INDIAN SUMMER: With any luck, we’ll get an Indian summer this
year.

What exactly is “Indian summer” and where did the term come
from? Kim Benjamin of Bradford passes along an explanation about
this phenomenon written by Pete Jones.

Indian summer, Jones writes, is a period of “delightful weather”
likely to occur in late October or early November. “It doesn’t
happen every year, but sometimes there is a bonus of two or three
such periods,” he adds.

“Most meteorologists shy away from the term, probably because it
can’t be defined with precision. However, by general definition,
Indian summer is a period of unseasonably warm weather coming soon
after the first frost. Days are warm, but nights are chilly in
Indian summer. Skies are clear, but often there is a haze in the
distance.”

And the phenomenon occurs, according to the Encyclopedia
Britannica, “when a cool, shallow polar air mass stagnates and
becomes a deep, warm high-pressure center … Vertical air motions
are inhibited, and smoke and dust are concentrated near the ground,
which accounts for the haziness.”

The term “Indian summer” has been around since the 1770s, and
one story says the expression came about because pioneers were told
of the phenomenon by Native Americans. Another story is that
settlers believed the haziness of Indian summer was the result of
prairie fires set by Indians.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about the Indian summer in “The
Song of Hiawatha” and, in 1892, Walt Whitman referred to it in one
of the pieces he wrote shortly before his death. But it was a
Chicago newspaper artist who brought the phenomenon to the
attention of the public.

“John T. McCutcheon, an editorial artist with the Chicago
Tribune, popularized the concept of Indian summer with his
illustration, ‘Injun Summer,’ which first appeared in the newspaper
in 1907. The illustration depicts an old man and a young boy
looking over a harvest field transformed by evening’s fading light
and smoke from a leaf fire into an imaginary Indian village. The
illustration and its accompanying text, a poem, caught on at once
with readers of the newspaper.

“Reader response was so favorable that the Tribune reran the
piece the next year. In fact, the illustration and its text
appeared each year on the last day of October until 1992, when the
newspaper dropped McCutcheon’s creation because it was by then
considered politically incorrect.”