Hope

I finished the book, The Children’s Blizzard and I certainly recommend it if you’re at all interested in the history of the Plains states. It’s really everyone’s history as what happened there shaped our countries vision. Not just the blizzards, but the grandeur as well. Imagine yourself, an immigrant fresh from a dying Europe and seeing that limitless expanse of grass. Not a tree in sight. Sod that had never been touched by a plow and 160 acres of it was all yours. All you had to do was to pay $18 and ‘prove it up’ within 5 years. But no one had told the immigrant of the blizzards and the prairie fires and the grasshoppers. They would soon find out all about those things and more, yet they persevered. Tough people!

A little fact to ponder. Between 1850 and 1900, 16.5 million humans left Europe for America. Most of these immigrants didn’t speak English and would settle among those that spoke their own language. Friesians, Mennonites, Estonians, Norwegians, Danes, Russians, etc. You would think that would teach us that if we left people to their own devices, that within a generation or two they would find a common language. And they did. Imagine that!