In three minutes, the front subtracted eighteen degrees from the air's temperature. Then evening gathered in, and temperatures kept droppingin the norhtwest gale. By morning on Friday, January 13, 1888, more that 100 children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska prairie.
Thousands of impovrished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered "land, freedom and hope." The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood or controlled, and America's heartland would never be the same.