Not a Garden
By Glenda Shepard
I'm Glenda Shepard of Yucca Corners farm in rural Stanton County KS. On a 100 plus degree day in August, I have for you my Radio Readers BookByte of The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin.
The Children's Blizzard covers the January 12th, 1888, blizzard that roared out of Canada onto the Great Plains, killing hundreds, many school children. The book gives an explanation of the immigrant population most affected by the blizzard.
P. 9 "Word had spread throughout Europe that there was land--empty land, free land--in the middle of the continent to the west.".
The proclamation was true if you disregard the Native Americans who had been eradicated from their land. Laskin completely ignored this question of ownership.
After the Homestead Act offered "free" or, more truthfully, land taken from Native Americans, U.S. Government administrations began one of its greatest mistakes.
P. 270 "Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in The New York Times, September 3, 2002, it’s time for us to acknowledge one of America's greatest mistakes...a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains."
Laskin covers the motives for migration from Europe to the Great Plains and weaves weather forecasting into the first 5 chapters of the book. By the time you read 3, 4, and 5, you can feel how this blizzard will explode onto the prairie. So, titling chapter 6 "Explosion" is exactly the effect this blizzard had on the immigrant population. Families basked in a warm January morning until vastly differing cold and warm fronts brought suffering and death.
On p. 78 Laskin states, "In weather everything connects." Then he spends the remainder of the book showing you how a "disturbance" can lead to an "indication" which read by an unimaginative Signal Corps officer who fails "to make a connection between his work and the fate of the people who froze to death or suffocated in blowing snow or lost limbs to frostbite on January 12th."
As I moved through chapters made up of the statistics of wind speed and temperatures to chapters of the personal accounts of children, teachers, and parents, I found myself empathizing with the storm's victims. As a mother and retired teacher, I would probably not have kept my children home from school on a Friday as Maria Albrecht did the morning of the storm. Story after story follows the victims trying to survive. Decisions that saved lives, decisions that cost lives.
By chapter 9 "Prairie Dawn" the blizzard had blown out, and in chapter 10 Sunday "the cold came down from the north like a river in flood."
In chapter 11 Aftermath, as immigrant bodies were discovered on the frozen prairie, I found it darkly amusing that only when Texas and Louisiana sugar and cotton were threatened, did Signal Corp General Greely become outraged. Did he place less importance on dead immigrants than the safety of sugar and cotton crops?
The blizzard and the cold air that followed were a boon to the Winter Carnival in St. Paul where "the ice palace would rise to 120 feet at its highest turret, with some 55,000 22-by-33-inch ice blocks covering an acre of ground and weighing in at 6,000 tons--all of it frozen solid by the subzero weather and glittering like diamonds."
Beyond the ice palace, settlers threatened to leave, but families like the Huntleys and the Shaws stayed put. P. 267 "Grieving families got on with their lives, prayed for more rain, had more children."
In the years following 1888, the "great white endeavor of settling and taming the prairie" continued but the blizzard of January 12th, 1888 "did mark a turning point, a change of mood and direction."
High Plains natives know we don't live in a garden. Our aquifer is drying up underneath our feet. We never get enough rain. Be wary of still days: they are followed by blow-you-over days. P.268 "Living here and making a life off the land was never going to be easy."
Thank you for listening to my Radio Readers BookByte for the Children's Blizzard, one of High Plains Public Radio Readers books for the fall read.
