Book: The Children's Blizzard

 Book: The Children's Blizzard

Author: David Laskin

Pages: 307

This s my 31st read for the year

What Amazon Says:

The gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and case a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.  January 12, 1888 began as an useasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves.  But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed.  One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds.  Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.  By the morning, some 500 people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools.  In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realitites of their harsh environment.  Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

This was a good book. Hard to read the reality of what the people went through.  I had read the Historical Fiction version of this story a few years ago, and was interested to read more about it.  The parts of this book that are personal accounts of the families was heartbreaking and the best parts of this book.  The other parts about weather and thoughts on how this storm came about were a bit dry.  But overall a good book.

Stars: 4