The morning of January 7, 1873, opened clear and bright over the south half of Minnesota, with no signs of foul weather in the sky. The country people had left their homes on their usual errands to mill, to post-office, to town, to distant wood lots or fields, without thought of danger. Soon after midday those who were still on the road were overtaken by one of those terrible winter storms known to old voyageurs as “blizzards.” The most learned authority in America on English usage has recently made the statement that the word “blizzard” is not more than twenty-five years old. It was in common use in Minnesota in the fifties. In a true blizzard the air is so completely filled with a fine granular snow as to cause absolute darkness. It is, as on this occasion, frequently accompanied by a furious wind. The temperature may or may not be excessively low. The voyageur did not attempt to travel when a blizzard overtook him, but got behind and beneath such shelter as he could find or make, and waited for it to blow over. These inexperienced Minnesota settlers pressed on, wandered from the unfenced roads, and if they found shelter it was by good fortune. Many perished in the terrible gusts which swept the prairie. The weather did not clear till the third day. The first accounts estimated the number of lives lost at many hundreds, but when the state statistician collated the local reports sent in he was happy to find that not more than seventy persons had perished. A much greater number, of course, were frost-bitten and maimed. There were cases in which farmers had been either injured or destroyed while attempting to reach their houses from their barns and fields. There has been no blizzard of any notable severity in Minnesota since this of 1873.
In June of the same year a southwest wind brought over the western border, south of Big Stone Lake, swarms of the Rocky Mountain locust (_Melanoplus spretus_), which soon spread themselves over large parts of fourteen southwestern counties as well as a considerable area of northwestern Iowa. Because not learned enough in entomology to distinguish, the people supposed these locusts to be grasshoppers, and soon adopted the abbreviated form “hoppers.” The growing crops were presently devoured. Settlers who had made their first plantings were impoverished and had to accept the generous aid of neighbors. The area visited was small compared with that of the state and its settled portions, and it was not conceived that grasshoppers could survive a Minnesota winter. The legislature of 1874 made an appropriation of $5000 to relieve cases of complete destitution, and another of $25,000 to be advanced to the farmers for the purchase of seed.