The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin
A Novel
Title: The Children’s Blizzard
Author: Melanie Benjamin
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Publication Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780399182280
Rating: 4.5 stars
January 12th, 1888, dawned as a surprisingly balmy day on the prairies of the southern Dakota Territory and Northern Nebraska (highs were in the 30s and 40s). After a cold snap that had everyone trapped in their homes, many prairie homesteaders were taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to air their woolen clothes on the lines outside their homes, make trips for supplies, tend to livestock, and get outside in general. It was still well before the spring planting, so most of the children were still attending school in their one-room school houses. Children were sent to school that morning in their light outerwear so that their heavy winter clothes could fully dry and have the stink blown off on the line. However, between 12pm and 3:30pm, a freak blizzard blew in dropping temperatures to as low as -58 and depositing up to 6 inches of snow in some places. As meteorology wasn’t really a field yet and there wasn’t a scientific way of predicting the weather, almost everyone was caught unprepared and underdressed for the storm. The storm hit just as many schools were letting out for lunch or the end of day causing many students and teachers to have to shelter in place overnight in their ill-equipped one-room school houses and many child casualties, leading to the storm often being referred to as The Children’s Blizzard. Visibility was so low that when the storm finally stopped, many people were found dead within 10 feet of their homes and barns. The official death toll is 235, but that is likely underreported by papers and doesn’t account for the many people who were never found, whose deaths were unreported, or those who died later of illnesses and frostbite caused by the blizzard.
While the Children’s Blizzard was real, this book is a work of historical fiction with fictitious characters who were created based on real people and oral histories of the events. The story is told from multiple points of view and by multiple characters: Raina Olsen, a sixteen-year-old teacher at her first teaching post near Newman Grove, Nebraska; Anette, an eleven-year-old girl bought by the family Raina boards with to help with chores, who attends Raina’s school; Gerda Olsen, Raina’s eighteen-year-old sister who teaches at a school near Yankton, Dakota Territory; Gavin Woodson, a journalist who was exiled from New York to Omaha, Nebraska after pissing off Joseph Pulitzer, who mostly writes propaganda to convince new immigrants and inner-city poor back east to move west to colonize the land stolen from Native Americans; and Ollie Tennant, a black bar owner in Omaha.
The chapters move back and forth between the characters as Raina tries to keep her children safe in the school house. Anette runs out into the storm so she doesn’t miss her afternoon chores, followed by one of her friends. When the school house window is shattered by the storm, Raina knows she has no choice but to take her eleven students out into the storm to try to get them to safety before they freeze to death inside. Gerda releases her students from school just as the storm hits in an attempt to be able to spend the afternoon playing house with her boyfriend. Gavin is greatly impacted by a homesteader he saw right before the storm that probably died and he sets out across the prairie to cover the devastation and aftermath of the blizzard. Ollie has to walk to the north side of Omaha to try to get his children from their school (because they are black, they must attend a black school in another neighborhood). He sees the contempt and fear with which they are treated by their white teacher, which makes him think seriously about the kind of community he wants for his family in Omaha. When the snow finally settles, no one is left unchanged and everyone has to take a hard look at their values and choices.
Before I found out about this book, I had never heard of the Children’s Blizzard before. I really cannot imagine what it must have been like to live through such a sudden and shocking event and the macabre days after where so many were having to have limbs amputated and trying to find deceased friends and family out in the snow. I also was upset by all of the descriptions of the deaths of animals in the storm. I was shocked that there isn’t more information and stories about this out there. Benjamin even states in the Author’s Note that when she got the idea to work on a book on this topic, she knew the name of the blizzard but didn’t really know what had happened.
The book is not an easy read because of the difficult subject matter, but I thought the writing was good and the changing story lines between chapters made this book hard to put down. I wanted to know what was happening next for all of the characters, but I knew I’d have to keep moving through the chapters to get that information. It’s hard to find a good stopping point in this book without having to spend your nights tossing and turning and wondering how things turned out for someone.
Through the character of Ollie and mentions of life on the nearby Great Sioux Reservation, Benjamin also tries to describe what life in this area and the time period and this blizzard was like for people other than the mostly Norwegian and German homesteaders. I think it’s great that she tried to reflect a broad spectrum of experience, but in this regard, I feel like it fell a little flat. While Ollie was actually one of my favorite characters, he had a much smaller part than many of the other characters and wasn’t as connected to the story and other characters as the rest of them were. In terms of plot, he could have been left out of the book, and the main substance of the story wouldn’t really have been impacted, which cannot be said of the other characters. I think there are ways he could have been more centralized in the story that wouldn’t have made him feel like a “token” diversity character. The same can be said of the Native Americans. There isn’t a single Indigenous character in this book and anything the reader hears about Native Americans in this story is being recounted by another character and is filtered through their own experience of Native Americans. I don’t think you can really talk about the life of homesteaders on the prairie in the 1880s and the propaganda the government put out to draw white people to Nebraska and the Dakotas without acknowledging the people who had been displaced to “free up” that land for settlement. The general vibe is that life on the reservations is cruel and the boarding schools Native American children were stolen and forced into were wrong, but given that the reservation was so close, I think hearing more about how that community fared in the blizzard would have added to the story. However, it does seem like a lot of the research materials available about the blizzard are from city newspapers and oral histories, as many people outside of the cities couldn’t read or write, so it’s possible that Benjamin couldn’t find as much about Native Americans in the blizzard because the white papers and government wouldn’t have bothered to save or document their experience. We have lost so much history by only preserving one side of the story.
I also haven’t really ever thought about the science of meteorology or how it was developed, but this book made me curious to know more about that. I’ve never really thought about how much we take for granted being able to watch weather systems develop and some foresight when it comes to major weather events. A tree fell on my house last year (luckily no one was hurt and the damage was minimal), but ever since then, I’ve been wary of high winds and big storms. I can’t imagine how afraid I would be if a blizzard of this magnitude were just to pop up out of nowhere.
I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come. Marveling at the expectations put upon prairie teachers, sometimes only months older than their students. I was moved by the book’s commentary on guilt and how sometimes despite our best intentions, things don’t turn out ok in the end. I am definitely going to be looking for some more books on this topic too so that I can learn more about it.