I don’t know what’s come over Texas. Instead of drouths, we have floods. Right now all the western rivers are on the rampage; the Colorado, the Frio, the Guadalupe, the Nueces, the San Antonio, and all the others. At least nine lives have been lost, and the damage to property runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Highways and railroads have been washed out, bridges washed away. And naturally, humanity couldn’t be content with the damage the elements were doing, but they had to war on each other. Guns barked in the flooded district to the southwest and a soldier out of San Antonio got a slug through his heart. All up and down the flooded area survivors clinging to trees and house-tops were taken off by the rescuers. Most of the damage to property was in southwestern Texas, but the water was higher in this part of the woods than I’ve ever seen it. Judas, what a rain! It started raining about midnight, and along towards dawn it turned into what almost amounted to a cloud-burst. I’ve seen it rain in Louisiana and the East Texas blacklands, but I never saw such a rain — and this section was almost on the fringe of it, the main bulk falling west of here. All the creeks and rivers rose out of bank, and the Brown County lake, which was estimated would be two years in filling, was flooded over-night; 145 miles of shore line, and mighty deep, too. That was four days ago, and still the water is gushing over the spill-way, in spite of the fact that all flood-gates are being kept wide open, to take care of the surplus. Two main streams run into the lake — the Pecan Bayou and the Jim Ned, and the water in both streams is backed up for miles. I never saw so much water in West Texas in all my life. A new high-way, recently built by Brown County at much expense, was simply cut to pieces. The farmers along those streams are ruined; their whole crops swept down to the Gulf. Particularly those above the new highway that crosses the Bayou. Against the urgent protests of these men, the highway engineers built a dump or levee across the river bottom, more than half a mile wide — supposed to keep the highway above water. To the assertions that the flood-gaps were not large enough to accommodate the water at high-tide, they merely laughed. What do farmers know about road-building and bridge-building? So this flood ripped their fine levee to shreds, rushed over it and washed the highway down the creek; and what is much worse, the remnants of the levee backed the water up and ruined hundreds of acres of grain which otherwise might have escaped destruction.

• Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, 13 July 1932, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard 2.381-382

The flooding occurred on 3 July 1932, and Howard used the incident as the basis for his story "Wild Water" (published posthumously in Cross Plains #7, 1975).

Since it’s cold and snowing today, let’s think back to a different, warmer time of year. When one thinks of earthquakes, Montana is not the place that commonly comes to mind. However, the Big Sky State (along with neighboring Idaho and Wyoming) got more than their fair share of shaking one August evening in 1959. I’m a park interpreter first and historian second, so please indulge me a little scene setting.

It’s a beautiful day right at the peak of the Yellowstone National Park busy season. Campgrounds are packed full in and near the park, and conditioners are cramped. Unless, and only unless you know the secret gem that is the Madison River Canyon section of the Hebgen Lake Forest District nearby. The smaller Forest Service Campgrounds therein are also full, but more peaceful. Whereas Yellowstone is full of the tourist crowd, it’s much more common to find fly fishermen and family groups this far out from the park. Places with names like Cabin Creek, Rock Creek, and Cliff Lake all settled down after the long sun-lit day, and were mostly asleep by 11pm that evening.

It would be a dramatic understatement to say that, when a magniture 7.3-7.5 earthquake struck a little over half an hour later, the peace came to an end. Later geology would reveal that two fault blocks had slipped due to shear stress to cause the earthquake. The quake subsequently caused a seiche wave to form on nearby Hebgen Lake as well as causing cataclysmic damage to an already weakly bonded mountainside (largely consisting of dolomite and gneiss rock composites among others). The immense shaking lasted just over 45 seconds. For those camped in and near Rock Creek Campground, the shaking was accompanied by an incomprehensible roaring as 80 million tons of ruck and debris hit the campground at a hundred miles an hour.

36 people lost their lives that night, killed by the landslide at Rock Creek or by a boulder that was dislodged near Cliff Lake. The death toll breaks down to 20 fatalities outright from Rock Creek Campground, two fatalities from a family of four at Cliff Lake (tragically the parents, leaving their young children as survivors), and another five washed away in the mud/rock/debris slide on the other side of Rock Creek Campground. In Idaho, another eight were caught in another landslide and also perished.

The quake also caused the last great geyser shake-up in Yellowstone that we’ve seen, causing many to erupt simultaneously that night, starting new geysers, shutting off others, and making Old Faithful less so. The stories from the survivors are right out of fiction. Near misses, escapes from cabins sliding into chasms, chance tragedies, and uncertainty that didn’t end until almost 24 hours later.