Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Children's Blizzard

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Children's Blizzard

According to David Laskin's final chapter, 'nearly 70% of the counties in the Great Plains states have fewer people today than they did in 1950.  These days nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the Census Bureau in the nineteenth century.... and Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s.  The white farmers and townspeople who remain would shun you for daring to say it, but in large stretches of the prairie it's beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history.'