Research Paper On Death On The Blizzard Of 1888

Death on the Prairies: The Murderous Blizzard of 1888 The Blizzard of 1888 was one of the worst natural disasters to occur in U.S. history. It dramatically affected the Great Plains of Montana, the Dakota Territories, Nebraska, and Minnesota. This devastating weather event impacted the land, people, and migration during one of the worst times in America. The land’s temperature reached record low numbers around 40 degrees below zero (Laskin 41). Hundreds of people heavily struggled in the cold and some would eventually froze to death. Originally, there was a massive increase of settlements in the western frontiers but, there was also a huge decrease in migration as farmers head back to the eastern cities. Nicholas D. Kristof, writer of New

Around 225 million acres of land were planted with crops as settlers arrived for almost thirty years after 1870 (41). However, on January 12, 1888, the blizzard came as gray clouds formed and windchills blew over the Dakota and Nebraska prairies. On the same day, that disaster hit when children went to school without winter clothing and farmers who were doing chores far away from their homes. Temperatures decreased as every hour passed and it reached to the point that people would have frozen faces if exposed. The air was so dense that it was hard for people to breathe and hypothermia became common. Obviously, crops were frozen and there was no hope of growing anything at that storm. Major John Wesley Powell, an explorer, geologist, and writer in meteorology, said “When it came to great disasters” people knew far less that they thought they knew” (42). Back then, weather forecasters were a failure due to errors, faults, and lack of better technology to predict possible weather

At first, thousands jumped at the opportunity for a fresh start with their own land. Soon, those plans went up to smokes even at the end of the blizzard. There were more difficulties such as droughts that appeared in the 1890s (48). People went broke as income went down because corn prices was cut in half in the late 1800s. Over time, families left their homes and a majority of them went back to the urban coast. Though, some return to the plains for a second chance but, it was fruitless in the end. It went to around 70 percent of those states have less people than the year of 1950. One would compared this condition to the frontier by the Census Bureau in the early 1800s. The Native Americans returned and their bison settle in those regions, thus their populations “reached levels that has not seen since the 1870s” (49). Factors such as the depressed economy and natural disasters led to the costly failure of Great Plains