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The Children’s Blizzard
by David Laskin
Imagine sending your children off to school on an unusually warm day in January, 1888, without coats, hats, or any outer garments.
Then, just as school was getting out, the temperature dropped 18 degrees in 3 minutes, a wall of ice blasted the prairie, and by morning more than 100 children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie–one of them very likely yours.
A fictional triller? No. The Blizzard of January 12, 1888 really happened, and author David Laskin captured every gritty, tense moment of an American tragedy.
Laskin’s story reads like a novel. He deftly intersperses historic weather reports with firsthand narratives and family lore to craft one of the most fascinating accounts of the deadly blizzard that touched hundreds of families–mostly immigrants–living on the Northern Plains.
Meet the Norwegian and German families who came to the Dakotas for the promise of free land: Gro and Ole Rollag, the newlyweds whose illusion of paradise on earth was quickly shattered by long harsh winters, prairie fires, and grasshoppers that devoured the crops.
Meet too the Kaufmanns and Albrechts whose children were caught on their way home from school when the blizzard struck. Or, Peter Wierenga, who found all four of his children frozen in a grove of saplings.
Learn too, the grisly facts of how a body might survive a night outdoors in freezing weather, only to drop dead in the morning after standing up.
And what of the aftermath? For years afterwards, every social gathering included people missing fingers and toes as a result of frostbite. But even more difficult was the realization that this “free land” wasn’t free after all - - that it bore the high price of extremes. Homesteads were abandoned, and even today nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the census Bureau in the 19th Century.
As Laskin wrote “Who could have predicted that the bill would arrive with a sudden shift of wind in the middle of a mild January morning? A thousand storms of dust and ice and poverty and despair have come and gone since then, but this is the one they remember. After that day, the sky never looked the same.”
Highly recommended.
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