Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Read online

  Her uncle showed Clem the skies and explained why he believed a tornado was coming.

  Exactly what Clem said next is left to the imagination, but one has to conclude that they probably discussed Mabel and whether they should alert her. Mabel was with her parents, 63-year-old William, a business owner, and Ella, 61 and in poor health, and possibly both of her siblings, her older sister, Bertha, and her younger brother, Leslie. It’s possible that Clem or Porter or both ran the five blocks and reported their concern about the tornado, but they knew Mabel and her family were aware of the weather and probably didn’t want to worry anyone on just a hunch.

  At about 5:30 in the afternoon, the clouds became considerably darker—almost green—and then the clouds formed one massive, dense, black wall.

  Porter wasn’t the only one who noticed the skies. F. G. Elmendorf, a traveling salesman from Indianapolis who had just arrived from Chicago, discussed with some fellow salesmen the ominous-looking dark clouds that had shown up after a little rain, and they were nervous. Still, Elmendorf went about his business and picked up something to read, killing time in his hotel’s lobby.

  Another visitor to the city, a man who gave reporters the name of F. J. Adams, didn’t like how the sky looked. He decided he was going to get out of the city.

  It was a smart decision, made a little too late. As Adams walked toward the train station, the temperature plummeted, and the sky turned black. There were a few drops of rain. It was windy. Still, when the funnel cloud barreled toward him, having first touched down fifteen minutes earlier, eighty miles southwest at Kramer, Nebraska, before racing past Lincoln and into Omaha at six in the evening, nobody, not even Adams, could say that they had been expecting it.

  Inside Elmendorf’s hotel lobby, the traveling salesman was sitting next to a window. Then he noticed that the sun seemed to have disappeared. He could hear a humming sound, “the most fearful and peculiar sound I ever heard,” he would say later, and thunder crashed over the city, as did rain. But he wasn’t sure exactly what was happening outside his hotel.

  Porter and Clem ran downstairs to the basement. But it was for Clem’s benefit only. Porter sprinted back upstairs to watch the tornado. If it developed into anything important, he wanted to be able to give his readers a first-hand account of the storm.

  Porter stood on his porch, amazed at what he was seeing. There was a tornado, all right, and it was beginning to carve up his city.

  F. J. Adams was thrown against a building, and it must have saved his life, for he was able to remain where he was and watch the world collapse around him.

  “I saw a man picked off his feet and blown through a plate glass window of the Odd Fellows’ Temple,” Adams said. “He was killed. A taxi careened around a corner, seemed to be running solidly, and in the next instant, it tilted and rolled and then lifted over a sidewalk wall about six feet high. The chauffeur, I believe, must have been killed, as the machine was smashed to kindling.”

  Adams watched the entire roof of a small store blow away. Seconds later, a man who decided he was better off outside than in, charged out of the store. The man was lifted into the air, spun around for more than a hundred feet, and body-slammed back into the earth. The man didn’t get up.

  Similar to Elmendorf’s recollection, Porter would write that “a billion bumblebees could not have equaled the giant humming which accompanied the storm.”

  Of what it looked like, Porter called the tornado a “black storm cloud” that “rode a great white balloon of twisting electric fire.”

  Houses, according to Porter, collapsed like cards or simply disappeared. Another house, a three-story residence, was split in two, as if a giant sword had sliced it. Porter watched a cottage sail through the air and strike the fifth story of the Sacred Heart convent and smash apart the south wing as if it had been made out of paper.

  Then a house was picked up and hurled a quarter of a block and directly into the house of William and Ella Higgins.

  Where Mabel was.

  Then the tornado was gone. Porter ran for the pile of rubble that used to be his in-laws’ house.

  There was no warning of the tornado, no explanation from Mother Nature. The storm crossed diagonally through the city, across the western and northern parts of the city, attacking residential areas both wealthy and poor. It chugged along for about six miles through Omaha, leaving a path of destruction about a fourth to a half-mile wide. Instead of acting like some tornadoes, hopping into the air and then landing again, this cyclone’s path of destruction was continuous, staying low to the ground during those six devastating miles.

  Almost sixty years later, in 1971, Tetsuya Fujita, a meteorology professor at the University of Chicago, and Allen Pearson, head of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center, designed the Fujita-Pearson scale. The Fujita-Pearson scale designated tornadoes F1 to F5, with the lower F1 representing winds from 117 to 180 miles, and the F5 to describe a tornado blowing at 261 to 318 miles per hour. The tornado that hit Omaha in 1913 is believed to have been an F4, which means winds were ranging from 207 to 260 miles an hour, and its path was a hundred miles long, a rarity for a tornado.

  But the power and durability of the Omaha tornado can really be told with this factoid: a sign from a store in Omaha was found in Harlan, Iowa—sixty miles away.

  One of the first signs indicating how unique and ugly this tornado was going to become was when a body dropped out of the sky.

  Charles Allen was walking at the corner of Forty-Fifth and Center Streets just after the tornado seemed to have materialized out of thin air. He was astonished to have a little girl, about four years of age, fall out of the sky into his arms. His shock turned to horror when he realized she was dead. He would live out the rest of his days wondering what her name was.

  At that point, the tornado had already crossed Woolworth Avenue, the street where Dorothy and Leslie King lived. It seems to have never come closer than five blocks away from the King home, but had it veered a little to the east, Dorothy King, and her as-of-yet unborn child, Leslie Lynch King, Jr., might have become casualties of the tornado.

  Dorothy King would then have never divorced her abusive and alcoholic husband, remarried, and moved to Michigan. Which means her son wouldn’t have renamed himself after his stepfather, and the country would never have gotten to know Gerald Ford, the future 38th president of the United States.

  If tornadoes could be described as having a personality, this one was a sociopath, and the details are disturbing. Mabel McBride, a 24-year-old elementary school art teacher, convinced her mother and young brother that they were safer huddling in a corner of a room than running outside. She was probably correct, or should have been, but when the roof blew away, the floors above collapsed, and a heavy board fell and struck Mabel on the head. She died instantly, but perhaps her actions saved her brother and mother, who survived.

  At the edge of the city and near the edge of the tornado’s path, most of the children in the orphanage, the Child Saving Institute, were indeed saved by virtue of being herded into the cellar, but two babies, Thelma and Cynthia, were sucked out of the windows.

  Just outside the Idlewild, a pool hall, trolley conductor Ord Hensley spotted the cyclone coming toward his streetcar, which was packed with about a hundred screaming passengers.

  “Everybody keep cool and lie in the center of the car,” shouted Hensley, grabbing two women who were boarding the streetcar and pushing them to the floor while dropping down with them. Nobody needed to be persuaded otherwise. Charles H. Williams, one of the passengers, managed a curious glance at the storm and a fleeting thought—It looks like a big, white balloon—as he watched houses blowing away and trees rocketing into the sky. But like every other passenger, he dropped to his hands and knees and joined the pile of humans that had collected onto the floor of the center of the car.

  Then the windows shattered. Trash, not rain, enveloped the car. A heavy wooden beam crashed through one window and poked out the other. Wooden plank
s, tossed by the wind, landed on top of the streetcar passengers. Then as quickly as it had come, it was over for the passengers, and Hensley, Williams, and the others staggered to their feet, unhurt.

  The patrons of the nearby pool hall were having their own problems. Eight African-Americans were playing at one pool table, with the rest of the crowd watching. Then everyone heard what sounded like a freight train roaring toward them, and the roof shot up into the sky and, along with it, the pool table. Seconds later, the pool table, along with the roof, came crashing to earth, killing most of the onlookers. A fire broke out next. The county coroner managed to rescue three of the men from the rubble and was likely haunted for the rest of his life by the sight of another man burning to death. In all, fourteen men died in the pool hall.

  Several blocks away, the conductor of the streetcar on Forty-Eighth and Leavenworth wasn’t as brave as Ord Hensley had been. This conductor saw the approaching tornado and jumped off, running for his life and leaving his passengers behind. One of them, Leon Stover, a thirty-year-old bookkeeper for a department store, moved behind the controls and tried to drive the streetcar and outrace the tornado. It was a nice try, but the twister swept past the streetcar, raining glass and splinters onto a bloodied Stover, who was suddenly aware of a father’s anguished cries. The father’s baby had been ripped from his arms and blown into the void.

  The Diamond Picture Theatre collapsed, killing thirty people inside. The Sacred Heart Convent was turned into firewood. Then the tornado turned its attention to William O’Connor.

  William was eight years old. He had just been sent by his older brother to go to the drugstore across the street from the family’s house to buy some stamps. A few moments later, Lawrence O’Connor, eighteen years old, saw the storm and shouted to the rest of his family—his parents and five other siblings—that a cyclone was coming and to run for the shelter.

  Lawrence didn’t go to the shelter. He chased after William.

  His little brother was reaching the pharmacy when Lawrence grabbed him and pulled him back across the street toward the house. Halfway across the street, the tornado caught Lawrence, who was still clinging to William, and flung the two brothers both into the air. All the way up, and then all the way down, Lawrence never let go of his younger brother.

  A group of people were huddled in the garage of a brick building at 40th and Farnam Streets when the tornado made direct impact. It—and they—were suddenly blown away.

  Inside the house of Rose Fitzgerald, a 33-year-old widow, guests were sitting down for a birthday dinner. The guest of honor, Patrick Hynes, eighty-one and a widower, must have been feeling pretty good about where he stood. He had seen plenty in his life since his birth in Ireland in 1832. He fought in and survived the Civil War. His children, married and with children of their own, seem to have been doing well. His son, William, in particular, had a successful elevator company. Surrounded by friends and family, Patrick Hynes gave a little speech to raised wine glasses, and as they all began sipping to good health, the house came crashing down.

  Hynes climbed out of the rubble with a fractured leg but was otherwise uninjured, and most of the guests crawled out, although not everyone. His daughter Margaret had two broken arms and internal injuries. “Oh, if only it had been me instead,” Hynes later said.

  Another party was going on at the home of Benjamin Edholm, a 62-year-old Swedish-American carpenter, and his wife, Hanna, 61.

  Hanna saw the tornado first. She drew the shades but before she could corral everyone in a cellar, an object burst through the window and slid across the table and crashed onto the floor with most of the dishes.

  It took a moment to realize what that object was: a human body. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, the naked body, a man, sat up, grabbed the tablecloth and wrapped it around his body. The man asked for some trousers, was hastily given a pair of Benjamin Edholm’s, and dashed out the door without even introducing himself.

  A Mrs. F. Bryant, 92, was lying in bed on the third floor of her son’s house when walls and floorboards blew apart around her. Mrs. Bryant plunged to the ground and even farther than that, landing in the basement. She was covered in debris, but she also was still in her bed and alive. Her son and daughter-in-law, also still alive, managed, with a lot of difficulty, to remove enough rubble to help her out.

  When Edward Dixon saw the funnel cloud, he stopped what he was doing and spun around in fear. The tornado was smashing his neighbors’ houses into oblivion, and, by the looks of it, planning on paying a visit to the Dixon residence in less than a minute. The 39-year-old chemist fled upstairs, shouting for his wife to gather their three children.

  He never reached the second floor.

  Strong winds, the tornado’s advance team, hit the house, sending explosions of glass from the windows and into the living room. As if grabbed by an unseen hand, Edward was plucked off the stairs and pulled into the dining room, where he landed flat on his face. Dazed, his right ear aching from a shard of glass that had been, moments ago, part of one of his windows, Edward was nonetheless still alive. He struggled to his feet to find he was surrounded by his wife Opal and their three terrified children: eighteen-year-old Nina, twelve-year-old Lester, and six-year-old Doris. It was clear that within seconds they were going to all die.

  But Edward and Opal shepherded their kids to the cellar anyway. Behind them, they fastened the lock shut.

  And behind the door was the tornado. Before the Dixons had a chance to hide and huddle, the ceiling above them disappeared.

  When it was all over, once the tornado had left Omaha entirely, people began taking stock of what had just happened. In Elmendorf’s hotel, nobody had moved since the tornado began, and once it ended, for a long stretch of time, nobody emerged outside. According to Elmendorf, they confirmed that it was a tornado when either the telephone rang or someone called from the front desk, which seems unlikely since many and possibly all of Omaha’s telephone lines were down. Perhaps because it was getting dark, or maybe the staff discouraged the guests from leaving, Elmendorf and his fellow traveling salesmen would wait around and get reports on the tornado damage, not leaving to look around until the morning.

  At another hotel—or possibly it was Elmendorf’s—Mary Knudsen, a servant for an affluent family, came into the lobby as a disheveled mess. She was hysterical but managed to verify to everyone that a tornado had blown apart the city.

  The Dixons were not sucked out of their basement along with their ceiling. Edward, Opal, Nina, Lester, and Doris somehow were left alive and in their cellar, which was the good news. The bad news was that the cellar was on fire. But Edward scrambled out and managed to pull his wife and children out of the hole in the ground before it became a fire pit.

  Afterward, the Dixons stared at their neighborhood, or what was left of it: telephone poles at 45-degree angles, upturned Model T Fords and uprooted trees, and wooden planks, brick, and debris strewn about. It looked like running carefree and barefoot on a lawn would never be possible again. Of course, as is almost always the case with a tornado, there were some fortunate houses standing as they had always been, as if nothing was amiss at all. The Dixons could see fires in the distance—there were about twenty infernos throughout Omaha, although none too serious; they were all put out by firefighters and the rain within the next three hours.* In the trees and on telephone wires hung bedsheets and clothes.

  If the Dixon family could have reached into the future to summon the image, they would have thought it looked as if Omaha had been blasted by a nuclear bomb.

  But at least they were around to see it. “We had lost our all,” Edward later told a journalist, possibly Thomas Porter, “but were thankful for our lives.”

  One girl, Margaret Matthews, would later write to a popular children’s magazine and share what the tornado aftermath was like for some of the Omaha residents.

  “I’m sure I shall never forget it as long as I live,” recalled the thirteen-year-old. “I didn’t see the tornado
cloud, but I heard the roar, and that was enough. I was not at home at the time, but over at my chum’s for the night. We were up-stairs and the folks were down, and all of a sudden we heard a loud roar, and the lights went out, and we ran down-stairs. My chum’s mother had seen the cloud, and had called for us to come down, but we had not heard her. It did not hit their house nor ours, and we are very thankful. All that night, people came running in, asking for help, and we did not sleep much.

  “Next day, I went around to see the ruins, and I am glad I went once, but I would not go again. One poor old man had lost his house and family. The house was laying on its side, and he couldn’t talk—he just cried.

  “Now,” Margaret continued, “every time the least little cloud comes up, every one rushes out to look, and most rush to their cellars.”

  Small wonder people were afraid. Taking in the sights was too much to bear. Approximately 1,250 buildings had been demolished into rubble, including eleven churches and eight schools. Featherless chickens bobbed back and forth as if nothing had happened, and the occasional cow could be found impaled on a fence post. A man’s body hung in a tree.

  The bodies of Cynthia and Thelma, two babies, were located a good distance from the wreckage of the orphanage where they spent their short lives. Elsewhere in the city, a toddler whose mother was killed was found in the street alive, playing with a dead dog.

  Clifford Daniels didn’t make it. He was a mail carrier who was described by his pastor as a strikingly good-looking fellow who was well liked by all. He and his wife, Luella, and their two daughters, six and four years old, were found in the ruins of their house; the girls were embraced in the arms of their mother, while Cliff was found on top of them, which suggested to everyone that he had tried to shield them with his body.

  Eighteen-year-old Clifford Daniels, Jr., escaped the cyclone’s wrath, but only because he hadn’t been home.