Hello Radio Readers! This is Marit coming to you from western Lane County with a Radio Readers BookByte about The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. This tragic story reminds me of a particularly bad winter storm we had when I was in high school in the early 2000s.

The western Oklahoma town of Cheyenne rests near ground scarred by a painful history. It was here, in late 1868, that Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led a dawn assault on the peace-seeking Southern Cheyenne village of Chief Black Kettle—an event once widely chronicled as a "battle," but now recognized as the Washita Massacre. Decades after, the town named for those displaced people found itself locked in a different kind of survival story: an early-20th-century rivalry for regional dominance.

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.

Tune in this week to enjoy two compositions, one featuring a harpsichord and the other a piano!

Some folks might be able to skip watering during the winter where they live...but here on the High Plains, you'd do well to keep an eye on the moisture in your soil, or things might get a bit more dry than your trees would like!

I am Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, OK, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read. Growing up in the Carolinas, I never thought of blizzards as part of my weather vocabulary. Hurricanes, yes. But blizzards belonged somewhere else. Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard reminded me that weather has a way of making such distinctions meaningless.

Welcome to Poets on the Plains, I’m Brad Aaron Modlin. This poem is by Rayni K. Wekluk. Let’s start with the title: “The Railroad Brought Us Here.” Us as collective—the inhabitants who arrived to The Great Plains in train cars.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we're talking about the book The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin. This is about the 1888 blizzard. It affected three states, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

When the Jeffersonian explorer Zebulon Pike undertook his Southwest Expedition in 1806, he went in search of the headwaters of the Arkansas River and the Red River. His trek brought him from the area of St. Louis through the Kansas plains, and into Southeastern Colorado. He camped on Willow Creek, near present day Lamar, at a place that has since been designated a community park.

In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin seeks to unpack the complex history of Anabaptist emigration to the Great Plains and the eventual tragedy of the 1888 blizzard, which took the lives of hundreds of people, many of them children. There are many points where Laskin might impart some sense of cosmic morality to these events, such as when he repeatedly notes that the land that lured these settlers from their Mennonite communities in Europe had been violently seized from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited it for millennia by the U.S. military and railroad companies.