Last Monday it simply poured all day long on the prairie and in the Bear Paw Mountains even more.
As I was driving to Big Sandy that Monday morning, I was thinking of cloud bursts as I crossed the Gravel Coulee Bridge just south of Laredo, Montana.
In, I believe, 1938 a cloud burst, in the mountains south of Gravel Coulee. A wall of water came down the watershed. That water killed several people in an afternoon. I remember Ed Cook saying that he and his dad were watching the wall of water from the top of a bluff when along came the very school house that Cook was going to have his first teaching position in that fall. The two of them watched the school careen from bank to bank one side of the water filled coulee to the other and then the water lifted the school and it landed on a bluff down creek from the Cook’s vantage point. Later Ed said that when he went inside the school, there was rarely even a book out of place. The building had just moved from one area to another.
Years later in Greenough Gulch on upper Clear Creek there was another cloud burst on the divide between Greenough Creek and People’s Creek. Francis and Laened Black and their two daughters were staying in their log cabin right on the bank of Greenough Creek. Francis said that it had rained all day at their cabin but not enough to worry about. The creek had not come up much at all.
After dark the family all went to bed and they heard what they thought to be a huge wind blowing. Yet, when they looked out the windows of the cabin, there was nothing moving. No wind at all. Francis decided it must be the creek so he took his wife and daughters and headed for the mountain right behind the cabin. When they were safely up the mountain, a wall of water hit the cabin. It was as high as the dining room windows and although nothing happened to the cabin and the wall of water was over almost as soon as it got started, all the bridges on Clear Creek were out and roads were rendered impassible and the family was marooned for several days.
It was a time that the Black family never forgot.
Don’t you forget flash floods and cloud bursts either. They are still around and cause deaths upon occasion.
