54 pages • 1 hour read
David LaskinThe Children's Blizzard
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This book includes descriptions of natural disaster, specifically a snowstorm. It also describes deaths of adults and children by exposure.
The Prologue gives an overview of the event and describes many of the contributing factors and background information that will be discussed in further depth in future chapters.
A blizzard broke out over the center of North America on January 12, 1888. Seemingly out of nowhere, a “roar” sounded from the sky and a huge wall of blinding snow hit the prairies of the Great Plains states. The cold front sped down southward, first leveling Montana, then North Dakota, then South Dakota. Nebraska fell last, but all of the states were hit before 3 pm. An unseasonably warm morning became a deadly freeze, with windchill levels of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. By the 13th, hundreds of people caught in the blizzard lay dead in the snow. Many of those victims were children trying to navigate the storm to get home from school. These tragic young victims inspired the event’s name: the Children’s Blizzard.
This blizzard, far from simply being a tragedy, was also a reckoning for America. For decades, the grasslands in the center of America were ignored in favor of the coasts. After the Civil War, when America began to seriously turn toward industrialization, both railroad companies and the American government began to coax settlers to cultivate and civilize the mostly uninhabited lands of the Midwestern US. Under the Homestead Act, the US government promised every new settler 160 acres of land for a small filing fee and a promise of five years of cultivating it. Settlers, intoxicated by this deal, claimed over 225 million acres between 1870 and 1900.
This was during America’s Gilded Age. While the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers were building mansions in New York and skyscrapers were built in Chicago, settlers built tiny one room huts out of mud and burned buffalo bones for fuel. Most critically, they moved from their homes, either on the East Coast or in Europe, to a land they didn’t understand. Desperate to start making a profit on their new plots, they were at the mercy of extreme weather for which they could not reasonably prepare.
Though national weather forecasting existed at that time, it was severely limited and often sabotaged from within by politics, ignorance, and petty squabbles. Forecasters, called “indications officers,” were more concerned with appearing to be accurate in their predictions than in keeping the public safe, sometimes even covering up their mistakes to avoid embarrassment. Run by the US Army, the Signal Corps, as the weather service was known at the time, was bound by regulations and political considerations that kept them from being able to truly pursue meteorology as a science. The Signal Corps, like many American institutions created at that time, was a way to aid the economy, not the American people. They were much more concerned with predicting weather for the sugar-growing states in the South than they were for the poverty-stricken pioneers.
The Children’s Blizzard captivated the national media in a way that permanently changed America’s weather forecasting policies. The tragedy of the deaths of innocent children, the heroism of their rescuers, some of whom were young female schoolteachers, and the devastation wrought on the population all marked a change in American perception of weather policy. Understanding how the Children’s Blizzard happened provides valuable information about “the history of America itself” (8).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Departures and Arrivals”
Chapter 1 introduces the immigrant families the narrative follows throughout the book. These families, from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, conceived of America as “land, freedom, and hope” (9), three things in short supply in their poor and often overcrowded, overtaxed communities. Exaggerated accounts of the ease in which crops could be grown in America and the huge, free plots of land for white immigrants were advertised in pamphlets distributed to European farmers and peasants by American railroad companies. Between 1850 and 1900, about 16.5 million immigrants came from Europe to America. Hundreds of thousands of them settled in the vast grasslands known as the Great Plains. Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa were all extolled to the immigrants as ideal farmland that would make them rich.
Gro and Ole Rollag, the first immigrant family David Laskin follows, emigrated from Norway in 1873. The scant crops produced by their Norwegian farm, divided into tiny parcels to accommodate new generations, convinced them to try their luck in America. They were soon followed by Gro’s brother Osten and their mother, Kari.
Swiss-German Mennonites, called “Schweizers,” left their Ukrainian villages in a mass exodus in the summer of 1874. Fifty-three families, totaling 342 people, loaded up their wagons with their possessions, having already sold everything they couldn’t move. The Mennonites had faced religious persecution in Europe, not least for their refusal to serve in armed forces. For a few generations, they found refuge in Poland, Ukraine, and Crimea under the patronage of Catherine the Great. However, in 1870, Czar Alexander II demanded that they submit to Russian military service and send their children to schools where they only spoke Russian. America seemed like a good refuge from this oppression, and the Mennonites left in droves.
Anna and Johann Kaufmann, young Mennonite parents, traveled with their community to America with their two young children. Mennonite scouts had already traveled to America to see the farmland for themselves, and they reported back that the Dakota Territory, especially Nebraska, seemed “rich and beautiful and full of promise” (20). Anna and Johann, and the rest of their community, reached America by steamship from Hamburg to New York Harbor. This community included the Kaufmanns and their neighbors, the Albrechts and the Grabers, among others. The Mennonites, already wary of being swindled, negotiated with railway company agents to transport them all to Dakota on a single train. New York was a terrifying maelstrom to new immigrants, and they were glad to leave it. However, the trains they had chartered turned out to be cattle cars with hard benches. The crew was cruelly indifferent, refusing to let the immigrants stop long enough to buy food in towns. They finally stopped in Yankton in the Dakota Territory. The city was a “small brown scratch” (27) on the prairie, and the Mennonite men walked outward from it in order to stake their claims.
The Homestead Act offered land to anyone willing to cultivate it for five years, regardless of race or sex. The way the Homestead Act divided up land, however, meant that the communities were spread out in 160 acre plots, and farmhouses were much more isolated than they were in Europe. The Schweizer family the Kaufmanns found themselves neighbors with Maria and Johann Albrecht and Peter and Freni Graber, other Mennonite families. They formed a tight-knit community despite the artificial distance. Their children all attended school in the Rosefield Township.
Meanwhile, Gro and Ole Rollag learned that the stories they heard in Europe were not entirely true. Much of the free land had already been snapped up, forcing Gro and Ole to head further west with Osten and Kari. They settled in Minnesota and built a sod house for shelter. Sod houses were made of slabs of hard-packed dirt supported by wooden timbers over the roof. Farming was difficult: the Rollags thought that winters in Norway were bad, but they quickly realized Minnesota was much worse.
Lena, a poverty-stricken young girl, found herself on the outs after her father died and her mother remarried. The new husband preferred his own children, and Lena was quickly farmed out as labor to the Woebbecke family in Seward, Nebraska. The Woebbeckes appreciated her for her strength and dedication to their family. Though painfully shy, she attended the school close to the Woebbecke home until the rough weather prevented her from traveling safely.
Benjamin Shattuck, a Civil War veteran from Ohio, settled in Nebraska. During his military service, he was kept as a prisoner of war in miserable conditions and had a permanently injured leg as a result. He married and had seven children, the eldest of whom was named Etta. A devout Methodist like her father, 19-year-old Etta supported her entire family by working as a schoolteacher, earning $25 a month.
Other families followed throughout the narrative include S. F. and Abi Huntley, two ordained Quaker ministers in Dakota, who along with their five children led the way for a Quaker settlement near Wessington Springs. Additionally, the narrative follows William Clark Allen, a lawyer from Minneapolis who decided to move his family to Yankton to try his luck with cultivating and claiming land. He settled in a nearby township called Groton and built the first frame house in the area. W. C. quickly became indispensable to the town, opening a hardware store, acting as postmaster, then police justice. The Allens marked the beginning of the Dakota Boom, a mass emigration of immigrants into the Dakota Territories, rapidly building up new towns out of nothing. W. C.’s sons Will and Hugh worked for the two local newspapers, and eight-year-old Walter Allen busied himself with playing in the prairie and the nearby James River. Will and Walter, though 10 years apart, were very close. They both preferred to take matters into their own hands rather than listen to the adults in their lives, traits that would have momentous importance on January 12, 1888.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Trials”
The Schweizer settlement faced trouble “just days” after they settled in Dakota. A prairie fire destroyed the possessions of many of the Schweizers. The Kaufmanns and their neighbors in Rosefield Township were spared, but others lost their houses and supplies. Grasshopper swarms also spelled disaster for the settlers. Swarms could be a mile high and a hundred miles across, with billions of the insects sweeping through crops and leaving them picked clean. The settlers lost two years’ worth of crops to the grasshoppers in 1875 and 76. Without crops for food or profit, the settlers were forced to take jobs with the railroads laying tracks in order to support their families.
Weather, however, was the supreme threat. Wind, lightning storms, and droughts all wreaked havoc on the settlers, but blizzards were the deadliest phenomena by far. 1873 brought the first bad blizzard on the settlers of the Great Plains. It killed 70 people. The winter of 1880-81 was called the Snow Winter because the snow took them by surprise on October 15th and didn’t let up until late spring of the next year. This early snow killed the settlers’ crops, and starvation loomed for many of them. The railroad workers tried to dig out the tracks but gave up as soon as it became clear that the snow they cleared was soon replaced by a fresh snowfall. When the snow finally melted, it flooded huge sections of the prairie. Some farmers actually rowed boats over their flooded corn and wheat fields. Entire towns were wiped out by the violent water flow.
The next remarkable winter was in 1886 to 87, called the Winter of Blue Snow. Before that winter, huge cattle operations had started expanding northward from Texas as Native Americans were driven from their lands by violent white expansion. The huge grasslands seemed ideal for cattle grazing. This attracted wealthy investors, including Teddy Roosevelt. Suddenly, wealthy people were building mansions and castles on the prairie and bringing in chefs and servants from Europe. After a huge fire devastated most of the grassland in July of 1886, the cattle were malnourished and unprepared for the horrible freezing blizzards. Cattle died in the millions, starved, exhausted, or suffocated by snow. When the snow finally melted in the spring, “flooded rivers carried the carcasses of thousands of cattle” (62), marking a fatal bust in the burgeoning Great Plains cattle industry. The winters were too brutal.
The winter of 1887-88 was also rough, with steady snowfall and weather so cold that mercury froze inside of thermometers. The morning of January 12, however, was a welcome exception. Noticeably warmer weather drew people outside to marvel at the 32-degree weather, after steady temperatures of at least 20 below for months. The sky was also a mysterious “copper” color, adding to the mystery of the sudden balminess. Children, trapped inside for months, begged their parents to let them go to school. Since weather often forced the one-room schoolhouses of the areas to close or put children in significant danger if they were allowed to go, school was a relatively rare outing in the winters. Maria Albrecht didn’t trust the sudden weather change on the day of the Children’s Blizzard. She instructed her children to stay home. Despite her protestations, the two older boys decided to go to school anyway.
W. C. Allen’s son Walter, now eight, was excited to go to school that day, proud of his responsibility as row monitor, in charge of all the coats and overshoes of the children in his row.
Gro (now Grace) and Ole Rollag kept their children home from school that day as well, more for chores’ sake than safety. Etta Shattuck and her family, now in Holt County, Nebraska, only stayed there for two years before the whole family moved back to Seward. Etta stayed behind, however, since she was a schoolteacher in the area. Ten days into January in 1888, Etta had decided to close school, since conditions had become too dangerous for the children to walk there. Children were not only precious, but they were also farm workers and their extra hands couldn’t be risked for education. Etta announced to the community that the school would reopen in spring, but she wouldn’t be back to teach, since she would join her family in Seward. On January 12, she set out to get some paperwork filled out that would allow her to collect her wages. Etta, a devout Methodist, was often heard singing hymns, so it was likely that she sang as she walked out into the dangerously warm weather. When the wind suddenly shifted, the father of the family with whom she was boarding called out after her to come back, but Etta didn’t hear and kept walking. He didn’t dare go after her: the storm came on too quickly.
Prologue-Chapter 2 Analysis
The Prologue and Chapters 1 and 2 set up The Children’s Blizzard, establishing the events of the time period, the stakes, and the characters involved in the tragedy. The allure of free land under the Homestead Act enticed families like the Rollags and Kaufmanns to leave their homes in Europe in search of a better life. However, the reality of frontier existence proved to be harsh and unforgiving. Challenges of Frontier Life for 19th-Century Immigrants are discussed as the author describes settlers who struggled to eke out a living from the land, facing a scarcity of resources and isolation. The narrative also sheds light on the hardships faced by individuals like Lena, who, after being orphaned, was sent to labor for another family. Despite the challenges, immigrants like the Kaufmanns and the Rollags persevered, adapting to their new environment and forming tight-knit communities with fellow settlers.
In the face of threats like blizzards, prairie fires, and grasshopper swarms, settlers relied on each other for support and survival. For instance, when a prairie fire destroyed the possessions of members of the Schweizer settlement in Rosefield Township, other members of the community extended their assistance, demonstrating a spirit of solidarity and showing Community Resilience in the Face of Natural Disasters. It is this very resilience that captures the media’s attention later in the narrative, and Laskin uses these opening chapters to establish not only the characters’ relationships to one another but also their relative role in the country at large. The struggles and fates of immigrant settlers often wasn’t a priority in the minds of many Americans. In the chapters to come, the Children’s Blizzard plays a major role in humanizing inhabitants of the Great Plains region, bringing awareness and education to other parts of the US through tragedy.
Despite the terrible losses and challenges that resulted from weather events such as this blizzard, they also catalyzed advancements in infrastructure and emergency response, highlighting The Role of Natural Disasters in Shaping American History. Laskin illustrates how events like the Children’s Blizzard, the Snow Winter, and the Winter of Blue Snow left a lasting impact on communities and prompted societal changes by forcing crop and livestock economies to adapt to the weather. Laskin also addresses the interconnectedness of human and environmental factors in shaping historical events—the expansion of cattle operations into the Great Plains, for example, lead to ecological imbalances and exacerbated the impact of harsh winters on livestock. The devastation wrought by natural disasters forced settlers and policymakers to confront the challenges of frontier life and adapt their strategies accordingly.
The tragedy of the blizzard also underscores the importance of accurate weather predictions for public safety. Those accurate weather predictions were sadly lacking at the time, leading to avoidable deaths. The heroic efforts of rescuers, including young female schoolteachers, showcase the selflessness and bravery within these communities. Ultimately, the disaster prompted a reevaluation of weather forecasting practices, leading to improvements that benefited future generations of immigrant communities.
