Welcome to Poets on the Plains, I’m Brad Aaron Modlin. This poem is by Rayni K. Wekluk. Let’s start with the title: “The Railroad Brought Us Here.” Us as collective—the inhabitants who arrived to The Great Plains in train cars.

For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we're talking about the book The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin. This is about the 1888 blizzard. It affected three states, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

When the Jeffersonian explorer Zebulon Pike undertook his Southwest Expedition in 1806, he went in search of the headwaters of the Arkansas River and the Red River. His trek brought him from the area of St. Louis through the Kansas plains, and into Southeastern Colorado. He camped on Willow Creek, near present day Lamar, at a place that has since been designated a community park.

In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin seeks to unpack the complex history of Anabaptist emigration to the Great Plains and the eventual tragedy of the 1888 blizzard, which took the lives of hundreds of people, many of them children. There are many points where Laskin might impart some sense of cosmic morality to these events, such as when he repeatedly notes that the land that lured these settlers from their Mennonite communities in Europe had been violently seized from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited it for millennia by the U.S. military and railroad companies.