Schoolchildren's Blizzard | Not Forgotten | 5
Against The Odds
Audible
4.7 • 7.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
Early settlers to the Midwest were accustomed to harsh winters, but the blizzard that hit the Great Plains on January 12th, 1888 caught thousands of pioneer families off guard. The storm was especially brutal for children trying to find their way home from rural schoolhouses. Author David Laskin joins host Mike Corey to talk about how he pieced together the stories of the blizzard, and how the event lives on in the memory of their descendants. Laskin is the award-winning author of The Children’s Blizzard, and The Family.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This series contains depictions of violence and death involving children and may not be suitable for everyone. |
| 0:10.0 | From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. |
| 0:54.0 | Thank you. This is against the odds. Imagine it's the late 1880s, and you're a pioneer, farming a homestead in the Dakota Territory. So far, January has been |
| 0:56.7 | very cold, but this morning, January 12th, is a little warmer. There's some sun. Who knows, |
| 1:03.6 | maybe it's the sign of a winter thaw? Your kids go off to the schoolhouse and you head off to a day |
| 1:09.4 | of farm chores. You have no idea what's coming. |
| 1:14.2 | The blizzard that hit the Upper Midwest on January 12, 1888, took thousands of people by surprise. |
| 1:21.7 | Everywhere from Montana to Nebraska and the Dakota Territory to Iowa, it was one of the worst blizzards in U.S. history, devastating for the people who became trapped, |
| 1:32.1 | especially for school children trying to get home. |
| 1:35.5 | My guest today is award-winning author David Laskin. |
| 1:38.8 | He wrote The Children's Blizzard, which won the Washington State Book Award in 2005. |
| 1:46.4 | David Laskin, welcome to Against the Odds. Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here. So tell me, why did you write this book about a |
| 1:52.7 | blizzard that probably most people have never heard of? When did it first come on your radar? |
| 1:58.2 | Okay, so I am a lifelong weather nut. That's something that was |
| 2:01.8 | instilled in made by my dad, and I turned that mania for weather to good use in a book that I wrote |
| 2:08.4 | many years ago now called Braving the Elements. A subtitle, which was chosen by my publisher, |
| 2:12.8 | was the stormy history of American weather. And it was a cultural history of weather in this country, |
| 2:19.4 | and one of the chapters was called Weather in the West. And that chapter detailed the reactions |
| 2:25.4 | of the early settlers and pioneers to new weather phenomena that they experienced as they started |
| 2:32.1 | pushing west to settle the Great Plains and all the way |
| 2:35.4 | out to California. |
| 2:36.7 | And while researching this chapter, that was when I first came upon references to the |
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