The Children's Blizzard

"Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end."

This book is an account of the big blizzard that struck the plains states in 1888, called the Children’s Blizzard because of the unfortunately high proportion of children who died during it. The day of the blizzard was unseasonably warm, kids left home to walk to school without appropriate weather gear, and then the inevitable tragedy struck. It’s an incredibly sad tale, one recounted in fairly gruesome detail here, both during the blizzard and the frostbite-y aftermath of some of the victims.

I just wish it clicked with me more. The beginning of the book was fairly slow. We get a lot of backstory behind some of the families, immigrants called from overseas with the promise of better lives for the most part. They arrived in the plains without being prepared for the incredibly wild weather swings and the feast or famine nature of farming there. But there’s just so much backstory for the families that I found myself checking out a bit. Then we get a detailed chapter about weather forecasting of the period and all the major players there, which again had me checked out a bit while the author talked about how (understandably) hard forecasting was back then. I just found it a bit dull.

Then during the actual blizzard, it felt like the author played it a bit fast and loose with some of the victims. Chapter 8 especially felt a lot like disaster fanfiction, where we’re treated to entire sections of what victims of the blizzard went through during their final minutes but without anyone being there, there’s no way to know any of it was accurate. It’s not like they made it home to write journal entries, and the dead by and large died alone or together so nobody was there to carry the tale home. It felt a little gratuitous and contrived.

But the blizzard itself is an incredibly sad story that I’m glad to have (finally) read about when I got to those segments of the book. Those parts that were factual, pulled from accounts, were very compelling and should have made up the bulk of the book.

In 1888, a huge storm unexpectedly swept across the American plains. Many of its victims were children returning home from school. The end result of the sweep of the storm was that more than half of the people who lived on the plains ended up moving and leaving the plains by the beginning of the next century.

David Laskin tells the stories of many of those caught in the storm, most of whom were recently arrived immigrants from Europe in search of farmland.

I applaud the effort it took to weave a story of multiple accounts of the devastating impact this blizzard had on the lives of those that experienced it into a full-length book. However, all the accounts are of white settlers - apparently, the blizzard sidestepped any and all of the native americans that lived in the region. It would have been nice to learn how the native experience compared...or, at the very least, have a paragraph or two about why native americans weren't included so it doesn't seem like they were omitted on purpose.

This was certainly an interesting, although obviously greatly depressing, book. Many other reviewers have commented on the immigrants' backgrounds, tough conditions, poor quality of weather prediction, and other themes in the book. The thing that stuck in my mind months after finishing it, however, was a few lines at the very end of the book: “...it's beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history.” “Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s.” The settlement of the Great Plains may have been one of America's greatest mistakes, and this 1888 blizzard was the first sign.