Year round the wind blows--from gentle breezes to the stem-bending gusts in the west. Welcome on hot summer days. Unpleasant during cold winters. Dodge City lays claim to being the windiest city in the United States.
Rainfall varies, from over 40 inches in the southeast to less than 20 inches annually in the far west. According to Indian legend and trapper accounts, the worst flood in Kansas happened in 1844.
It rained so hard and so long that every stream and river in the central and eastern regions flowed out of its banks. Southeast of Lawrence, the Kansas River expanded to ten miles wide. Even the banks of the Arkansas River and her tributaries in the arid southwest were swollen with water. Towns, homesteads and ranches were swept away.
The Native Indians called tornadoes Devil Winds. They'd seen the devastation left in the wake of these fierce whirlwinds. But the majority of the white settlers had never heard of such a powerful storm.
One of the earliest accounts of a tornado comes from a Lawrence resident. One sultry warm August morning in 1854, Ely Moore joined a party of Indians on a buffalo hunt. He noted that grasshoppers and insects swarmed by the millions. So did the Indians. The Natives knew bugs shrouding the sun for minutes on end was a portent for the Devil Winds.
Most likely, more than one black funnel made up the mile-wide storm in 1854. Acres of sod were stripped from the prairie. Two buffalo were found devoid of hair and crushed, as if the storm had sucked them high up into the whirlwind then flung them to the ground.
In dry weather, settlers paid close attention to these incoming storms. Lightning could strike the tall grass and start a prairie fire that spread faster than a horse could gallop. Fed by high winds, the fires licked across the prairie devouring everything in their path.
Blizzards could be just as vicious. Old-timers can tell you when the barometer plummets and cotton-white snow clouds roll in from the northwest, we're in for a winter storm.
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