Prairie Works

Prairie Seeds

Today was our first day of Indian Summer and after our latest bout with below normal temperatures, it was greeted with much fan-fare. Indian Summer has been a term used rather loosely.  True Indian Summer is a period of abnormally warm weather following a killing freeze in Autumn. A killing freeze occurs when the overnight temperature reaches 28 degrees or colder. Indian Summer typically occurs in the mid to late Autumn and can occur more than once. The killing freeze  has already occurred across Northwest Illinois. Some say it must happen before the first snowfall (this could not be true this year).

Indian Summer was first recorded in Letters From an American Farmer, a 1778 work by the French-American soldier turned farmer J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur (a.k.a. Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur):

“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.”

As a climatic event it is known throughout the world and is technically called a weather singularity (a climatic event that recurs around the same time of year). The frequency, intensity and length of the weather pattern is dependent on geography. It is most frequently associated with the eastern and Midwest states, which have a suitable climate to generate the weather pattern, i.e. a wide variation of temperature and wind strength from summer to winter. Many of those states are also famous for their areas of hardwood forest, which show up well during Indian summers when the leaves have already begun to turn and the sun is shining.

Why Indian? Well, no one knows, but as is commonplace when no one knows, people guess. Here are a few of the more commonly repeated guesses:

• When European settlers first came across the phenomenon in America it became known as the Indian’s Summer.
• The haziness of the Indian Summer weather was caused by prairie fires deliberately set by Native American tribes.
• It was the period when Native American people harvested their crops.
• The phenomenon was more common in what were then North American Indian territories.
• It originated from raids on European settlements by Indian war parties, which usually ended in autumn.
• Parallel with other ‘Indian’ terms it implies a belief in Indian falsity (Indian giver?) and untrusted and that an Indian summer was an imitation of the real thing.

As with many words and phrases we do not know and will never know it’s true origins, but it is always open to speculation.  I will assume that it was a combination of several of these.

On the prairie front Indian Summer means seed pickin’ time. The sunny, warm and dry conditions make it optimal conditions to harvest the seeds for next years crop and is one of the most enjoyable tasks of the year. Who was thinking that we had abandoned the true purpose of Indian Summer?

Great Article from the National Weather Service: http://www.crh.noaa.gov//dtx/stories/i-summer.php