Many settlers jumped at the arrival of fine weather. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.Carl Saltee, a 16-year-old Norwegian immigrant in Fortier, Minn., remembered that “on the 12th of January 1888 around noontime it was so warm it melted snow and ice from the window until after 1 p.m.” ‘A beautiful day’ David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland. With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. 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. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.īy the next morning, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. One moment the air was calm the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. The gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller.' - Entertainment Weekly This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand.' - Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

'David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise.

The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin