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description of the tornado as he saw it from the platform of an
observation car on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad:

DESCRIPTION OF THE TORNADO

"For miles," he said, "it seemed as if the train were being pursued by
the storm. We were approaching Ralston, Neb., when I first noticed the
strange cloud mounting the sky. Before that it had been clear."

Mr. Coon, from his observation car seat, saw the storm strike Ralston.
"The passengers sat as if glued to their seats when the cloud struck,"
he said.

"The engineer brought the engine to a stop and the passengers ran over
to the wreckage of the houses. We could hear the groans of dying men and
the wails and shrieks of injured women and children. I entered a house,
or rather what had been a house, and beneath me lay a woman. I looked
and I knew that she was dead. We got all of the injured out of the ruins
and brought them to the train.

"We were about to leave when our attention was called to a little house
some distance from the others. It had been wrecked and moved from its
foundation, but we found a mother and her little baby lying upon a bed
uninjured.

"The cloud wheeled and made towards South Omaha. We were not far behind,
but our way was blocked by the debris the tornado had thrown on the
tracks. Then, too, we stopped frequently to pick up the injured. There
were some with their limbs torn off and all were cut and bleeding."

A Chicagoan, who withheld his name, told of the scenes at Omaha when the
train stopped there. He said:

"I was just recovering from what I had seen on the train when we pulled
into Omaha with the injured. It was night then, but such a night. The
sky was lighted with a red glare, and the streets were filled with
people who acted as though they were mad. Frequently the cries of the
wounded, unloaded at the station, were drowned by terrific peals of
thunder."

It is difficult for any one who has not lived through a tornado to have
any conception of what such a storm can do. Tornadic force means
anything more than one hundred miles an hour. There have been instances
where tornadoes have shaved off the stone sides of buildings as if they
had been sliced away by a stonecutter. Forecaster Scarr, of New York,
said that the tornado that wrought destruction in Nebraska may have been
of the resistless kind that simply ground stone and brick to dust and
carried up its electrified funnel the remnants of every building it
struck. T