The Terrible Storm

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 11, 1873

The Terrible Storm.

Accounts which continue to come in of the loss of life occasioned by the late storm and the intense cold, in the West, the present winter, are heart-rending to contemplate.

The Fillmore County (Minn.) Republican says: One of the most heart-rending cases of loss of life by freezing occurred last week, about four miles north-west of Granger, in this county. It happened that on Tuesday, the day the great storm began, Mr. Evans, a Welsh minister of the Gospel, was away from home with his wife and two children. On his return in the evening the storm overtook him, and, it appears, when within three-quarters of a mile of his own house a snow-drift stopped further progress in that direction. From the indications, it is supposed he took his oldest child out of the cutter and carried it home, after which, taking a couple of blankets, he returned to the cutter, wrapped his frail wife in the blankets, and, carrying his babe, started for the house again, but never reached it. In the violent storm he lost his way, and with his babe perished. Meanwhile, the child that had been carried home was waiting in the cold for the return of its father; the anxious wife was waiting in the cutter for her husband. Who can describe her agony and the little one's terrible suspense? It is all left to conjecture. When the neighbors called at the house the Saturday following, it had but a solitary little frozen occupant; the wife and mother was found a stiffened corpse; the horse had also succumbed to the raging storm. How and where the unfortunate husband and babe were found we are not definitely informed.

An old man of about 70 years, living in the Norwegian settlement about seven miles north of Sioux Falls, started out from home on the day of the storm to tie up his cattle in the barn but a few rods from the house. The wind was blowing furiously at the time, and instead of finding the barn, the old gentleman was carried past it, and being totally unable to retrace his steps, he wandered around for a time and finally perished. He was subsequently found scarcely half a mile from the house. He was a Norwegian by birth, and for a man of his years had a very vigorous constitution.

Within a radius of twenty-five miles from Fergus Falls, Minn., it is estimated that the number of frozen bodies already found, together with those which will undoubtedly be picked up, will reach fifty. In this locality, a man started on Tuesday afternoon for New Ulm, after a doctor to attend his wife who was taken in childbirth, leaving her alone at home. He could find no doctor who would volunteer to brave the storm that day, and he started back for his home. He was subsequently found about half way between New Ulm and his own house, frozen stiff. When the doctor arrived at the man's house on Wednesday, he found that the wife had given birth to a child, and that both mother and child were frozen to death.