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► FROM PAGEKiller storm left people, cattle deadin those days.”Joe Addison was 15 in 1918 and living in Hays, where his fatherowned and operated the local phone company. A winter storm knocked out service between Salina and Hays, so Addison and another individual were sent by train to Salina, where they started re-stringing the lines between here and Brookville.“The poles were 18 to 20 feet tall, and they put them in the ground three to four feet. The snow was so deep we could walk on the hard crust and reach up and touch the wires,” he said.A storm the year before shut down rail travel in western Kansas for several days.The snow was too deep for Kansas equipment to handle, recalled HaroldButler, who was a school boy in the Logan County town of Winona.“They had to bring in rotary snowplows from Nebraska and Wyoming to blow the lines clear,” he said.In 1912 Salina was the victim of a Feb. 26 blizzard that clogged Santa Fe Avenue with 5- to 6-foot drifts. That snowfall was the most since a 24-incher fell in February 1900.But the mother of all snows to hit Salina and the rest of the Great Plains was the blizzard of January 1886. Temperatures were 10 to 20 degrees below zero with winds blowing as high as 40 mph, producing a wind chill between minus 79 and minus 85 degrees. The storm was a killer. Scores of people died. Many settlers were found later frozen in their beds. Approximately 80 percent of the cattle caught in the storm’s
Newspaper Details
Salina Journal
Salina, Kansas, US
Wed, Jan 13, 1993
Page 17
Full Page
Clipped by
Salina P.
KS, USA 19 Jan 2023
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