Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1896-06-08
THAT TEXAS CYCLONE
AN ACCOUNT OF ITS MYSTERIOUS
 FORCE AND DEsTRucTVENsss.

Marrow Path of the storm.
 Fair as garden of the Lord' is north Texas in the month of May. The corn Is to the horses knees the oat- fields are heading; the cotton plant is ready for hoeing out the orchards show the new growth; nature is pushing her productive power to it's limit All of this influences you as you ride toward Sherman, and then without warning you come upon strip of desolation stretching across and marring the scene. Where nature is doing her best nature has done her worst. The two are side by side in ruthless contrast. Twenty thousand people coming from all direc- t1ons have spent Sunday in Sherman. They have tramped over the cyclones path from where it tore through the cemetery on the south, leveling tomb stones and uprooting evergreens and oaks, to Fairyiew, one of Sherman's beautiful suburbs on the north, now field of wreekage. They have marveled greatly and have gone away on the excursion trains with strange tales to tell. Sherman's own people are still burying their dead and crying for their injured. That is as far as they have been able to get with the problem of Friday evenings visitation.
 All day the relief committee, those strong, resolute men who come to the front i'll every community ill times of great emergency. was in session in the front part of store i'll the public square. They sent nurses here and there; they gave orders for eoffins they re- oeived reports from the searching par ties; they revised the list of the dead and missing. Gradually the work of re- lief took on practical and definite form
 The path of the storm was so narrow at the Pearce place that had the family left the house and gone east or west 100 feet they would have been spared. Not even the foundation was left of the house, and the path was swept as clean of vegetation as if it had been narrowed. But 100 feet to the east or the west the corn was growing, and the foliage was undisturbed.
 Cedar is one of the toughest of trees. In the Sherman cemetery stands a cedar tree with pine board driven through it's trunk as neatly as if it had been mortised there. The old sexton is man of powerful physique He was at work among the graves when he heard the roar and saw the black cloud He flung himself fiat Oh the ground, with his hands elasped about the trunk of a small cedar tree Several times in that five minutes of awful suspense he said the cyclone seemed to raise him from the ground and almost tear his hands loose, with all the vantage he had.
 The finest monument in Sherman cemetery, if not in Texas, is the Scotch granite shaft reared to the memory of the late c. 0. Binkley. The force, what ever it was, tore the shaft from the ped estal and flung it off, not in the course the spiral cloud was moving, but in the opposite direction. The cyclone moved northward through the cemetery. The shaft of the Binkley monument lies sev- eral feet to the southward of the base.
 Dr. Michael had been to the cemetery and was just driving ont when he was overtaken. The mysterious force lifted him from his new buggy and carried him back into the cemetery, 200 yards. Here again the force of the storm was exercised i'll the reverse. Dr. MichaePs horse was found standing beside Post Oak creek, some distance from the ceme- tery. Dr. Michael's new buggy dis appeared as completely as if it had been caught up ill the clouds. The willow bends to the breeze and saves it's yield ing branches when other trees suffer. The rows of willows along Post Oak creek are as bare as so many telegraph poles
 Mir. W. J. Dunn had one of the finest rose gardens ill north Texas about his pretty home in Fairview. His fence was made of Bois d Arc posts, a wood into which it takes skill to drive nail. MT. Dunn's rosebushes are as bereft of blos- soms and leaves as if q December bliz- gard had struck them, and those Bols d. Arc posts are twisted and snapped as if they had been inch pine pickets
 Such evidence helps to a realization by comparison of this resistless force. 1t dealt destruction which left nothing whole. Where a house stood squarely i'll the path, as did Jem Browns at Fair view, suburb. the fury not only tore 1t apart in the orig inal timbers and boards, but it shivered and snapped every tim Der and every board. It took the con tents and broke them.
 Miss Maggie Dupree came home from her country school teaching and left $60 in safe place in the house. The house is gone, and neither Miss Dupree nor any one else has found the money Philip Nichols, gardener ill the out skirts of the city, lost a roll of $96 in the same way.
 Some mysteries continue unsolved Ill spite of efforts of relief committees. In front of Captain Ely's, where not one brick is left standing on another, are the wheels and tongue of a wagon. The wagon bed was found hundreds of yards away. The horses a1e missing; so is the man who was driving them.