The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1889-05-03

Go NtAutolAu III lIo BclLL Oelpu. -uGil dO IC-
scribes his hero, Monsieur Violet, and two COM
panions as galloping behind a herd of buffa-
loes till the latter ran into a canyon some 500
feet deep and filed it with their mangled bod
les. That sort of thing was chiefly fancy
Nothing but an extraordinary wind, amount
ing in fact to a light hurricane, can make a
prairie fire dangerous to life; one can walk
across tho line Of the ordinary fire without
danger, or can outwalk it when there is but
little wind. But dry wind storm causes it
TO play havoc with property and even endan-
gers life, as shown by the late calamity in
Dakota
For some reason not yet fully understood
the air in all the far western regions occa-
sionally assumes an unnatural dryness. This
appears to run in belts from west of south to
north of east. In Kansas it has been known
to shrivel every green and growing plant in
an hour or two, and in Platte and New Mex
leo the lips of one caught in such dry belt
viii crack and blister; his tongue, if he has
no water, will soon grow so dry that he can
not utter word. A tender skin will blister
and peel off if the wind is hot as well as dry.
At such a time the very earth seems to burn,
and though the grass be but three or four
inches high, and so thin that fire would ordi-
narily die out before spreading a rod, such a
wind sends the blaze forward with amazing
rapidity, and whirls the blazing straws so far
that fierce flames often break out sixty or
eighty yards in front of the main line of fire
The extraordinary dryness at which the
air arrives may be judged from the fact that
the signal office hygrometer at Yankton,
during the late fires, showed only Z per cent
Of humidity, though the maximum capacity
4-
20. In other words the moisture in the air
was only one-tenth Of the average amount,
and not quite one-thirteenth the amount re-
quired to produce an excess and precipita-
zion Of dew. 1t is sell, evident that no ami
NAL now occupying the earth's surface could
breathe that sort of air many days without
pulmonic desiccation. There is little won
der that, as the spectators say, 1.-The very
earth seemed to burn When a village
caught fire it was doomed Many hundred
head of stock were choked or burned to
death. The suns rays were obscured by dust
and smoke, and the total loss in Dakota will
exceed 100000. Very few lives were lost, !
however.
FOREST FIRES MORE DESTRUCTIVE.
r Fires in the pine woods in an unusually dry |
time,are far more destructive to human life, |
as the smoke suffocates many who escape the
flames. The deaths in the awful contiagra-
ton a few years ago in the timber regions of
Wisconsin and the adjacent sections of Min |
nesota ard Michigan were never stated, but
they ran into hundreds. Early in this CEN
tury there was an almost continuous and ter |
ribly destructive fire from the Rio Grande to
the upper Missouri, which borderers ex-
planned by the fact that two or three very
wet seasons, with unusual growth of grass,
were succeeded by a year of extraordinary
W drought Then, for the last time, all the for
-ests along the rivers were swept by fire far
down into Missouri and Arkansas; and further
north traces of this fire were visible till a
few years ago The loss of life was of course
small. as there were no inhabitants but hunt
ers and Indians.
THE FIRES OF 'FoRTY-EIGHTn
In 1913 there was another series of wide ex-
tended fires, and in the memorably ''dry sea-
son" of 1854 fires ragged from Ohio to the
Rocky mountains Even the swamps
burned" that autumn, said the western peo-
pie, the matted roots and grass being dry as
finder to the depth of foot below the sur
face. Down to that time the uneducated
classes in the west believed that the peculiar
season called Indian summer" was due to
prairie fires, but experience showed that after
the prairies of Illinois were plowed up and
the fires ceased, the lovely season remained
and grew more lovely still. The prairie grass
of Illinois and Iowa was TALL soft and rank,
much like that of eastern meadows, while
that of the plains beyond the Missouri was
short, hard and why, not forming a con-
tinuous sod; hence the latter made but a
trifling fire except as aforesaid, when driven