The Children's Blizzard - by David Laskin
On Friday, January 13, 1888, just as school was letting out on a bright, sunny day, disaster struck the Dakota Territory.
With a roar of thunder, a veritable wall of snow and lightning rushed in, with winds gusting at 80 miles per hour. In three minutes time, the temperatures dropped 20 degrees. Visibilty was reduced to nothing and persons caught out became disoriented in the driving, biting cold.
And then it started getting colder as night began to fall. In the end more than 500 children would be found frozen dead. And that's just for starters.
In The Children's Blizzard, author David Laskin tells the story of this epic storm, one that is still infamous in family lore throughout the Northern Midwest. In essence, there are three stories which make up the book.
First, there are the settlers. Largely made up of Swiss-German, Norwegian and Ukrainian immigrants who came to homestead the prairie for the oldest of New World reasons: They were in search of religious freedom and prosperity for their children. Deeply religious Schweizer Anabaptists, hard-scrabble farmers escaping poverty, they endured appalling hardships to get to lands sight unseen after selling almost all their worldly goods for the tickets.
Their stories are told with a novelist's flair. Here are short, sympathetic portraits of couples and children, derived from journals and interviews with relatives, who formed the very backbone of Nebraska and South Dakota. Their lives were very different from our own, their choices were often forced by circumstance, their values not so different from most of ours.
They were not warned in time to avoid the blizzard. Its doubtful they could have been.
This was the Gilded Age, the era of the telegraph and early meteorology. This second story I mentally dubbed "the proto-geeks" because of their wonkish interest in science and communications. It was extremely- and surprisingly- interesting to me to read of the US Signal Corps' struggles in forming the first alarmingly limited 'internet'. Their motives for forecasting weather were spurred primarily by economic reasons: The herds, crops and railroads of the Midwest were to be safeguarded against an "act of God" if at all possible. People were of a secondary concern to the government of that era.
It makes perfect sense, actually. Those segments formed the core of our economy in those days and a catastophic loss, as Laskin shows did happen, injured the entirety of the nation. Then, as now, no Administration likes to preside over a failed economy.
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