Tragedy on the Ridge: A Lightning Strike in the Mesan District
A brutal mountain storm leaves one prospector dead and another miraculously stumbling into camp to report the horror.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Billy Tonkins and J. Tabor were struck by lightning during a storm in the Mesan district on June 11. At 2 p.m., Tabor staggered into the writer's camp, having been helped in for the last 100 yards by two other prospectors whom he had overtaken. His story hardly needed telling. His hair was fluffed close on both sides of his head, his whiskers were singed off, and a smell of burnt hair and flesh filled the hut. When the writer helped to strip his wet clothes from him, his shoulders were found to be badly burnt, his forearm burned even worse, while in the middle of his stomach was a patch as big as a plate burned brown. The front of both thighs was burned, and the ends were torn off his boots. Yet, after recovering his senses, Tabor had cried to his comrades to see whether Billy was still living. In half an hour, a gang of ten men raced up the breakneck side of the ridge only to come down two hours later with the limp, dead body of Tonkins. They found him under a little pine high up among the white boulders, struck apparently on the left side of the head.
“His hair was fluffed close on both sides of his head, his whiskers were singed off, and a smell of burnt hair and flesh filled the hut.”
While wilderness survival reports today often emphasize modern gear and satellite communications, the visceral descriptions of lightning damage in early frontier journalism remind us how vulnerable early explorers remained to the elements. This tragic account underscores the brutal reality of prospectors working in the rugged Cascades.
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