Blizzard

Blizzard is a fierce storm of bitter frosty wind with fine blinding snow, in which, especially in the western states of the American union, man and beast often perish. In one which visited Dakota and the states of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, in January 1888, the thermometer fell within twenty-four hours from 74° above zero to 28° below it in some places, and in Dakota went down to 40° below zero. In fine clear weather, with little or no warning the sky darkened and was filled by snow or ice-dust as fine as flour, driven before a wind so furious and roaring, that men's voices were inaudible at a distance of 6 feet. Objects became invisible a few yards off. Farmers died in the fields ere they could reach their houses, and children on their way from school; some of those who died having been not frozen but suffocated, from the impossibility of breathing the blizzard. Some 235 persons lost their lives. This was the worst since 1864; the Colorado River in Texas was frozen with ice a foot thick for the first time in the memory of man. In some districts blizzards are looked for three or four times in a winter; but really disastrous ones are rare, those of 1836, of December 1863, January 1866, January 1873 being, till that of 1888, the severest on record. The word, which seems to be akin to blast, bluster, first became usual throughout the United States during the severe winter of 1880-81, but was in colloquial use in the West early in the century. See WIND and STORMS.