The hot wind began blowing a regular gale, and soon the crowd disappeared. All feeling of merriment gave way before the contemplation of the ravaging blast that was hourly doing irreparable damage to the growing crops. As the day advanced, the wind became hotter and hotter, until not a soul was visible on the streets of Meade. People hastened to their homes, offices, and stores for shelter, and shut themselves away from the intensely suffocating air. A few minutes’ exposure would blister the face and hands of the hardiest farmer.
On rushed the scorching wave,—its wilting breath shriveling up every growing thing as effectually as a prairie fire,—everything excepting the native buffalo-grass, the cacti, and the sunflowers. The grass it cured, and made more sweet and fattening for the cattlemen’s herds.
The thermometer registered 102 degrees in the shade. The following day it ran up to 108 degrees,—next day it registered 114 degrees, while on the fourth day of this terribly heated blast of parching, burning winds, the mercury reached 119 degrees in the shade.
It was a suffocation indescribable, dealing relentless death to the agricultural hopes of the great Southwest. It was like some intense heat driven from thousands of furnaces, where limitless quantities of anthracite burn with blue and forked flames, creating heat sufficient to change even the very rocks into liquid. For a hundred hours this stifling, burning breath belched forth from the jaws of calamitous destruction. Utter devastation followed.
On the first day, the fields of growing corn seemed to shrink in timidity; on the second day the proud plumage of tassels drooped on the stalks; on the third day the blades whitened and shriveled and became like some aged and decrepit thing; while on the fourth day the tassels, blades, and even the stalks were snapped off in their parched brittleness and scattered by the winds of this terrific tornado of heat.
The fields were swept of every vestige of growing grain. The entire country became a desolate waste. For a hundred miles in every direction no living vegetation, planted by the hand of man, survived. The hopes, the labors, and the achievements of years were alike swept into the vortex of absolute ruin; and these farmers in the Southwest beheld the Great American Desert, as depicted by the earlier geographers, in all its primitive awfulness.
Farmers became mendicants; business men, paupers; while notes and bonds in the bankers’ hands turned into worthless assets. A cry went up from the starving thousands, and once more train-loads of provisions came from the East for the relief of the Kansas sufferers.
John B. Horton, the cattle king, caused hundreds of beeves to be brought in from the range, and he opened a free market on the public square of Meade, to feed the destitute and hungry.