A Very Real Family History
By Matt Kliewer
In 1902, my great-great-grandfather H.B. Kliewer gained his U.S. citizenship. He had been living in Hillsboro, Kansas, ostensibly orphaned when his father died shortly after the family emigrated from Russia in the late 1880s. Until a few days ago, I had only a vague outline of this story. I knew my family had emigrated from Russia as part of the larger Mennonite migration discussed in David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard, but I was unfamiliar with the texture of this family’s settler story.
I think many of us, at least those whose family histories are deeply tied to the complicated, violent settlement of the Great Plains, have a similarly vague outline. These narratives of emigration mix with the mythopoeia of Manifest Destiny, and the individual stories that form these complex histories pale in comparison to the national or regional mythos.
Laskin’s choice to engage with these narratives of migration and settler colonialism through the lens of the Blizzard of 1888, the Children’s Blizzard, allows the book to embrace the complexity, refuse to erase those histories that challenge traditional frontier narratives, and individualize and humanize the tragic weather event. In reflecting on how many of these individuals are lost to the larger prairie consciousness, Laskin writes, “Today, aside from a few fine marble headstones in country graveyards and the occasional roadside historical marker, not a trace of the blizzard of 1888 remains on the prairie. Yet in the imagination and identity of the region, the storm is as sharply etched as ever: This is a place where blizzards kill children on their way home from school” (8).
And who would live in such a place? Who would force their children to live in such a place? Perhaps only those with nowhere else to go, no reasonable choice between a harsh environment they barely understood and those in denial of the limits of the freedom this land seemed to promise. Laskin closes his book by arguing that the Children’s Blizzard may have offered settlers all the evidence they needed: they were not welcome. They were not safe. They would never be safe. Laskin quotes Nicholas Kristof, who argues in a New York Times opinion column that “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” (270).
Perhaps I’m the wrong person to engage with this central thesis of The Children’s Blizzard. It did not take a catastrophe for me to understand that I desperately needed to escape. I knew there’s nothing in those lands for those unwilling to face constant disappointment at best, and insistent threat at worst. But whether or not the relatively brief settlement of the Great Plains has been a failure, and whatever we make of the early violence, hardship, and death that characterized the region at the turn of the century and beyond, I’m grateful that Laskin’s book refused to abandon this place and forced me, however reluctantly, to begin to consider what I’ve inherited from the land that has shaped me.
I’m Matt Kliewer for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
Originally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
