Two years ago in December, in eastern South Dakota, my son and I semi-wittingly encountered what one resident of Aberdeen informed us was the worst blizzard in the region in at least 50 years. Other nearby coffee cup-gripping kibitzers nodded soberly in agreement. And the storm was, as best I can describe it, a doozey?a full-scale inland hurricane. We survived it in the shelter of a Motel 6, with cable TV and a bucket of 40-weight fried chicken.

The 50-year blizzard of 2005 was confined mostly to the northern tier of the Dakotas, cost a number of lives and it shut down civilization for several days, even though residents and travelers knew of its approach and ferocity. The doozey that was that storm, however, paled in comparison to the intensity, size and tragedy of The School Children's Storm of January 12, 1888.

"I have seen the Dread of Dakota...and am now ready to leave anytime we can sell," wrote a Dakota homesteader to family in the East. "Oh, it was terrible. I have often read about Blizzards but they have to be seen to be fully realized."

That widespread aftermath sentiment is reported near the end of David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard (2004), which powerfully chronicles the unforecasted, deadly blitzkrieg of a storm that took the lives of at least several hundred settlers on the Great Plains, including too many children caught in its grip as they left schoolhouses and struggled to reach home or any available shelter.

By no means was the Children's Blizzard of 1888 the first killing storm on the Great Plains. Others, perhaps even worse because of their duration, occurred in 1873 and 1880-81, and killed millions of cattle and wildlife. In those years, fewer people resided on the mixed-grass prairies, so there were fewer human victims. Nonetheless, those caught unaware and in the open also died. The deaths of some, lost and played out just steps from safety, are not rural myths.

In the late 1880s, the Great American Desert was populated by Civil War veterans and foreign immigrants lured there by the "American letters"?extravagant promises of railroad company hucksters and by their own hopes for lives better than in their Scandinavian, Ukrainian and other Middle European homelands. They were pioneers who settled on the former bison-hunting grounds of vanquished Indians in the Dakotas, Nebraska, eastern Montana, Minnesota and Iowa. They arrived by steerage-class in ships, in bench-seated boxcars, by ox carts and boot leather. Their American Dream began treeless.

Residing in soddies and dugouts, they settled and proved up free or dirt-cheap quarter sections, burned buffalo chips, twisted straw and rare coal for fuel, and they plowed for a livelihood through thick prairie grasses to a remarkably fertile soil. Compared to the material, ecumenical and economic constraints from whence they arrived, the hardships and privations of settlement were nominal prices to pay. But there lurked the Four Horsemen of the Great Plains?prairie fire, grasshoppers, drought and winter storms. Most of the sodbusters persevered by dint of religious faith and toil. They were bolstered in their faith by reading from thick family Bibles. Their burden of labor was eased by children.

When crops were in, livestock pastured and weather permitting, the children trekked daily as much as several miles to small, uninsulated and poorly heated schoolhouses, to learn the educational basics.

On an unseasonably warm and mild morning, January 12, 1888, after children arrived at the schools and were beginning their lessons, the blizzard struck. Only a very few, whose parents sensed or understood the atmospheric indicators of massive cold weather fronts, stayed safe.

What occurred suddenly across the plains was a dark tsunami of billowing, shrieking wind, blistering cold and flour-like ice crystals so dense and invasive that they blinded and suffocated. At speed faster than any horse or locomotive or the response time of an inattentive Signal Corps (responsible for weather predictions and warning in those days), the blizzard advanced mercilessly over thousands of square miles before the morning of the next day, Friday the 13th.

By one contemporary account, 20,000 people were overtaken and, quite miraculously, only about 1 percent perished. But of that percentage, 40 were children who necessarily, but fatally fled their schools. Later accounts, following spring thaw, set the death toll much higher.

This 307-page book, wonderfully constructed, tells of the tragedy of that enormous storm?tragedy borne of miscalculation, soft science, pettiness, fateful timing and happenstance. In its pages is the tapestry of three convergent, historical dramas?the birth of a killer blizzard, the emerging discipline of weather forecasting and the churlishness among many of its practitioners, and collision of weather and the lives of individual families.

Previous reviews in this newsletter have dealt with books documenting other natural or human-facilitated environmental disasters. They, like the topic of this book, relate that all resources, values and expectations are subject to the vagaries of Nature. A common thematic element among them is that we humans are blind to or increasingly apathetic about the forces of nature. But time and again, history has proven that our defenses and preparedness, even today (witness Katrina), aren't nearly enough to stem the omnipotent nature of Nature. Real or imagined, the newfound focus on global warming and climate change hopefully will not be another saturation of foreboding that eventually leaves society blas? and vulnerable until Nature gets around to correcting itself and us, metaphorically, by another children's blizzard.

The Children's Blizzard was published by HarperCollins, 10 E. 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022. It currently is available in paperback for $13.95 from here.