I’m rooting for the groundhog to give us good news when he does his annual thing soon. It’s been a harsh winter. Parts of the country have had to dig out from huge snowfalls blown their way by a blizzard. You may be interested to learn how “blizzard” entered the American vocabulary.
Blame it on, of all things, a blizzard. But it didn’t start that way.
If you’re in the mood for light reading, flip through Houghton Mifflin Word Origins. It reports blizzard first popped up in the language of frontier America. It had nothing to do with a storm. An 1829 glossary describes a blizzard as “a violent blow.”
Davy Crockett (of coonskin cap and Alamo fame) wrote in his 1835 Tour Down East that when a preacher asked for a toast, “I concluded to go ahead and give him and his likes a blizzard.” Meaning Davy would strike him with a long, wordy toast.
In the late 1800s an old-timer recalled, “I first heard the word ‘blizzard’ among young men at Illinois College. If one struck a ball a severe blow in playing town ball (modern baseball’s forerunner) it would be said, ‘That’s a blizzard.’”
Sometime around the Civil War, the word first started popping up, albeit rarely, in connection with a winter storm. The 1862 book Forty Years on the Frontier says, “A blizzard blew up and raged all night.”
And maybe the word would have remained on the fringes of our vocabulary, if it hadn’t been for the Blizzard of 1880-1881.
Think you’ve seen severe winter weather? No matter how bad it is where you are, it can’t hold a candle to this, the Mother of All Bad Winters.
That winter was so bad, folks couldn’t even agree what to call it. Some named it The Black Winter. Others, The Snow Winter. There was even The Horrible Winter.
I first learned about it the same you may have discovered it: in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (Which is probably the most accurate name of all).
It arrived unusually early and started untypically harsh with a sudden heavy snowfall on October 15, 1880, long before pioneer families were prepared. Crops weren’t fully harvested, grain wasn’t ground into flour and meal, and the supply of wood to keep stoves burning until spring hadn’t been chopped.
Yet the snow kept coming. Drifts eventually grew two and sometimes three stories tall burying houses, barns, and stores. People had to tunnel from one structure to another.
Even worse, rail service was frozen in its tracks. The snow was higher than the trains. Railroads hired extra crews to clear the rails; but just as soon as they dug out a path another storm blew up and covered it.
It was a critically serious situation. Trains brought the food, fuel, clothing, and medicine necessary for survival. No trains, no vital goods.
Laura didn’t exaggerate in The Long Winter. In fact, scholars are impressed by the book’s historical accuracy. The ordeal was so horrific, she could recall specific details about it when she wrote her story 60 years later.
Journalists struggled to find a word strong enough to convey the power of the unrelenting winter storms. Some unsung scribe hit upon “blizzard,” and the word caught on. Suddenly, blizzard spread like wildfire in newspaper and magazine stories about the bad weather.
It became so popular so fast, The Nation observed in early 1881: “The hard weather has called into use a word which promises to become a national Americanism, namely ‘blizzard’ … the blizzard of snow has knocked out the former meaning of mere human violence.” He was right; when was the last time you heard someone describe a fistfight as a “blizzard”?
It finally stopped snowing that April. But the trouble wasn’t over. All that melting snow caused terrible flooding. In fact, the town of Yankton, South Dakota, was almost entirely swept away. Flooding was so bad it pushed steamboats far inland and left them high and dry.
We still have the word blizzard, thanks to that 1881 blizzard.
(Personally, my favorite blizzard is the DQ Blizzard treat. It’s been satisfying sweet tooths since it came out in 1985. Including mine.)
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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