The Children's Blizzard
• The Weather Channel began assigning names to big snowstorms in 2012. A blizzard that blasted the Midwest on Jan. 12, 1888, was so destructive that it acquired several names: "The Children's Blizzard," "The Schoolchildren's Blizzard" and "The Schoolhouse Blizzard."
• The morning felt more like April than January: warm, calm and clear.
• Oscar Coursey, three of his siblings and their schoolmates were at recess the morning of Jan. 12, 1888, outside the schoolhouse near their homestead in southwestern Beadle County, playing in their shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens. "Suddenly, we looked up and saw something coming rolling toward us with great fury from the northwest, and making a loud noise," Coursey wrote in

Pioneering in Dakota.  "It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver, and then all tied together with great silvery rope."
• All the children had just gotten inside the schoolhouse when the storm struck with such force that it nearly moved the building off its cobblestone foundation.
• George Duernberger had taken his horses to a well about one-half mile from his homestead in Faulk County when one of the horses jerked the halter rope from his hand and started for the barn. A hurried glance to the northwest showed him a gray bank.
• "Then the wind came. Everything was blotted out, and the trail disappeared, the

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