The Children's Blizzard

By David Laskin

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060520752
• ISBN13: 9780060520755
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 307 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.1" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

A must for history and weather fans

Like Isaac's Storm (Erik Larson) before it, The Children's Blizzard takes us into a nearly forgotton place in American history and slaps us with the almost casual brutality of life before modern meteorology. David Laskin has researched the subject of the blizzard of 1888 in meticulous fashion and we can't help but be impressed with his scholarship. Laskin has previously written on meteorology and he has a way of making the capricious nature of the atmosphere highly accessible. Readers should be warned that Laskin is unsparing in his depiction of the death by exposure of children trapped in the storm. If you've read "To Build a Fire" by Jack London (whom he credits) you'll have a small idea of what these children go through. Images will haunt you: Parents dragging their frozen children into the house to thaw by the fire so their contorted bodies will fit into tiny coffins. Even those who survive must endure gruesome injuries. This is history and it must be told. But one wonders what ever made these settlers think such a life was worth the hardships. It was a rare family that had not lost children, even before the great blizzard. A minor criticism of The Children's Blizzard is its tendency, especially early, to focus on historical minutiae. Emphasis on the life of plains settlers before they left Europe drags down the early narrative. Recommended, but not for the easily disturbed reader.