It’s probably best not to dwell on what it says about life in Iowa that the names of two fearsome types of weather originated here. But in 1870, a northwest Iowa newspaper attached an already violence-laced word to the most violent sort of snowstorm, and 18 years later, a former UI professor borrowed the Spanish word for “straight,” to describe a devastating storm that ripped through Iowa in 1877.
O.C. Bates, editor of Estherville’s Northern Vindicator, was not a man to be restrained by the rules of grammar or limit his vocabulary to the conventional. He was also not the sort of person to let another newspaper besmirch the reputation of an Emmett County neighbor.
Following a report in the Algona Upper Des Moines, a Kossuth County newspaper, about an Emmett County resident almost dying in a massive snowstorm in March 1870, Bates decided to respond. In the April 23, 1870 edition of his weekly paper, Bates wrote, “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.”
A week later, the word got a second “z,” when Bates wrote about a local doctor who had gone to Dickinson County to treat an “unfortunate victim of the March ‘blizzard.’”
Bliz(z)ard had those quotation marks in its first appearances, not because Bates was introducing a new word, but because he was using an old one in a new way. Americans had long used “blizzard” and “blizz” to describe sudden blows or volleys of gunfire, but Bates was the first one to use it for a sustained fusillade of snow.
The new use spread quickly throughout the Midwest, and in 1888 it reached the New York Times, which called blizzard “an American word for an American storm.”
Over the years, people from Texas to Minnesota have claimed to have been the first to use blizzard as a weather word, but there’s no evidence of anyone doing so before Bates.
As for the state’s other entry in the bad-weather lexicon — derecho — there’s no question about its parentage. In an 1888 paper published in the American Meteorological Journal, Gustavus Hinrichs used it in his description of a thunderstorm with devastating straight-line winds that struck Iowa in July 1877. The storm had windspeeds equivalent to a powerful tornado, and since “tornado” is a 16th-century mangling of the Spanish for thunderstorm (tronada) modified by the mangling of the Spanish verb for twist (tornar), Henrichs used Spanish again. But this time the word wasn’t mangled.
The Danish-born Hinrichs was one of the leading U.S. scientists at the time, with an international reputation for his work in chemistry, physics, geology, mineralogy and meteorology. He was part of the University of Iowa faculty for more than two decades, but by the time his derecho paper was published, he’d been fired by the university and left the state in disgust.
Hinrichs immigrated to the United States in 1861, and after a year teaching high school in Davenport, he was hired by UI (known then as SUI, the State University of Iowa, which is still its legal name) as an instructor for modern languages. In addition to Danish and English, Hinrichs was fluent in French, German and Italian. He began teaching science the next year.
Hinrichs set up chemistry and physics labs that garnered international attention. The chart of elements he devised became the foundation for the periodic table of elements. He was a leader of the campaign to found the UI College of Medicine, and served on its faculty after it opened in 1870.
Then in 1871, UI got a new president. George Thacher was a graduate of the Yale Divinity School and had spent 30 years as a minister before being appointed president. Thacher didn’t think science was an important part of a university education, and slashed funding for it. Thacher and Hinrichs had a hostile relationship for all six years of Thacher’s presidency. Most of the faculty and, more importantly, the Iowa Board of Regents sided with Thacher.
It wasn’t just the university where Hinrichs faced a lack of funding. In 1875, he took the initiative to create the Iowa Weather Service, the country’s first state weather bureau. For the first three years, he paid all the expenses out of his pocket and relied on volunteers. In 1878, the Iowa Legislature finally provided some money for equipment, but none for salaries.
Hinrichs’ relationship with the university and the board of regents didn’t improve much under the next president. Josiah Pickard was a little less conservative than Thacher, but still underfunded science at UI. The fight over funding became increasingly bitter, and in 1886 the regents fired Hinrichs from the university for “general obstreperousness.” The next year, they fired him from the College of Medicine.
Hinrichs continued to run the Iowa Weather Service without being paid, and in 1888 he published his study of the 1877 derecho. In 1889, he gave up on Iowa and moved to Missouri. Hinrichs started his own laboratory, where he invented, among other things, Universal Embalming Fluid. It was quickly embraced as the industry standard, and it was probably used on Hinrichs after his death in 1923.
Parts of Hinrichs’ story may seem familiar. Conservatives undermining science and education, state lawmakers not funding a vital public service, a talented person leaving the state because of a lack of opportunity here. Probably best not to dwell on what all this says about life in Iowa.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
