The Children's Blizzard

I finally sat down this week and started reading this book I bought last fall. It's been in my reading list to the right for months but actually I picked it up and few times and ended up reading other books. I finished it last night.

It is called the Children's Blizzard. It is a tragic story of a blizzard that stuck the Great Plains in 1888. It's called the children's blizzard because the day of January 12th started out as a unusually warm morning after weeks of cold weather. So most of the kids in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and western Minnesota went to school that day and often with very few jackets. But the warm weather was just the front of a massive cold wave from Canada. When it struck it struck fast and with incredible fury. Many children died trying to make it home or even to the nearest farmhouse. Men even died trying to get from their barn to their house.

It's a good read especially of how people react in a crisis. It reads like a mystery at times. The author does a good job of describing why and how these immigrants from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia came to settle the Great Plains, about weather systems and what happens when hypothermia sets in.