The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

Fathers collapsed while trying to drag their children to safety. Husbands staggered into the blinding wind in search of wives. Children fled that day while their teachers screamed into the relentless roar. The blizzard of January 12, 1888, is still remembered on the prairie. Here too is a meticulous account of the evolution of the storm and the vain struggle of government forecasters to track its progress. 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. 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. 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. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.īy 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. One moment the air was calm the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed.

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. 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.

A masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland - the 'Children's Blizzard' of 1888.

The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin