“Campbell has had too much experience with northwestern ‘blizards’ to be caught in such a trap, in order to make sensational paragraphs for the Upper Des Moines.”Ī week later, on April 30, 1870, the Vindicator spelled “blizzard” with a double “z.” Under the headline “Man Frozen at Okoboji, Iowa,” an article says: ![]() That issue of the Vindicator debunked a “glowing account” in another newspaper, the Algona Upper Des Moines, that an Emmet County resident was endangered by a severe storm that had struck the Midwest on March 14-16, 1870: (Someone should write an article about the names of small-town newspapers.) In an article published in February 1928, Read says the earliest example of the usage he found was from the April 23, 1870, issue of the Northern Vindicator, a newspaper in Estherville serving Emmet County in northwest Iowa. ![]() Well, Estherville can indeed take credit for the first use of “blizzard” in reference to a severe snowstorm, but the term had been around for dozens of years in another sense.Īllen Walker Read, a Columbia University etymologist and lexicographer who died in 2002, wrote two papers in the journal American Speech about his efforts to track down the roots of the word “blizzard.” But did the word really originate in your neck of the woods? Is it true?Ī: Several towns in the upper Midwest-Marshall, Minnesota Sturgis and Vermillion, South Dakota and Spencer and Estherville, Iowa-have been mentioned over the years as the source of the word “blizzard.”Īs a Midwesterner who’s experienced stormy winters, you won’t be surprised to hear this. I grew up in northern Iowa, not far from Estherville, and experienced my share of blizzards, but I’d never heard this. Q: I read the other day that the term “blizzard” was first used in Estherville, Iowa.
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