The Children's BlizzardZondervan, 13 ต.ค. 2009 - 336 หน้า “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. . . . 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 “Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller.” — Entertainment Weekly 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. 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. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent. By 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. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. 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. 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. David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland. The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. |
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... boy named Ole , three years her junior , from a neighboring farm . Rollag was his sur- name as well , since it was the custom in that part of Norway for families to take the names of the farms where they lived . In Tinn there were six ...
... boys if they were to remain in Norway.” abs Two families to a wagon—they had agreed on this beforehand. The women would sit on top of the trunks and bags and bedrolls with the smaller children, while the men and older children walked ...
... boys would live longer than their brother. Before they left Waldheim, the Schweizer families raised their voices in a song of farewell. “Jetzt ist die Zeit und Stunde da, dass wir zieh'n nach Amerika” (Now the time and hour are here ...
... boy remembered an old Ukrainian peasant telling his parents solemnly that their ship was sure to sink, or if it didn't, then they would certainly be killed and eaten by Indians. abs It was the logistics of the journeys that the ...
... boy was con- vinced that the first black man he saw was “old Nick himself.” Traveling in steerage, the Schweizers did not even glimpse the ornate luxury of the first-class staterooms and public rooms above—dining room tables set with ...