Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/72

As it neared the town of Camanche, the appearance of the storm was awful beyond description. The light of day was blotted out and the roar of the elements stilled every voice and blanched the cheek of the bravest. No escape seemed possible. Many families ran to the cellars, while others huddled together and clung to each other in their terror. The fury of the united tornadoes struck the village at seven o’clock in the evening. One who visited the ruins the next morning gives the following description of the sights:

“Amid the devastation that met the eye and is utterly indescribable, wherever a few boards hung together were gathered the survivors, some slumbering, others sitting in despair mourning the loved and lost; some nursing the wounded, while many lay dead side by side in rough boxes in a building. The tornado had swept through the town a quarter of a mile wide, literally prostrating everything before it. The town was not a mass of ruins, but it looked as though the houses and their contents were literally scattered. There were fragments of what had been houses everywhere. All that was left of Camanche was a few houses and all of these injured. No houses were left in the direct track of the tornado, and those at the edges were riddled as if by cannon shot. In many cases broken timbers had been hurled through houses, carrying death and destruction. Eleven store buildings fronting on the river ere piled in ruins, and much of them with their contents were swept into the river. There is not a business house in the town left unimpaired, and nearly every one was totally destroyed. The scene was appalling and cannot be described.”

Thirty-nine business houses were totally destroyed, beside two churches and two hotels. Forty-one persons were instantly killed, and more than eighty lacerated and mutilated in every conceivable form. Of the three hundred and fifty dwelling houses in the town not fifty were left uninjured, and eight hundred and sixty persons were homeless. Crossing the river the tornado struck Albany, on the Illinois side, swept on eastward through the entire State, killing eleven persons, wounding more than fifty, and destroying an immense amount of property. Crossing Lake Michigan north of Chicago we last hear of it in Ottawa County, Michigan, where it had exhausted its de-