Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, January 11th and January 12th, 1888, a massive blizzard sweeps across the U.S. Great Plains,

starts in Canada, through the Dakotas in Nebraska over to Minnesota and Wisconsin.

As we'll discuss though, it really touched much of the United States.

People were ice skating in San Francisco, there were some reports of that.

But the Blizzard and the extreme cold is remembered not mostly for the area that it covered but for its death toll

In the end some 235 people died in this storm one of the deadliest winter storms on record, and a great number of those people

who lost their lives were children, school children, many of them stuck at school or trying to

get home from their schoolhouses.

The deaths of the children was such a defining story coming out of this.

This became known as the quote Children's Blizzard of 1888.

So let's talk about that, the Children's Blizzard Blizzard the Schoolhouse Blizzard here as always Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt. Hello Nicky

Hello Jody and Kelly Carter Jackson is not with us today. She has as I think you heard last episode she had knee surgery to

ring in the new year she's recovering not taping this week but we wish her

well she will be back soon so we'll do it Nicky and I I think all of us on the team here when we found this story had the

reaction of like, why in the world would you call this this cool kids' blizzard?

Because it actually sounds kind of jolly, right? Like, oh, the schoolhouse blizzard.

And then you read the story and you're like, oh, well,

this is awful.

Yeah, it's because kids were trapped inside their school houses.

But we will get to that and why that was a kind of defining story of this blizzard.

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