The Children's Blizzard

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin is an account of a devastating natural disaster that took place in 1888. Affecting multiple Midwestern states, the blizzard claimed the lives of many people, including children. The loss of lives to the blizzard laid bare the vulnerabilities of isolated immigrant communities in the Great Plains and marked a watershed moment in American history regarding disaster prediction and mitigation. The author, David Laskin, is a well-known historian who has written other books on both weather disasters and American history. Published in 2004 by Harper Collins, The Children’s Blizzard was praised for its tracing of five different historical accounts of the blizzard to create a vivid, engrossing portrait of an American tragedy.

This guide refers to the paperback edition released by Harper Perennial, a subsidiary of Harper Collins, published in 2005.

Content Warning: This book includes descriptions of natural disaster, specifically a snowstorm. It also describes deaths of adults and children by exposure.

Summary

The Children’s Blizzard begins with an overview of the different factors that coincided to exacerbate the blizzard to tragic proportions. The extremes of weather in the Great Plains region, the unpreparedness of immigrants moving to America to claim farmland, and the ineffectiveness of the weather prediction services at the time all combined to create a once-in-a-lifetime disaster that claimed many lives.

Laskin introduces the immigrant families whose firsthand accounts form the historical narrative of the book. These Norwegian and Ukrainian families traveled to America on the promise of new land under the Homestead Act. Lured by exaggerated claims of the ease of farming in America, these families instead found that the Great Plains states were host to extreme weather phenomena that proved dangerous, even fatal. Though floods, droughts, and fire all destroyed homes and crops, the most dangerous threat came from the blizzards. These snowstorms were more extreme than anywhere else on the continent because of several different weather factors like uninterrupted pressure buildup and geographical forces that intensified winds.

In 1888, meteorologists had limited weather forecasting technology. Additionally, the United States Signal Corps, the national weather service run by the Army, was plagued by infighting and political pressure that kept meteorologists from being able to focus fully on keeping the public safe. When the blizzard of January 12, 1888, arrived, multiple natural and social factors coincided to make it one of the deadliest weather disasters in American history. It was called the Children’s Blizzard because it caught many children on their way home from school, forcing them to fight against blinding snow-laden winds to get home, or to shelter in place and try not to freeze. The morning had been unseasonably warm, so parents felt comfortable sending their children to school to celebrate the brief respite from winter. They didn’t realize that the warmth was the result of a drastic pressure differential in the atmosphere that created a devastating storm seemingly from nowhere. The blizzard erupted in the late morning, and by 3 pm, it covered three states in an icy, windy snowstorm so extreme that people could not see their hands in front of their faces. The poverty of the immigrant families in the area meant that the children rarely had sufficient clothing to deal with the cold, not to mention the lighter clothes many wore in response to the warmer weather at the start of the day; many of these children died.

Often, the only hope for the children was valiant effort from the community to rescue them. Parents and teachers did what they could to protect the children against the sudden onslaught of snow. However, the teachers forced to form disaster strategies on the fly were often young and inexperienced, some of them still teenagers, which led them to make tragic miscalculations that resulted in the deaths of children. Others, like Minnie Freeman, made better decisions and, through planning and determination, got all of their charges to safety.

This case captured national media attention. The public, distressed by the tragedy of the deaths of children and enchanted by the young female schoolteachers who showed great bravery, raised money to support the affected communities. They also put pressure on the government to review how their weather forecasting service had failed to warn the public about such a massive storm. This new attention created lasting change in the national weather service, removing it from the Army’s responsibilities and placing it under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. Weather stations received more robust telegraph networks and were authorized to stay open all days of the week, changes that wrought a significant positive effect on public safety. However, the Children’s Blizzard marked an end to the cultural movement of immigrants staking their claims in the hope of attaining wealth. The extremes of weather on the prairie could no longer be explained away by weather-forecasting bureaucrats as flukes. People were forced to admit that the devastating weather extremes were actually the norm, and thousands of people abandoned their claims to the land, heading back to the East Coast and the safety of more robust infrastructure. To this day, the Great Plains states remain some of the poorest and most sparsely populated in the US.