ALBERTA CLIPPERS, DAKOTA DRIFTERS, AND PANHANDLE HOOKERS. Thus the three major tracks of winter storms east of the Rockies, something recognized by Lieutenant Thomas Mayhew Woodruff, Signal Corps weather forecaster in St. Paul in January 1888. But in those days which track any particular storm would take, and how quickly, was not known. Thus, when a particularly deep low brings in train a particularly cold high with great speed, The Children's Blizzard, which is Book Review No. 22, has several tragic stories of death by exposure, made worse because many people who began their day dressed for the warm sector ahead of what we now understand to be the cold front were taken completely by surprise by the storm.

There are four or five strands to the story. The storm itself is relatively unimportant; it's the optimism of emigrant farmers anticipating the consequences of Scandinavian land-tenure laws and Russification policies (Alexander II's mistreatment of German Protestants in Volhynia figures in the Superintendent's family history) and seeking opportunities to become landed gentry in a new country; the eagerness of the railroads to develop traffic in the empty spaces between the midwestern gateways and the Pacific Ports that led many of those migrants to believe the Northern Plains had a lot of upside potential; the public choice dynamic at work by which St. Paul received a weather station to provide, at taxpayer expense, information of great commercial value to elevators and packers; and, ultimately, the recriminations over the Signal Corps's failure to anticipate this blizzard, and a slightly more deadly late spring blizzard in New York City and New England two months later, that structure this story.

Perhaps author David Laskin would have a better story without some of the editorializing. His criticism, at p. 86, of Lt. Woodruff, who was ceremonially sacked in the recriminations, for "lacking imagination" suffers when he twins "A common failing in a person trained and drilled all his adult life in military discipline. A common failing in an age hell-bent on material progress and territorial expansion." In a foxhole, your imagination can get you killed. In business, or in migration, it is your lack of imagination that will be your undoing. Come off it. Likewise, his p. 269 explanation for the storm being called the "Children's Blizzard" because many of the dead were youngsters caught out at school is a bit over the top.

[I]n a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children's disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did the work no one else had time for or stomach for. The outpouring of grief after scores of children were found frozen to death ... was at least in part an expression of remorse for what children were subjected to every day -- remorse for the fact that most children had no childhood. This was a society that could not afford to sentimentalize its living and working children. ... A safe and carefree childhood was a luxury the pioneer prairie could not afford.

Nor could any other hardscrabble society, whether in Europe where many of the stories began, or any of the poorer parts of today's world. Might it be more accurate to argue that the entire history of preindustrial civilization has been a children's disaster, in which offspring are necessary liabilities to provide any hope of support for the few adults to survive to an age at which they're no longer able to work?