's storm story and go looking for it needlessly. All is a consequence of having too many notes and too little experience writing book-length non-fiction. The fascinating stories still compel one to continue reading, and I bet I'm not the only one who skipped the 14-page scientific segments that read as though they go in a separate book. I also don't think Laskin ought to use adjectives like "handsome" to describe the real people who are his characters unless he's going to A. also name the source of that adjective for this person or B. Add photos of these people, which he must have seen to decide upon handsome as the word for the fellow he used it to describe (because if he never saw the man's face we need to know where he got the word handsome etc) Handsome is very subjective. He also says "Lena was not a pretty girl", understandable if we know Lena has smallpox scars all over her face but he says it of others without real explanation for the choice to give us something so subjective, instead of "Lena was 22 and in a 1987 photograph with her father looked bigger-boned and taller than him, and was slouching badly ... " or, " Lena's mother wrote five years earlier in her journal, "Lena will never be pretty but she is dependable". I want to know who said she wasn't pretty, and if it was Laskin, not someone long dead, why. Otherwise it is one of the better true horror stories because it doesn't involve a personality disorder or character flaw at its roots like recent mirrors to it here--tales of survivors of gunmen with many victims or of stars committing suicide or of one wasting his girlfriend on Valentine's Day because the man thought she was asleep beside him and the noise in the bathroom was an intruder he had to kill, the intruder armed or no. The author is I guess to be commended for giving us the accounts of these hardy and foolhardy people and letting them want to die after all they've been through without putting them down for it. The author says ""Edna and Matilda also died in the night. Born 5 yrs apart, the daughters of German immigrants, the girls had grown close ( while weathering) the tragedies that had befallen their family. Two days before Christmas,6-yr-old Frederick died of diphtheria. Six-weeks later their father, Peter, deranged by grief, hanged himself. Since then their mother had managed alone with 6 children. Eda was 13, Matilda,8..." I respect him for not pointing the finger at these guys but treating it like it's not a "you have, you do.." thing. Author shows the right respect for his subjects in how he treats the idea of someone killing themselves because they have been knocked off their equilibrium as if it is another somber consequence of living out there in no man's land or immigrating to America where grasshoppers got all their crops two years in a row after the baby died on the ship over. He killed himself because this other death deranged him. It can. It's OK for it to. It's not his fault." You--don't measure up. You---are wrong and bad. You--can't get out of this yourself, go put yourself in an institution now. I've facilitated it for you ---"as seemed to happen to Mindy McCready. Parade magazine pointed out last Sunday in an article about strong families that "I, I" and "we" can solve things, "you... you..." never will. You have suicide ideation, You are suicidal,You need help. I hate people like that, because they aren't only stupid but
dangerous. The handsome guy Laskin described was John Jensen, a handsome young immigrant from Denmark. Was lost int he storm for 7 hours . "Though safe himself" after stumbling into a neighbor's home, he was "desperate with anxiety at leaving his young family alone in their farmhouse. A week later he wrote a letter to his sister describing the tragedy that had befallen him: " When I came home I found my loving wife outside the house,frozen to death,and then I went in the house and there lay my little girl on the floor froze to death. The little one (4 weeks' old Anna ) was living. She was a very good wife and it makes me feel that I wish I was dead. But it must be God's will that it should happen so. But what I am glad over, we shall meet in HEAVEN, where we will never part." Again, there is no authorial intrusion about that. Of course we'd feel like that,exactly, and it's not a thing to blame someone for. It doesn't mean he's going to kill himself. It means hey this is hard and it has hit me this bad. "Run get rid of your thoughts that go like that like you're cleaning out your cache!" is what they say now-a-days. I think it's the violence done to the body in most suicides, especially in the case of guns-- no one wants to find such a sight,and when someone is really suicidal, they won't tell you anything that will let you stop them--McCready didn't tell, didn't warn she had a gun. Survivors of suicide as self-help groups direct them to call themselves are now filing themselves under "Suicide" and so extremely suspicious of it under the surface of everything. Under I wish I was dead. Saying he wishes he was dead does not at all mean John Jensen is suicidal. He said he wished he was dead, never said he could do it himself or planned to or any of that that everyone thinks I wish I was dead means, wrongly. It could mean" I wish that part was over with, now I have to deal with it alone and the long-term agony that might lead to it all by myself because my loving wife is gone." That is a painful thing he sees himself undergoing and until he gets used to not sharing all with someone he loves or anyone else anymore he's going to be hurting and fearing an accident or anything he might then have to deal with alone having not a dependable partner anymore to feed the chickens if he went in a hospital or a coma, someone back home to light a fire for the baby to stay warm and see he was fed---. He will have to take a wife within 2 months I bet. This is a good book showing a resilient American spirit of optimism in the cruelest circumstances--our immigrants were tough as rawhide. It's a good book from which I learned the pioneers all kept diaries, I never realized so many people wrote. Now I can see they had to write to siblings,parents sometimes, there were no phones. I'd love to see children's kept-up diaries, never have seen such a fossil. The author would entertain me in telling how he could access these things and how they were preserved for our generations to begin with.(less)

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Dec 07, 2012 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to admit, I read this book partially in the anticipation of winter snow, and partially to make my meterologist-husband jealous. I found it relatively enjoyable, eventhough it was a tragic story/time in history. There was one paticular chapter, that was a little hard for the average reader to understand. It was full of technical weather jargon and unless my husband was there to ask, it was a little difficult. The event/story takes place in the winter of 1888 in the growing population of th...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Joan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was the first book I read on my iPhone. I downloaded it after having my daughter recommend it. Since my mother came from South Dakota and my father was very interested in local and midwest history, she thought I would like it. I did. While I really liked it, I gave it a four because there was such excessive detail at times, I did some skimming through parts.

The book talks about the blizzard, but also about the real-life immigrants who came to the area and why they came. You came to feel as...more

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Dec 27, 2011 Mary Shafer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of my all-time favorite books about extreme weather (and I've read a LOT of them!). Laskin does a phenomenal job with the meteorological aspects of this tragic storm, giving readers every bit of detail they need to feel appropriately awed by the sheer size, power and intensity of it. But where he really shines as a writer is by making us actually care about it on a human scale because he helps us get to know those dirt-poor, hardscrabble farmers on the high plains who suffered most from its...more

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Mar 18, 2011 Lori L (She Treads Softly) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Children's Blizzard is another one of my favorite non-fiction books. Like Isaac's Storm, it's also another book for weather geeks. This time the weather disaster is the January 12, 1888 blizzard that hit the Great Plains. Since this occurred just 12 years before the Galveston Hurricane, there was present in the national Weather Service infighting, jealousy, and control of information, and another disaster happened without any clear warning sent to the public. Arguably, in this case, even if...more The Children's Blizzard is another one of my favorite non-fiction books. Like Isaac's Storm, it's also another book for weather geeks. This time the weather disaster is the January 12, 1888 blizzard that hit the Great Plains. Since this occurred just 12 years before the Galveston Hurricane, there was present in the national Weather Service infighting, jealousy, and control of information, and another disaster happened without any clear warning sent to the public. Arguably, in this case, even if the storm had been correctly predicted and the information passed on, very few of the people in the vast region the storm hit would have received any notification or warning. Laskin includes information about the immigrants in the region and history on the government's weather service. I thought Laskin, another good writer, did a commendable job in setting the tone and the historical context while leading up to the blizzard and its aftermath.

One of the reasons The Children's Blizzard is a favorite of mine is that I basically know the area of the country in which the blizzard occurred. I recognize the names of towns and can place them not only on a map but can "see" the land surrounding them. My paternal grandparents were Swedish settlers in Nebraska. I also know how quickly the weather can change in the area. I went to college in the Great Plains and vividly recall one day in early Spring where we woke up to warm, short sleeved shirt and shorts weather. Early in the afternoon the weather suddenly began to change, temperatures quickly dropped and we had a huge blizzard that night. Even today you hear stories about motorists thoughtlessly driving into a blizzard and getting stranded in their vehicles. With all our advances in weather forecasting and weather radar, people still need to understand that a natural disaster can occur. They need to take warnings seriously and have a healthy respect for how quickly weather can change rather than assigning blame every where but at themselves. Very Highly Recommended - one of the best. http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/

(less)

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Mar 30, 2010 Dnicebear rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There's a lot of pain in this book, and how appropriate to read during Holy Week. To be honest I'm skimming over some of the pain--the author is excruciating in detail, and, to his credit, he doesn't forget the emotions that go along with the pain. Laskin's love of weather is apparent in the way he researches and lets a great blizzard grow in the region and in our imaginations. He spends several pages on the electricity ("St. Elmo's fire) and all the other details that allowed such an immense st...more

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Jan 31, 2010 Clytee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a non fiction book putting together stories about an incident I had heard about all through my childhood, the "great blizzard of 1888".

My home state of Nebraska was affected by this fierce blizzard and cold wave that came up so fast that it killed several of the pioneers/immigrants/farmers living on the prairie I grew up on. Many were caught being unable to see even between their barns and homes. A lot of the deaths were children trying to get home (or somewhere safe) from their rural o...more

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Jan 29, 2010 Evanston Public Library added it · review of another edition

Does it look like snow outside? Chicagoans are by no means strangers to the extremes of weather. Furious winds, bitter cold, icy roads, piles of snow, massive drifts, endless hours of shoveling, “dibs” on dug-out parking spaces, and the exhaustion in dealing with it all form the list of gripes we all have with winter. But Laskin’s moving account of a spectacular and devastating blizzard on January 12, 1888, followed by a record-breaking cold front will have you thanking your lucky stars you live...more Does it look like snow outside? Chicagoans are by no means strangers to the extremes of weather. Furious winds, bitter cold, icy roads, piles of snow, massive drifts, endless hours of shoveling, “dibs” on dug-out parking spaces, and the exhaustion in dealing with it all form the list of gripes we all have with winter. But Laskin’s moving account of a spectacular and devastating blizzard on January 12, 1888, followed by a record-breaking cold front will have you thanking your lucky stars you live in an era of nearly perfect weather prediction, central heating, down coats, and microwaveable cocoa. Laskin’s novelistic writing style gives us a picture of the immigrants who came to settle the prairie states. We meet the families, learn how they journeyed here, and how they struggled to make a life in the harsh environment. Laskin also presents the story of the nascent U.S. Weather Service, managed by the Army Signal Corps. With the growing understanding of weather patterns, improved record keeping, and the advances in telegraphy during the last decades, the Corps overestimated their forecasting skills to predict, or “indicate” as they called it then, sudden weather changes.
Jan. 12th dawned as an unusually mild morning after weeks of frigid cold. The sun shone, the temperature rose into the mid-40s, and many of the farm kids went to school that day after being confined at home. The storm struck suddenly and fiercely, catching farmers at work outdoors, and trapping the children in their tiny schools where their teachers, often young women just barely out of childhood themselves, were faced with staying put with minimal heating resources and no food, or sending the students home on a trek through deeply ravined territory with no protection and homesteads set far apart. With Laskin’s suspenseful telling, we follow their harrowing, moment-by-moment experiences on the day of the storm and the heartbreaking events in its aftermath.
(Barbara L., Reader’s Services)(less)

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Jan 24, 2010 Fred rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"The Children's Blizzard" is but one episode in a long grueling saga of "life on the prairie" at the end of the 19th century. It is also a story that, once again, makes lies of the hollow promises offered up by the railroad companies of the day in their effort to populate land along rights of way with customers for their freight-hauling services. The Northern Pacific, for instance, recruited land-hungry Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, and others with promises of good homesteads available for almo...more "The Children's Blizzard" is but one episode in a long grueling saga of "life on the prairie" at the end of the 19th century. It is also a story that, once again, makes lies of the hollow promises offered up by the railroad companies of the day in their effort to populate land along rights of way with customers for their freight-hauling services. The Northern Pacific, for instance, recruited land-hungry Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, and others with promises of good homesteads available for almost nothing, arable land, bumper crops, and a moderate climate, pleasant weather even!
But what happened in 1888 was not the first bad winter storm to sweep across the plains; railroad and government officials had ample evidence available to them to demonstrate that fact. What happened at the beginning of 1888 was, however,the first really bad blizzard to strike Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming and Dakota after that monumental deluge of north European immigrants had crossed the ocean to take advantage of the great land rush on the northern Great Plains.
One could go on. At a personal level, this book is a story of catastrophic personal loss by hundreds of families. No one will know for sure how many people--mostly children--perished on that January day. Estimates range between 250 and 500. The immediate cause for these deaths had to do with the fact that so many children were in school on January 12th, and when the cold front began to sweep down upon the high plains, the temperature dropped 18 degrees in three minutes. Concerned for their students' safety, teachers sent their classes home. Many children had no transportation from their tiny one-room schools. They set out walking. Many froze to death. Some were rescued by frantic parents. Some who set out to rescue children froze to death themselves.
Author David Laskin is a fine storyteller and brings home the senselessness and tragedy associated with this disaster--a weather disaster that occurred, we need to remember, before the nation possessed any kind of reliable weather forecasting or modern warning systems. The telephone had not yet been invented, and telegraph communication was, at best, a rudimentary method for "getting the word out." If one wishes to understand the hardship and privation endured by the pioneers who settled the upper Great Plains, this is a fine place to begin.(less)

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Nov 03, 2009 Loretta rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book, although history and not fiction, reads like a gripping thriller. (I had trouble putting it down.) And it's about weather, no less!

But this is not about an ordinary storm. Frowing up in Minnesota, I've seen many dangerous, life-threatening blizzards myself but nothing that was as devastating as this one. Imagine Hurricane Katrina as a blizzard instead of a hurricane. As if that isn't bad enough, imagine it happening to some of the poorest settlers just before the turn of the century--...more

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Feb 13, 2012 Catherine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-group, historical

Powerful recap of the January 1888 blizzard that devastated the Great Plains and upper Midwest. The book begins with background information on the families of many of those who lost their lives or suffered devastating injuries. Most had already gone through great hardship to travel to the United States and make their way across it to their new homes. For about the first half of the book I had to flip back to this chapter frequently to keep everyone straight.

The descriptions of what a person expe...more

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Jan 27, 2010 trishtrash rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, meteorological

“We have been calling every storm a blizzard,” the Reverend S. F. Huntley wrote to a friend in New York, “but then [after January 12:] decided that we had never had a blizzard before and never wanted one again.”

‘The School Children’s Blizzard’, as it came to be known, swept across the American Midwest on January 12 1888, the worst storm of it’s kind to afflict the prairie lands since the settlers arrived there from Norway, Denmark, and Germany. Dakota and Nebraska in particular were caught in a...more “We have been calling every storm a blizzard,” the Reverend S. F. Huntley wrote to a friend in New York, “but then [after January 12:] decided that we had never had a blizzard before and never wanted one again.”

‘The School Children’s Blizzard’, as it came to be known, swept across the American Midwest on January 12 1888, the worst storm of it’s kind to afflict the prairie lands since the settlers arrived there from Norway, Denmark, and Germany. Dakota and Nebraska in particular were caught in a perfect storm of bad timing, poverty, convergences of air pressure and temperatures whose results moved with bullet-train swiftness, and the residual hope of the immigrants who had been lured there by promises of a ‘garden land’. When the morning seemed to herald a week-long thaw, not unheard of in January, prairie-dwellers took advantage of the lull to send their children to school, or to work on their farms, or to let the livestock out onto the pastures. Many of them were without heavy winter coats, or hats. This mistake cost more than 100 children their lives, and heralded the end of the first mass influx onto the Great Plains. Life here was no garden.

While Laskin’s text needs no diagrams or visual aids, the inclusion of one or two might have enriched it even further. That’s a mild complaint, though; Laskin’s delivery of the physics behind the blizzard is accessible and well integrated into the pace of the unfolding story.

The conditions that Laskin describes in harrowing, meticulous detail are almost impossible to summarise in review, but the 1888 blizzard makes for gripping retelling, and Laskin builds the story and moves it along at a pace that brings the reader into jeopardy along with the sons and daughters of farmhands across the flat, empty land, wide-eyed with fear as they try to strike out for home or turn back for some known shelter as the storm arrives ‘in a moment’. The wealth of hard research (sufficient to warrant a chapter-thick addition at the end of the book entitled ‘sources’, which is interesting in itself), of meteorological data, immigration, family histories of the settlers; even the bureaucratic failings of the bodies in charge of weather forecasting only add to the tension… this is a proper history, one that revolves around the human struggle, the individual tragedies and sometimes miraculous saves of that day.
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Jun 29, 2012 Dree rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-reads, history, nonfiction, the-midwest

A social history of the fast-moving and very strong blizzard of January 1888, which hit Nebraska and South Dakota just as schools were letting out. Virtually unexpected, temperatures dropped rapidly after a mild (for January) morning, catching children on their way home and farmers out with their livestock.

The chapters on the families are fascinating, since the author talked to descendants/relatives and had access to family records and lore, as well as local newspapers.

The chapters on the weath...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Laura rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I am a huge fan of non-fiction reading, and I was super pumped to find this exciting story on a little known part of history at the used book store. As a life-long resident of the mid-west, I am certainly not ignorant to "blizzards" and whiteouts. I know how much they can inconvenience a person in the 21st Century, so I can only imagine what a disaster it was for those living in the late 1800s in their sod houses, reliance on crops they produce, and multi-mile walks to school.

This book was supp...more

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Sep 12, 2009 Faith rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stayed up until 3 a.m reading this book! Foolish, foolish! And it totally freaked me out too. All those children freezing to death. Horrible. The weird thing is the author kept making references to 9/11 and how the scale of the School Children's Blizzard disaster was similar and I was reading it on 9/11. The whole thing was most disturbing. That said, I found the book really fascinating in many different ways. For one thing I have never, ever thought about the history of meteorology and how we d...more

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Mar 08, 2011 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've had a fascination with the prairie for the last year or so. Let's just say there's a very large gap between my Little House on the Prairie days to now! Being a native Minnesotan, I prided myself on my love of the Northwoods and water, but the prairie and all it's stark beauty has really called to me lately. There's something about the way the sky stretches out over the vastness that appeals to me. You can see for miles and miles and when you get away from it, there's a sense of the world cl...more I've had a fascination with the prairie for the last year or so. Let's just say there's a very large gap between my Little House on the Prairie days to now! Being a native Minnesotan, I prided myself on my love of the Northwoods and water, but the prairie and all it's stark beauty has really called to me lately. There's something about the way the sky stretches out over the vastness that appeals to me. You can see for miles and miles and when you get away from it, there's a sense of the world closing in on you that's very hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it.

Our history as Pioneers fascinates me. Their bravery in the face of what to us now is such a benign environment has prodded me to learn more. We don't have traditional Pioneers now. The bravest thing I think one can do now is to start a new business. I've done that and it was both exhilarating and frightening all rolled up in one big snowball of a package. As my business partner and I ventured into unknown territory, we often referred to ourselves as Pioneers. Close, but really not the same cigar.

No matter how we challenge ourselves to brave new paths, there is nothing that compares to the Pioneers who lived a little over one hundred years ago. This book is the fascinating account of just one of the real dangers that they faced. Imagine a world with very little outside communication. Imagine a world where many children died from diseases we've almost obliterated with routine childhood vaccinations. Imagine a world without thermostats and furnaces, Gortex, Columbia jackets, and cars. Imagine no roads. Imagine very few people. Imagine getting hit by a blizzard with no warning on what started as a seasonably warm day.

This book details just such a world. A world where many immigrants risked all that they had in order to own a piece of America. A world where losing one or more of your children was almost commonplace. A world where life was just plain hard, in more ways than I had originally realized.

I found this book read somewhat like a thriller, just as the jacket promised, but not completely. There were times when I found the meteorological descriptions a bit long. I suppose if that is something that interests you, you'd love it, but that's just not my cup of tea. While critical to the understanding of the enormity and suddenness of the storm and the lack of procedures for the efficient and thorough monitoring of the weather, it just went in too much detail for me.

What compelled me to get back to the pages was the Pioneer's stories. The descriptions were breathtaking. The tales so harrowing and stark, I found myself turning up the heat and sending up some quiet thanks to all who braved this part of the world before me.

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Apr 30, 2010 Elaine Nelson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

When I checked this out, I thought it was about the winter described in the Laura Engalls Wilder book "The Long Winter" -- it's the same region, but about a specific week 8 years later. (The author briefly touches on that winter as well.) The story is gruesome and fascinating, especially to someone who loved the Little House books as much as I did when I was a child.

Before getting to the blizzard of the title, he spends several chapters on the families who moved into the region over the previous...more

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Mar 01, 2012 Donna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, history

Oh my, this book taught me much about the weather and it's crazy turns and crisis' it can bring on. I feel so for the poor pioneers of Jan. 12, 1888 and what they endured in that blizzard.

Jan. 12, 1888 had started out to be an unseasonably warm day across the Dakotas, Nebraska, Illinois. Children had gone to school either without coats and gloves or very light outer wear. By afternoon of that day the sky exploded into a mess of horizontal snow and tornadic like winds. Temperatures started to plu...more

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Nov 19, 2011 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Ryan Askey

I picked up David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard, having read Ron Hansen's "Wickedness," a nearly perfect short story that describes the events of the Blizzard of 1888. And The Children's Blizzard fulfills nearly every promise of that exceptional short story, giving an engrossing, readable account of a terrible piece of American history.

Which is another way of saying that Laskin's work here is nothing short of remarkable: it is thorough, heartbreaking, and, of course, true. The Blizzard of 188...more

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Feb 25, 2010 Diana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, history-sociology, weather

While the first 100 pages or so seemed to drag on and at times the erratic shifts between family accounts, locations and politics disrupted the flow, I finished the rest of the book in one sitting without realizing I read it straight through.

Laskin's detailed descriptions of what things would have looked like, and felt like were amazing. Combining survivor accounts, weather observations and medical information to illustrate what was happening in the storm and to body systems in such intense con...more

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Nov 25, 2008 Karla rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: history buffs, weather lovers, genealogists researching the area

This was my second time through reading this book---both times for book clubs. Geez, I wish I retained things better. The only thing I retain is water.
Part of me really enjoyed this book. I found myself really interested in the five families the author concentrated on, their immigration journeys, their decisions to travel to the prairies. But what about the Native Americans? Seems to me that there must have been a sizeable number of them on the prairies and I don't remember a word about them. An...more

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Feb 04, 2012 Shirley rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Laskin does an incredible job of laying the groundwork of this historical book. He tells the stories of immigrant families that settled in The Great Plains He uses excerpts from their journals and he also details the working of the weather forecasting system then in place. He also includes a short chapter on the science of storms such as lows/highs, fronts, and jet streams. Laskin describes hyperthermia and frostbite, and shows why these can be fatal. He does his best to show how and why this st...more

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About David Laskin

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York, I grew up hearing stories that my immigrant Jewish grandparents told about the “old country” (Russia) that they left at the turn of the last century. When I was a teenager, my mother’s parents began making yearly trips to visit our relatives in Israel, and stories about the Israeli family sifted down to me as well. What I never heard growing up...more Born in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York, I grew up hearing stories that my immigrant Jewish grandparents told about the “old country” (Russia) that they left at the turn of the last century. When I was a teenager, my mother’s parents began making yearly trips to visit our relatives in Israel, and stories about the Israeli family sifted down to me as well. What I never heard growing up was that a third branch of the family had remained behind in the old country – and that all of them perished in the Holocaust. These are three branches whose intertwined stories I tell in THE FAMILY: THREE JOURNEYS INTO THE HEART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My 2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Long Way Home (2010) also won the Washington State Book Award.

I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.

When I’m not writing or traveling for research, I am usually outdoors trying to tame our large unruly garden north of Seattle, romping with our unruly Labrador retriever pup Patrick, skiing in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, or hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. My wife, Kate O’Neill, and I have raised three wonderful daughters – all grown now and embarked on fascinating lives of their own.
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