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.