The Children's Blizzard

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin (2004) is a riveting work of nonfiction detailing the events of the infamous blizzard of 1888 that blighted the Great Plains region of the United States. Laskin has since written on other historical topics including The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War (2010) about American immigrant soldiers. He also writes for the travel section of The New York Times.

The introduction explains how on January 12, 1888, a cold front traveled south from Montana through North Dakota to Nebraska, dropping temperatures 18 degrees Fahrenheit in three minutes. The timing of this anomalous blizzard was such that the population of the region it struck was especially dense as a result of the Homestead Act of 1862 that dramatically increased the population of this “Great American Desert.”

In the prologue, Laskin records that between 250 and 500 children died in the blizzard, famous for the schoolchildren sent home from school that the storm claimed as casualties. In the subsequent chapters, Laskin observes that between 1850 and 1900, 16.5 million people immigrated from Europe—especially Norwegians, Germans, and Ukrainians who ventured beyond East Coast cities to the Midwest, often meeting relatives there. The book goes back in time several centuries before the blizzard to the decades leading up to it, examining the extended experiences of individual families, from their local cities to major shipping centers in London, and finally to New York’s immigration center at Garden Castle—an overwhelming hub of city officials, transportation services, and money exchangers, as well as the vast numbers of families with children using the services. According to Laskin, many of these families chose to immigrate because of the economic circumstances in their home countries. For example, the Norwegian couple Ole and Gro Rollag settled in Iowa because their family farm was going to be partitioned with each successive generation, and they feared not having land to bequeath to their children. Families such as Anna and Johann Kaufmann belonged to a sect popularly known as Schweizers, as they had German roots but took a religious stance against infant baptism, ostracizing them from other Protestants. They were welcomed into Russia under Catherine that Great, but Czar Alexander II withdrew these protections, forcing the residents of these German enclaves to send their children to Russian schools. Many, such as the Kaufmann family, opted to emigrate. In these opening sections, Laskin paints a picture of a hardy group of people eager for the promise of America. They were misled, Laskin observes, by the railroad companies who advertised passage to America in many countries overseas, offering the illusion of mild winters and fertile soil.



After introducing five immigrant families who settled in the Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Iowa, Laskin discusses the scientific causes of the storm. The science of meteorology was nascent at best. There were no meteorologists in the modern sense, only “indication officers,” so-called by the Army—the chief national sponsor of a nationwide weather service. The low-pressure pattern originated over the Pacific Ocean and passed over the Rockies, reaching Alberta, Canada on January 11, and moving into Montana on January 12. As a cold front moved south from Wyoming, a warm front moved north from Nebraska. This caused deceptively low temperatures on the morning of the storm (a reported 30 degrees in Denver). By the afternoon, Army Signal Corps observers reported 40 mph winds. In addition to the conflation of two weather patterns and high wind speeds, the storm also moved very quickly: between 60 and 70 miles per hour as reported near Lincoln, Nebraska. Laskin attributes St. Paul, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Thomas Woodruff’s lack of training in meteorology to his ultimate failure to forecast the imminent storm adequately.

The second half of the book discusses the storm from the imagined perspective of its victims as well as the memoirs of those whom the storm left bereft of family members. Laskin graphically details how frostbite affects one’s limbs, requiring amputation, and how hypothermia can result in death. Because the morning temperatures caused a thaw, parents sent their children to school with little clothing. When the blizzard began to show its full force at 10:30 a.m., school was released, and students and teachers had to look for shelter in haystacks and caverns on their way home. Two children, Walter Allen and Lena Woebbecke, strayed from the group at their own peril. The blizzard prevented people from seeing across the street; nevertheless, husbands ventured out in search of wives and children. Anna Kaufmann finds her three children dead in the snow and can muster no other reaction than to laugh.

Laskin describes the courage of the schoolteachers who voluntarily exposed themselves to frigid temperatures to aid their students. One newspaper especially, the Omaha Daily Bee, covered these heroic actions in an effort to raise money for schoolteachers and families of children victimized by the storm. Laskin explains how the storm cost not only several hundred lives, but also cost the country trillions of dollars. Laskin encourages the country finally to acknowledge its mistake and in this way, reconcile this underrepresented natural disaster that befell the Great Plains more than a hundred years ago.



Upon its publication, The Children’s Blizzard won numerous awards, including the Midwest Booksellers Choice for Nonfiction, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Washington State Book Award.