The Children's Blizzard

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So, my original review isn’t untrue, but my point of view has apparently expanded dramatically in the years since I wrote it. Re-reading the book now, I was struck numerous times by the complete absence of any non-white characters in Laskin’s telling of this story. In particular, this was the time period just after Native Americans had been forcibly removed from their lands onto reservations. Surely the blizzard must have had an impact on them? (A quick Google search turned up at least one very interesting anecdote—a group of Indian men who were hunting with their dog when the storm hit and ended up trapped inside the icy shell of a snowbank, only to be saved by that dog’s persistence.) Then too, in the detailed, rich show more description of the Europeans settling the plains, why was there not so much as a mention of the people they had to kill and displace in order to do so?

So . . . I’ll leave the original review untouched (below), but I wanted to say something, because these omissions (they had to be more than just oversights) bothered me immensely this time around. They should have bothered me the first time, but I simply wasn’t seeing clearly.
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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. show less

It's obvious that the author is a meteorological nerd and it overwhelms the book. The anecdotal tales are the highlight, and revealing this horrible incident is a justification for writing it. I also enjoyed the back stories of the Norwegian immigrants, in these fraught anti-immigrant days of the worst president ever. But all the arcane weather data prevented my absorption in the narrative.

This is a very, very good book and one that I will re-read at some point to re-capture the details that escaped on the first go round. And it was also delightful to read a weather geek explain the phenomenon that caused this catastrophic blizzard: high pressure, low pressure, and how they work. Maybe someday I'll understand that aspect!

Laskin does a phenomenal job researching the lives of the families caught up in this push into the Western US plains. He researches the history and places where 5 or 6 families originated, their customs, reasons for making the voyage, experiences to get to their ports, and other similar stories from the time. So we get to know some families, know that they had stories similar to other people from the same show more region or on the same transport, and they were not plucked up and placed in the Dakotas or Nebraska out of thin air.

There is a great deal of research into early American weather forecasting, especially what worked and what didn't. And the Signal Corps and Lieutenant Woodruff, who was an active duty soldier in charge of the weather forecasting and relaying messages East from the various points in Montana and the Great Plains, interpreting them, and drawing them on a map ready for the telegraph machines.

When the storm hits, Laskin again goes into detail about the snow and ice and crystals, as well as what extreme cold does to the human body based on survivors' stories and medical evidence. It is also important to know, and I didn't, that there were survivors who lasted the night, only to die the next morning when the blood from their freezing limbs began to circulate around their hearts.

So it's a heart-wrenching historical account, very similar to "Isaac's Storm" and tales about the Northwest Passage, of people who left one land and set of difficult circumstances for hope of a better life, only to have that life changed so tragically. show less

I applaud Laskin for his effort - it must be hard work to take an account of the scariest blizzard ever and turn it into a sloppy, sodden, boring mess.

The blatant, sloppy mistakes early on were my first clue that all was not quite right in the state of Denmark. (For instance! Laskin quotes from Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and mis-identifies one of the schoolgirls as Laura's sister, Mary. No, dipshit - Mary was blind and she stayed at home. Reading comprehension is key.)

... Laskin is one of those writers who feels like the reader should suffer just as much reading the book as the author did researching for it. So everything is included. Did you want to know about the beauty of 19-century ... wherever? Here's 3 pages on it! show more How about the weather forecasting apparatus of 19-c St. Paul? Have an entire chapter!
Really, all that crap is crap that I can forgive. We all get a little excited over our pet subjects. What pissed me right off were the choppy, inter-twined narratives. On page 135, we left Ella keeled over in a snowdrift, apparently dead; on p. 152 we join her again, resurrected and safe. Page 136, five children walk home together; it is implied that they live. Page 161, all five children are dead. (And Laskin goes deep into obvious lies about their final conversations, their final thoughts, their final steps. What arrogant presumption.)

The graphic, horrifying detail of hypothermia and frostbite, gangrene and amputations was quite a surprise, after the gosh-let's-sit-you-youngins-down-and-tell-you-a-story-about-the-olden-days paternalistic tone of the rest of the book, which - chapters of tedious meteorological detail aside - seemed to focus mainly on Our Brave Little Soldiers and Our Good Little Women, all living in the makebelieve world of longago when everyone just did their part.

Two stars for a whole lot of blah, blah, blah. show less

On January 12, 1888, a snowstorm from hell swept across America's Great Plains. Temperatures rapidly dropped to levels that sound more fitting for Antarctica, and blowing snow crystals reduced the visibility to zero, making it nearly impossible to find one's way to shelter. Hundreds of people died. A distressing number of them were children, since the storm hit while schools were in session, and many of the kids, with or without their teachers, ventured out into the storm in an attempt to get home from school, or at least to reach someplace better stocked with firewood.

I have to say, my primary reactions to this history of what was to be called "The Schoolchildren's Blizzard" seems to consist largely of "This is interesting, but..."

The show more account of the storm itself actually takes up less of the book than one might expect. First, it's preceded by some background on the settlement of the American prairies and the history of various immigrant families who were caught in the blizzard, including the motivations that drove them to leave their former homes and the hardships they faced on the journey and afterward. This is interesting, but it bounces back and forth between the tales of the various families so much that I found it a little difficult to keep track of everyone.

Then it goes on to explain in great detail how the storm formed, what the state of weather forecasting was at the time, whose job it was to predict this sort of thing, and why there wasn't more warning. This is interesting, but contains perhaps more information about the internal politics of 19th century weather forecasting than I ever actually wanted to know.

The chapters that do cover the events of the storm are rather gripping, with harrowing accounts of what people experienced and some very detailed and vivid descriptions of exactly what happens to the human body as it succumbs to hypothermia. This is interesting -- very much so -- but, well, it turns out that reading about children freezing to death is just really not a good time. (I know, who would have thought?)

All of this has, however, left me with one very useful realization: I never, ever, ever want to live someplace like South Dakota. I mean, I kind of already knew that, but now I'm really sure. It's not even so much due to hearing about the horrors of the blizzard, as about how the just-slightly-below-freezing temperatures that preceded it kept being described as "warm," or even "balmy." If you ask me, anywhere that's considered warm is just not fit for human habitation. show less

This well written account of the devastating and deadly storm that overran the Great Plains on January 12, 1888 chronicles the event with painstaking details. The author explains that the Army Signal Corps, following strict regulations, gave indications, not forecasts, of the weather. No National Weather Bureau existed, and no personal forecasts were allowed. He further explains how the frigid Canadian air collided with the warm gulf streams, and together created the massive front that inundated the plains. No warning was given for this sudden storm. Indeed, there was no way to get word to all the outlying farms even if a warning had been issued. The author goes on to explain how the pulverized snow and ice crystals coated clothes and show more skin and froze on eyelids and made even breathing difficult, if not impossible. Animals froze where they stood and suffocated. But worse by far was the fate of the children. The storm struck as many schools were closing for the day. Caught unawares, some teachers told their student to hurry home as quickly as possible. But many got lost on the way. Other teachers kept students in the the schools, only to have windows blown in, roofs blown off, and fuel exhausted. Because the day had started out warm for January, most of the kids were ill dressed for winter’s worst, without heavy coats, boots, scarfs, and mittens. The author writes about several of the doomed children, of the teacher who got her class to safety, of the people who sheltered as best as they could under hay stacks, and of those who survived the night, only to drop dead the next day. He also writes of the aftermath, of the amputations and the infections that claimed more lives. Reading like a novel but including the well researched details that explains the entirety of the blizzard, this nonfiction book is rich with the history of that time period in the Great Plains. Highly recommended. show less

As a child, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. I read them each over again times beyond count, but my very favorite was The Long Winter. It accounted how Laura's family and the town of De Smet, South Dakota, struggled to survive a brutal winter of low food and fuel. A morbid book, to be sure--I guess it's no surprise that I've grown up to write post-apocalyptic tales of survival, and I still have a keen interest in historical tales of survival as well.

As I began to read The Children's Blizzard, I wasn't surprised to find that Laskin was also inspired by Wilder's The Long Winter. Wilder's terrible winter was the one of 1880-1881; the titular blizzard of this book took place January 12th, 1888 and was truly a show more freak storm.

The media stories a century ago often called the incident 'the School-Children's Blizzard,' because so many of the dead and maimed were children and teachers. They died in the grip of a suffocating, sub-zero storm, or froze to death in their school or home. Hundreds, across Nebraska and the Dakota Territory. Laskin takes a very thorough approach and begins by talking about these pioneers and where they were from: Norway or Germany, Mennonite or Quaker, they came west seeking a promised land of plenty. He focuses on several particular families, and in doing so, creates terrible tension because it's impossible to guess who will live or who will die. This is creative non-fiction at its finest. The science is a tad daunting as it describes the unique elements world-wide that come together to create such an unusually powerful storm--measurements state that the temperature dropped eighteen degrees in three minutes--and the manner that freezing kills the body; while the science is important, overall this is a tale of humanity, and that's the real story here.

I am most definitely keeping this book on my shelf and will be referring to it for years to come. show less