Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1879 — A Prairie Fire. [ARTICLE]

A Prairie Fire.

In an article entitled“ Some Features of Kansas Farming,” in Scribner for November, Mr. Henry King gives the following vivid description of that beautiful scourge,—a firs on the prairie®: Next to calamites like that the home-steader’s wife told of, the great besetting fear of the settlers on the border—in all the new and thinly peopled portions of Kansas, in fact—is the coming of the autumn prairie fire, which ‘so frequently menaces theirstacks and cribs, their helpless stock, their stables and cabins, and even their lives. Were it not for its known danger and power of havoc, this tempest and scourge of fire would be a spectacle of commanding force and beauty. First, you will catch glimpses of what you take to be gray wisps of haze away off on the horizon; and watching, you will see these vagrant particles deepen gradually, and. gather into a definite volume of smoke, black like a rain-cloud, aud bronze about the edges. Then the strange, somber bulk starts forward across the prairie, and you hold your breath at sight of the rapid progress of it. (A mile in two minutes is not an exceptional rate of speed for a fire once fairly under way.) It halts an instant, you notice, over a broad swale where there is standing water; but it is for an instant only. The next moment it reaches the upland again and the dry grass; and directly it grasps a belt of the tall, thick blue-stem, and the flame leaps suddeuly and madly out above the smoke, then subsides again, and the black mass grows blacker thaa ever, and rolls higher and higher, and you can scent the burning grass, and hear the distaut roar of the fire —an awful roar,* resembling the sound of artillery in heavy timber, And it is so calm immediately about you that you do not so much as miss ihe ticking of your watch in your pocket; there is no breath of air stirring, and the sun is shining, and the heavens above yon we blue and placid Th the stillness will be bco ken soon. oncoming cloud is only a few mi les away now, and you easily trace the scarlet and terrific energy at its base; the smoke begins to hurt your eyes, too, and the heat becomes heavily oppressed. And then/all at once, the wind smites and staggers you, that appalling roar deafens you, and the sun Is blotted out, and you are in a darkness as of a midnight without moon or star. It is an experience of but a dozen seconds or so, this sudden plunge

in to darkness, though it seems an hour, and when you look out again, you find that the fire has passed vou a mile or more to your right, and is still rolling desperately onward; and there in its track are charred and smoldering stacks of hay, and an occasional house aflame and tottering to its fall, and a group of men and boys beating back the outer line of the fire with brush and old clothes, and sending forward little oounter-flres to meet it and if possible keep it at a safe distant. The creek may stop it and smother it when it gets there, though such a hope has mere chance for a warrant: sometimes these mighty conflagrations vault across streams twenty or thirty yards im width, *• swift and rssisß fat their

momentum; and aa a rule they arc effectually stayed only when they reach a wide extent of plowed land, and have to yield} sullenly, for lack of anything more to feed their inexorable fury