The Children's Blizzard

“In the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school.”

This quote shows the indelible impression left on the character of the Great Plains states, as well as the nation, by the Children’s Blizzard. The sheer tragedy of the loss of the lives of children marked a watershed moment in the history of European expansion into the prairie, laying bare the extreme danger of the endeavor.

“They liked what they saw, especially the great empty prairies of Dakota. It was July and the unbroken grass looked rich and beautiful and full of promise.”

This quote, referring to the Schweizer scouts from Ukraine inspecting the prairie, shows that their hopes for settlement only increased after doing their due diligence. More cautious than most other immigrants, the Schweizer community nonetheless suffered from the extreme winter weather, unable to comprehend the danger that faced them.

“The Homestead Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was the first color-blind, sex-blind equal opportunity piece of legislation on the American books.”

This quote illustrates the radical nature of the Homestead Act. An unprecedented government move, it promised to redistribute a staggering amount of land wealth to individuals in exchange for settling and farming the land to add to America’s economy. This act attracted desperately poor people from America and other countries who were hoping to improve their lives.

“God inflicted ten plagues on the Egyptians to punish them for refusing to free the Israelites, but with the settlers of the North American prairie He limited himself to three: fire, grasshoppers, and weather.”

This quote alludes to the Christian biblical imagery that dominated the cultural imagination of the settlers. Additionally, it draws a comparison to the plagues of Egypt, a punishment on the Egyptians by God, to the seeming divine punishment of Christian immigrants on the prairie. Though the quote implies that the settlers had it easier, the three plagues of the prairie nonetheless spelled ruin for many immigrants.

“When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast of 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs lining your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens.”

With this quote, Laskin paints a vivid picture using sensory details to place the reader into the freezing cold of the prairie in winter. He also showcases the danger of prolonged exposure, describing how the ice closes up the nostrils and potentially damages the eyes.

“Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the ‘great waves’ of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun.”

This quote shows the settlers’ wonder at the strange weather conditions on the morning of January 12, 1888. Though the temperature rise was welcome, the cannier settlers were uneasy at the sudden change and predicted disaster, urging their children to stay home despite the warmth.

“The weather had turned so frigid that the parents worried their children would get frostbite or chilblains or even freeze to death on their way to school. Families couldn’t afford to lose a child to injury or death: out on the frontier, working children made the difference between surviving and going under.”

This quote points out that the children on the prairie were not just precious emotionally: They were also crucial farm laborers. The immigrants had as many children as they could to help with the farming efforts and increase their chances at survival. Education was often sidelined in favor of labor, and parents could not risk sending their children into any sort of danger.

“Weather is the steam the atmosphere lets off as it heaves itself again and again into a more comfortable position. Weather keeps happening because the equilibrium of the atmosphere keeps getting messed up.”

This quote shows Laskin’s characteristic bird’s-eye view of the weather systems. He contrasts the intimate accounts of immigrants’ experiences with meteorological data and a distant view of weather patterns across the North American continent and even the globe.

“The fact that so many people died when the potential energy of this disturbance was released over the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa on the afternoon of January 12 was by no means Woodruff’s fault. Given the state of the art of weather forecasting in 1888, Lieutenant Woodruff did the best he could.”

Laskin points out that Woodruff, though used as the scapegoat for the lack of warning of such a brutal storm, had been doing the best he could with the tools he had. The lack of communication infrastructure in the region and the general disregard for public safety in the Signal Corps were more to blame than Woodruff’s cautious approach to forecasting a cold front.

“It never occurred to him that he might have done something more urgent to alert the people of the Upper Midwest that the mild calm weather of the morning of January 12 would not last.”

This quote describes what Laskin calls Woodruff’s main flaw: his lack of imagination. Unable to stretch his mind outside the bounds of his preconceptions, he could not predict a storm of this magnitude, since he didn’t believe it was even truly possible. This flashback format is characteristic of Laskin’s style as he constructs the tragic circumstances that led to the disaster.

“Many wrote that the onset of the storm was preceded by a loud roar, like an approaching train. It was a roar they not only heard but felt vibrating in their gut.”

This quote shows Laskin’s vivid imagery as he describes the ominous roar of the storm as it approached. This type of concrete sensory detail is typical of Laskin’s prose about the storm itself, which acts to draw the reader in and sympathize with the fear of the settlers.

“Countless witnesses wrote that visibility was so poor at the height of the blizzard that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. It’s tempting to dismiss this as hyperbole or a figure of speech—but there is in fact a meteorological basis for these claims.”

This quote shows the extreme nature of the blizzard, with “whiteout” so severe that people caught in it were completely blinded. Though it seems like a hyperbolic turn of phrase, whiteout actually does prevent a person from seeing even inches away from their face. People resorted to feeling their way along guiding fences, clotheslines, and trees to reach destinations only yards away, unable to navigate otherwise.

“The school windows went from pearl to charcoal as the cloud of snow enveloped them, not so much falling as slamming sideways.”

This quote showcases Laskin’s imagery, describing the suddenness of the weather conditions as the windows were blocked up almost instantaneously with snow. The force of the wind kept the snow from falling or even blowing, instead moving with a violent force fully capable of knocking an adult over.

“Hundreds, possibly thousands of children spent the night in schoolhouses or the boarding places of their teachers while their parents sat up and wondered where they were. Precious desks and tables and chairs were fed into the stoves. Those were the lucky children.”

This quote describes the fear and uncertainty of the people imprisoned by the storm, especially schoolchildren and teachers. They were suddenly trapped in one-room schoolhouses not meant to protect anyone from the elements and forced to burn all their school furniture and equipment for warmth, since they didn’t know when the storm would end or when rescuers might find them.

“A sign of the fierceness—and strangeness—of this storm was the eerie electricity that crackled through the air as the temperature began to drop. It was like a lightning storm, only instead of bolts flashing thousands of feet between cloud and ground, smaller electrical discharges sparked at the surface.”

This quote showcases the meteorological phenomena that accompanied such an extraordinarily destructive storm. The two pressure fronts from north and south met each other on the prairie with such force that it created electricity not miles above the Earth’s surface like a thunderstorm but right on the surface of the prairie. Settlers describe electric shocks emanating from their metal stoves and pokers, and even sparks and flames emerging from their fingertips.

“When the Schweizer boys left school late in the morning, the windchill was about 5 degrees above zero. At 9 pm, four hours after the sun set, the windchill had dropped to 40 below zero. In conditions like that, exposed human flesh freezes in ten minutes.”

This quote describes the brutal, deadly conditions of the blizzard, in which children dressed in thin cotton and wool clothing were forced to march to try to make it home. These conditions would kill adults quickly, and it is remarkable that the boys survived as long as they did in such terrible conditions.

“The catalog of their suffering is terrible. They froze alone or with their parents or perished in frantic, hopeless pursuit of loved ones. They died with the frozen bloody skin torn from their faces, where they had clawed off the mask of ice again and again.”

Laskin again uses imagery to describe the heartbreaking tragedies of the blizzard. The panic of the people caught in the storm, desperately trying to keep themselves alive, as well as the suffering of people whose shelters were not sufficient to keep them warm, was horrific. It is difficult to fully envision the fear and anguish of the settlers, so Laskin uses a list format to amplify the images as he describes them.

“Weather goes on forever with no direction or resolution, but a storm, like a story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The conditions that made the storm will in time unmake it.”

This quote again pulls out to a bird’s-eye view of the weather conditions. It points out that storms are by nature temporary, as the Earth regains its atmospheric equilibrium. 

“Pure catastrophe is fatiguing. The city dailies soon wearied of tales about frozen children and blockaded trains. After only a few days, accounts of amputations, record cold temperatures, and staggering losses of livestock began to blur together.”

This quote describes the short attention span of the media in the face of this tragedy. Though stories of disaster are compelling, it is difficult for bystanders to fully imagine the horror, and therefore they often cannot muster up more than initial sympathy. By showcasing the stories of heroic female schoolteachers, however, the newspapers again seized public interest by capitalizing on Community Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters.

“For years afterward, at gatherings of any size in Dakota or Nebraska, there would always be people walking on wooden legs or holding fingerless hands behind their backs or hiding missing ears under hats—victims of the blizzard.”

This quote points out that although the survivors of the storm were the lucky ones, the physical and psychological trauma affected them for the rest of their lives. The description of the survivors hiding their loss of extremities points to the culture of modesty and reticence in the immigrant settler communities, as they didn’t want to invoke pity.

“Today, a ‘surprise’ storm that killed over two hundred people would instigate a fierce outcry in the press, vigorous official hand-wringing, and a flood of reports by every government agency remotely involved, starting with the National Weather Service. But in the Gilded Age, blame for the suffering attendant on an act of God was left unassigned.”

This quote describes the cultural attitude of the larger American community at the disaster that befell the poor settlers of the prairie, thematically highlighting Challenges of Frontier Life for 19th-Century Immigrants. Nowadays, a disaster having such tragic ramifications would be considered unacceptable and would prompt outrage. At the time, though, suffering was seen as a given for pioneers on the frontier. Government agencies were disinclined to make changes that would benefit poor immigrants, instead focusing on the interests of the sugar-growing states and the major port cities of the East Coast.

“What motivated the congressional change of heart was the conviction that the transfer would make farmers happy and perhaps inspire them to put more trust in the weather service. Scant mention was made of public safety.”

This quote points out that the changes made to the national weather service were less a response to the tragedy than a political decision meant to mollify large groups of voters. Though the changes created lasting positive effects, highlighting The Role of Natural Disasters in Shaping American History, they were not intended to increase public safety. Rather, they were meant to increase public trust in government services.

“The truth was beginning to sink in: the sudden storms, the violent swings from one meteorological extreme to another, the droughts and torrents and killer blizzards were not freak occurrences but facts of life on the prairie.”

This quote points out that the settlers, lured by exaggerations of easy living and profitable farming in the Midwest, gradually learned that the weather extremes posed too much of a danger to their lives to continue working their land. They learned that their “free land” was not actually free, and they paid the price for it in human lives.