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| The closest thing I could find in my photo albums to a blizzard-stricken Dakota Territory is an exceptionally snowy day at Fort Necessity. |
The Children's Blizzard by David LaskinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The answer is Pa Ingalls, of COURSE. But I also hate railroad tycoons!
One of the things that I like most about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novels is that she explicitly places them in a specific geographic and historical context that she very much wants to be relatable. She tells her audience that she is writing books about what it was like when their grandparents were children. But Wilder writes these fictional stories about the fictional childhood of a fictional grandparent as someone with no living grandchildren to tell her own real-life stories to. Other than the first-draft memoir Pioneer Girl, we don’t really know what her real-life version of her childhood would have been and how it would have differed from the fictional Little House. We know only a handful of the many stories that Pa, also a storyteller, must have passed down to her and her siblings. But based on what we do know about Wilder, her memoir and interviews, the historical records, and how much trouble librarians have always had figuring out how to shelve the books, we know that her stories are often (mostly?) true to life, sometimes only lightly fictionalized, and sometimes simply more inclined to be an idealized version of her overall tumultuous childhood. We can’t take her words as gospel, obviously--and nor do we, or at least me and my fellow Pa Haters don’t, because it’s clear as day how much Wilder wants us to love Pa. But dang, would it be easier to categorize Wilder’s work if she’d had a better understanding of authorship and journalistic integrity… or maybe not, since her style of outsider art heavily edited by a narcissist daughter with a political agenda and an equally loose concept of authorship is maybe what makes these books so special.
Anyway, all that is simply to say that I read The Children’s Blizzard specifically to directly inform my understanding of Wilder’s The Long Winter, so much so that I also re-read The Long Winter, which will be a tale for another day, but wow. SO much bleaker than I remembered!
And as far as directly informing The Long Winter, it both did? And also didn’t?
The part that was most informative regarding The Long Winter, and the decision-making therein (which again, is explicitly fiction, but could be anywhere from lightly fictionalized to completely invented), was the looming, but rarely actualized, presence of That. Fucking. Train! Reading this book, I’m almost glad that our rail system mostly went the way of the dodo, because those train magnates deserved nothing but bad things! Bad people! Bad! Bad and booo!
Genuinely, though, I actually am really sad about the state of our rail system. I don’t want the train companies to snooker me into moving into a death zone, but I DO want to be able to take the train to Indianapolis and Louisville and Cincinnati and St. Louis, which I could have done 100 years ago! Just give me the 1920 version of train travel without the 1920 version of impending economic downfall!
ANYWAY. The idea behind The Children’s Blizzard is that the train companies lied, cheated, stole, and did whatever else they could get away with (which was basically everything) to get people to move--via train, in many cases!--out to these lands stolen from the indigenous peoples, then when the settlers got there in many cases the train company sold them land they themselves had gotten free from the government, and when the settlers needed supplies, well, guess what? All those supplies came out by TRAIN!
Again, more on that when I write specifically about The Long Winter, but still. Don’t forget that we HATE those train assholes!
Anyway, all that is simply to say that I read The Children’s Blizzard specifically to directly inform my understanding of Wilder’s The Long Winter, so much so that I also re-read The Long Winter, which will be a tale for another day, but wow. SO much bleaker than I remembered!
And as far as directly informing The Long Winter, it both did? And also didn’t?
The part that was most informative regarding The Long Winter, and the decision-making therein (which again, is explicitly fiction, but could be anywhere from lightly fictionalized to completely invented), was the looming, but rarely actualized, presence of That. Fucking. Train! Reading this book, I’m almost glad that our rail system mostly went the way of the dodo, because those train magnates deserved nothing but bad things! Bad people! Bad! Bad and booo!
Genuinely, though, I actually am really sad about the state of our rail system. I don’t want the train companies to snooker me into moving into a death zone, but I DO want to be able to take the train to Indianapolis and Louisville and Cincinnati and St. Louis, which I could have done 100 years ago! Just give me the 1920 version of train travel without the 1920 version of impending economic downfall!
ANYWAY. The idea behind The Children’s Blizzard is that the train companies lied, cheated, stole, and did whatever else they could get away with (which was basically everything) to get people to move--via train, in many cases!--out to these lands stolen from the indigenous peoples, then when the settlers got there in many cases the train company sold them land they themselves had gotten free from the government, and when the settlers needed supplies, well, guess what? All those supplies came out by TRAIN!
Again, more on that when I write specifically about The Long Winter, but still. Don’t forget that we HATE those train assholes!
It would still be unethical business practices if, when people got to those territories, they discovered that everything was exactly as it had been depicted to them. Even if you really could simply tickle the ground and wheat would grow, the train monopoly would be too powerful to be trustworthy. But the train monopoly was too powerful AND they were a bunch of liars, because the climate in those territories was not suited for what they'd advertised, so not only could people not making a living as promised, but they couldn't even come prepared for what they'd be facing.
Specifically, those winters. They were bad, they were long, and settlers were completely unprepared to survive them. Neither sod houses nor claim shanties had proper insulation, and people were often unable to stock enough food and fuel to see them through to Spring, much less stock enough to keep their animals alive. This Children's Blizzard was unusual only in its suddenness and its timing, which struck most places during the school day, when kids who lived miles from the school house had come to school that day in light clothes appropriate for the warm spell they'd enjoyed that morning. But the cold killed settlers all winter, every winter.
The petty politics of weather forecasters was a necessary but dry part of the book, and you can genuinely skip those sections and still know what’s going on. Guys didn’t always do their jobs correctly, sometimes people were drunk, and telegrams cost money that the government didn’t always want to pay, all of which led to the news about the cold front not getting spread like it should, but I dunno how much of an impact a correct forecast really would have had here. It’s not like kids were checking the morning weather forecast before leaving for school!
What did not inform my re-read of The Long Winter is that this blizzard actually was not the one depicted in The Long Winter. I was sure it was, because Wilder describes a blizzard early in the book that matches the description of the Children’s Blizzard VERY well. But it’s not, oops! It does make me wonder if Wilder drew on newspaper descriptions of that blizzard for her scene, though. But the book was still worth reading, because it did inform my overall understanding of The Long Winter, the migration to Dakota Territory, and the impact of that FUCKING train, ugh!
If you’re into disaster non-fiction (and if you are, then my response to you is “!!!?!!!”), this book pairs well with David McCullough’s book on the Johnstown Flood. They occurred in adjacent years, the painful level of detail about the individual experience of each disaster is similar, and the aftermath is also interestingly similar in terms of the media response. The media loves a darling!
P.S. View all my reviews
The petty politics of weather forecasters was a necessary but dry part of the book, and you can genuinely skip those sections and still know what’s going on. Guys didn’t always do their jobs correctly, sometimes people were drunk, and telegrams cost money that the government didn’t always want to pay, all of which led to the news about the cold front not getting spread like it should, but I dunno how much of an impact a correct forecast really would have had here. It’s not like kids were checking the morning weather forecast before leaving for school!
What did not inform my re-read of The Long Winter is that this blizzard actually was not the one depicted in The Long Winter. I was sure it was, because Wilder describes a blizzard early in the book that matches the description of the Children’s Blizzard VERY well. But it’s not, oops! It does make me wonder if Wilder drew on newspaper descriptions of that blizzard for her scene, though. But the book was still worth reading, because it did inform my overall understanding of The Long Winter, the migration to Dakota Territory, and the impact of that FUCKING train, ugh!
If you’re into disaster non-fiction (and if you are, then my response to you is “!!!?!!!”), this book pairs well with David McCullough’s book on the Johnstown Flood. They occurred in adjacent years, the painful level of detail about the individual experience of each disaster is similar, and the aftermath is also interestingly similar in terms of the media response. The media loves a darling!
P.S. View all my reviews
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