Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1886 — WESTERN. [ARTICLE]

WESTERN.

A farmer named Upeold, near Chetek, Wis, cut his wife’s throat from ear to ear and hanged himself with a bed-cord Julius Baum & Co., wholesale clothiers, of San Francisco, have made an assignment for the benefit of their creditors. The firm is one of the oldest and largest in that city. The liabilities are estimated at from $750,003 to $1,000,000. John Schryock, a wealthy farmer who lived near Olney, 111,, was murdered by robbers, who carried off $3,000 which was concealed in the house. Before leaving they set fire to the premises, which were totally destroyed. Joliet, 111., was swept by a cyclone which demolished fifteen or twenty houses. Despite this frightful destruction of property not a person was fatally hurt. Everybody seemed to be aware of the approach of the cyclone some minutes before it struck the city, and secured their safety by fleeing to their cellars. The cyclone came from the southwest straight up the Desplaines River. Constant flashes of lightning lit up the sky so that the funnel-shaped monster could be plainly seen as it came whirling toward the city with a roar like a hundred locomotives blowing off steam. The air was filled with boards, limbs of trees, sections of roofs, and pieces of heavy timber. A bridge -was picked up bodily and deposited almost intact two blocks away. A heavy grindstone was blown 250 feet Pieces of houses were carried a quarter of a mile. A large number of houses were more or less moved from their foundations and wrenched out of shape, many of them with great patches of shingles missing from their roofs. Telegraph poles were twisted off like pipestems, and the streets were blockaded with a mass of tangled wires. Numerous holes were scooped out of the hard gravel streets. Eye-witnesses say that the.-e holes were made by balls of electricity, or fire, which bounded along the ground during the rush of the cyclone. Great trees were torn up, and their bodies twisted into every imaginable shape Numbers of horses and cows were buried beneath falling barns, and some were badly crippled. The horse and buggy of Deputy Sheriff Ward was hitched in front of his house when the cyclone came, and after it had passed the horse and buggy had disappeared, and no trace of it has yet been found. The damage to property in the city is estimated at $75,000, and may exceed that sum.

George T. Seiter, Assistant Secretary of Vie Board of Public Works of Cincinnati, was arrested for embezzling $6,003 from the city. Other officials are supposed to have been connected with the affair, and startling revelations are anticipated. A young lady giving her name as Mary Lathrop and her home as Rhinebeck, lowa, was found in the woods near Red Cloud, Neb., by a hunting party. She was chained to a log an! in a famishing condition. Her story was that she had gone from her home some five weeks ago with a young man who had promised to marry her, but instead ho had joined a party of young men, who had taken her to where she was found, repeatedly outraged her, and left her to die. Restoratives were administered, and an effort was at once put on foot to capture and lynch her betrayer and assailants. Ex-Governor Foster, of Ohio, is President of a company organized to convey natural gas from Findlay to Toledo, a distance of forty-five miles. The plant will cost $1,253,000.