“Januray 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning aacross
Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that
children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that
afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently
changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded
in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds.
Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped
through the center of the continent. By Friday morning, January
13, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie,
many of them children who had perished on their way home from
country schools.” The Children’s Blizzard was both fascinating
and disturbing. I’ve never lived “up North.” Reading Little
House on the Prairie books is the extent of my exposure to
blizzards and the like. So reading about the horrible
possibilities inherent in an American plains blizzard was eye-
opening. Did you know: that in a particularly bad snowstorm
something can occur called St. Elmo’s f