The Children's Blizzard

This year's One Book One Community selection in Alliance is The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin. Readers who have participated in past OBOC events in Alliance will be familiar with the structure: various presentations over the next several months dealing with issues in the book, climaxing with a personal appearance by the author. 

Despite its somber subject matter, Benjamin’s book is an enjoyable read. Based on a real-life tragedy, the book tracks the story of two (fictional) siblings, Gerda and Raina Olsen, and the very different choices they make on January 12, 1888, the fateful day when a sudden and violent prairie blizzard strikes Nebraska and the Dakota Territory. Saying which sister makes the right choice and which the wrong would rob the book of much of its suspense, so I’ll avoid dropping spoilers.

The book also provides insight into the practice of using very young women— girls, really—as school teachers in the West. Raina Olsen is sixteen at the time of the story, just one year older than her oldest student. Young women like Raina and Gerta were responsible not only to teach all subjects to a single room full of students of diverse languages and needs, but also to clean the building, ensure a supply of wood or coal for heat, and occasionally make life-or-death decisions that would tax even today’s highest-paid superintendents. 

Benjamin does a great job of describing in detail the suddenness of the storm, the bone-chilling cold and low visibility that resulted, and the many deaths, some of which were not discovered until the spring thaw. She contrasts the story of the homesteaders, lured in many cases, out west under false pretenses with the story of Omaha-based newspaper writer Gavin Woodson, responsible for some of the flowery copy that falsely painted Nebraska and the surrounding areas a garden of eden ripe for the picking. 

Comparisons to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are inevitable. A quote from Oprah Daily on the back cover notes that Wilder fans will also like this novel, which is probably accurate. Benjamin also invites such comparisons through “Little Schoolhouse on the Prairie,” an afterword in the paperback edition that delves into the responsibilities of prairie schoolteachers and references the long-running television series based on Wilder’s books. 

Benjamin’s work is more nuanced because it takes into account injustices faced by American Indians, displaced by the government and forced to live on reservations, their children schooled by institutions that sought to strip them of their heritage. The Children’s Blizzard also provides a Black American perspective through the character of Ollie Tennant, a bartender in Omaha who moves his family to a different part of the city once it becomes clear that white residents do not prioritize his children’s education or physical health. 

These are important reminders that much of America’s legacy has been stamped over the unwilling sacrifices of others. These scenes don’t overwhelm the narrative, but they deepen it. 

The novel also underscores, even in the halcyon days of the nineteenth century, the role of mass media (in this case, newspapers) to shape reality and to support the welfare of big businesses (the railroads). Woodson, who sets out to redeem himself after writing glowing puff pieces that coax people out west, instead becomes a participant in growing his paper’s circulation through romanticized stories of heroism involving the blizzard. His is a dubious redemption. 

I recommend The Children’s Blizzard. It spotlights a largely forgotten incident in American history, evokes a sense of bone-chilling cold, and provides plenty of food for thought. 

To learn more about the Alliance OBOC program for 2023, visit the Rodman Library website. 

Revisiting an old friend in the Little House books

Prevailing wisdom among people who study pre-teen reading habits is that girls will read books about boys, but boys are less likely to read books about girls.

Maybe this is changing because of the success of “The Hunger Games,” with a strong female lead whose exploits in three bestselling books are a hit with not only the YA crowd, but adults as well.

I’ve always been an exception to the boys-not-reading-about-girls rule, myself. One of my earliest literary adventures was “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” with spunky Dorothy traveling down “the road of yellow brick,” encountering eccentric companions and showing off her silver slippers to good effect. (Her route became “the yellow brick road” and her footwear turned ruby only in the MGM movie.) I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, and Judy Garland was one of my first big-screen crushes, even if she was too old to play Dorothy.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit another childhood favorite with a female protagonist: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, newly reprinted in two handsome hardbacks by the Library of America.

These books hold a special place in my heart. When I was a new student at Washington Elementary School in 1976, my second-grade teacher, Melva Jean Watson, read aloud from “Little House on the Prairie” almost every day. Something about the Ingalls family leaving Wisconsin and heading West in a covered wagon struck a chord with me, even if my own migration from Middlebranch to Washington Township in the backseat of a car wasn’t much by comparison.

I am still impressed by the family’s moxy. Laura’s father, referred to mostly as Pa, decides the woods of Wisconsin — immortalized in the first book of the series, “Little House in the Big Woods” — are becoming too crowded. “Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun,” writes Wilder, who refers to herself in the third person. “The path that went by the little house had become a road.”

Those all sound like good reasons to stay in Wisconsin, not leave it, but nobody has ever accused me of having an overabundance of pioneer spirit.

In the books, little Laura and her sisters often take a backseat to the story of their parents, and Laura’s main occupation is to observe the ways of pioneer families. Not surprisingly for people who lived for — and by — the harvest, the books are filled with food, much more than I remember from age 8. (Maybe Mrs. Watson omitted some parts.)

The Ingalls’ attic in Wisconsin is a veritable produce stand: “The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

In “Farmer Boy,” which tells the boyhood story of Ingall’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York, mealtime is almost sensuous. “Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed …”

All that’s missing is a cigarette afterward.

Nearly every page of the “Little House” books are filled with industrious people planting, nurturing, harvesting, storing, slaughtering and building for winter. It’s impressive, especially to a reader whose winter preparations involve nothing more than covering the air-conditioning unit with a tarp and buying a new ice scraper for the car.

Wilder’s characters have fun too, going to the occasional dance and inviting extended family to visit at the holidays, but mostly they work.

One of my favorite sequences in the books, however, has nothing to do with harvests or dances. Later in “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo’s teacher drives a group of disruptive students out of his classroom using an ox-whip. Taking the biblical injunction to spare the rod and spoil the child almost literally, the teacher thrashes the students, jerking them off their feet, tearing their clothes and bloodying their bodies.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I always thought Mrs. Watson read that section with even more vim and vigor than the other chapters.

It’s always nice to revisit old friends, and even nicer to find out that they are more companionable than you remember. So it is with the Little House books. While these new editions omit the classic illustrations by Garth Williams, they are hardly missed. Laura Ingalls Wilder still holds me in thrall with stories of pioneer pluck and an almost-vanished lifestyle that appeal to either gender and all ages.

Originally published in April 2013 in The Alliance Review