AWFUL TEMPEST IN MINNESOTA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 105, 2 May 1873, Page 2

AWFUL TEMPEST IN MINNESOTA.

o . The New York Herald of January 22 gives the following description of the horrors of the hurricane which recently devastated Minnesota : — Tuesday, the 7th January, was a lovely and mild day; the sun was bright, and the air balmy; every pulse of the country was astir under the genial influence, and the wild swans that flew, overhead once or twice from their meres must have seen the prairie roads alive with teams, and farmers were all out. At the nearest For remainder of news, see fourth page.

leaped into tbeir sleighs, and with voice and lash urged their cowering horses out into the storm. Then the work of, death began; for more than fifty hours, till late on Thursday, the freezing wind and falling,,, snow It was not a steady fall of snow, but a howling hurricane, the wind. sometimes attaining a speed of 28, 30 or 32 miles. The snow came in fitful flurries, with a wild screech and a stinging ?whizz. The themometer fell steadily, till at Chambyslam it registered 54 deg. below zero. At other places the mercury or .spirit marked from 8 deg. to 42 deg. deg below. " Some of. the farmers who set out soon found that if they valued life they must turn back. They were enveloped in sheets of snow that . blinded them. The wind came so fiercely that they were fain to stop and turn round till a momentary lull came. The road-^-why, the level prairie was all road now, without one track or wheel or runner to indicate the path of safety. Wherever there was a slight knoll or a tree, the driving snowsleet curled round it and broke over it like yeasty billows over a wreck, and far to leeward grew up drifts of eccentric form. Then the snorting horses that toiled along pressed with their heaving flanks closer to each other for warmth and dumb protection and sympathy, and refused to go forward. The driver felt, himself becoming listless, his cold limbs were growing warm, and warned of the swift coming of death, he turned and retraced his steps. Happy they who did so betimes. There were many who held on stubbornly till it was too late. There were many who, goaded on by the dreadful fear of the fate of their wives and little ones left alone in their frail citadels, forced on through the drifts that grew deeper at every step, and cold that became more intense at every moment. And there were others who gerw weary of the contest, and, lying down ia their robes, were lulled by the elemental rage into a slumber which kuew no awakening. Sometimes the horses gave out, aud the unhappy driver, benumbed and chilled, his movements impeded, by his heavy clothing, had to abandon his team and take to the drifts. Tbe moans and shrieks of the horses that found themselves thus deserted by their masters are said by some few who survived such scenes to have been agonising to hear. " And at their homes things were no better. There was, perhaps, a scanty supply of fuel in the corner, and but a day's food in the larder. Night trod closely on the heels of noon. Perhaps the mother was alone with her suckling child, her husband 10 miles away in one direction, her children two miles away in another. These hapless parents suffered countless deaths. The wooden buildings cracked and rocked in the swing of the storm like ships at sea; the timbers cracked with the frost like rifles. Beads of frost stood on ' every piece of woodwork; the small panes of glass were so thick with ice that there wes no chance that the lamp set in the casement could sen. its feeble light to the belated stragglers without. It was impossible to open the doorß, so high were the drifts. The fire grew low, though it was replenished with the scanty furniture, day succeeded to darkness, but the day was as the night. Only the chimney of the house appeared above the drifts. The poor woman knew that her children lay dead hand in hand on the prairie, and that her husband's corpse was somewhere entombed in a giant drift. The little baby's blue lips laid against her empty breast, and soul bad sped from between them in a little cloud of frozen vapour. She lay down and died, and the relentless winds wafted through the apertures of the room a decent drift of diamond snow for her winding-sheet. Only they were envied who met with a swifter fate in the raging storm without, and were spared the sight of their children dying before their eyes of hunger as well as of cold. " When Friday, the 10th, came, the sun rose upon a land of snow and silence. Drifts many feet deep and many square miles in extent were there. Here and there a chimney of a house stood up like a tomb-stone in a vast cemetery, the land lay like a corpse under a winding-sheet that had moulded itself into occasional wrinkles over the dead limbs or set features. Now came the labor of clearing away the joint drifts and setting free the imprisoned trains, and the sadder task of tracing through the prairies the steps of the dead. Everywhere they were found lying still and statue-like in the icy embrace of death. Sometimes the searchers would find man and horses together, , the former lying dead, wrapped in his robes; with the whip ia his hand; in the sleigh one horee down, the other standing in the spot where we was fastened by his partner's fall till he shared his partner's iate. Sometimes the sleigh was found overturned, with the traces cut ; then to right or left would be discovered the .drjver, who had wandered round in a .despairing circle to .die.^ ; Occasipnally the 'leasts showed in their dilated nostrils,

widely-3pread lips, and staring eyes the signs of mortal terror; and the men, too, were Laocoons of ice, statues of writhing despair; but as a rule death came quietly, as it generally does in tbese cases, first robbing the victim of the consciousness of approaching death , "which begets an agonised struggle for life, and stilling him - with a stupor said to be as delicious as it is deadly. The death roli cannot yet be made up with any reasonable degree of certainty.