Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Children’s Blizzard, by David Laskin

The Story: On January 12, 1888, everyone in the Plains woke up to above average temperatures and sunny skies.  It had been really cold for weeks, so everyone got outside while they could.  Kids went to school, farmers went to town, yadda yadda.  A lot of people didn’t even wear their winter coats.  In the early afternoon, a storm blew in like they had never seen.  It sounded like a train roaring and it hit with just that force.  There were sustained winds of over 50 miles per hour for hours at a time.

Because everyone had went out, they now faced the decision to try to wait it out where they were or try to make it through the storm to safety.  This book chronicles several families and individuals that were there and what they decided and how that turned out.

This blizzard went down in history as The Children’s Blizzard because a large number of the deaths that resulted from the blizzard were kids headed home from school.  There are also some pretty incredible survival stories here too as well as some absolutely wild facts about life an weather on the Plains and how the new settlers dealt with everything that happened.

What I Thought: This is one of those books that I could not get over.  Who ever I was around while I was reading suffered because I’d look up every few minutes and share some obscure fact from the 1880’s.

There is a lot here about the families journeys from Europe, across America to get to the Dakotas and Nebraska and the Plains that was just fascinating.  The method of tracking and predicting the weather as well as getting that info across the country was something totally new to me.  The part that I was just fixed on, though, was just how tough  life was day-to-day for these people but how they didn’t just go back east.  This blizzard was horrible, but the year before was even worse.  Not to mention the draughts, the high number of infant deaths, the animals and bugs and pests that were in everything, and just how hard normal life was.  The author talked a lot about how these were hardy people and they just kind of bucked up.  They didn’t complain or moan or get all upset, they just dealt with stuff (including blizzards) as they happened.

The stories of deaths were heartbreaking. The stories of survival were incredible.  I loved this.

I was not so enamored by the history of Thomas Woodruff (I think that’s right), who was blamed for not getting the word out about the storm early enough.  There were several chapters devoted to how he ended up in his position, what his position entailed and how he dealt with the fallout after the blizzard.  This was completely uninteresting to me and I did find myself just scanning the parts about him.

This wasn’t one of those non-fiction books that reads like a novel, but the writing was crisp and clean and not hard to get into at all.  The first few chapters it was hard to figure out which story was which, but once I got the families and individuals straight, I was totally sold.

Conclusion: If you have even the most remote interest in American history, I think you’d get into this.  It’s full of trivia and random facts that will make any history buff happy, as well as a great story to keep it moving along.