The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin

  as Schweizer immigrants’ destination

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  My Life at a Glance

  Meet David Laskin

  About the book

  Finding and Telling the Story

  Read on

  Living History:

  The Author Receives Some Astoundingly

  Deep-rooted E-mails from His Readers

  About the author

  My Life at a Glance

  THOUGH I HAVE NEVER LIVED on the American prairie, I have always been drawn to the weather and the landscape of this awe-inspiring part of the country: the immense sky that opens out from horizon to horizon, the summer thunderheads shadowing the distance, the radical plunges and rises in temperature, the inescapable wind, and the sideways snow. The Children’s Blizzard gave me the chance to write about all of these—along with two other aspects of the prairie region that have long fascinated me: its history and the resilience, courage, and generosity of those who have made their lives beneath its fickle skies.

  I have always loved to read, and I think my desire to write came directly out of the books that captivated me as a child. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Giants in the Earth, The Call of the Wild, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Incredible Journey, Old Yeller, The Way West, King of the Wind—these were among the books that started me on the path to authorship, and several of them ended up being inspiration or background for The Children’s Blizzard.

  “Two other aspects of the prairie region have long fascinated me: its history and the resilience, courage, and generosity of those who have made their lives beneath its fickle skies.”

  I grew up on Long Island, New York, a child of the 1950s baby boom. Though my surroundings were clipped, tame, and leafy, my head was always full of Western adventure, Mississippi River boat trips, wagon trains, and sled dogs. We sang “America the Beautiful” in elementary school, and I still remember the sense of wonder I felt when I first saw “purple mountain majesties” in Upstate New York. I had always assumed this was just something they put in a kid’s songs—like a red-nosed reindeer and twinkling little stars. It astounded me that even relatively low-lying mountains like the Catskills and Adirondacks really are purple when seen from afar. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I saw “amber waves of grain” on a bus and camping tour of the national parks. The bus drove as fast as possible from New York through the Midwest to reach the Badlands of South Dakota, and then the “real” mountains of Wyoming and Utah. But those amber waves and blue skies made an impression that stayed with me.

  I was extremely fortunate in my formal education. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate and majored in the history and literature of England and the United States, and then spent two years at Oxford University, working toward a master’s in English literature. For six years my primary responsibility was basically to read the finest works written in the English language and to delve into the history surrounding the creation of those works. The fact that all this glorious reading did not have a simple, straightforward “practical” application did not dawn on me until I left the ivory tower in 1977 and began looking for work. One prospective employer, a paperback publisher in New York, told me at my job interview that my education prepared me for nothing aside from being a terrible snob, but he took a chance and hired me anyway. I stayed in book publishing less than two years. I was restless. I quickly realized I wanted to be on the other side—writing the books, not editing and marketing them. So I took the plunge and hung out my shingle as a freelance writer. This was in 1980—a very long time ago, it seems to me now. The shingle has been hanging ever since.

  Meet David Laskin

  DAVID LASKIN is the author of Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals and Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

  “Weather has shaped every aspect of our nation’s culture and history from the emergence of our identity as an independent nation to our efforts to forecast our violent and changeable weather.”

  My first projects were primarily books about raising children (my wife and I have three teenaged daughters), but I’ve always loved to travel and soon I was writing travel articles for the New York Times and then a book called Eastern Islands about the islands of the East Coast from Maine to Florida. My next book, A Common Life, which grew directly out of my education, was a group portrait of the friendships between eight major American writers, spanning the generations from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to the twentieth-century poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

  Soon after moving from New York to Seattle in 1993, I abruptly changed direction and plunged into a sweeping cultural history of weather in the United States. Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, published in 1996, was the result. In the course of this narrative, I covered how weather has shaped every aspect of our nation’s culture and history from the emergence of our identity as an independent nation to our efforts to forecast our violent and changeable weather, from our religious beliefs concerning weather to the various ways that radio and television have turned weather into news, entertainment, human interest stories, and just plain silliness. In my next book I used the same basic approach to focus on weather in the Pacific Northwest. Rains All the Time is an intentionally ironic title, for as I quickly discovered, the myth that the skies are always gray and dripping over Seattle and Portland is just that—a myth.

  I never really planned to specialize as a writer, but over time it became clear that my work fell into two broad categories: weather and literary biography. My next book, Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals, belongs in the second category. Like A Common Life, it is a group portrait of American writers, though this time I looked at the tight-knit circle of men and women who dominated New York (and by extension American) literary politics from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. Partisans won the Washington State Book Award in 2001.

  After the publication of that book I was itching to find another weather-related subject. This time I wanted to move from history to story: I wanted to write a compelling true narrative about the impact of extreme and deadly weather on the lives of ordinary people who became extraordinary in the course of their encounters with elements beyond their control. That, in brief, was how I came to write The Children’s Blizzard.

  “Over time it became clear that my work fell into two broad categories: weather and literary biography.”

  About the book

  Finding and Telling the Story

  I FIRST LEARNED of the “children’s blizzard” while writing Braving the Elements. I was working on a chapter called “Weather in the West”—about the droughts and tornados, dust storms and incredible cold fronts that American settlers marveled at when they crossed the Mississippi and began to settle on the great open prairie that stretches to the Rocky Mountains. As I searched for contemporary descriptions of some of these meteorological catastrophes, I came upon many accounts of the schoolchildren’s blizzard, often written by the children themselves. These searing descriptions of the sky literally exploding with snow lodged in my mind. The image of children as young as five spending that frigid night of January 12, 1888, outdoors with no shelter haunted my imagination. My account of the children’s blizzard took up a page or two in Braving the Elements, but the storm and the vividness of the accounts stayed in my head.

  Another source of inspiration was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic The Long Winter. This account of the snowy winter of 1880–81—a winter that began with a blizzard on October 15 and ended with floods the following spring—is both harrowing and absolutely factual. Every detail that Wilder put in the book—from the near starvation that isolated families suffered to the drifts of snow that buried their homes to the feeble fires of twisted hay
they had to rely on for warmth—rings absolutely true to the accounts of the pioneers. I read this book to my daughters when they were young and I was mesmerized. My book grew directly out of my reverence for Laura Ingalls Wilder and my fascination with the narratives of the pioneers.

  As the book gelled in my mind, I realized that it had all the elements of the books I most love to read and write: history, weather, religion, science, heartbreaking stories of struggle against the elements, intense faith, and bitter disappointment. What made it especially compelling to me was the fact that people confronted this storm as families. The white settlers, most of them immigrants from Europe or East Coast cities, had only been in this region for five or ten years. They were just getting established, paying off debts, replacing sod huts with their first frame houses—and then the blizzard came and destroyed them. Family was all they had, and it was the desire to save family members or the agony of wondering what had happened to a missing loved one that made these stories so overwhelming.

  On an early research trip to the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln, I filled a notebook with dozens of these family stories—and on subsequent trips to the South Dakota State Archives in Pierre and the Minnesota History Center in Saint Paul, I found scores more stories written by blizzard survivors.

  “My book grew directly out of my reverence for Laura Ingalls Wilder and my fascination with the narratives of the pioneers.”

  I realized that the most gripping narratives in my book would be the ones with the most vivid details from families. I therefore decided to contact descendants of people who were caught in the storm, and to ask them whether they had family stories, memoirs, letters, and diaries about the event. Through the Internet I found a way to take out classified ads in every newspaper in Nebraska and South Dakota, the two states hit hardest by the storm. The responses were phenomenal. After chatting with family members by phone or exchanging e-mail, I planned a series of trips to meet with them in their homes. These meetings were the most enjoyable part of researching the book. I sat down and talked for hours with people whose parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents had been caught in this storm. I drove with them down country roads between fields of corn or soybeans searching for long-vanished country school houses or old homesteads. I walked the ground that their relatives had walked over one hundred years ago as the northwest wind tore at their faces and sealed their eyelids shut with shattered snow crystals. I searched out the churchyards where these storm victims lie buried. It was these meetings that really turned The Children’s Blizzard from straight history into an intensely dramatic narrative that many readers have compared to a novel.

  “I planned a series of trips to meet with [descendants of the storm’s victims and survivors]. These meetings were the most enjoyable part of researching the book.”

  My cell phone also came in handy in tracking people down while I was on the move. I often found myself prowling through tiny country cemeteries, searching out the graves of storm victims and the nearby graves of their descendants. Some of the headstones bore the name of a person with the date of death left open. That’s when I reached for my phone. Literally standing by her future grave, I placed a call to June Woebbecke and learned that she had married into the family of one of the most celebrated storm victims, a little German girl abandoned by her parents and raised by distant relatives. I’d read contemporary newspaper accounts of Lena Woebbecke’s night alone on the freezing prairie, her terrible suffering and the eventual amputation of her legs. But I never expected to discover that the fifth generation of the Woebbecke family was living on that same farm, just two miles from the schoolhouse that Lena had left on that fatal day. Thanks to my interview with Lawrence Woebbecke, I learned that Lena had not died shortly after the blizzard, as contemporary newspapers reported, but lived on to young womanhood. She died shortly after her marriage and was buried in her wedding dress. Mr. Woebbecke gave me directions to Lena’s grave at a tiny crossroads named Ruby not far from the interstate. The Immanuel Lutheran Church where Lena and her husband, George Schopp, worshipped is gone, but the graveyard remains. Somebody is looking after it, for the grass was clipped and the headstones stood straight. Standing there for a few minutes on a warm November morning and paying my respects to this brave and unfortunate individual was something I’ll never forget.

  “Writing the scenes of their deaths—or miraculous rescues—made the awesome, unpredictable power of America’s weather almost unbearably real to me.”

  By the time I finished writing the book, Lena Woebbecke and the other storm victims whose brief lives I had tried to reconstruct were precious parts of my own life. Writing the scenes of their deaths—or miraculous rescues—made the awesome, unpredictable power of America’s weather almost unbearably real to me.

  Read on

  Living History The Author Receives Some Astoundingly Deep-rooted E-mails from His Readers

  I HAVE RECEIVED scores of messages from families affected by the storm. Every time I read or lecture about the book, whether in the region where the blizzard hit or farther a field, someone comes forward to share a story about their storm-linked ancestor. Each story rings true to a detail or an account in the book. Each one is precious.

  “It was affirming to see that what I wrote corresponds so closely with the stories that have come down through families.”

  I’d like to share two of the family stories that directly concern individuals I wrote about in the book. I was touched that these people took the time to write me at such length. And it was affirming to see that what I wrote corresponds so closely with the stories that have come down through their families.

  On New Year’s Day 2005, I received this e-mail message from a woman living in Kansas named Donna Zerger:

  Dear Mr. Laskin,

  I picked up your book in a Barnes & Noble bookstore on a display of new books in Wichita, Kansas, and started scanning through the first chapter or two. I suddenly recognized the names of my husband’s great-grandparents, Johann and Anna Kaufman, and I was immediately riveted. The story you tell is one that has been passed down in my husband’s family for one hundred and sixteen years. His grandmother, Anna Kaufman Zerger, was the youngest of their ten children. We have heard mostly through oral history, how seven of her brothers died—one in the old country, one on the ship while crossing to America, one in the years following their arrival in South Dakota, three in the terrible blizzard, and finally the last one in Kansas of appendicitis at the age of twenty or twenty-one after working hard all day in the field…. The tragedies that dogged the Kaufman family through many years brought the three remaining siblings very close…. One hundred and ten years after the major disaster of the blizzard, the descendants of those remaining three siblings were still providing support and care to each other in times of need and celebration. The suffering they endured left a mark on the family, which has extended to three generations and shaped their relationships and connectedness.

  The story was not new to me even before my marriage into the Zerger family, because I too am a “descendant” of the great blizzard of 1888. Peter O. and Susanna Gering Graber are my great-grandparents. My grandfather, Christian C. Graber, turned ten about a week after the fateful blizzard and was next in age to Andrew, who you call Andreas in the book. Although he was old enough to go to school and had been attending that year, he stayed home the day of the blizzard, but years later, did not remember why. His brother Peter was one of the five who froze to death and their house, being closest to the school, was the shelter they were all attempting to reach. What struck me when reading your book, was how closely all the details you describe resemble the oral history which has been handed down through the generations in my family also. It seems amazing that one hundred plus years after the fact, the details that were handed down through two families mostly by word of mouth and that you discovered through extensive research, are so consistent…. John, the older of the two Graber boys who made it to their house and survived, grew up to be
come a Kansas state legislator and businessman. The family has been prolific and successful. Our branch is long on farmers, teachers, engineers, and carpenters and, includes architects, computer specialists, and meteorologists. From our humble beginnings in a two-room house, we found America to truly be a land of opportunity.

  I thank you for choosing to research and write this story so that both of our family histories will be preserved.

  —Donna Graber Zerger

  “‘Although he was old enough to go to school, he stayed home the day of the blizzard, but years later, did not remember why.’”

  A few days later an e-mail message arrived from a cousin of Donna’s. Evidently the far-flung Graber family has a very active network. Carolyn Graber Trout’s message to me was long and vivid and heartbreaking. Here is part of it:

  “‘My dad told the story of the blizzard to us so often that we felt as if we had been there struggling in the blinding snow.’”

  Dear Mr. Laskin,

  My dad told the story of the blizzard to us so often that we felt as if we had been there struggling in the blinding snow. His father—my grandfather, Christian Graber—was home the day his brother Peter froze along with the other four boys. My parents have the brief description grandpa wrote of that terrible day. I don’t remember grandpa telling the story, but I do remember hearing it from my great-uncle, Andrew, who managed to make it home safely. I was probably about six or seven when I heard the story from him, but I can still remember how he looked when he talked about letting go his brother’s hand to wipe the ice from his face. Great-uncle Andrew was holding his cane, the tip of it centered between his shoes as he sat in his chair. When he was telling us how he couldn’t find his brother’s hand again, he rapped his cane against the floorboards. Hard. I remember that it made me jump.