Note is made of the terrific storm in Dakota January 17 and 18, with its appalling loss of human life, its destruction of live stock, its interruption of the commerce of the territory. With that wonderful resiliency which characterizes the people, and the soil of the Northwest, that region recovered-added millions to its wealth; made the per capita $533 and restored all except the human life, which fell a prey to the tempest.
January 21. Prof. Hinrichs (to whom we are indebted for meteorological observations, from July and following) said of the cold spell in Iowa: The continued extremely cold weather that has prevailed during the past ten days is very remarkable, and fortunately a rare feature in Iowa climate. During the middle decade of this January, the temperature has been zero or below zero every night. On two of these nights it reached to within one or two degrees of the lowest temperature ever registered in almost twenty years.
The mean temperature of the second decade of this January is 4.1 degrees below zero.
Only once during the twenty-eight years for which we have an unbroken series of reliable observations at Iowa City has any winter decade been as cold, namely the first decade in January, 1864, which had a mean temperature of 7.2 degrees below zero, according to Prof. Parvin's observations. Accordingly, the second decade of January, 1888, and the first decade of January, 1864, have been the coldest ten day periods in the history of Iowa for almost thirty years.
Later-January 29. From New York and Boston were reports of disastrous storms driving ships and vessels out to the sea, railroads in all the northern New England, the intense cold was uninterrupted, trains were delayed, traffic suspended, and losses were too numerous and extensive to admit of any estimation or formulation. The unprecedented storm in New York city and the east, of March 12, will pass into history by reason of its eclipsing anything heretofore observed at the northwest, and from sad memories of a great man who, perished from the result of the exposure incident to it. All business was paralyzed March 12. The stock exchange made the smallest of all previous records, the produce markets were merely nominal, the courts were.stopped, every street car in New York, Brooklyn and Jersey City stood still, of forty mails due up to noon only two arrived, the cities were snow bound. At Washington the capitol was the center of the miniature cyclone.