In looking for an answer to your question about the blizzard of 1888, I found this info on Midwest weather which may offer some answers for you. American weather historian David Ludlum, in his two-volume history Early American Winters, cites an American newspaper as the first published source of the word blizzard referring to severe winter weather conditions. It appeared in the April 23, 1870, issue of the Estherville [Iowa] Vindicator. The paper's editor, defending a local citizen from remarks written in the rival Upper Des Moines of Algona, Iowa, wrote: "Campbell has had too much experience with northwestern ‘blizards' [sic] to be caught in such a trap, in order to make sensational paragraphs for the Upper Des Moines." The storm he referred to struck western Iowa from 14 to 17 March 1870. The editor of the Upper Des Moines, who also was the local Smithsonian weather observer, described the blizzard in his notes thus: > "The storm continued with unabated fury (wind N.N.W.) All night and the > following day.... This was one of the most fearful storms known in this country > since the notable storm of Dec. 31, 1863 and Jan. 1, 1864. The air was so > completely filled with drifting snow that no object could be seen at fifty feet > distant. About ten inches of snow fell which is so drifted that the roads > were completely blocked..." A week later, the Vindicator carried a story headlined "Man Frozen at Okoboji, Iowa." In it, blizzard is spelled with the accepted two zs (perhaps the early reference was a typographical error): "Dr. Ballard, who has just returned from a visit to the unfortunate victim of the March ‘blizzard,' reports that his patient is rapidly improving." Interestingly, in a May 14 story of that year, the Vindicator reported on the reorganization of the local baseball team. Among the items of discussion was the renaming of the team from the Westerners to the Northern Blizzards. The reporter confessed to: > "a certain liking for it, because it is at once startling, curious and > peculiarly suggestive of the furious and all victorious tempests which are > experienced in this northwestern clime. No exceptions can be taken, for it is an > applicable, euphonious, refined and pointedly suggestive term, and certainly > unique, if nothing more." Thereafter, the term blizzard referring to a winter snow storm quickly became common usage to describe a severe winter snowstorm whose driving winds propel ice and snow through the air like a "volley of musket fire." Now this may only answer part of the question--we now know how the word blizzard came to mean a weather phenomenon--but if the library has the book by David Ludlum, it may also shed some light on the particular effects of the blizzard on southeast IA in 1888. Hope this helps. Judy Neu Springwater, NY