Success Quote by William Henry Ashley

Snow here isn’t picturesque; it’s paperwork fatigue. Ashley’s line has the clipped dryness of a man who’s been trained to record the world in useful increments and is now admitting, almost against type, that nature can overwhelm even the dutiful chronicler. The phrasing matters: “so common” turns weather into background noise, while “omitted to note” reveals the real subject - not snow, but the limits of attention. He’s confessing that constant conditions erase themselves. When something happens “two days out of Three,” it stops being an event and becomes infrastructure.

That’s a businessman’s sensibility showing through. Merchants and managers live by logs, ledgers, and regularity; they note what changes because change affects supply lines, prices, travel, labor. Snow that falls incessantly is the kind that stops being romantic and starts being friction: delayed shipments, impassable roads, missed appointments, slow information. The sentence quietly translates climate into cost.

The wry subtext is self-implicating: Ashley is acknowledging how easily the act of observation becomes selective, even lazy, when repetition dulls urgency. It’s also a small critique of record-keeping itself. If a journal can’t be bothered to note what’s most frequent, what else gets smoothed over? He’s pointing at the way history is made from what someone had the energy to write down.

Contextually, early 19th-century travel and commerce were at the mercy of weather in a way modern life isn’t. Ashley’s offhand omission reads like a dispatch from an economy where “common” snow could still quietly rearrange a week - and where the most honest report is sometimes the admission that you stopped reporting.