The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1873-01-23
Northwest-The Philosophy OF Our
Winter Climates.

Winter Climates.
The accounts published in the HERALD of the
dreadful sufferings by the recent unparalleled
snow storm or deadly polar wave in Mime
sofa and other Western States have excited o
painful interest all over the country. They
will naturally attract to that section o great
deal of curiosity regarding its temperature
and to the philosophy Of our cold continental
Winter climates generally. The climate of
Minnesota, from the purity and dryness of its
atmosphere, has been generally regarded as
one admirably calculated to benefit those suf-
fering from consumption and pulmonary COM
plants in their various stages Recent expe-
rience demonstrates that if the very lowest
degree of temperature, accompanied by the
most terrific Of snow tempests, are to be re-
garded as panaceas for such complaints, Min
nesota is just the State, and Minnesota Win
ter is just the climate in which the suffering
patient can with certainty plunge himself-it
is certain to kill or cure in a very brief period
In connection with this terrible Arctic agita-
ton in Minnesota it may not be uninteresting
to mention few striking facts. At the time
of the Minnesota storm and subsequently the
weather reports indicated intense and increas-
ing cold in that State, and thence to Missouri,
Ohio and over the Upper Lakes, the tempera-
ture ranging everywhere below zero in the
Upper Valley of the Mississippi and attain
ing in Minnesota the fearful depression
of forty-fve degrees below zero, with
northwesterly winds. At the very time
when the mercury was falling so low in
the Minnesota thermometers its readings over
the Pacific slope, in California and Oregon
and eastward to the Upper Missouri River and
the one hundredth western meridian are aston
ishingly high-from fifty-five to seventy-fve
degrees higher than in Minnesota It is
most important physical inquiry how
it is that these vast aerial undLa-
tons, already traced to their cradle in
the Pacific, should give warm weather to its
American shores and their adjacent terrific
ries, while on their advance eastward beyond
the Missouri they become intensely frigorific.
A correct relief map of North America shows
that the Continent is worked by two immense
depressions. One of these is longitudinal
furrow, or deep cash, about one hun
bred and thirty miles wide, running
northwestward from the Red River VAL
ley all the way to the mouth of the Mac
kenzie River in the Arctic Ocean. The other
is the vast elliptical basin of Hudson Bay,
deeply scooped out Both these continental
hollows serve as receptacles or reservoirs for
the cold air-waves which first appear on the
North Pacific shores as warm and vaporous
air moving eastward, but, subsequently con-
densed on the Rocky Mountains, tumble down
as cold and snowless air into these two great
continental troughs. From the westernmost of
these, extending from Lakes Winnipeg and
Manitoba to the Polar Sea, in whose central
depression lies embosomed the chain of British
American lakes, there issues the great river
of torrental cold, which sweeps down the
Upper Mississippi and whose expanding
stream finally spreads itself out in fanlike
shape over the whole eastern half of the
United States. The ice-clad encourage of
Hudson Bay and its solid sheet of ice sus-
tain in Winter enormous columns of
relrlgerateu ar winch, whenever the
barometer falls in Canada or the United States
southwark begins to pour forth thither in
floods of cold, and also, doubtless, feeds itself
to the storm-breeding Gulf Stream regions
lying far to the southeastward. The climatic
agencies of these great receptacles of Winter
temperature-not unlike the tabled Eolian
Cave Of the Winds-have been scarcely ever, if
at all, noticed by geographers or meteorolo-
gists; but they exert an influence upon the
continental climate quite as marked as that
of the great magazine of tropic air banked up
in the Gulf Of Mexico.
These facts strikingly demonstrate the
climatology Of the far Northwest and the
Pacific States and Territories, on whose
golden shores civilization will. in all proba-