Continued from last 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.