Indian Summer
in the United States and Canada, a name applied by general consent to a hazy, smoky, warm spell of weather expected late in autumn. The cold weather which precedes Indian summer is called squaw winter. So far as the origin can be traced, the term appears to have arisen in western Pennsylvania about 1790, but the exact origin is not known. In the West the term is supposed to indicate the season when the Indian went hunting for buffalo and other game to lay in his winter's meat. The Dakota Indians, at least, counted on a time of this sort along in October and November when fine hunting weather might be expected. Whatever its origin, the term is now well set in literature. A line or two from Lowell's An Indian Summer Reverie is expressive of the season's rare beauty:
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare.
Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms,
Each into each, the hazy distances!
The softened season all the landscape charms;
Those hills, my native village that embay,
In waves of dreamier purple roll away,
And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.
Our mild, sweet day
Of Indian summer fades too soon;
But tenderly
Above the sea
Hangs, white and calm, the hunter's moon.
The village spire
Shows like the zodiac's spectral lance;
The painted walls
Whereon it falls
Transfigured stand in marble trance!
--John Greenleaf Whittier.