The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado | Page 3

little use of a few of its forces; but he is
impotent before its power.
Thus we pause to reflect upon the most staggering and tragic cataclysm
of Nature that has been visited upon our country since first our
forefathers won it from the Indian--the unprecedented succession of
tornadoes, floods, storms and blizzards, which in March, 1913,
devastated vast areas of territory in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and a
dozen other states, and which were followed fast by the ravages of fire,
famine and disease.
THE DEVASTATION OF OMAHA
The terrible suddenness and irresistible power of such catastrophes
make them an object of overwhelming fear. The evening of Easter
Sunday in Omaha was doubtless as placid and uneventful as a thousand
predecessors, until an appalling roar and increasing darkness
announced to the initiated the approach of a tornado, and in a few
minutes forty-seven city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest
and best built part of the city could no more withstand this awful force
than the weakest hovels. Twelve hundred buildings were destroyed,
most of them homes, but among them many churches and school
houses. The just and the unjust fared alike in this riot of destruction and
then the tornado rushed on to find other objects on which to wreck its

force in Council Bluffs and elsewhere. It left in its wake many fires, but
fortunately also a heavy rain, while later a deep fall of snow covered up
the scene of its awful destruction.
THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD
With the rest of the country, fair Dayton sorrowed for Omaha. Two
days later Omaha, bowed and almost broken by her own misfortune,
looked with sympathy across to Dayton, whose woe was even greater.
A thousand communities in the United States read the story and in their
own sense of security sent eager proffers of assistance to the striken
districts. And not one of them has assurance that it may not be next.
There is no sure definition of the course of the earthquake, the path of
the wind, the time and place of the storm-cloud. Science has its
limitations. Only the Infinite is master of these forces.
In the legal parlance of the practice of torts such occurrences as these
are known as "acts of God." Theologians who attempt to solve the
mysteries of Providence have found in such occasions the evidence of
Divine wrath and warning to the smitten people. But to seek the reason
and to know the purpose, if there be purpose in it, is not necessary. The
fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men and
women to think--and even to pray.
But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand of
death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great Lakes
to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is
veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the
Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. And as this awful
deluge drained from the land into Nature's watercourses the demons of
death and devastation danced attendance on its mad rush that laid waste
the borderlands of the Mississippi River from Illinois to the Gulf of
Mexico.
A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD
Those who have never seen a great flood do not know the meaning of
the Scriptural phrase, "the abomination of desolation."

An explosion, a railroad wreck, even a fire--these are bad enough in
their pictorial effect of shattered ruins and confusion. But for giving
one an oppressive sense of death-like misery, there is nothing equal to a
flood.
I do not speak now of the loss of life, which is unspeakably dreadful,
but of the scenic effect of the disaster. It just grips and benumbs you
with its awfulness.
In the flat country of the Middle West there is less likelihood of swift,
complete destruction than in narrow valleys, like those of Johnstown
and Austin in Pennsylvania. But the effect is, if anything, more
gruesome.
After the crest has passed there are miles and miles of inundated land,
with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to
break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling
and boiling as it seeks to find its level.
[Illustration: THE CITIES AND TOWNS INCLOSED BY THE
HEAVY BLACK DOTTED LINES WERE THE CHIEF SUFFERERS
BY THE SWEEP OF WATERS]
The scene in a town is particularly ghastly. How ghastly it is, you
would have realized if you could have gone with the writer into the
flooded districts of Ohio and Indiana, traveling from point to point in
automobiles and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in
boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The
upper floors