The Children's Blizzard

"Constantly and futilely, the earth’s atmosphere seeks to achieve equilibrium. Weather is the turbulent means to this perfect, hopeless end."

This book is an account of the big blizzard that struck the plains states in 1888, called the Children’s Blizzard because of the unfortunately high proportion of children who died during it. The day of the blizzard was unseasonably warm, kids left home to walk to school without appropriate weather gear, and then the inevitable tragedy struck. It’s an incredibly sad tale, one recounted in fairly gruesome detail here, both during the blizzard and the frostbite-y aftermath of some of the victims.

I just wish it clicked with me more. The beginning of the book was fairly slow. We get a lot of backstory behind some of the families, immigrants called from overseas with the promise of better lives for the most part. They arrived in the plains without being prepared for the incredibly wild weather swings and the feast or famine nature of farming there. But there’s just so much backstory for the families that I found myself checking out a bit. Then we get a detailed chapter about weather forecasting of the period and all the major players there, which again had me checked out a bit while the author talked about how (understandably) hard forecasting was back then. I just found it a bit dull.

Then during the actual blizzard, it felt like the author played it a bit fast and loose with some of the victims. Chapter 8 especially felt a lot like disaster fanfiction, where we’re treated to entire sections of what victims of the blizzard went through during their final minutes but without anyone being there, there’s no way to know any of it was accurate. It’s not like they made it home to write journal entries, and the dead by and large died alone or together so nobody was there to carry the tale home. It felt a little gratuitous and contrived.

But the blizzard itself is an incredibly sad story that I’m glad to have (finally) read about when I got to those segments of the book. Those parts that were factual, pulled from accounts, were very compelling and should have made up the bulk of the book.