Terror from the Sky: The Regina Tornado of 1912
Originally printed in Folklore Summer 2012, Vol. 33, No. 2.
In the last week of June, 1912, Reverend B.C. McGregor was delivering an address in Regina on “The Problems of the Modern City.” He probably did not expect that a tornado would be one of them.
Yet on the evening of Sunday, June 30, a tornado slashed through Regina, demolishing everything in its path. The bright bunting that had festooned the streets in preparation for Dominion Day became wet shrouds for the hidden dead.
The Regina Morning Leader described how it all started: “It was exactly ten minutes to five when just by Wascana Lake at the south end of Lome Street two huge black columns of dust were to be seen whirling rapidly upwards. Both columns were extremely thick and were revolving at a terrific speed. In a few seconds the colour changed to white and both columns joined each other. Then with a roar the columns swooped to the ground dealing out death and destruction on all sides.”
The two clouds collided near the Legislative Building, forming a dark pillar shaped like a colossal funnel. Eyewitnesses variously described it as “a greasy ice cream cone, with the tip of the cone pointing toward the earth,” “a mammoth elephant’s trunk,” and “a black hand of God, with finger tips clutching down for us poor mortals.”
The force of the tornado sucked out papers from the newly constructed Legislative Building, including the provincial examination papers. This left the teachers with no option than to mark their students on the basis of their year’s scholastic work.
1912 Regina Tornado Aftermath - corner of 16th Ave. and Smith Street - Saskatchewan Archivies Board Photograph Collection.
The turbulent winds then barrelled northward, crunching Regina’s richest residential section, and slicing through the mansion of the Honourable Walter Scott, premier of the province. At 15th Avenue, the south wall of the Williamson Apartments blew out. Pianos, a yelping terrier flung about like a rag, and a nude woman astonished in her bathtub came sailing through the gaping hole.
On Victoria Avenue, Judge John Lamont was just putting up his hand to close the sash of his bathroom window when the whole brick wall of the mansion crumbled away. After minutes of silence, the judge opened the bathroom door, went downstairs, and walked out through the cavity that was now his front door.
The velocity of the wind was estimated to be as high as 260 miles per hour. One eyewitness who saw the approach of the great cloud, “as black as an ace of spades,” declared: “The noise was like forty thousand shrieking, howling devils let loose; the rain fell in torrents, the lightning flashed with blinding brilliancy; it became so dark that I noticed through the windows that lights had been turned on in many houses.”
At least one man was convinced that Judgement Day had arrived. However, he recovered himself sufficiently to comfort two young girls at the height of the storm: “Don’t be scared of those sign boards and chimneys flying outside the window. It’s just God’s handiwork.”
At Victoria Square, the Presbyterian and Methodist churches were destroyed, and the big cupola of the Baptist Church was yanked off and rolled like a marble two blocks away to Mclntyre Street. Fortunately, these churches were empty at the time. The only church undamaged, yet filled with a congregation, was St. Paul’s Anglican. This escape gave rise to a good deal of crowing afterwards that “God protected the Anglicans, because only they are of the true faith.”
After blowing the roof off the Regina Public Library, which had just opened one month earlier, the winds demolished the three-story, brick and stone Telephone Building. Three of the telephone operators, still in their chairs and with their headphones on, plunged from the second story to the basement under the weight of a 15-ton switchboard. Miraculously, the three women burrowed through the bricks and glass and wriggled out of a basement window.
These three operators were the first to stagger to the Regina Leader Building to spread news of the holocaust. At first their story was treated with jocular good humour and they were kidded about “trying to get their names in the paper,” but when the staff realized the women were serious, they formed a rescue party to free the others trapped in the building.
The tornado reserved the brunt of its fury for a pulverizing attack on the mercantile and warehouse district along South Railway and Cornwall Streets. Fifty whinnying horses were reportedly plucked up from Mulligan’s Livery Stable on South Railway Street and deposited on the buckled Canadian Pacific Railway tracks. Dewdney Avenue was wrapped in $150,000 worth of horse blankets, sucked out of the tumbling four-story Ackerman Building. A bookkeeper walked into a steel vault to put away his ledgers and, when he stepped out, was bewildered to find himself in the middle of the bald prairie.
The storm had hardly passed when citizens were digging through the rubble in search of trapped victims. Because telephone service was wiped out. Boy Scouts served as messengers. With the city’s electricity blasted away, volunteers dug through the ruins under a balefully dark sky by the flicker of oil lamps held aloft by thousands of women.
The survivors recited their tales of escape with incredulity. The Beelby family had sought refuge in the attic of their home, and the tornado whirled them, top story and all, 150 feet across the road and deposited them safely in a neighbour’s yard, where they crawled out through the attic window.
Marion Beelby recalled: “I remember seeing a cracked platter of my mother’s tumble from the top shelf in the kitchen pantry. We found it on the sidewalk, with no more than the same old crack in it.”
Wilfred Beelby related that a bottle of brandy bounced out of his medicine cabinet and landed on the street - cork out, standing straight up, glass unbroken, and brandy intact. “In our shaken up state,” he declared, “believe you me we needed a drink of brandy.”
In the aftermath, searchers found an infant inside the oven of a stove. A little flesh had been torn off her legs, but otherwise she was amazingly unruffled in her pink summer dress.
One woman saw two men assisting a third man, whose pant leg hung empty, out of a wrecked house. “Oh, dear,” she exclaimed. “That poor fellow has lost his leg.” A fourth man, following the three, said, “No, ma’am. A beam fell on his leg and broke it. But it was a wooden leg.”
The tornado played strange tricks. Some potted plants, standing on an open verandah in a house on the west side of Smith Street, were not even blown over. Yet houses on the east side of the street were reduced to rubble, one cottage being completely carried away and never found.
Harry J. Potts, a local plumber, was discovered sitting on a piano stool amid the ruins of his house, reading a book. “I found this book blown into my yard,” he explained. “It is entitled Business Hints for Beginners. Providence must have delivered it to me, for this loss means I’ll have to start my business life all over again.”
1912 Regina Tornado Aftermath - 19 Block Lorne Street - Saskatchewan Archivies Board Photograph Collection.
C.R. Delarue, a visitor staying at the Clayton Hotel when the storm struck, described the devastation on Lorne Street: “My, it was a sight! The road was literally strewn with all kinds of goods, telegraph poles, trees, lumber, glass and parts of furniture and clothing.” As he strolled along the street, he saw 70 or 80 homes “as flat as a pancake.” “There wasn’t a post standing - just piles of rubbish. It was impossible to recognize that houses had stood there.”
Delarue had walked down the same street that very morning and “had admired the beautiful residences.” “One might almost call them mansions - none of your wooden shacks,” he wrote. None of the buildings in Regina carried insurance against tornadoes.
The storm left many exaggerated reports in its wake. Initial accounts emanating from Regina cited 31 people dead, but one Eastern paper made the number 300. Whole families living on Lorne Street were reported to have been killed. The Morning Leader declared: “Truth and fiction went hand in hand, and none knew which could be believed, for indeed the truth often outrivaled the fiction in pure horror and gruesome tragedy.”
Without telephone service, rumours ran rampant: “Forty telephone girls killed; scores drowned in the lake, hundreds killed on the north side; Moose Jaw wiped out entirely; Saskatoon has thousands killed; Winnipeg almost entirely wiped out; five Sunday school classes in the Metropolitan Church buried in the ruins; train blown off track and scores killed.” After hearing such wild stories, people must have been relieved that the damage was not as bad as imagined.
Some incidents were obviously fabricated, such as the story of a man who was caught by the tornado while taking a bath. He allegedly seized the hot and cold taps with both hands and steered his craft towards the waterworks. There he descended, so the story goes, filled the tub again, and calmly finished his interrupted bath. There was no need to exaggerate, however; the truth was exciting enough.
Inquiries as to the extent of the damage and the number of injuries were insatiable. One telegram, with a questionable sense of priorities, asked: “Is the money safe? How is mother?”
The initial casualty figures proved to be inflated; people who had been listed as missing or presumed dead started to turn up alive. John Ferguson, whose name appeared on all the original lists of dead, was discovered alive, though critically injured, in a neighbour’s house.
Another “victim,” Alex Lobsinger, was last seen at Wascana Lake just before the tornado struck, and was presumed drowned. Three days later, however, he returned, surprised that the authorities had listed him as “missing.” He had simply been wandering around, totally unaware that anyone was worried about him.
Although it lasted only a few minutes, the tornado cut a swath three blocks wide by about 12 blocks long through the centre of the city. It killed 28 people, injured 200, and left 2,500 homeless out of a population of 30,000. Property damage was estimated at between four and five million dollars. Altogether, 500 buildings were destroyed or damaged. Even though carpenters were paid 60 cents an hour - an exorbitant figure at that time - not enough could be found to meet the enormous demand.
Mayor Peter McAra cancelled the Dominion Day celebrations and ordered that all bars be closed. Instead of a festival, Canada’s national birthday became a day of mourning, with flags flying at half-mast throughout the city. C.R. Delarue described that day as “the saddest in the whole history of Canada.”
Although the storm is often referred to as a cyclone, it was actually a tornado. One citizen described it thus: “It started as a tornado and ended as a cyclone. Having seen both, my only surprise is that there is a building standing in Regina today.”
Alerted by telegraph, several trainloads of volunteers came from Moose Jaw to help clear away the debris. But business went on as usual, or as best it could under the circumstances.
At the Roseland Theatre, advertised as “the safest and coolest spot in town today,” Reverend McGregor continued to deliver his address on “The Problems of the Modern City.”
Suggested Additional Reading:
Sandra Bingaman, “Storm of the Century: The Regina Tornado of 1912,” Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2011.
Frank W. Anderson, “Regina’s Terrible Tornado,” Surrey, B.C.: Frontier Publishing Ltd., 1968.
Frank Rasky, “Great Canadian Disasters,” Longmans, Green & Company, 1961.
Armed with a Master’s degree in history from the University of Regina, KEITH FOSTER worked in the Prairie History Room of the Regina Public Library and was on the board of the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society when it launched Folklore in 1979. He had two articles published in the first issue, and a few more since then.
When not researching or writing about Saskatchewan’s history, Keith writes book reviews, poetry, and plays. So far, Regina Little Theatre has produced four of his one-act comedies – Domestic Bliss, The Gazebo, The Super Shoe Sale, and The Ghost of Wascana Lake.
“people stories” shares articles from Folklore Magazine, a Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society publication.