lightning jets leaping, its gray sheet of 
rain falling in a slanting torrent even 
while the sun shines directly overhead. 
Before the storm is seen, it can be heard, 
its thunder rumbling gently from a great 
distance. And before it can be heard, it 
can be felt — a shift in the temperature 
of the air, a certain silencing of the wind. 
“Excepting the sound of distant thun- 
der, which was continual,” wrote Eng- 
lish naturalist John Bradbury of a prai- 
rie storm in May 1810, “an awful silence 
prevailed, and the cloud which had al- 
ready spread over one half of the visible 
horizon was fast shutting out the little 
remains of daylight.” As the cloud drew 
overhead, he noted that it was of “a 
pitchy blackness, and so dense as to 
resemble a solid body, out of which, at 
short intervals, the lightning poured in a 
continual stream for one or two seconds. 
Darkness came on with a rapidity I 
never before witnessed.” He wrapped 
himself in a blanket and lay down on the 
open land. “The lightning,” recorded 
Famham of a storm in 1839, “was in- 
tensely vivid,” as three black clouds, one 
in the southeast, one in the southwest, 
and one in the northeast, “rose with an 
awful rapidity towards the zenith.” As 
he looked up, he saw the cloud “rent in 
fragments, by the most terrific explosion 
of electricity we had ever witnessed.” 
Peals of thunder followed, as burning 
bolts leaped from cloud to cloud, envel- 
oping the land in a “lurid glare.” 
Hail often accompanied these storms, 
although, curiously, the size of hail- 
stones seems to diminish with the pass- 
ing of time. In 1541 one of Coronado’s 
conquistadors, Pedro de Castaneda of 
Naxera, reported hail in the southern 
plains “as large as bowls and even 
larger, and as thick as raindrops, that in 
places they covered the ground to the 
depth of two and three and even more 
spans.” The huge stones destroyed the 
Spaniards’ tents, dented their armor, 
bruised their horses, and broke all their 
pottery, a problem for the Spanish army 
since the local Indians, who ate only 
fruit and meat, had no use for crockery 
and could supply them with none. Many 
years later on the Plains, a report circu- 
lated of an Indian who had been 
knocked down by a hailstone the size of 
a goose egg. As for myself, although I 
stood on our screened-in back porch 
through many a summer storm with my 
father, a farm boy who never tired of 
watching it rain, and saw countless 
white stones fall from the sky and 
bounce across our green lawn, I cannot 
