Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1885 — MENNONITES DROWNED. [ARTICLE]

MENNONITES DROWNED.

The Terrible Destruction Wrought by a Water Spout at Indianola, Nebraska. A sad calamity is reported from Indianola, Neb., by which three women and six children lost their lives. All of them were Bohemians, and belonged to the religious sect called Mennonites. A dispatch from Indianola gives the following particulars of the disaster: A party of seventeen Bohemians, en route to Dundy Creek, camped in Richmond Canyon, half a mile from the Republican River, nine miles east of this place. At dark a heavy rain set in, and about 10 o’clock a waterspout burst a short distance above, flooding the heretofore dry canyon to a depth of fifteen feet. This came down the canyon, each wave rising a foot or two higher than its predecessor. The party was asleep in the wagons. The one nearest the bed of the stream was occupied by John Maeek, his wife, and son; the center one by John Osmer, his wife, and four children, and three other children; aDd the third was occupied by Joseph Havelic, his wife, and three children.

When the flood struck the wagons Havelic was the first to arouse. He jumped up. grasped the wagon tongue, and attempted to pull the wagon out of the water. Fresh waves struck it, wresting the tongue from his grasp and carrying the wagon out into the raging flood. Osmer had already jumped from his wagon and Succeeded in getting his four children to shore, but before he could return to the wagon it was carried down in the seething canyon. The first Macek knew of the situation he was sailing down the stream. Seeing a tree just ahead, he bade his wife and son cling to him, and that he would try to catch the tree. He succeeded, but the sudden stop shook off his wife and son, and they went down in the flood. Macek climbed into the tree, from which he was rescued in the morning. But two of the eleven bodies missing had been found. In one of the wagons was a coffee-pot in which was $1,200, which was washed away and not recovered. There was no wjnd. The storm was accompanied with thunder and lightning. It was simply a sudden deluge of water, which, in the immediate vicinity where it fell, was ten feet deep, and, as it spread, covered the prairie to a depth of three feet. Fourteen soldiers belonging to the United States Cavalry were drowned in the same canyon in 1871 from a similar cause.