The children's blizzard

Review by Choice Review

There are actually two books in this volume. The first is the tragic story of the January 1888 Great Plains blizzard that claimed the lives of over 100 schoolchildren, many of whom were dismissed from their classrooms by well-meaning teachers to try to safely reach their homes during one of the deadliest winter storms in US history, and the children's brave immigrant parents, who had settled in the Dakotas and Nebraska only to find themselves engaged in a constant battle against the elements. Laskin focuses on five of these families and describes the fates of their children, often in horrific detail. The second story, told in alternating chapters, traces the inner workings of the weather arm of the US Army Signal Corps and its desperate, futile attempts to warn Plains residents about this deadly, fast-moving storm. Laskin is at his best when he relates the heartbreaking stories of the storm's victims; the chapters on weather history interrupt the book's flow. Nevertheless, this is an important work that should be read by every resident of the Great Plains. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. A. Boughter University of Nebraska at Omaha

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

Though rudimentary, weather forecasting in 1888 was capable of predicting a major winter storm. For the upper Great Plains, full of homesteading immigrants from Norway, Germany, and Russia, the weather sentinel was army officer Thomas Woodruff, posted in St. Paul, Minnesota. The meteorological data Woodruff worked with in January 1888, but failed to appreciate, portended a devastating blizzard. This is but one dimension in Laskin's account of a disaster that claimed between 250 and 500 lives. Replete with stoic fact and touching pathos, his history also encompasses the pioneers in Nebraska, the Dakota Territory, and Minnesota whom the snowy whirlwinds visited with frigid death; hypothermia's physiological process forms yet another aspect of Laskin's narrative. It is a perceptive presentation, evoking lives--many those of children--unnoticed by history but for the tragedy of this storm. Schools were in session when the tempest roared across the plain; teachers, as Laskin recounts, made varied and fateful decisions about saving their students. An adroit, sensitive drama and a skillful addition to a popular genre. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2004 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In 1888, a sudden, violent blizzard swept across the American plains, killing hundreds of people, many of them children on their way home from school. As Laskin (Partisans) writes in this gripping chronicle of meteorological chance and human folly and error, the School Children's Blizzard, as it came to be known, was "a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie," a turning point in the minds of the most steadfast settlers: by the turn of the 20th century, 60% of pioneer families had left the plains. Laskin shows how portions of Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas, heavily promoted by railroads and speculators, represented "land, freedom, hope" for thousands of impoverished European immigrants-particularly Germans and Scandinavians-who instead found an unpredictable, sometimes brutal environment, a "land they loved but didn't really understand." Their stories of bitter struggle in the blizzard, which Laskin relates via survivors' accounts and a novelistic imagination, are consistently affecting. And Laskin's careful consideration of the inefficiencies of the army's inexpert weather service and his chronicle of the storm's aftermath in the papers (differences in death counts provoked a national "unseemly brawl") add to this rewarding read. Agent, Jill Kneerim. (Nov.) Forecast: Praise from Erik Larson and Ivan Doig, a nod from the B&N Discover program, and book club attention (it's an alternate for BOMC, Literary Guild and the History Book Club) should help this title stand out. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

On an unseasonably warm winter day in the Great Plains, a ferocious blizzard suddenly blew up out of nowhere, and soon 500 people (mostly children) were dead. A harrowing story from the author of Braving the Elements; with an eight-city author tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Adult/High School-That 1888 January day on the northern plains was bright and warm-the first mild weather in several weeks-leading many children to attend school without coats, boots, hats, or mittens. A number of students were caught in the sudden storm that hit later that day. Laskin details this event-the worst blizzard anyone in those parts ever encountered. It not only took the lives of hundreds of settlers, but also formed a significant crack in the westward movement and helped to cause a movement out. The author introduces five pioneer families, beginning with why they left the old country. The personalization of these settlers breathes life into this history and holds readers spellbound. Laskin devotes several chapters to the meteorology of storms, especially this one, and the politics and history of the Army Signal Corps, which ran a fledgling weather service at the time. Readers are then led through the storm and its effects on the featured families as well as on many others. Some teachers kept students at school, burning desks to stay warm overnight; some tried to keep students in but were unsuccessful; and some led them out, not realizing how dangerous it was. A few children and adults who got lost somehow managed to survive covered by snow, then died when they got to their feet in the morning. Laskin explains why, and delves into other effects of prolonged exposure to cold. A gripping story, well told.-Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Popular historian Laskin (Partisans, 2000, etc.) gives an engrossing if speculative account of a brutal 1888 blizzard that signaled the end of optimism on the Great Plains. "The tragedy of the January 12 blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population," asserts the author. Laskin shrewdly takes a broad historical view, arguing that the snowstorm--which killed hundreds, including numerous schoolchildren--demonstrated the folly of settling the Dakota and Nebraska territories. In his telling, scores of Germans, Scandinavians, and persecuted Ukrainian Mennonites found irresistible American railroad agents' promises of free grassland prairie homesteads in "one of the most beautiful climates in the world." Though the land was indeed spacious, it proved capricious and unforgiving of the immigrants' naivetÉ, besetting them with locusts, fires, snowstorms, droughts, and other seeming "acts of God." Still, nothing compared to the 1888 blizzard, as its stoic survivors' awed narratives make clear. Precursor storms arrived throughout 1887, devastating the open-range system of cattle management. (Theodore Roosevelt's losses were particularly severe.) When temperatures rose unaccountably on January 12, the hapless settlers, unaware of what such oddities portended, assumed the warmth was more than momentary. Laskin intercuts between their recollections and the fledgling weather forecast service provided by the War Department's Signal Corps, headed by notoriously incompetent martinet Adolphus Greely, who serves as the primary villain here. Clearly fascinated with forecasting's infancy, the author leaves open the question of whether quicker communications or less interference by Greely might have helped save the far-flung settlers. Some children owed their lives to plucky schoolteachers who sequestered them in one-room schoolhouses overnight, burning desks for warmth; many others perished, snow-blind, only yards from inhabited structures. The blizzard's toll provided fodder for the nation's newspapers, which highlighted maudlin tales of heroism and tragedy; it also forced the transfer in 1891 of forecasting responsibilities to the Department of Agriculture. A suspenseful disaster narrative. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Children's Blizzard Chapter One Departures and Arrivals Land, freedom, and hope. In the narrow stony valleys of Norway and the heavily taxed towns of Saxony and Westphalia, in Ukrainian villages bled by the recruiting officers of the czars and Bohemian farms that had been owned and tilled for generations by the same families, land, freedom, and hope meant much the same thing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: America. Word had spread throughout Europe that there was land -- empty land, free land -- in the middle of the continent to the west. Land so flat and fertile and unencumbered that a family could plant as soon as they got there and harvest their first season. "Great prairies stretching out as far as one could see," wrote one Norwegian immigrant of the image that lured him and his wife and three sons to America in 1876, "with never a stone to gather up, a tree to cut down, or a stump to grub out -- the soil so black and rich that as somebody said, you had only 'to tickle it with a plow, and it would laugh with a beautiful harvest.'" As for the sky above this land, there was no need to worry. Rain, they were promised, would fall abundantly and at just the right times. Winters were bright and bracing, snowfalls light and quick to melt. "Indeed, it may be justly claimed as one of the most beautiful climates in the world," proclaimed a pamphlet written, translated, and distributed by agents of one of the railroad companies that owned millions of the choicest acres of this land, "and one best adapted to the enjoyment of long and vigorous life." And so they came for land, freedom, and hope, some 16.5 million of them between 1850 and 1900, the majority of them never getting beyond the East Coast cities, but many hundreds of thousands, especially the Germans and Scandinavians, ultimately bound for the vast American grassland frontier bordered by the Mississippi to the east and the Missouri River to the west. Gro Rollag was one of the seven hundred fifty thousand Norwegians who emigrated to America in the nineteenth century. She was twenty-two years old and a bride of several days when she left her family's farm in Tinn in the Telemark region of southern Norway in April 1873. Gro had married a strapping blond boy named Ole, three years her junior, from a neighboring farm. Rollag was his surname as well, since it was the custom in that part of Norway for families to take the names of the farms where they lived. In Tinn there were six Rollag farms scattered through the valley -- North Rollag, South Rollag, Center Rollag, and so on -- all of them small and niggardly in yields of barley, oats, potatoes, hay. Growing seasons were short this far north, crop failures all too common in chilly overcast summers, fields so pinched that only the most primitive tools could be brought in. "Our honeymoon took us to America," Gro Rollag wrote fifty-six years later with her dry humor, as if they might have chosen Paris or Nice instead. While the truth, of course, was that Gro and Ole left Tinn because the fields of the Rollag farms were being divided into smaller and smaller parcels every generation, because they didn't want to leave their children with less than they had, because in Norway only the firstborn sons inherited the arable valley parcels known as bonde gaard, and because Ole was facing five years of compulsory military service. But it wasn't in Gro's nature to write this in the memoir she titled "Recollections from the Old Days." Nor did she mention how hard it was to leave behind this stunningly beautiful landscape at the beginning of spring -- the mountains rising sharply from the shores of a twenty-five-mile-long lake known as the Tinnsjo, the farms clustered on a level shelf of land at the head of the lake, the waterfalls gleaming on the sides of the mountains and feeding streams that merged into the broad Mana River, the red and white farmhouses scattered around the stately white church. Beauty was abundant and free in the countryside of Tinn -- but you couldn't eat beauty, and the beautiful farms were yielding less and less while the population steadily grew. But they were comparatively lucky in Tinn. Elsewhere in Telemark the farm fields had become so small from repeated division that farmers had to harvest the hay that grew on the thatch of their roofs and grow vegetables by spreading dirt and manure on top of rocks. It was a sad, haunted country for all its beauty. Men in the prime of their lives built their coffins and stored them inside until they were needed. "It was not a very pleasant thing to look at before you got used to it," recalled one Norwegian immigrant. Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenthcentury ancestor -- lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America. Gro and Ole were the first of the family to emigrate, leaving Oslo on April 24, 1873. "We traveled via England and with the Cunard Line from Liverpool," Gro wrote in her recollections half a century later, furnishing precious few details. "We were thirteen days on the Atlantic and landed at Boston. From there we went west in a railroad boxcar. We took a little snack for the journey -- a piece of sausage and a few crackers each." The Children's Blizzard . Copyright © by David Laskin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Childrens Blizzard by David Laskin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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