WEATHER: Hunter’s Storm

Like many another Midwesterner, 17-year-old Gerald Tarras of Winona, Minn., went hunting last week. With his father, his brother Ray, his black Labrador retriever, and a friend, Bill Wernecke, he made his way to the bottoms where the Mississippi, having left Lake Pepin, spreads out through countless bayous of marshland, surrounds innumerable small islands. These are the ancient hunting grounds of the Sioux, lying for miles on both sides of Winona along the river—a country of sloughs and thickets providing perfect ambushes, and lying in the natural flyway of southbound ducks.

It was perfect weather for ducks. Rain drizzled from the slate-colored sky. Up & down the Upper Mississippi, hunters were out. There were eleven of them on tiny Polk Island, near Fort Madison, Iowa, where the blinds are built on pilings; the lower end of the island is flooded in a storm. There were more on Lake Muskego, Lake Winnebago, on the Wisconsin River, on the Illinois River. Outboard motors sputtered in the dawn on the lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota; prized decoys bobbed in countless sheltered inlets.

Through the thickets that are almost the same as they were in the days of the Sioux, the hunters watched, warm in their canvas jackets.

The rain changed to sleet, the sleet to snow. Around noon, gusts of wind burst explosively, howled up to tornado velocity, then died away. The cold began to cut through the warmest clothes. Up & down the Mississippi, hunters scrambled to save their decoys, their boats, suddenly found themselves struggling to save their lives. Winds had whipped up six-foot waves on the river. Polk Island was washed under water; one of the blinds went down, carried its hunter under. Others tried to row ashore, found they could not pull against the gale. Waves broke over rowboats, sheathed outboard motors in ice. When darkness fell, the storm had been howling for hours. The wind grew stronger as the night grew colder and the snow increased.

In the Mississippi bottoms near Winona, Gerald Tarras and his party had barely reached the hunting grounds when the wind came. They were worried, tried to get back. For 14 hours they fought the gale, sometimes standing in the water. Bill began to nod with the fatal drowsiness of exposure. The others beat him to keep him awake, fighting freezing just as the Sioux had once fought it. Young Gerald was holding the older man when, at 2 in the morning, he moaned, died. Daylight brought no cessation of the torment. At 2 in the morning, after 23 hours of exposure, Gerald’s brother. Ray, died. Tarras father &son remained alive beside the bodies, too weak now to save themselves. Aviator Max Conrad of Winona—who flew a Piper Cub training plane, led rescuers to one party after another—spotted them. At 2 in the afternoon Father Tarras died, half an hour before a rescue party found Gerald, still alive but losing consciousness, crouched on a stump, holding his dog for warmth.

In last week’s storm a great mass of warm, moist, tropical air swept from the lower Mississippi Valley. Cold air was pressing south from Canada, underrunning the warm air drift, creating an area of low barometric pressure that moved from eastern Nebraska through Iowa, western Wisconsin, across western Lake Superior. In Colorado there was a three-foot snowfall in Cimarron Valley, where 10,000 head of cattle and sheep were endangered; in Oklahoma and Kansas, houses were unroofed.

The cities were safer, but not much. The big wind hit Chicago at 11:01 a.m. In two hours there were 600 emergency calls to the fire department. Chimneys went down, a water tank plunged through a roof, a cornice dropped to the street, killing a Negro, the ten-story Hiram Walker Whiskey sign on the corner of Randolph Street and the Outer Drive, one of the biggest electric signs in the world, crashed in a mass of twisted steel and broken light bulbs. On the Great Lakes the 4,220-ton freighter William B. Dacock, ice-covered, was driven on the rocks, broke in two, killing all of her crew of 33. A car ferry and four other vessels were grounded. When the storm was over, the casualties—sailors, hunters, city dwellers —totaled 159. Four ships were sunk, over 1,000,000 turkeys were frozen, boosting the price on Thanksgiving eve. It was the Great Lakes’ worst storm since 1913, and it came on the 27th anniversary of that bigblow.