Submitted by Gerti
Because
of the huge winter storm that came through Northwest Indiana this
week, I figured it was the perfect time to read about the blizzard of
January 12th,
1888. It took place in Dakota and Nebraska, and killed between a few
hundred and a thousand people, especially school children, who were
often on their way home when the blinding snow and below-zero temps
descended on the Plains.
David
Laskin’s “The Children’s Blizzard” details that horrible
episode in US history, and instead of laying blame on the national
weather service (which didn’t exist at the time), he shows why the
“Signal Corps” which predicted the weather back then failed to
predict much of anything. Laskin shows how the person most often
blamed for failing to warn people, Lieutenant Woodruff, was just an
honest man caught in the infighting taking place between college
professors and governmental opportunists, none of whom could really
predict the weather at all. From information given, it shows that
Woodruff had actually made inroads into understanding how a polar
vortex could come from Canada to kill school kids in the Plains. He
also understood what lower barometric pressures indicated, and how
cold and warm fronts interacted, even though fronts would not even
be named for another 30 years. So Laskin details the early history of
meteorology, and the nature of global weather itself, although at
times those paragraphs were really hard to get through.
More
entertaining for me were the stories of the school kids and their
families, which often included why those families left Europe to come
to the settle on free farmland in the Plains. These stories were easy
to read, and engaging emotionally, as I read hoping against hope that
certain children would live through the storm. Laskin definitely sees
the big picture, as he linked the whole tragedy to the greed of
various wealthy and often unscrupulous businessmen (namely those
running railroads) who wanted to make money from passengers and
therefore advertised this second Eden in Europe, despite the fact
that running a successful farm on the American Plains was never a
sure thing. We know that 100+ years later, but in the 1880s, many
people thought success was simply a matter of hard work and
stick-to-it-iveness, which sadly, it was not.
It
is obvious through the passage of time to see how the tragedy
occurred, and how the death of so many children was the perfect storm
of meteorology in its infancy, and an immigrant populous with little
experience of the Plain’s vicious weather. But like any tragedy, so
much turns on the decision of the moment - parents who refused to
let children go to school that day, children who ran outside when
they should have stayed inside the safe and warm school buildings -
but the true message is that so much is random, and no one could
predict that morning which decisions would mean life or death. I did,
however, learn a lot about hypothermia from this book, and reading it
scared me enough about freezing cold and snow to keep me off the
roads during yesterday’s blizzard!
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