Non-fiction five challenge--The Children's Blizzard.

This was the second of five books I am reading for the Non-fiction Five Challenge. It took me nearly all of May to get to my first book and this one took me 2.5 days to finish. The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin occurred on January 12, 1888 and roared across the country from Montana across to Bismarck, ND and then south-southeast across eastern South Dakota, western Minnesota, northeastern Nebraska and ultimately hitting Galveston, TX and dropping temperatures there to the high 30 degree mark.

High 30's would have been a God-send for the poor children of southern Dakota Territory, northern Nebraska and western Minnesota. The morning dawned with temperatures unexpectedly above zero. Parents finally let their kids head off to their one-room schoolhouses that morning and many left their coats and heavy winter wear at home in this welcomed break from the typical subzero January temperatures. By 3:30 pm temperatures had dropped 40 degrees or more with a driving, blinding wind so strong snow and ice were reduced to a powder. By dawn the next day hundreds of people were frozen to death, the majority of them school children overtaken by the storm while trying to find their houses.

At the time the storm blew through the Midwest was in it's infancy. The author often included the modern day references so the reader could locate themselves geographically. What made this so interesting to me is I grew up west of the area and am very familiar with the landscape in the book. I have friends and family who grew up in some of the towns most strongly affected by the blizzard. I also grew up in my own "Dakota Territory" blizzards and know exactly what a "snow day" meant for us...usually the snow came in the night but the wind howled across the treeless flatness relentlessly dropping temps to the 40 below or lower point easily; snow days were actually COLD days. These kids and teachers didn't have the prediction nor the communication instruments that now make planning things so much easier.

I was fascinated reading this story because I could literally picture the landscape in my mind. I could also picture these strong, independent frontiersmen doing what they knew to do...protect the children, the livestock, and only then yourself. Their were heroes, their were fools, their were near misses that cost lives, their were miracles that others survived. The children of the blizzard are still remembered today. A lot of the towns and homesteads so devastated by that storm are their today and are still fighting each season against the harshness of the Dakota weather.