s that easterly wind blowing again; was I, too, growing
superstitious? I turned over all the papers. The news was the same in
all, but there was not an editorial paragraph of comment in any of the
sheets, which, indeed, teamed with all the details of active commercial,
political, and social life.

I went down town after eating my breakfast and found that the
intelligence had not awakened any public attention that was observable.
The two or three persons to whom I spoke with regard to it treated it as
one of the passing sensations of the hour that would be explained sooner
or later. It was not till the evening papers of the 27th came out that
the matter began to be discussed. The dispatches in these papers were of
a nature to arouse widespread anxiety. It was very obvious from their
construction and import that the feeling west of the Mississippi was
more intense than had up to this time been suspected. The columns of the
papers were filled with brief but rather startling telegrams from
various points. Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, St. Paul, St.
Louis, and Chicago sent anxious sentences which had a thrill of
trepidation in their broken phrases. And it was easy to see that this
feeling of deep concern increased with each dispatch from a point
further west.

Telegrams sent to St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul represented the
condition of anxiety in Ogden and Pocatello to be bordering on
excitement. Fears were entertained, the dispatches said, of a
"meteorological cataclysm," and thousands who had friends either on the
coast or in transit were besieging the telegraph offices in vain.

The hurried comments of the evening papers on the news were singularly
unsatisfactory and non-committal. "The unprecedented storm that is now
raging on the Pacific slope," I read, "and which has temporarily cut off
communications with the far West, will by its magnitude fill the country
with the most serious apprehensions." "The earliest news from
California, which shall give us the details of the storm," said another
paper, "will be looked for with eagerness, and will be promptly and
fully furnished to our readers."

As curious as anybody could be to know what kind of a storm it was that
had stopped railroad travel from Idaho to Mexico, and remarking with
surprise that the Signal Office utterly refused to recognize a great
storm anywhere, I dismissed the subject from my mind with the reflection
that there would in all probabil