The Herald and The Lantern

Page 7

Blizzards Weren’t All Bad

WASHINGTON, D.C. - ‘‘Where are the snows of yesterday?” asked ^an American writer named Justin McCarthy, echoing a question first raised several centuries earlier by the French poet Francois Villon. \ If McCarthy, who died in 1936, had only looked he would have found the answer. Those snows— the big ones, anyway — are preserved in history and record books. THE CURRENT, Christmas issue of National Wildlife magazine takes a look at those books and comes up with some cold facts concerning the most fearsome, frigid winters of yester-year : The lowest temperature ever recorded in the U.S., according to the National Wildlife Federation’s bimonthly, was minus 79.8 degrees F., at Prospect Creek, Alaska, on Jan. 23, 1971, and the heaviest snowfall was 86 feet at Rainier Paradise Ranger Station during the same winter of 1970-71. That’s about as deep as'an eightstory building is tall. ONE OF THE earliest

American \ blizzards tracked down ty National Wildlife was in ^February, 1668. One New England pioneer called it ''‘the terriblest winter ever'’ as Boston got buried under 42 inches of white stuff. And that was before the days of snow plows. Perhaps the granddaddy of all blizzards was in March of 1888. From the Chesapeake Bay to Maine, for four days, an average of 40 inches of snow buried the region. Winds gusted up to 70 miles per hour, and there were mote than 400 deaths — 200 in New York City alone. Train passengers were marooned and 200 ships foundered. ONE HISTORIC snowstorm came as a disguised blessing. ^At 6

p.m. on Christmas Day, 1778: a bitterly cold bliz zard struck the East. General George Washington wrote in his diary: "The wind is nor theast and beats in the faces of the men. It will be a terrible night for the soliders who have no shoes. Some of them have tied old rags around their feet, but I have not heard a man complain.”. Later that night

Washington crossed the Delaware with his shivering army of 2,400 men and slipped into Trenton, N.J. After a long night of Christmas revelry, the Hessian mercenaries were no match for the ragged Americans. "The Revolutionai7 War would not be won for five more years,” says National Wildlife, "but the Battle of Trenton was a turning point. Had it not been for the cover of that snowstorm, it might have gone the other way . "

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