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THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD

David Laskin 

Now available in paperback with a new P.S. section containing author insights, interviews and more!!

After several weeks of bitter cold, January 12, 1888, began as an exceptionally warm and inviting winter day on the Great Plains.  Farmers were already out tending to their fields as boys and girls raced to school with no coats or gloves.  Around morning recess in the Dakotas and on the bell of afternoon dismissal in Nebraska, the young pupils and their teachers were suddenly assaulted by an explosion of hurricane-force winds and torrential snow.  By midnight, windchills had plummeted to 40 below zero.  By the dawn of Friday the thirteenth, up to 500 people lay dead on the stark, white prairie.  Too many of the victims were school children killed while trying to find their way home.

David Laskin tells the story of this ferocious storm and its aftershocks in THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD (Harper Perennial; October 11, 2005).  Drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts and the emotional eyewitness accounts of German, Scandinavian, and Ukrainian immigrant settlers who survived, Laskin presents an intimate portrait of a watershed event in the pioneer era.  By bringing to life parents who lost children, children who lost siblings, and teachers who led their students to shelter—or to death—when the roofs blew off their one-room schoolhouses, he reveals how one capricious act of weather crushed many pioneers’ faith in the promised land. 

         “The blizzard literally froze a single day in time,” Laskin reflects.  “It sent a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie.  It forced people to stop and look at their existences—the earth and sky they had staked their future on, the climate and environment they had brought their children to, the peculiar forces of nature and of nature’s God that determined whether they would live or die.”    

Deftly interweaving the facts of history and meteorology with personal dramas, THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD unfolds the stories of close-knit immigrant families whose lives were tragically changed on January 12, 1888.  Among many memorable men, women, and children, readers will meet:                       

Lena Woebbecke, a fatherless German immigrant girl who was “farmed out” to relatives in Nebraska at age eleven, started school after the harvest, and tragically refused her teacher’s offer of shelter from the storm for fear of not getting home in time to do her afternoon chores.

Etta Shattuck, a deeply religious teenage schoolteacher in Nebraska, who took shelter from the storm in a haystack, and sacrificed both her legs to frostbite.

Three devout Mennonite couples who left the Ukraine for a new home in Dakota and their five sons who left school together and wandered blindly in the storm for hours before finally succumbing to exhaustion and hypothermia.

           Between vivid slices of life and death, THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD gives a gripping, hour-by-hour account of the storm’s development and the desperate, botched attempts to track it.  Two very different men come to light for their role in the disastrous consequences:  Lieutenant Thomas M. Woodruff, the West Point Graduate who detected the first signs of the blizzard at the fledgling forecast office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and his boss, General Adolphus Greely, the autocratic head of the War Department’s Signal Corps.  As Laskin reveals, a combination of incompetence, military protocol, and his superior’s ego may have prevented Woodruff from taking bold action to alert the people of the Upper Midwest to do something to prepare for the coming “cold wave”—before it was too late.                 

Full of deep understanding for the hard lives of the pioneers, amazement at the power of nature, and frustration over the fallibility of science and the helplessness of mere mortals, THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD cuts to the heart of the American heartland at a crossroads in our nation’s history.  A Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Pick for the Holidays, and a selection of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, and History Book Club, David Laskin’s heartbreaking and harrowing book will make readers think as they feel for each victim, survivor, and hero.  

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID LASKIN is the author of four previous books, including Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals and Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, and the coauthor of Artists in Their Gardens. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Preservation, and Smithsonian.  He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Title:  THE CHILDREN’S BLIZZARD

Author: David Laskin

Publication Date: October 11, 2005

Price: $13.95

Pages: 320 

ISBN: 0-06-052076-0

Harper Perennial 

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