We have had more than ever before—what has been called “tornadoes” this year. I went back in time to when our ancestors settled in Marcus and surrounding areas. These people experienced what some called “tornadoes” while others said, “cyclones” or hurricanes? Coming from “the old country” to America, did they ever experience these back there? So, I went to look up information on these three.
A tornado is a spinning column of air with a diameter varying from a few years of over a mile that is whirling at high speeds and is normally followed by a funnel-shaped downward extension of a cumulonimbus cloud. Winds can range from 40 to 300 miles per hour. A funnel-like column of cold air descends from a story cloud. They have a smaller diameter than most. Except for Antarctica, tornadoes have been spotted on every continent.
A cyclone is an atmospheric system characterized by rapidly swirling air masses around a low-pressure core, which is typically accompanied by stormy and often destructive weather. Cyclones are storms that originate in the Southern Pacific. A cyclone is a massive and destructive storm. A cyclone is defined by a low-pressure zone surrounded by high pressure. High-speed winds whip through the middle, followed by heavy rain. They have a wide circumference.
Both cyclones and tornadoes are stormy weather systems with the ability to cause havoc. They occur as a result of atmospheric instabilities.
Hurricanes tend to cause much more destruction than tornadoes because of their size, duration and variety of ways to damage items. The destructive circular eyewall in hurricanes (that surrounds the calm eye) can be tens of miles across, last hours and damage structures through storm surge, rainfall-caused flooding, as well as wind impacts. Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a mile or smaller in diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from their extreme winds.
Cyclones, tornadeos, and what some called hurricanes, were a great fear of the early settlers. There were no trees for protection. The roar of the wind, the crash of the buildings, and falling chimneys made up a din that was awful.
June 28, 1881, a brick building standing on the plat of Old Cherokee, and which was built for the first schoolhouse in the county, was blown down. It was owned by Henry Stahl, and when the walls collapsed, every member of the household was with, except Mr. Stahl, who was not at home. The family, consisting of wife and five children, were buried in the ruins. The mother and three children were only slightly injured; but Willie, 15 years old, and his little sister Edith, 9 years old, were killed, being crushed beneath the walls of the falling house.
The scene of desolation could not be imagined. The walls were leveled almost to the ground, and the family buried beneath the debris, which was dug away, the injured taken there from a place of safety and the children’s bodies tenderly placed beneath a temporary shelter. As people were about to leave the scene, aa cry was heard from beneath a huge pile of brick. They went to work to remove this and found a crushed bed with a small dog that had crawled under it for protection.
A house in the Huxford addition, a two-story structure was carried off its foudation to a distance of forty feet and thrown upon the ground upside down, destroying everything the building contained. Mr. Aubrey was upstairs with his aged mother when the storm broke over them. He rushed downstairs to close the windows and doors. When the house began to move, he had barely time to leap from the room with this two children when it went over. He found his mother still living among the debris. She died with her arms about his neck.
In Meriden, there was considerable wreckage of buildings and one life lost. Mrs. William Wrought, who was at the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Pierce, while looking at the storm from the bedroom window, was struck by lightning and instantly killed. The other members were shocked by the lightning but not seriously injured.
In Tilden township the house of Mr. Crego was blown down and his wife killed. Mr. Crego was out at the time and on returning he found his child among the debris, living and not greatly injured, but his wife was crushed to death beneath the heavy timbers. An aged lady in Sheridan township, Mrs. Stevenson was severely injured. A large number of people received injuries in this storm, along with those that died. The property loss was very large, and every part of the county suffered greatly.
This storm took the life of Mrs. Charles Krekow. She left behind her husband, Charles and their daughter.
The next tornado of serious proportion which swept over the county leaving ruin in its wake occurred on June 14, 1885. At 9 p.m. Sunday, a long dark cloud slowly came up from the southeast. Another storm cloud wa in sight in the north and west; both clouds were radiant with incessant lightning. At ten-forty, rain accompanied with hail and driven by a sharp wind set in from the southeast, veered to the soughwest; this lasted about 10 minutes, and then the air became a dead calm.
At 11 o’clock, a hurricane from the northwest struck this city with great violence, and this increased to a terrific sweep that lasted until nearly 12 o’clock without a moment’s cessation except the occasional irregular pulsing motions common to such storms. The roar of the wind, mingled with the crash of buldings, flying timbers, falling chimneys an snapping trees, made up a din that was awful. Citizens who had cellars or storm caves rushed into them, and where they were not so fortunate, they stood trembling in their quivering and swaying houses, helpless and terrified. The scene next morning was one that was awful. Citizens whose houses had been wrecked were seen removing the water-soaked furniture and bedding; tree tops, boarads, splinters and tin roofs were seen in all directions; fences were down and gardens flattened.
There were few houses that escaped some damage. Th loss in the city was conservatively estimated at $30,000. The newspapers of that day devoted several columns to giving detailed statements of losses and incidents of the storm. The Garfield school, which had only been completed a short time before, suffered severely; the roof was torn completely off and the east wall blown. Damage to the building was estimated to be over $6,000.
In Marcus township, Mrs. M. Gano was hurled through the air three hundred yards and killed. One of the chioldren was also killed and Mr. Gano was seriously wounded, and the other child was also severely injured. In Silver township, John Paul had his head crushed in and died the following night. His house was torn to slivers and scatered over the prairie.
At the Gilman home, the father of John Gilman of Wisconsin, who was visiting his son, suffered a broken leg. Mrs. Gilman was almost mortally wounded. When the house began to rock she ran out, but remembering that she had left her child, returned for it and was crushed by the falling house. Mr. Gilman was severely injured.
There was a long list of losses from all the townships of the county. In Amherst, Simipson-Bethel church was badly injured; Schoolhouse No. 1 in this township was totally demolished, and all the others badly injured.
The little town of Meriden suffered severely; the loss being estimated at $20,000. The Methodist Episcopal church was wrecked beyond repair.
Marcus was also a fearful sufferer. The Methodist church was torn to pieces, while the Lutheran, Christian and Catholic churches were all damaged.
The wide track of the storm and the havoc wrought is well illustrated by the fact that one farm insurance agent reported 208 losses in this county. This storm was not less than two hundred miles wide. Its western edge was near Elkpoint, South Dakota, and extended to the eastern part of the state, and on eastward.
While the storms of 1880, 1881 and 1885 caused treat hardship and suffering generally, there was not nearly the loss of life which occurred July 6, 1893.
This storm brought death in its train to ten citizens of this county while many more people were mangled and torn. It is generally referred to as the “Pomeroy cyclone,” by reason of the greater loss of life there, where over fifty lives were sacrificed to this terrible cyclone. What has happened may happen again, and that there may be preserved in permanent form, a record of this awful storm which were given by eye witnesses.
At a little before 5 o’clock last Thursday evening, the people who live along the river bank four miles east of Quimby looked up betweed the defile of the low hills on either hand and saw two black clouds moving toward each other. From the northwest and the southwest, angry messengers approached each other. The sultriness of the sumer day had lowered into a gust and a tale as the twilight had written its message of wrath across the scroll of the sky. There was a dash of rain and a patter of scattered hail. The wind grew more boisterous and beat upon the trees. The sky scowled—it was a summer storm. The fields drank up the moisture and were glad. The corn waved waist high was refreshed and nodded in gladness to the bending oats and bearded grain that rejoiced with it in new found freshness. It was a summer storm that meant and made for plenty and for peace!
But when the two dark clouds approached each other and met upon the rim of the saucer-like valley which opens down toward the river, there was a surpassing change. This was a portent of evil. The black masses of flying send embraced each other in mid-air over the smiling and contented valley and quicker than the lightning that played upon their turreted fronts, the summer storm had given birth to the dread prodigy of the upper world—the cyclone. With inconceivable fury and swiftness, it sped across ten miles of blossoming prairie, and in its trail it left desolation and death. Straight as an arrow, it clove its way to the eastward. In an incredibly short time, it had come and gone. Mothers looked upon it with whitened lips, breathed a prayer—and were dead. Children with a child’s fearlessness bubbling to a laugh upon faces, were smitten by the sword of the passing angel of vengeance. Homes crumbled like dust before the touch of its finger and inextricable confusion followed the path of its cohorts across the fields and woodland of its path.
The storm was on its way, so lets follow it. Shortly after, or perhaps before, the two clouds met in conjunction just east of and above the bluffs of Quimby, the wind did some damage to the house of Jerry Bugh, and destroyed the barn of Reuben Rogers. The Bugh family were in the barn with the hired man and the children suffered some injury. On the McClintock place where Roy Wright is living, in Rock township, all the buildings were demolished and Mrs. Wright was hurt internally. At Elroy Cooks’ most of the family was away and only the little girl, Ethel, was hurt. Then the Perry schoolhouse was straight in its path. It licked the building up and left no board upon another. There was a drive well beside the school. As though with satanic fingers, the storm reached down and clutching the pump, pulled forty feet of the tubing out of the ground. Just beyond, Jap Scurlock was tiling the Vandercook place. The family of nine saw the long serpent-like trail of the cyclone and took refuge in the cellar. An instant afterward, the house was a mass of ruins, scattered over the fields and the family huddled in the semi-darkness escaped, though the heavy wooden steps that lead down from above were pulled out and tossed on the round above. Newton Scurlock lost his best horse, harness and crops. The Rev. Joe McGovern, the Wesleyan minister living close by, had taken refuge in the cellar and so his life was saved, though his house and barn were destroyed and all his earthly possessions scattered by the winds.
A little way down the road and on the side toward the river’s brink, stood the house of Joe Wheeler and just back and to the side was were Mrs. Henry Molyneux lived. There had been comfortable homes, ample barns, herds and flocks. But last Friday morning, was a different story. Out of each house the storm had claimed a victim. The fields all about were littered with dead kine (cows, cattle). The fences were gone; sheds of apparel and scraps of household furnishings were scattered about. Seven dead horses were within sight with swollen and misshapen bodies mutely giving evidence to the awful force of the elements. Beside the road, a crippled cow moaned in pain. Trees were stripped off to the uttermost limbs stood like white and ghostly sentinels. The heavy castings of an 8-horsepower corn sheller had been torn asunder and lay scattered about. Forty hogs lay in a wide winrow a quarter of a mile of where the storm had blown their lifeless bodies to the edge of the timber line. The ground was littered with corn from the dismantled cribs where it had been stored.
When the storm sprung up in the late afternoon, Mrs. Wheeler had been churning butter in the cellar. Her husband was in town on business. Her mother, Mrs. O.M. Lester and her siser Alta, both of Quimby, had come to Cherokee to visit with her. When the wind grew in violence, they all went down into the cellar. Mrs. Lester wanted a shawl put around her so Mrs. Wheeler snatched a quilt from the lounge and threw it about her mother. They went into the cellar and huddled there in the darkness. Mrs. Wheeler had her arms about her mother and Alta sat upon a chair holding the little ones upon her lap to quiet them. All at once with a horrible roar, the house was whisked away and the ruins of the walls and flying debris that filled the air fell into the place. Mrs. Wheeler felt a shock as something struck her mother and then the aged woman gave a little gasp and sank back more heavily into her daughter’s arms. She was dead. A spoke wrenched from a wagon wheel, or some projection from a buggy body that had been hurled into the cellar, had struck her in the side and penetrated her body near the back, tearing a dreadful wound in the tissues of flesh and her life went out instantly. The daughter laid her down and in the dim light, saw the jaged rent in the coverlet; she peered into the white, still face, and knew that her mother was dead. Then she laid her down and with her sister and the children, left the place of horrors and went out through the storm to find shelter in neighbor’s house.
At the same time, another life was claimed just beyond, where Mrs. Molyneux’s house had stood. Mrs. Molyneux had been to town in the afternoon and, returnig home, had been accompanied by Mrs. John Underhill, an intimate friend of many years. They started for the cellar when the storm drew near, and Mrs. Molyneux had just reached the door and was in the act of opening it when the house was wrecked. She was found lying about ten feet from where the house had stood, and a discolored bruise upon the back of her head and neck showed where some flying missile had struck and instantly robbed her of life. Mrs. Underhil was unhurt.
Continued next week
The remains of Mrs. Lester were brought to Cherokee the same evening and the interment took place on Saturday afternoon. She was a woman of 50 years of age, had lived here many years and was respected by many friends who had long known her. Mrs. Henry Molyneux was the mother of A.R. and Frank Molyneux. She was well known throughout the county and was universally regaraded with affection and esteem. Her remains were taken to the nearby home of her nephew, Rube Warburton, from which place the funeral was held on Saturday at 10 a.m.
Mr. Wheeler lost eight head of horses, five of which were his own, forty-nine head of hogs and six head of cattle, besides all his house-hold furniture, organ, sewing machine, farm utensils, etc. The Molyneux place was also swept clean of everything. All about, fields and trees had been whipped clean. The corn was raveled out and worn to the ground by the lashings of the wind. There was no green thing left that gave promise of a harvest in the path swept by the storm. Yet when Wheeler’s barn was blown to fragments, one of his horses was left standing uninjured, while the horse Mrs. Lester had driven from town and which stood next to Wheeler’s, was blown out and killed.
Leaving this spot which it had desolated, the furious gales swept on across to the east. In its path was the Pilot Rock bridge, an iron sturcture with a span of 120 feet, which had once stood on Second Street in Cherokee and had been moved to its present side and dropped into the river bed. When it went off its high iron piers, it tore its heavy anchors loose and took the stone caps from the piers with it. Twisted and wrecked, the water of the river rippled and gurgled through its broken trusses and dismantled stays.
Then the storm climbed the steep side of the wooded bluff beyond. Up it went through the barrier of dense shrub and trees and the storm laid its lash upon all growing things that ruffled its path. Once at the summit, a landscape awaited its coming! Across the south half of Pilot and Pitcher townships, the groves about the homes, and along the section lines, the sentinel rows of trees, gave variety to a scene made up of abundant fields. It was here that the cyclone worked its greatest horror. It was along this shining way it had chosen for itself, that it took down whole families and by its grew-some terrors, perpetrated the very nightmare of its demoniacal work.
Close by the river on the old McCready place where John Cojohn lived, and near by and just south was Mannie Peterson’s home. Cojohn’s house was taken up and dropped in a mass of ruins. The Petersons were just about to move out of the old log house they had so long lived in, into a new frame just completed. The last nail had been driven that day. Like a structure of cards, it went down before the blast. Along the road leading past Sam Whithouse’s home, the evidences of the storm could be seen in twisted trees and broken fences. But the Will Simmons place was right in the path. Simmons had a cave and took his family into it just at the right time. Nothing remained but the dismantled windmill. No stick of house or barn or sheds stood. The barn was carried ten rods, the house twenty, in the power which reached down from above. A colt was killed, but four horses that were in the barn escaped. Four hundred bushels of corn and three hundred bushels of oats were scattered for the birds to feast upon.
Down the road a little way, the cyclone found the V.M. Groves place, the big barn, 80 x 60 feet, with its outbuilding on the west side of the road and across the highway was the house with a big grove all around the place. Jess Mason and Frank Baker were in the brn when the storm struck and wrecked it. For an instant, they were pinned down by timbers and the next instant, with scarcely a hurt, they were free, and the beams and baords had been lifted off and scatterd far and wide. The big white stallion belonging to Mr. Henry Thiel was in the barn at the time, but was rolled three hundred feet and unhurt. The trees of the grove were twisted into fantastic shapes. The iron wheels of farm imiplements lay scattered in the fields. A dead steer lay upon its back in the ditch, and jammed up against a tree was the body of a calf. The windmill lay upon its side. A binder stood upon end far in the dismantled grove. A new wagon, battered and broken, was jammed in among the maple trees. Barb wire from the fences trailed across the road and was rolled up in a tangle.
Onward to the east the storm went. Straight in its way stood next the home of Samuel Burdge. This pioneer had worked for 25 years to get his place to what he wanted it to be but in an instant, all was gone. Burdge and his wife and three childeren were sped from life to eternity. Another child, the last, feeble of mind, lingered a little while with swollen and sensitive body.
Burdge was perhaps passing from his barn to the house hoping to save his lived ones. When the neighbors gathered to the home after the storm had passed, they found Burdge lying near the house. He had never reached the house. A neighbor picked him up and held him while Burdge gasped as he saw the damage. He was bruised, but at first it was not thought he was seriously hurt. Perhaps it was the dreadful shock which killed him, less than a half hour later.
Sixty rods away the mother’s body lay, and no less far from where the house had stood, two other children were found. The body of the oldest boy had been carried close to a half a mile. The little girl had a ghastly gash in her forehead, a great yawning rent the looked like the heavy blow of an axe and spread the cloven skull apart. The oldest boy’s neck was broken and one of his feet had been cut off at the ankle and again the leg was severed just below the knee. All the white and distorted faces had been pelted with mud, which covered them in a thick layer. The feeble-minded girl, who was still alive, was found under a broken maple tree. Her limbs were swollen and porous and her whole body was racked and surcharged with electricity so that it gave out a distinct shock to the hand laid upon the tender flesh.
The wreck of everything upon the place was confusion worse confounded. In the cellar over which the house had stood, two horses were dropped by the storm, one dead, the other alive. Even chickens upon the place were dismembered and the several parts of their bodies were blown hither. The Burdge bodies were taken to Mike Dubes’ place, as well as the one survivor was taken and tenderly cared for by the kindly and and people in his household.
The father and mother, with their of off-spring about them, lay beside in the house, shrouded in the white cerments of death. At Good Hope church, strong and willing arms dug a wide trench and in it, side by side, the five were laid to rest. This was the climax of the whole grim tragedy—the greatest loss of life at any one place, yet it was not the last, not yet, perhaps, the most horrible of all those whimsical terrors which the cyclone spread.
The John Peters place is on the other side of the road and eighty rods north. Peters, with his family, had taken refuge in the cellar. With them were two children of Allen Cunningham. Mr. Cunningham had been away on an errand to Samuel Hawe’s place during the aftearnoon, and when the storm came up, they locked up the house and went over to take shelter with neighbor Peters’ little ones. So as the wind grew wilder, they all took shelter in the cellar—Peters, his wife, their nine children and the Cunningham children. All at once a gust of wind blew the east door open upstairs and Mrs. Peters told her husband he had better close it. He went up to do so and had just reached the door when the vortex of the cyclone took the house into its embrace. Peters was blown out and had his right arm shattered, was cut about the head and had a severe contusion on his right side, the extent of which at the time was not known. The only one injured in the cellar was the little Cunningham girl, who was struck by a rock but not seriously hurt. While the ruins of the Burdge home were scattered to the east, the fragments of the Peters house were spread to the south, and thus the lines of debris approached each other, and seemed, as they lay in the fields, to have been left there by the receding eddy and tides of the wind.
Allen Cunningham saw the storm from his place which, though not perhaps more than sixty or eighty rods on north of the Peters place, was outside of its baleful circle. He saw the whirling funnel of cloud as it swept in from the west. Its center seemed to him to pass directly between the Burdge and Peters places, and just as it got there it dropped down and sucked them up into it jaws. But there was dreadful work for the storm yet to do before it should have done its work in Cherokee county.
At the Wm. Slater’s place, its vengeance seemed to find much to spend itself on. Lulu, Mr. Slater’s 28 year-old daughter, had been an invalid a good portion of her life, was killed. Bert Slater was so cut about thehead and bruised that recovery was semmingly impossible. Ida Johnson, a domestic, was killed and the hired man, who with the son Bert, was coming from the barn at the time and had his arm broken.
As illustrating, perhaps, the power of the storm and the peculiar nature of the horors which it spread in its way, was the case of Miss Lulu Slater. When her body was found, one leg had been wrenched or twisted off and the dismembered limb was found hours afterwards two miles away. The buildings, as in the other instances cited, were demolished, 37 head of horses and cattle were killed and an immense amount of minor damages done. The whole place shows the fantastic work of the powers which here seemed to concentrate themselves. All these strange and acts of freaks this storm had, were not known before to some people. Now they were aware of how a storm of this kind can use its power of wind and electricity to suck away human life and material belongings.
Some freakish things were reported. An 8-inch beam was picked up from the ground and carried through the air, driven end first into a cottonwood tree eight feet above the roots. There the piece protruded, so firmly fixed that a man stood upon it when he sawed out the section of the tree as a grim curiosity to be preserved and handed down.
A common Russian iron fire shovel was taken up by this same force and driven into a cottonwood tree a disance of three or four inches. The concussion broke the handle of and there the blade remained immovable and solid as thoug I had grown in its new resting place.
A barb wire fence was taken up in the air and its three strands woven about the tops of tall trees, braiding them together in a tight lacery of twig and limb and trunk and wire, from which the solid posts, torn from the ground, hung pendant and swung aimlessly in midair.
Ed Converse was living on a farm four miles southn of Aurelia and was in the path of the storm. E.W. Nelson, the musical instrument man of Cherokee had stopped there, put his horse in the barn with the harness on, and when the storm gave portent of cyclonic proportions, took shelter in the cellar with the other seven. All those sheltered escaped injury though in the wreck which followed, they sometimes had a close brush with death, for after the house was carried off, the air was filled with flying boards, stones and mud.
The strangest freak reported by reliable witneses who saw the whole affair, was when Mr. Nelson’s horse was seen carried through the air. The cyclone took it skyward to a height of one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet, carried it a half mile and then dropped it unharmed to the ground. Mr. Lent Wadell, who witnessed the flight of the horse, and near whom the animal was landed, said the horse seemed dazed and uncertain on its legs for a few moments but soon recovered. On Friday Mr. Nelson drove it to its stall in the city. The harness which it had on was torn to shreds.
Marian Johnson lived on the old Whitehead place with his three grown children. They were in the house when the cyclone struck it and Johnson was killed. The boy and his two sisters were saved. They clung to each other and perhaps this is how they escaped death. Some minor damage was done to the homes of Henry Steineke, Lent Wadell and Horatio Pitcher, but at about that point, the storm center seems to have lifted and it passed on to its dreadful work near Alta, Storm Lake and beyond.
As we have traveled over the path of the whirlwind storm, we have seen the evidences of what it had done. We saw how it drew forth the tubing from the well at the schoolhouse, how it hung fence posts on the tops of trees, how it drove fire shovels and bits of scantling into growing timber, how it here and there snatched up a horse or cow and left them standing unharmed. We have seen how it blew to the east and to the west, the north and the south, how it laid bodies of dead cattle in a long straignt windrow on the Slater farm. These mentioned acts of freakishnes were but just a few.
The cyclone was like a dread and awful presence taking life but seemed to by- pass others. F.G. Fawyer lives just east of the Elroy Cook place in Rock township and he stood in his doorway as the storm drew near and watched his herd of 38 cattle on the side of the hill where they were huddled in the corner of a forty-acre field. He saw the storm strike them and watched it as it swept them clear about three sides of the forty acres, down one side and up the other, through barb wire fences and back again, until it left them huddled in a bunch in the corner to the right of where they had started. Five of the cattle had broken legs, all were scratched, gashed, and bruised. Ten milk cows which had been in an adjacent pasture had been carried about by the wind into the main body of stock and swept around with them, but without injury to any one of them. On the Slater place, where much damage was done, the men who gathered to dispose of the dead cattle found a curious thing. At one place, the funnel of the storm had seemed to rest over an old well and into the pit dropped the carcasses of seventeen head of hogs.
James Wilkie, the carpenter, had a unique experience which strangely enough escaped death to tell. He was working at the Peterson place and had just finished the new house which was to take the place of the pioneer log cabin the family lived in. Wilkie was caught in the vortex of the storm, swept into and through a heavy hedge, and after being rolled a considerable distance, was landed against a sturdy tree. With the instinct of self-preservation, he threw his arms about the trunk and held fast, and though the gale broke the tree off short above his head, he had no fatal hurt. When he went back the next day to gather up his tool kit, there were but a few tools he could find. They were scattered just like the new cottage and the old log cabin were scattered.
The Peterson family was still in the old log house and when it went to pieces about their ears, it would not have been wonderful if some of them had been killed. Yet the only one seriously hurt was Mrs. Olson, the mother of Mrs. Peterson, who had a broken rib and was somewhat bruised and shaken up.
J.R. Neil and C. Lindberg were at another place putting up spounting. When Neil puts up spounting on an ordinary house, he does not use a ladder as he finds it not necessary. Ordinarily he can reach up from the ground quite easily probably because he was “built” that way! However he was standing on a barrel full of rain water which happened to be standing at a convenient point near the side of the house. When the wind began blowing, they took shelter inside and though out of the track of the storm, they saw the wind take the barrel full of water and whirl it across the field.
It has often been asserted that there is a point just beyond the storm center in a cyclone where an absolute calm prevails. Mrs. M. Baumgardner and Mrs. Dan Rhode of Cherokee believe this is true. They had been picking berries on the bluff almost across from the Joe Wheeler place on the afternoon of the storm, and when it began to blow, took shelter in the old Scurlock home up on the hill. They say they thought the cyclone climbed the bluff just below them, and then that there was an absolute calm that they witnessed.
Aside from money loss, there was also a story about a curious legal status dealing with the relation to the daughter of Samuel Burdge, the sole survivor of the famuly of six. Had this child lived, she would, through the curious and accidental circumstance of her mother dying first, been a pauper. She was the child of her mother by a prior marriage. Had Mr. Burdge died first, her mother would of course been his legatee and the child, had she lived, would have inherited the estate, but as it so happened the storm which killed both Burdgeande and his wife took the latter first. Mr. Burdge lived some twenty minutes longer than his wife. Thus the title to the property, by reason of this brief survival, remained in him and would have passed to his relatives rather than to the child of his wife. The circumstance, while not important, as matters have developed, is one of those peculiar things which rarely come to light, and as such has a curious interest.
Money loss was great aside from the people whose lives were crushed out by these storms. There were more than a dozen farmhouses with all their outbuildings that were swept away, immense amount of machinery ruined, and perhaps a hundred of horses and cattle that were killed.
Fences were ruined, groves demolished and growing crops ruined. The loss to the county from the destruction of the Pilot Rock bridge is probably $600, while the loss to individuals could be more than $60,000.
A newspaper article reminds people that help will be needed for these of our own family. “Let us bear each other’s burdens as it is a kindly and noble thing to share such losses as we may. It is easy for each one to give a little and thus make good the reprisals which an unkind fortune lays upon the few.”
It was touching and inspiring to see the way in which the kindly neighbors all along the track of these storms gathered to the work of rescue. All through that bleak night of horror they labored, gathering up and dressing the dead, caring for the wounded and suffering, taking the homeless to the shelter of their home. They gathered up and kept in such order as was posible the wreckage of household posessions and personal ornament. It was a radiant and glorious example of the brotherhood that holds us in its embrace that these things were done.
There were many other storms following the earlier storms but not as many lives were taken. Other storms in Cherokee county included snow, hail and heavy wind storms and the damage these did. When much rain falls, there is a chance of “flooding” and the Little Sioux River as well as many creeks played part in this.

Continued Next Week