The Great Blizzard of 1886-1887 is one of the harshest blizzards on record for the Plains states (though at the time, most of them were still territories, not yet admitted as states to the Union). The blizzard is immortalized and made famous for school children everywhere in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel, “The Long Winter,” which is part of her Little House on the Prairie series of books. Wilder weathered this blizzard as a teenager in South Dakota with her family and describes the hardships her family and the town went through during this infamous weather event. It is a wonderful first-hand account of someone who went through the harsh winter and survived, during times before houses had things like electricity, indoor heating, and hot water plumbing...