The Children's Blizzard - Hardcover

Laskin, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060520752 ISBN 13: 9780060520755

Publisher: Harper, 2004

Synopsis

“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.

About this title

About the Author

David Laskin is the author of The Children's Blizzard, winner of the Midwest Booksellers' Choice Award for nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian magazine. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

From the Back Cover

The gripping 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 Friday morning, January 13, 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. Drawing on family interviews and memoirs, as well as hundreds of contemporary accounts, David Laskin creates an intimate picture of the men, women, and children who made choices they would regret as long as they lived. Here too is a meticulous account of the evolution of the storm and the vain struggle of government forecasters to track its progress.

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, is still remembered on the prairie. Children fled that day while their teachers screamed into the relentless roar. Husbands staggered into the blinding wind in search of wives. Fathers collapsed while trying to drag their children to safety. In telling the story of this meteorological catastrophe, the deadliest blizzard ever to hit the prairie states, David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.

Reviews

Adult/High School–That 1888 January day on the northern plains was bright and warm–the first mild weather in several weeks–leading many children to attend school without coats, boots, hats, or mittens. A number of students were caught in the sudden storm that hit later that day. Laskin details this event–the worst blizzard anyone in those parts ever encountered. It not only took the lives of hundreds of settlers, but also formed a significant crack in the westward movement and helped to cause a movement out. The author introduces five pioneer families, beginning with why they left the old country. The personalization of these settlers breathes life into this history and holds readers spellbound. Laskin devotes several chapters to the meteorology of storms, especially this one, and the politics and history of the Army Signal Corps, which ran a fledgling weather service at the time. Readers are then led through the storm and its effects on the featured families as well as on many others. Some teachers kept students at school, burning desks to stay warm overnight; some tried to keep students in but were unsuccessful; and some led them out, not realizing how dangerous it was. A few children and adults who got lost somehow managed to survive covered by snow, then died when they got to their feet in the morning. Laskin explains why, and delves into other effects of prolonged exposure to cold. A gripping story, well told.–Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In 1888, a sudden, violent blizzard swept across the American plains, killing hundreds of people, many of them children on their way home from school. As Laskin (Partisans) writes in this gripping chronicle of meteorological chance and human folly and error, the School Children's Blizzard, as it came to be known, was "a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie," a turning point in the minds of the most steadfast settlers: by the turn of the 20th century, 60% of pioneer families had left the plains. Laskin shows how portions of Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas, heavily promoted by railroads and speculators, represented "land, freedom, hope" for thousands of impoverished European immigrants—particularly Germans and Scandinavians—who instead found an unpredictable, sometimes brutal environment, a "land they loved but didn't really understand." Their stories of bitter struggle in the blizzard, which Laskin relates via survivors' accounts and a novelistic imagination, are consistently affecting. And Laskin's careful consideration of the inefficiencies of the army's inexpert weather service and his chronicle of the storm's aftermath in the papers (differences in death counts provoked a national "unseemly brawl") add to this rewarding read.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Though rudimentary, weather forecasting in 1888 was capable of predicting a major winter storm. For the upper Great Plains, full of homesteading immigrants from Norway, Germany, and Russia, the weather sentinel was army officer Thomas Woodruff, posted in St. Paul, Minnesota. The meteorological data Woodruff worked with in January 1888, but failed to appreciate, portended a devastating blizzard. This is but one dimension in Laskin's account of a disaster that claimed between 250 and 500 lives. Replete with stoic fact and touching pathos, his history also encompasses the pioneers in Nebraska, the Dakota Territory, and Minnesota whom the snowy whirlwinds visited with frigid death; hypothermia's physiological process forms yet another aspect of Laskin's narrative. It is a perceptive presentation, evoking lives--many those of children--unnoticed by history but for the tragedy of this storm. Schools were in session when the tempest roared across the plain; teachers, as Laskin recounts, made varied and fateful decisions about saving their students. An adroit, sensitive drama and a skillful addition to a popular genre. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Children's Blizzard

By Laskin, David

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 0060520752

Chapter One

Departures and Arrivals

Land, freedom, and hope. In the narrow stony valleys ofNorway and the heavily taxed towns of Saxony andWestphalia, in Ukrainian villages bled by the recruitingofficers of the czars and Bohemian farms that had been owned andtilled for generations by the same families, land, freedom, and hopemeant much the same thing in the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury: America. Word had spread throughout Europe that therewas land -- empty land, free land -- in the middle of the continentto the west. Land so flat and fertile and unencumbered that a familycould plant as soon as they got there and harvest their first season."Great prairies stretching out as far as one could see," wroteone Norwegian immigrant of the image that lured him and his wifeand three sons to America in 1876, "with never a stone to gatherup, a tree to cut down, or a stump to grub out -- the soil so blackand rich that as somebody said, you had only ?to tickle it with aplow, and it would laugh with a beautiful harvest.'" As for the sky above this land, there was no need to worry. Rain, they werepromised, would fall abundantly and at just the right times. Winterswere bright and bracing, snowfalls light and quick to melt."Indeed, it may be justly claimed as one of the most beautiful climatesin the world," proclaimed a pamphlet written, translated,and distributed by agents of one of the railroad companies thatowned millions of the choicest acres of this land, "and one bestadapted to the enjoyment of long and vigorous life." And so theycame for land, freedom, and hope, some 16.5 million of them between1850 and 1900, the majority of them never getting beyondthe East Coast cities, but many hundreds of thousands, especiallythe Germans and Scandinavians, ultimately bound for the vastAmerican grassland frontier bordered by the Mississippi to the eastand the Missouri River to the west.

Gro Rollag was one of the seven hundred fifty thousand Norwegianswho emigrated to America in the nineteenth century. She wastwenty-two years old and a bride of several days when she left herfamily's farm in Tinn in the Telemark region of southern Norway inApril 1873. Gro had married a strapping blond boy named Ole,three years her junior, from a neighboring farm. Rollag was his surnameas well, since it was the custom in that part of Norway forfamilies to take the names of the farms where they lived. In Tinnthere were six Rollag farms scattered through the valley -- NorthRollag, South Rollag, Center Rollag, and so on -- all of them smalland niggardly in yields of barley, oats, potatoes, hay. Growing seasonswere short this far north, crop failures all too common in chillyovercast summers, fields so pinched that only the most primitivetools could be brought in. "Our honeymoon took us to America,"Gro Rollag wrote fifty-six years later with her dry humor, as if theymight have chosen Paris or Nice instead. While the truth, ofcourse, was that Gro and Ole left Tinn because the fields of the Rollagfarms were being divided into smaller and smaller parcels everygeneration, because they didn't want to leave their children with less than they had, because in Norway only the firstborn sons inheritedthe arable valley parcels known as bonde gaard, and becauseOle was facing five years of compulsory military service.

But it wasn't in Gro's nature to write this in the memoir she titled"Recollections from the Old Days." Nor did she mention howhard it was to leave behind this stunningly beautiful landscape atthe beginning of spring -- the mountains rising sharply from theshores of a twenty-five-mile-long lake known as the Tinnsjo, thefarms clustered on a level shelf of land at the head of the lake, thewaterfalls gleaming on the sides of the mountains and feedingstreams that merged into the broad Mana River, the red and whitefarmhouses scattered around the stately white church. Beauty wasabundant and free in the countryside of Tinn -- but you couldn'teat beauty, and the beautiful farms were yielding less and less whilethe population steadily grew. But they were comparatively lucky inTinn. Elsewhere in Telemark the farm fields had become so smallfrom repeated division that farmers had to harvest the hay thatgrew on the thatch of their roofs and grow vegetables by spreadingdirt and manure on top of rocks. It was a sad, haunted country forall its beauty. Men in the prime of their lives built their coffins andstored them inside until they were needed. "It was not a verypleasant thing to look at before you got used to it," recalled oneNorwegian immigrant.

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable youngwoman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead,and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. Accordingto family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper becauseshe preferred reading to housework. A love of books andreading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced tosell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered withdeepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenthcenturyancestor -- lovely old books sold to pay for their passage toAmerica.

Gro and Ole were the first of the family to emigrate, leavingOslo on April 24, 1873. "We traveled via England and with theCunard Line from Liverpool," Gro wrote in her recollections half acentury later, furnishing precious few details. "We were thirteendays on the Atlantic and landed at Boston. From there we wentwest in a railroad boxcar. We took a little snack for the journey -- apiece of sausage and a few crackers each."

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060520752
• ISBN 13: 9780060520755
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307