CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE OF HAIL.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 768, 26 January 1871, Page 3

CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE OF HAIL.

Brevet-Colonel Merriam, Major of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, who is now in Austin, after four years of military service on the frontiers of Kansas, New Mexico, and West Texas, had received leave of absence, and was journeying with his wife and child from El Paso to the Texan coast. They had reached the head of Concho river, and camped for the night, on Sunday the 24th of April. The stream at this point is so small that a man can step across it anywhere. The banks were twenty feet above the bed of the water. Fatigued with the long journey of sixty-eight miles in the previous twentv-four hours, without water, the tarty were pleasantly resting, when, early in the evening. Colonel Merriam was roused by the signs of an approaching storm. The tent was fastened and made as secure as possible, and about nine o'clock a hailstorm burst upon them, accompanied by some rain and a strong wind. The fall of hail was unprecedented, lasting until nearly 11, the stones being of the size of hens' eggs, and striking the tent and prairie with a noise like near and incessant musketry. The Colonel, who was not ignorant of the sudden and extreme overflows to which the mountain streams of Texas are liable, went out into the darkness as soon as the storm had ceased, to note what effect had been produced on this rivulet. To his amazement, he found in the formerly almost dry bed of the creek an irresistible torrent,loaded and filled with hail, rolling nearly bank high, white as milk, and silent as a river of oil. He at once saw the danger, and ran back to the tent shouting to the escort and servants to turn out. He placed Mrs Merriam, the child, and nurse in the carriage, and with the aid of three men started to run with it to the higher ground, a distance of not more than sixty yards. Scarcely a minute had elapsed from the time the alarm bad been given, but already the water had surged over the bank in waves of such volume and force as to sweep the party from their feet before they had traversed thirty yards. Merriam then abandoned the hope of saving his family in the carriage, and tried to enter it in order to swim out with but he was swept down the ice-cold torrent like a bubble. Being aw expert swimmer, he succeeded in reaching the bank about 200 yards below, and ran back to renew the effort, when he received the terrible tidings, that the moment after he was swept down, the carriage with all its precious freight had turned over and gone rolling down the flood, his wife saying, as she disappeared, " My darling husband, good-bye." The little rill of a i'ew hours before, which a child might step across, had become a raging river, covered with masses of drift-wood a mile in width, and from thirty to forty feet deep. Before day the strange and momentary flood had passed by, and the small stream shrank to its usual size, and ran in its wonted bed. The sad search began. The drowned servants and soldiers, four in number, were found,aridthebodyof the wife was taken from the water about three-fourths of a mile below, and prepared for a journey of fifty-three miles to the post of Concho for temporary burial. Not till three days after was the body of the child found, four miles clown the stream, and a long distance from its bed. The beaver ponds, from which the Concho takes its rise, were so filled with the icy hail that the cutfish were killed by the congelation, and were swept in waggon loads, together with myriads of small animals of the plain, such as rabbits and snakes, all over the country by the sudden and rushing flood. Three days after the storm, when the partyleft the Concho, the hail still lay in drifts and winrows to the depth of more than six feet. —"Austin (Texas) Journal."