Many children who had been kept home because of the intense cold trooped off to schools across the Midwest when the conditions turned unseasonably warm that Thursday morning.

When a wind-whipped blizzard and cold wave swept through in mid-afternoon, hundreds were faced with a choice — freeze to death in their little country schools or try to trudge home in the storm.

That desperate choice, and how teachers, students, families and communities coped with it, or failed to do so, is the engrossing focus of “The Children’s Blizzard” (HarperCollins, $24.95).

Author David Laskin has mined local historical records, newspaper files and family memories to compile a tragic and informative story of the January 1888 disaster little recalled today.

The exact death toll is not known, but estimates range from 250 to 500, many of them youngsters who never made it home from school — their deaths providing the book’s title.

Minnie Freeman, a teenager herself who taught school in the Nebraska sand hills area, became a heroine. Facing freezing conditions when the fuel ran out at the school, she led her 13 students — some reports had them tied together — into the storm and got them all to safety at a farmhouse a half-mile away.

That was no simple feat in blowing snow that allowed only inches of visibility. Many people died in that storm trying to get from their barn to the house just yards away.

In Groton, S.D., a parent brought a dray to the school to fetch the endangered children, but as they were leaving, young Walter Allen jumped off and ran back to get something. When he emerged from the school, no one was visible in the whiteout, out of earshot in the screaming wind. So the 8-year-old set out on foot.

Fine pellets blew into his eyes and made them water, and tears and snow eventually froze his eyes closed. He fell into the snow and gave up.

That would have marked his end but for his 18-year-old brother, Will, who realized that visibility was better close to the ground and crawled on hands and knees in the bitter cold until he found Walter and dragged the unconscious but alive youngster home.

The stories were tragic for many.

“They froze alone or with their parents or perished in frantic, hopeless pursuit of loved ones,” Laskin writes. “They died with the frozen, bloody skin torn from their faces, where they had clawed off the mask of ice again and again.”

It’s a chronicle of tragedy, but Laskin spins the story together to bring the people, place and event into reality, a tale of love and courage and death.