![]() ![]() ![]() Precursor storms arrived throughout 1887, devastating the open-range system of cattle management. In his telling, scores of Germans, Scandinavians, and persecuted Ukrainian Mennonites found irresistible American railroad agents’ promises of free grassland prairie homesteads in “one of the most beautiful climates in the world.” Though the land was indeed spacious, it proved capricious and unforgiving of the immigrants’ naiveté, besetting them with locusts, fires, snowstorms, droughts, and other seeming “acts of God.” Still, nothing compared to the 1888 blizzard, as its stoic survivors’ awed narratives make clear. Laskin shrewdly takes a broad historical view, arguing that the snowstorm-which killed hundreds, including numerous schoolchildren-demonstrated the folly of settling the Dakota and Nebraska territories. ![]() “The tragedy of the January 12 blizzard was that the bad timing extended across a region and cut through the shared experiences of an entire population,” asserts the author. Popular historian Laskin ( Partisans, 2000, etc.) gives an engrossing if speculative account of a brutal 1888 blizzard that signaled the end of optimism on the Great Plains. ![]()
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