6 ms·

Every now and then I wonder about weather from a historical perspective. What I find myself most curious about is whether we have documented evidence of what Na

Every now and then I wonder about weather from a historical perspective. What I find myself most curious about is whether we have documented evidence of what Native Americans thought of tornadoes. For tribes that lived out in the open on the plains, how did they avoid them? What did they think they were?

hotnfresh 3y ago
Avoid? Odds are extremely good that, if you live in “tornado alley” and never take any measures to avoid tornadoes, you’ll still not get hit by one your whole life. Good chance you’ll never even see one. High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  >I would be curious how they coped with them if "western" films have any accuracy, you push your horse to lie down, back to the storm, and you lie against him in between his feet, under a buffalo skin
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    Um, no. No horse is lying down during a hailstorm. They're under a tree or some kind of shelter. If they can't find shelter, they're standing up, butt to the wind, head down and ready to bolt at any second.
    - dmoy 3y ago
      Horses are get spooked in zero wind by inanimate objects that they just saw the prior week, in the same spot. Horses get increasingly skittish the higher the wind gets, even in "normal" conditions - I guess it makes it so they can't smell things downwind of them, so it's an evolutionary thing. When wind gets high, horses get really spooked. No way in hell would I put myself between or anywhere near horse legs during a tornado. That's just asking to die. From the horse, not the tornado.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        The last 24 hours it's been very windy and raining hard. The same horse that I pull out for extra feed twice a day, every day for months saw me in a jacket with my hood up and refused to have anything to do with me until I pulled the hood down and then he figured "ok, I know that guy." Yeah!
        dmoy 3y ago
        Oh yea moving objects are way worse than inanimate objects from horse perspective. Just meant that inanimate objects, even ones they've seen before, are also sometimes suspect. That old tractor? The one that's been rusting in the same spot for years? Well TODAY it's spooky, because... no reason.
        jprd 3y ago
        so much experience demonstrated here - omg the memories from this statement!
        ethbr1 3y ago
        My vet father's opinion on horse intelligence, specifically vis-a-vis being spooked: "What's the best thing about a horse?" "They taste like chicken." But I guess you get suddenly kicked, bit, leaned on, etc., you develop strong feelings on the matter. ... oddly enough, he's rather fond of cows.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      I once had the misfortune to be riding a horse when a hailstorm broke out. The horse closed his eyes and almost ran off a cliff; thankfully he hit a fence first and turned away from that.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      > No horse is lying down during a hailstorm you don't know it's a hailstorm till you're in it, prior to that it's just a storm you see coming across the plain. And while a singular horse does get skittish, the idea here I think is that the horse finds the calm presence of its owner to be soothing.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        Yeah, well, 15 years of living with horses has taught me otherwise. I'm calling bullshit on that idea.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    I thought you were supposed to kill the horse, cut it open and crawl inside? (I’ve read that Lucas was extremely influenced by western films, I guess I know where that one came from now).
- TedDallas 3y ago
  That is correct. I have lived in Tornado Alley for a half century. Serious tornadoes have landed all over my local area over the years, but I have also never even seen so much as a funnel cloud. They can be devastating though, but are also very localized and do not last long. That said, I do take tornado alerts seriously.
  - giardini 3y ago
    I've passed through neighboring regions only a handful of times in my life and rarely failed to see at least a funnel. Spookiest was a funnel at the edge of a dust storm: it dipped up and down like a spring toy and looked almost alive. I've also witnessed two waterspouts: one large, thankfully at a distance, and another at about a half-mile.
    - taeric 3y ago
      I'd hazard that, with cars, you are traveling far farther from your local area than most people could ever do in the past.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        Dust devils are also another thing. I’ve spent tens of hours driving in the southwest and mountain west and have seen several. Years and years living in, and hundreds of hours on long drives through, tornado ally and adjacent still-tornado-heavy areas, and I’ve never seen a tornado.
- siftrics 3y ago
  Anecdata: I grew up in southeastern Iowa and have seen more tornadoes than I can remember. Every single summer you'd go to the basement at least three or four times due to tornado warnings. The Iowa State mascot is a "cyclone."
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Yeah, been in at least a couple warnings (not watches—for those not from the region, a warning means a radar-detected tornado signature or a sighting from a reliable source, heading your way) a year my whole life. Don’t even know many people who’ve seen one. Never seen one myself, despite being in the set who’ll go outside when the sirens sound, if it’s daytime and the visibility’s good. They’re scary in theory, and in-fact if you have bad luck, but the acreage directly damaged by a tornado every year just isn’t that big, considering the size of tornado country. I doubt the natives living here had any particular strategy for avoiding tornados specifically, though they may have had beliefs and practices concerning them and certainly must have had things they did to stay safe in severe thunderstorms more generally. Not because they were incapable of coming up with such (far from it) but because direct experience with a tornado (not just seeing it, but having one come near enough for avoidance or even sheltering strategies to apply, beyond what you’d do for any stormy weather) is fairly rare.
    - msrenee 3y ago
      I've seen funnel clouds probably a half dozen times. The area I'm in now got hit in the last 10 years. There have also been a couple instances of stright-line winds in the last 15 years bad enough to tear huge oak trees out of the ground. The severely impacted area is fairly small, but it certainly would have been a concern for people loving in this area.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Marchand%20Vol%2026%20Num%202.pdf?sequence=1 https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Mar... (scroll down to 'storm on the plains') It does vary by tribe, this is just one I had bookmarked. I researched the topic a few years ago after the Derecho event. Also, these storms are one of the reasons why a lot of north american tribes didn't really nail down agriculture or settlement-building like the Aztecs did. When you plan on a storm deleting your construction once or twice a year, you optimize for something else.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Neat! And because I know there are a ton of coastal US folks here, east-of-Rockies / west-of-Appalachians has storms of a whole different breed. In terms of ferocity and suddenness.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    And multiple subregions too. I grew up in an area with 'lake effect' and currently live in the open plains. The storms on the plains are way more impressive even though they don't last as long. Nothing better than sitting on the porch when a huge system is rolling over.
FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_did_precolonization_midwest_native_americans/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_d...
swatcoder 3y ago
> What did they think they were? FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to certain folk stories, but you can very successfully navigate a world that simply "is" without all that "what" and "why" business we get intensely caught up in now. Having some cultural wisdom that reminds you to move camp under certain season, climate, or weather patterns will get your culture through lifetimes of tornadoes without ever spending much thought on "what" tornadoes are (whatever that even means).
- junofan 3y ago
  Yeah I dunno, the Caddo and Wichita were pretty serious about folk science. They had real villages and farms and stuff. They weren’t just kinda camping out and going with the flow wherever ancestral memory took them.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm not saying nobody outside of modernity thinks about "what" but that many cultures didn't/don't. And it's not even a matter of primitivism and in no way suggests some kind of meager culture. It just turns out that sophisticated cultures have gotten by without an exhaustive theory of "what", and that modernity's particular obsession is an idiosyncrasy rather than either an accomplishment or a universal. (Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)
embedded_hiker 3y ago
Even Lewis and Clark seemed to not know the word "tornado". On the way west, they found a patch of woods that had been torn up: https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad-day/ https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad...

hotnfresh 3y ago

Avoid? Odds are extremely good that, if you live in “tornado alley” and never take any measures to avoid tornadoes, you’ll still not get hit by one your whole life. Good chance you’ll never even see one. High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.

fsckboy 3y ago
>I would be curious how they coped with them if "western" films have any accuracy, you push your horse to lie down, back to the storm, and you lie against him in between his feet, under a buffalo skin
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  Um, no. No horse is lying down during a hailstorm. They're under a tree or some kind of shelter. If they can't find shelter, they're standing up, butt to the wind, head down and ready to bolt at any second.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    Horses are get spooked in zero wind by inanimate objects that they just saw the prior week, in the same spot. Horses get increasingly skittish the higher the wind gets, even in "normal" conditions - I guess it makes it so they can't smell things downwind of them, so it's an evolutionary thing. When wind gets high, horses get really spooked. No way in hell would I put myself between or anywhere near horse legs during a tornado. That's just asking to die. From the horse, not the tornado.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      The last 24 hours it's been very windy and raining hard. The same horse that I pull out for extra feed twice a day, every day for months saw me in a jacket with my hood up and refused to have anything to do with me until I pulled the hood down and then he figured "ok, I know that guy." Yeah!
      - dmoy 3y ago
        Oh yea moving objects are way worse than inanimate objects from horse perspective. Just meant that inanimate objects, even ones they've seen before, are also sometimes suspect. That old tractor? The one that's been rusting in the same spot for years? Well TODAY it's spooky, because... no reason.
        jprd 3y ago
        so much experience demonstrated here - omg the memories from this statement!
        ethbr1 3y ago
        My vet father's opinion on horse intelligence, specifically vis-a-vis being spooked: "What's the best thing about a horse?" "They taste like chicken." But I guess you get suddenly kicked, bit, leaned on, etc., you develop strong feelings on the matter. ... oddly enough, he's rather fond of cows.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    I once had the misfortune to be riding a horse when a hailstorm broke out. The horse closed his eyes and almost ran off a cliff; thankfully he hit a fence first and turned away from that.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    > No horse is lying down during a hailstorm you don't know it's a hailstorm till you're in it, prior to that it's just a storm you see coming across the plain. And while a singular horse does get skittish, the idea here I think is that the horse finds the calm presence of its owner to be soothing.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      Yeah, well, 15 years of living with horses has taught me otherwise. I'm calling bullshit on that idea.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  I thought you were supposed to kill the horse, cut it open and crawl inside? (I’ve read that Lucas was extremely influenced by western films, I guess I know where that one came from now).
TedDallas 3y ago
That is correct. I have lived in Tornado Alley for a half century. Serious tornadoes have landed all over my local area over the years, but I have also never even seen so much as a funnel cloud. They can be devastating though, but are also very localized and do not last long. That said, I do take tornado alerts seriously.
- giardini 3y ago
  I've passed through neighboring regions only a handful of times in my life and rarely failed to see at least a funnel. Spookiest was a funnel at the edge of a dust storm: it dipped up and down like a spring toy and looked almost alive. I've also witnessed two waterspouts: one large, thankfully at a distance, and another at about a half-mile.
  - taeric 3y ago
    I'd hazard that, with cars, you are traveling far farther from your local area than most people could ever do in the past.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Dust devils are also another thing. I’ve spent tens of hours driving in the southwest and mountain west and have seen several. Years and years living in, and hundreds of hours on long drives through, tornado ally and adjacent still-tornado-heavy areas, and I’ve never seen a tornado.
siftrics 3y ago
Anecdata: I grew up in southeastern Iowa and have seen more tornadoes than I can remember. Every single summer you'd go to the basement at least three or four times due to tornado warnings. The Iowa State mascot is a "cyclone."
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Yeah, been in at least a couple warnings (not watches—for those not from the region, a warning means a radar-detected tornado signature or a sighting from a reliable source, heading your way) a year my whole life. Don’t even know many people who’ve seen one. Never seen one myself, despite being in the set who’ll go outside when the sirens sound, if it’s daytime and the visibility’s good. They’re scary in theory, and in-fact if you have bad luck, but the acreage directly damaged by a tornado every year just isn’t that big, considering the size of tornado country. I doubt the natives living here had any particular strategy for avoiding tornados specifically, though they may have had beliefs and practices concerning them and certainly must have had things they did to stay safe in severe thunderstorms more generally. Not because they were incapable of coming up with such (far from it) but because direct experience with a tornado (not just seeing it, but having one come near enough for avoidance or even sheltering strategies to apply, beyond what you’d do for any stormy weather) is fairly rare.
  - msrenee 3y ago
    I've seen funnel clouds probably a half dozen times. The area I'm in now got hit in the last 10 years. There have also been a couple instances of stright-line winds in the last 15 years bad enough to tear huge oak trees out of the ground. The severely impacted area is fairly small, but it certainly would have been a concern for people loving in this area.

jabroni_salad 3y ago

https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Marchand%20Vol%2026%20Num%202.pdf?sequence=1 https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/904/Mar... (scroll down to 'storm on the plains') It does vary by tribe, this is just one I had bookmarked. I researched the topic a few years ago after the Derecho event. Also, these storms are one of the reasons why a lot of north american tribes didn't really nail down agriculture or settlement-building like the Aztecs did. When you plan on a storm deleting your construction once or twice a year, you optimize for something else.

ethbr1 3y ago
Neat! And because I know there are a ton of coastal US folks here, east-of-Rockies / west-of-Appalachians has storms of a whole different breed. In terms of ferocity and suddenness.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  And multiple subregions too. I grew up in an area with 'lake effect' and currently live in the open plains. The storms on the plains are way more impressive even though they don't last as long. Nothing better than sitting on the porch when a huge system is rolling over.

FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_did_precolonization_midwest_native_americans/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_d...

swatcoder 3y ago

> What did they think they were? FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to certain folk stories, but you can very successfully navigate a world that simply "is" without all that "what" and "why" business we get intensely caught up in now. Having some cultural wisdom that reminds you to move camp under certain season, climate, or weather patterns will get your culture through lifetimes of tornadoes without ever spending much thought on "what" tornadoes are (whatever that even means).

junofan 3y ago
Yeah I dunno, the Caddo and Wichita were pretty serious about folk science. They had real villages and farms and stuff. They weren’t just kinda camping out and going with the flow wherever ancestral memory took them.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm not saying nobody outside of modernity thinks about "what" but that many cultures didn't/don't. And it's not even a matter of primitivism and in no way suggests some kind of meager culture. It just turns out that sophisticated cultures have gotten by without an exhaustive theory of "what", and that modernity's particular obsession is an idiosyncrasy rather than either an accomplishment or a universal. (Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)

embedded_hiker 3y ago

Even Lewis and Clark seemed to not know the word "tornado". On the way west, they found a patch of woods that had been torn up: https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad-day/ https://lewis-clark.org/the-trail/nebraska-iowa/willards-bad...