Disasters Chapter Sixteen Of all disasters that could bring death and destruction to the plains settlers, prairie fires were probably the most dreaded. Killer blizzards and tornados could do more damage but they struck less often during the pioneer years, while the fearful fires came to some part of the country almost every spring or fall when the grass was dry and high winds most prevalent. Lightning could set one going, or the carelessly dropped match of a settler or a hunter, or a spark from the smokestack of a passing train. Even a careful man, going about his necessary chores, could sometimes let one get away. Almost every settler plowed fire-guards around his land every fall, and around his buildings and haystacks, then “backset” them the next spring and maybe planted a garden or a little cornpatch on the strips nearest the house. And everyone soon got into the habit of carrying matches at all times— prepared to set a “backfire” if threatened by a racing fire. The last thing at night during fire seasons most pioneer parents went outside to scan the horizon for the tell-tale glare of fire against the night sky.
At the first sign of fire, day or night, almost every man in the country rushed away to take part in fighting it. Loading shovels, pitchforks, barrels of water and old rags and sacks into his wagon and gathering neighbors as he went, he sought out the fire. Once on the site, each man fought as best he could, beating at the head fires with water soaked sacks, or with a piece of sod cut out of the prairie and impaled on the tines of a pitchfork, or shoveling dirt onto the flames. When there was time to do so they plowed new fireguards and/or set backfires. Charles Martens recalls the big fire of April 28, 1896, that started below Chambers (some accounts say it was started by lightning in the Amelia area and was thought to be under control when freshening winds fanned it into a holocaust and sent it racing on a new path of destruction.) and burned all the way to the Elkhorn River, a distance of twenty miles. The Martens lived six miles southwest of Emmet and nine-year-old Charles never forgot the sight and sound of that fire. A strong wind blew from the south and bits of ashes of grass, like snow, rode the gale. “The terrible fire roared past us about a half mile to the east,” he wrote. “There were great clouds of smoke and fire and it looked a hundred feet high. It just rolled and roared like many freight trains going by at once. The wide fireguards at the railroad held it, but it had no more than hit the river than the wind changed and the entire front of the fire blew to the east.
“Neighbors who had rushed to help were caught away from home and many were burned out completely. Quite a few families stayed with us until they could rebuild and us kids had a blast. We thought it a lot of fun, with people sleeping all over.” Writing of the same fire, Faye Puckett who, with his family, lived on the place now owned by Joe Ziska, 120 was seven at the time and recalls that hot, dry day and the high wind. The head fire had jumped the Elkhorn and was stopped at the railroad tracks when Faye’s mother sent him on a gentle horse to take a lunch to the herdsman who was out with the Puckett cattle, about 150 head of them.
The sky was full of smoke and ashes and the herdsman told the lad to stay with the cattle while he went to help fight the fire. There was no danger to the boy as long as the wind stayed in the south, but shortly after the man left Faye saw the fire boiling over the hills to the southwest. The sight was so awesome that he abandoned the herd and headed for home, “which was the luckiest decision I ever made, ” he wrote years later.
“Just as I reached home the wind turned to the northwest with hurricane force, making what had been the ‘side fire’ with a south wind the ‘head fire’ with a northwest wind. Just as I was riding into the barnyard my father came driving in from the other side. He had been to town after a load of lumber and had heard about the fire there. He put Mother and us children in the wagon and told us to drive over the hill to a freshly plowed field on the Jake Maring place. He stayed with the buildings.
After the wind changed our herder and two other men had to follow the fire, so the herder went back to the cattle and found them in a pond, safe from the fire. At the home place the barn and cattle sheds were all afire when the other two men got there. Flaming boards and embers were flying all over the place and the house caught and burned, too. Father and two men had hauled home three loads of new lumber the day before to start some new buildings and that all burned, but they managed to pull the load that was still on the wagon to safety.
“My mother, who weighed about as much as two forty-eight sacks of flour, had managed to carry seven or eight head of skimmer calves from the barn to an empty corn crib in the middle of the corral. This was before the wind changed and she thought they would be safe there. One calf got loose from her and was saved. The rest burned with the crib. When the house caught fire the men carried out what they could but flaming embers burned holes in a lot of things. I remember one rocking chair that we used for years that had a hole burned through one arm and another through the back.
“When the smoke from the head fires cleared enough, Mother and us children could see the school house and Jake Maring’s buildings, all on fire. Then Mother drove back to the top of the hill to see what was going on at our place, and when we saw the buildings all burning she drove down again so we wouldn’t have to watch. Then we drove on to ‘Uncle Tommy’ Maring’s to stay all night. It was crowded there that night, and until Father could build a new house on what is known as the Puckett ranch now, and we could move into it. The day of the fire had been so warm that my sisters were all going barefooted. The only clothes we had were what we had on, and the next day was so cold and rainy that the girls cried with their cold feet. Of course there was neither feed nor pasture left for our cattle, so Father took them north of Emmet for pasture. By July the new grass had grown tall enough to hay and we cut and baled some to sell for needed cash. My father and I, each with a team and a wagon load of hay, hauled it to O’Neill and put our teams in DeYarmin’s livery stable while we went to the hotel for dinner.
While we were eating the fire bell rang and when we got outside we found the livery barn all afire, with a hard south wind fanning it along. Forty-five horses, beside our four, burned to death. When my father got home and looked at the fine print on his insurance policy it read, ‘Insured on or off premises except in a livery barn.”‘ On the day of the fire just described John Gaughenbaugh had started to O’Neill. The smoky appearance of the air made him change his mind and hurry home again, and while he was changing his clothes his brother shouted “Here comes the fire.” Mrs. Gaughenbaugh took the old and nearly blind grandmother and a small grandchild to the center of a nearby ploughed field while John drove the cattle to another field, then headed back to the house as fast as his horse could run, hoping to save something more.
The plowed fields split the fire and it raced on by, sparing the buildings. When the wind changed and brought the fire roaring back on an angle, it burnt the District 141 schoolhouse and the Jake Maring and Ingersoll homes. Mrs. Maring was bedfast, following the birth of her first child, and her husband and some other men carried her out to a makeshift bed in the wagon, where she lay and watched her home burn.
Only four homes in the whole area were still standing that night, after the fire had gone by— Alex Maring’s, Uncle Tom Maring’s, the Hiatt’s and the Gaughenbaugh’s, all of whom took in all those who were “Burned out” and had no homes. Nineteen people put up at the Tom Maring house, the rest at the others. Mrs. Hiatt still had a home because of her own heroic efforts. When she saw the danger she put her four small children in the wagon and directed them to drive to a meadow that had been burned over a short time before. Then she spent the afternoon carrying water and fighting out the fires that started in the grass around her home. When all was safe she went for her children, whose frightened little faces were black with the sooty ashes that had settled on them as the fire burned past their meadow refuge.
Mrs. N.D. Ickes tells of another very bad fire that started on April 14, 1908. A Mr. Hanley living on Dr. Gilligan’s farm four or five miles northeast of O’Neill decided that was the day he had been waiting for— with not a breath of air stirring— to set fire to an old straw stack. Starting his fire all around the base of the stack, he expected it to burn down very quickly, but a sudden gust of wind from the southwest fanned the burning stack into an inferno and flung parts of it all over the place, setting on fire the weeds and trash accumulated over the winter.
Neighbors, habitually scanning the horizon during the fire season, saw and headed for the fire as fast as their horses could run. The flames raced northeast to a point about ten miles northeast of O’Neill. Then the wind changed and sent the holocaust rolling southeast toward Inman and Page. With every man in the country out fighting the fire, it was said there was not an able bodied man left in Page that night. Ray Siders, twelve years old, rode his horse until dawn, carrying messages between the various head and side fires. Thick smoke filled the air and the whole sky seemed lighted by the blaze, making it difficult to know where the actual fire was. There was the Elkhorn River to cross, and then the railroad right of way, before the fire could reach Inman; but the depot agent there took the precaution to telegraph to Norfolk for help, and for a coach and engine to haul the people to safety if it became necessary. A Mr. Davenport hurriedly hitched four horses to a sulky plow and began to plow a fireguard around his place. When he saw it was useless it was too late. He whipped up his horses and tried to make an end run around the west edge of the inferno, but was thrown from the plow and caught by the on-rushing flames, which burned over him. When found later he was so badly burned that the flesh came off his hands with his leather gloves. 121 his horses. A baby was born somewhere in the threatened area that night, but today the name of the new arrival has been forgotten.
Long years later Sarah Morgan Sorensen related her memories of the fire burning in among their buildings, and of her mother, grandfather and “all the kids old enough to carry water,” putting out the little fires; and of many haystacks burning all through the night. When her father, Charlie Morgan, came home at daylight from plowing guards and backfiring all night, he was badly burned and in great pain.
Another destructive fire swept the country about twenty-five miles southwest of Atkinson in 1910. A short time earlier Robert Clifford had built a new frame house south of the old soddy, his family’s first home, he had started to build a new cattle shed and on March 12 had gone to Atkinson for the last load of lumber. Later that day Mrs. Clifford saw smoke rising on the brisk south wind.
She hadn’t known how near the fire was until she and the hired man saw flames along the tops of the farther hills. The man hitched up a team, put the plow in the wagon and hurried away to try to plow a few furrows and backfire against them. But there wasn’t time and in a few minutes he was back, lashing the horses to keep ahead of the flames. Mrs. Clifford then put her little girls into the old soddy, now used for a chicken house, turned the cattle out of the corral and turned on the windmill. She and the hired man then gathered sacks and water pails and, amid smoke so dense they could scarcely breathe, beat the flames away from the house.
Neighbors came quickly, bringing spades, plows, water barrels and sacks. They saved the house, but the nearly finished new shed burned to the ground before the fire “forked” and went on by. All hay burned in the fire’s twenty miles wide path, but new grass came on early and there was soon forage for the livestock. Fuel was a problem, however, for the Cliffords, too, burned hay. Mrs. Clifford managed to get by by taking her little girls and scouring the pastures for cowchips.
A prairie fire, sweeping through tall grass at amazing speed on a high wind, will often burn over cowchips so quickly that they do not catch fire. Some chips, of course, will catch and smoulder for a long time, often starting new fires if not found and destroyed.
A vivid description of another fire, undated and location not given, comes from Anna Haigh Elder. She was nine years old at the time and her mother had to lend a hand After two days of agony he died. His four horses perished, too.
Soon after the fire started William Delong went galloping over the countryside, warning the farmers that there was a fire on the loose. At the Gannon home, just north of the Elkhorn and about a mile and a half north of Inman, he imparted his warning and hurried on. Bertha, the oldest daughter, thought they should get into the river but the mother, Rose, favored the family cave and they took refuge there.
After what seemed a long time, Mrs. Gannon raised the sloping door a crack, but such a gust of burning twigs and leaves blew in that she dropped it, tore off her apron, wet it in the vinegar barrel and beat out the blazing sticks. Then the children began to cry because they couldn’t breathe. The mother told them to break a jar of fruit and drink the juice. Bertha found and broke a jar of rhubarb, but in her panic poured most of it over her brother Roy’s head. Then the children became quiet in the darkness.
When she heard a voice outside Mrs. Gannon raised the door again. She and Bertha were able to walk out of the cave but the neighbor, Chauncey Keyes, had to carry Roy, Blanche and Helen out. unconscious from near suffocation, Roy and Blanche were soon revived but Mr. Keyes worked for a long while over little Helen before she “came to” and bit his finger when he tried to force her mouth open. Everything on the Gannon place, except the house, had burned— barn, sheds, feed, equipment and harness, as well as some pigs and calves.
The train from Norfolk had arrived and the crew had turned to and helped fight the fire away from the town, but many farmers lost heavily. James Cameron, southeast of O’Neill, saved only some horses and cattle and the clothes he and his family were wearing. Everything else, house and all went up in the flames. He had no insurance.
The big fire had burned a territory comprising thirty square miles and lying in a huge L shape. The north arm extended east to Antelope slough and the western arm south to the Elkhorn. Three families near the river and several farther north were burned out. Thousands of tons of hay, hundreds of fence posts and scores of telephone poles were destroyed. While the fire had been sweeping northeast a new settler, whose buildings were not in its path, refused to go help fight it, but when the wind changed and sent it back southwest, it destroyed everything but his house and burned the manes and tails off fighting the fire. Leaving Anna in the house, the mother gave her firm orders to stay inside and mind her two little brothers until she came back. “It was terrible,” Anna wrote, “to see that black smoke and the fire getting closer and closer and to know I didn’t dare leave the house and the two little boys. The fire had nearly reached our doorstep when my mother came back and told me it was almost out and we were safe.
“Another big fire came, one windy March day, burning by a mile to the west of our school house. It had been a dry year and there were many big tumble weeds in the fields. The fire started at the railroad tracks and burned a long way north. The tumble weeds would catch fire, then soar into the air, scattering the fire and making it very hard to fight. It turned out to be the worst fire ever known in that section of the country.” One of the earliest fires described in these histories occurred in the spring of 1887. It was started by a settler named VanSheets who attempted to burn some trash on his place, now known as the Kruegar farm. A sudden high wind sent the small blaze out of control and racing past his house and on north. It burned to the railroad, a distance of some four miles, but did little damage because most farmers had already plowed their fields, a circumstance that slowed the fire and broke it up into many “forks” or narrow head fires. An empty house on the corner of the farm where Harvey Tompkins now lives caught fire but did not burn. The old house is now used as a garage for the Tompkins’ tenent house.
But another very old building did burn in the spring of 1914, caught by a fire that came out of the northwest and burned over most of the Beckwith land. Guy Beckwith described the structure, which stood in their pasture, southwest of Chambers, as a one roomed affair, 24 by 36 feet in size with a high ceiling. It was there when the Beckwiths moved onto the place in 1913, but what it had been used for, a church, dancehall, or what, Guy never learned. It had not been used for years and its windows were broken and some of its shingles gone. The land had not been pastured for some time and the grass was tall tinder in the path of the fire which came sweeping in on a solid front. Guy and a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy, Bill Myres, alone at the buildings on the Beckwith place, watched the fire coming— then saw the wind whip to the north and force the fire to change direction, causing it to fork and make two fires, with the boys caught between them. Guy then sent 122 Bill, with the team and two saddle horses, to drive the cattle west, out of the path of the fire, while he stayed to try to save the buildings. He was unsuccessful and everything burned except a small barn and the steel windmill tower. Even some piles of new lumber and fence posts. “And it got so hot in there, with everything burning,” Guy recalled in after years, “that I got into the tank until the worst was over.
“Bill came back with the saddle horses about dark and he and I rode up onto a hill and looked out across the country. We could see hay stacks burning for miles and miles. Some said that fire burned clear into Garfield County, and I know it burned that big old building in the corner of our pasture. It was right in the lead fire’s path, and with everything so dry when it hit the yard it just seemed to jump right to the roof, and in no time at all it was gone.” Much worse than the prairie fire was the damage suffered by the Beckwith’s the fall before, just after they moved from Emmet to the new place. On October 5, 1913, Fred Beckwith, his sons, nineteen-year-old Guy and thirteen-year-old Kenneth, with the help of two neighbor lads, Frank and Joe Welch, had moved 125 head of cattle and horses and some hay machinery and household goods to the new farm. For the next two or three days they cut and stacked hay. The morning of the eighth dawned cloudy and rainy, too wet for haying. Guy and Joe moved some fence that day and came in about dark. When they went to the house Mr. Beckwith was getting supper and the two other boys were resting on a mattress on the floor. “Dad stepped out for a pail of water,” Guy recalled, “and when he came in he said the wind was coming up. A minute later all the windows in the room ‘blew in’ at the same time.” When Guy came to he was tangled in a pile of barbed wire and soaking wet. He reached out in the darkness, caught hold of something and pulled it up to him. “It was Kenneth. He had a stick drove into his head and when I pulled it out the blood ran over my clothes. There was sheet lightning and in the next flash I saw Frank, also dead, a little ways away.
“I didn’t know where we were or what had happened. Dad heard me and hollered and I went over where he was. He had come down across an old lister ridge and all his ribs on that side were broken. He was also wrapped in barbed wire and the bones on one foot were sticking through the flesh. He had a long cut across his cheek and down his side to the hip and he couldn’t get up. “Then Joe spoke up. He wasn’t far away and didn’t seem too bad hurt, except for bruises, but he couldn t get up either. I was up and going but had a broken arm and a lot of bruises. Also the calf of one leg was smashed but I didn’t know it then. It was two o’clock in the morning before anyone found us.” The tornado had come from the southwest, circled just west of the Beckwith house and roared in over some low hills to strike the buildings from the northwest. Lumber from the barn was scattered far to the southeast. The storm then went northeast to strike the southeast corner of Chambers, tear up some dwellings, kill two more people and injure some others.
A heavy rain followed the storm, and in the rainy darkness a horseman finally found the injured men on the Beckwith farm. The young man, Bob Frankey, then had to ride for help as all the Beckwith horses were gone (though not killed) and their wagons and harness torn to pieces. At long last the dead and injured were taken into Chambers, where Dr. Oxford said Mr. Beckwith was so badly hurt he could not live. He did recover, however, but was troubled by some of his injuries for the rest of his life. Neither did the boy, Joe Welsh, ever fully recover. Guy made a Barn southwest of Ewing destroyed by a tornado in 1936. complete recovery but did not know until later that he had suffered a severe concussion and, though he was up and going, knew nothing of what was going on that night.
Young Guy had taken out an insurance policy a few days before the storm. Since he was inside a building when hurt he could claim double indemnity, so figured that he made pretty good money on the deal. Just before the storm he had been working on the road, with a team, for three dollars a day— and boarding himself and the team out of his wages. During the twelve weeks he was laid up with his injuries the company paid him at the rate of fifty dollars a week.
With his insurance windfall, $632, more money than he had ever had at one time before, Guy bought a quarter section of land just south of the site struck by the tornado and built a small house and barn on it. A short time later, about the first of August, a fierce hail storm cut his corn to the ground and mowed the hay, too. Guy’s father and his seventeen-year- old sister Edith were at the farm with him at the time. Edith had driven a team and spring wagon to Chambers to get groceries and was due back about the time the hail came. Guy, on horse back, barely made it to the barn before the storm struck. He could see nothing of his sister, but hoped she had made it to the south side of the house, where she would have shelter for the team, although he could not see her from the barn.
While the storm roared across the country, leaving broken windows, bruised livestock and ruined crops behind it, he worried; and as soon as it let up a little ran to the house’but Edith wasn’t there and their frightened father was pacing the floor. So Guy ran back to the barn, got his horse and headed for Chambers. Hail stones such as those that had ridden on the wind on the storm just passed could kill and he was fearful of what he might find. But two miles from Chambers he saw the spring wagon in the Reningar yard. The good neighbor had seen the girl passing and had hurried out and “Hollered for her to come in.” It was lucky he stopped her, Guy said, otherwise she would have been out on the open prairie with no more places to stop.
A tornado struck Page about four o’clock in the afternoon on April 11, 1892, overturning boxcars on the railroad and wrecking a feed mill. The same storm demolished the South Valley school, east of the Harvey Tompkins home, and damaged some other buildings. After it had passed an old Negro named Hill was found in his field a few rods from where his house had stood, (on what is now the Chester Young farm) and within reach of his hand were a stove, a ham and a frying pan. Of this provident circumstance the old man said cheerfully to his rescuers, “The good Lord will always provide.” An 1880 hailstorm that came on the Fourth of July at Red bird bombarded the community with hailstones as big as teacups and left the ground covered for six to eight hours. Most families that did not otherwise have access to ice in the summertime gathered tubsfull of the hail and made ice cream. And while their parents grieved over ruined crops and gardens, the small fry rejoiced, for that freezer full of ice cream might well be the only one they would taste during a whole summer.
Destructive hail storms were usually very local in scope, damaging only a few fields. Therefore the storm of August 9, 1959, was memorable in that it swept a strip about six miles wide from St. Charles, South Dakota, down to the Star post office in Holt County. An estimated 12,000 to 13,000 acres of corn were destroyed in the strip and livestock were severely cut and bruised by the stones. At Senator Nelson’s place tornadic winds developed, leaving piles of hail three feet deep behind them. In places the state road grader had to clear drifts of hail that blocked the roads.
Another storm, date not given, came very late in the season, destroying the splendid field of corn that had been Jud Russell’s pride and joy. The family stood by the windows of their home, watching the hail beat the beautiful crop into the ground. It was all over in less than ten minutes. In despair, Mrs. Russell and the children watched “papa,” who, with the philosophy that becomes second nature to a farmer, turned from the window and said with simple finality, “Well, it got rid of that in a hurry.” Margaret Gaughenbaugh Ziska was thirteen years old when she saw her first tornado come roaring across the fields. “It was turning, whirling and twisting, and it was black,” she said. They had closed the doors and windows and the vacuum created by the storm caused all the windows to explode outward. A part of the house was carried away but none of the family was touched.
Although it did comparatively little damage at the Ziska’s, the same storm was extremely destructive at the Wilbur Urban place, and to a farm just south of the Lambert buildings. Stan Lambert, thirteen at the time, remembers that the funnel clouds came on May 18 and that the day had been very warm. When his father came in, late in the afternoon, he remarked that it was “a tornado day,” for the air was muggy and the sky had a brassy look.
About half past four Stan headed across the pasture on foot to bring in the milk cows. By then the storm was gathering in the southwest and the sun, though covered with clouds, still cast a strange, dim orange glow and low fleecy clouds scooted along the horizon toward an area of rolling black turbulence in the southwest. About three-quarters of a mile south of the house Stan gothered the cows and heeded them home, then he looked back and saw “a long shaft like an inverted tree trunk” extending from the cloud obove. The light had turned a whitish grey end a whirl of send end trash filled the oir at the base of the shaft.
With a prayer for safety, young Stan grabbed old “Suck-a-tash” by the toil end he end the herd went for home as fast as they could run. They reached the corral just ahead of a heavy downpour. Stan’s fether end young John Pribil were there, watch- ing the storm. John, moving his cattle from Emmet to the form south of the Lambert place, had stopped in until the storm possed. Sheets of rain, dirt end clouds were moving across the south in great vertical walls, Stan said, but within fifteen minutes it was all over and Pribil got on his horse and headed his cattle toward his new farm.
A short time later Wilbur Urban drove in from his place across the meadow to the east to call Dr. Gill of Chambers to come out to attend his mother, Mrs. mattie Urban, who had been injured in the storm. When asked about storm damage at his place, Wilbur replied, “Hell, even the trees are gone.” As Stan learned later, the mass of rolling black clouds he had seen in the southwest were the vortex of a mammoth tornado that had cut a half-mile wide swath, leveling the Urban buildings and cutting across the corners of the Lambert and Goranson pastures. Wilbur’s sister Maude and his uncle George had gone to town and his brother Buster was working on a neighbor’s farm. Only Mrs. urban had been at home and she had gone out to see about the chicks in the brooder house. When Wilbur hurried in from the field, just ahead of the storm, he did not know his mother was outside. By the time he reached the house the storm was upon them. From the window he saw his mother in the yard, hanging onto a post near where the brooder house had been a moment before. At first, due to the strange pressures of the storm, he could not get the door open to go to her aid. By the time he reached her a huge cottonwood tree had fallen across the kitchen and living room part of the house and the storm had suddenly subsided. George Urban’s Ford car sat untouched in the midst of the ruin of the farmstead and the young man put his mother into it and rushed her to the Goranson home, a quarter-mile south, where he left her while he drove to the Lambert place to call the doctor.
The tornado passed over the Goran-son place, doing little damage, just before it touched down at Urban’s. Mr. Goranson was not at home and the two boys, Wayne and Lee, were out in the pasture bringing in the milk cows. When they saw the rolling clouds racing toward them, the boys abandoned the cows and hit the roadside ditch, from where they watched the maelstrom pass.
When the doctor and neighbors reached the Goranson home, Mrs. Goranson had Mrs. Urban pretty well cleaned up and the mud, debris and blood washed off her. When she told her injured neighbor she thought it remarkable that she didn’t “go to pieces,” after all she’d been through, Mrs. Urban replied, “There’s enough pieces up at our place without me going to pieces, too.” “When my father, brother and I rached the Urban place. we were shocked,” wrote Stan Lambert. “That 124 place, with its nice buildings and fine shade trees had been a paradise for boys to visit and we always received a warm welcome there. Now the buildings were destroyed and the big cottonwood grove looked as though a giant mower had leveled it. With the Goranson boys and others, we started catching several hundred young chickens scattered over the place. We divided them up and took them home with us to care for until the Urbans had a place for them again, and drove the cattle up to Goranson’s until the Urban fences could be repaired. ‘In the meantime John Pribil had come back to our place to report that all the buildings and fences on his place were gone. A jackrabbit that had been hopping around the place the day before lay dead in the yard with all the hair stripped off him. The next day he moved his cattle back to Inman.
“More remarkable even than the disaster was the way the neighbors gathered in to help Urban’s clear away the fallen trees and wrecked buildings. By fall a new house and barn had been built and the year’s crops gathered in. All this was due in no small part to the stout spririts of Buster, Wilbur and Maude Urban and their mother, Mattie Urban.” Other unusual tragedies, smote Holt County families from time to time. Sixteen-year-old Ella Johnson contracted poison ivy from the plants that grew wild in many sections. After days of agony she gasped out her last breath as she clung to her brother, Wallace.
And there was the terrible explosion and fire at the Max Warnke home in 1944. It was a damp, foggy A pioneer schoolhouse’s primary reason for existance was, of course, education; but the building had many other uses as well. It served as a polling place for the district, as a center for dances and neighborhood entertainment, holding meetings and conducting community business, and often as a church and Sunday school. Other things happened in schoolhouses, too. A man named Jones hanged himself in the entryway of the District 42 schoolhouse near Rock Falls on July 4, 1911. Anna Tesch found the body hanging there several days later.
After providing shelters for themselves and their livestock and putting in their first crops, most frontier settlers next turned their attention to day and Kathleen, the oldest daughter, was ironing with a gasoline iron. The iron ran out of gas and she refilled it. As she lighted it again it exploded, flinging fire all over the room and jamming the doors so that they could not be opened. Mrs. Warnke, Kathleen and the twins, Regina and Ramona, scrambled out through a window and Kathleen, though badly burned, ran to the home of their closest neighbor, Loyal Hull, for help. For the four youngest children, ranging in age from one to eight years, were still in the burning house.
Mr. Warnke and his sons were out in the pasture looking for some cows, By the time Mr. Hull reached the. house Mr. Warnke had returned and was inside, trying to find the children. Mr. Hull went in and dragged him out, barely saving his life, but the four children perished with the home. Mrs. Warnke and her three daughters spent two weeks in the hospital, after which the family moved to Boyd County, bought a new farm and carried on.
The following March (1945) Larry and Ila Fae, children of Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Miller, were killed by a landslide while playing at the foot of a bank on Eagle Creek. Six children at District 208 school had been amusing themselves near the bank, which had been undercut by recent high water, when the cave-in occurred, covering five of them. One child escaped the slide. Help arrived quickly and the three Fernau children were uncovered in time. The Miller children, more deeply buried, were beyond help when dug out. Larry was six, Ila Fae eleven.