Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1888-03-22
THE NEW YORK BLIZZARD.

The following from the st. Paul Pioneer
Press, may have been prompted by a
spirit of retaliation, but who can say it
is not justified under the circumstances?
1t says:
The movement which has been set ON
foot in Dakota to raise relief fund for
the benefit of the sufferers from the ter
rible blizzard which has just swept over
New York and other states of the Allan
tic seaboard is as timely as 1t is gener-
Gus. We have occasional snow storms in
this region. Once in fifteen or twenty
years we have one of those ferce winter
storms which are known as billiards. One
of these exceptional atmospheric phe
nomena occurred this winter In portions
of Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. 1t pleas
ed the eastern newspapers to treat this
rare and exceptional class of storms as
peculiar to Dakota and Of frequent oc-
currence in that region. The irony of
Providence was never more strikingly ex-
bibited than in the answer it has just Civ
en- TO these aspersions of the eastern
press. In all the annals of the upper
northwestern states and territories no
blizzard was ever known or heard of
at all approaching IN its severity or
in its calamitous effects that which
has Just been experienced by the
states of the Atlantic coast. Snow
four or five feet deep on the
level and drifts piled twenty-five feet
high are features of winter storms which
are peculiar to the eastern states and ut
terly unknown in the northwestern re-
gion. Men have been caught by fierce and
binding snow storms at distance from
j 4 l.
pied plains of Dakota, Nebraska or west
ern Minnesota, and have persisted from
exhaustion and freezing in their fruit
less endeavor to find some sheltering
roof, but in all the annals of the
northwest no one ever heard of
human being having been frozen
to death in the streets of a populous city
or even of the smallest rural village I'M
less he was first stupefied by drink. The
fact that scores of people were actually
frozen TO death actually persisted from
exhaustion and cold-in trying to make
their way in the binding storm through
the most populous streets of New
York city and Brooklyn affords vivid
measure of the far more terrible Sc
verify of the New York biz
zard as compared with the fercest
winter storms which were ever experience
ed in Dakota or Nebraska. All the other
incidents and results of the blizzard, so
far as known, go to show that the rudest
Northwestern variety of that form of at
mospheric cataclysm is a feeble and I'M
hedged chicken of a storm In comparl-
son to the ferocious and fully developed
monster whose habitat is the Atlantic sea-
board. Telegraph lines everywhere pros
trated; absolute suspension of all com
munication and of all traffic-street rail-
way as we'll as other railways blockaded;
whole communities starving for lack of
food and freezing for lack of fuel; cattle
perishing by thousands; restaurants AID
saloons closed because all supplies are cut
off by the snow blockade, these are fea-
lures of the native New York blizzard
which show it to be SUI generiS-an in6i-
genous product of the climate of the
Atlantic seaboard, and wholly unknown in
the interior of the country"