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Thunder Road: Freak Accidents on the Westering Trails

Lightning bolt in a dark sky. — Public Domain

First comes a sudden stillness, then an unexpected cool breeze. Sunshine dims to darkness as growling, green-black clouds pile overhead, flickering with lightning. The wind rises. A brilliant bolt splits the air with a deafening crr-ACK, followed by momentary silence and then a violent, crashing boom that makes the living earth tremble. Plum-sized or larger hailstones pound the ground as if hurled, soon giving way to blinding sheets of rain driven nearly sideways by a howling wind. More bolts come faster and faster until the bright flashes are nearly constant enough to read by and the accompanying thunder booms like artillery.

Imagine experiencing this storm from a rocking, wind-tossed wooden wagon as the gale drives rain-spray through the rattling cloth cover, your children cling and wail in fear, and terrified cattle bawl and bellow around you, threatening to stampede. Forty-niner Kimball Webster thought that thunderstorms on the prairie were “the most violent and terrifying of anything of the kind I have ever witnessed.”

Lightning posed the greatest danger of these weather events. Sometimes a single strike killed dozens of cattle at once. On at least one occasion, lightning struck and destroyed a covered wagon.

T.M. Barber recorded one death in Nebraska in 1851:

Last night Mr. John M. Hurd…was struck by lightening, while crossing the Elk Horn [River] about eight oclock. He was struck on the right arm. Entered his body on right breast and passed entirely through to his ankles, where it passed from him, through his boots, leaving a hole in each boot the size of a picayune. Of course death was instant.

Emigrants documented other such deaths along the trails across prairie and plains, but the most unusual was that of an emigrant who caught a bullet when an electrical charge during a thunderstorm set off the black powder in his gun.