| 635 For three years or more we have at intervals appealed to members of the Church of Christ (usually called Hedrickites) for a sketch of the history of their organization; but so far we have received nothing from them. We therefore present what we have. The Saints'
almost its entire business limits, and seventy thousand people left homeless. On that same night, the conflagration swept through northern Wisconsin and Michigan, sweeping village after village with horrible loss of life, and ruining thousands of acres of timber, the cutting and milling of which formed the main industry of that region. Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Missouri, and California, the Alleghenies, the Sierras, and the Rocky Mountains have been ravaged by fire, destroying immense amounts of property and entailing widespread suffering. Chicago is not the only city which has suffered. Peshtigo, Manistee, Cacheville and Vallejo, California; Urbana, Darmstadt, and Geneva, under the Alps, have all been visited by terrible fires; and the torch of the incendiary has been applied successively to Louisville, St. Louis, Toronto, Montreal, and Syracuse.
The pestilence has walked at noonday. The cholera has steadily traveled from Asia westward through Europe, and our dispatches of yesterday announced its arrival at New York quarantine. One of the most appalling plagues of modern times, arising from yellow fever, has swept over portions of South America, and in Buenos Ayres [Aires] alone, twenty-eight thousand bodies were buried in one cemetery. Persia has been almost depopulated by the plague, which has been rendered all the more terrible by the added horrors of famine; and now, in our own country, smallpox has appeared as an epidemic in nearly every large city.
Storms, in their various manifestations, have never been so destructive before. In one night, a river in India suddenly rises, swollen by a storm, and sweeps away an entire city, destroying three thousand houses, and utterly prostrating the crops. The little French seaport town of Pornic has been almost utterly destroyed by a tidal wave. The icebergs of the Arctic have caught and imprisoned within their impassable walls thirty-three whalers, inflicting a loss of a million and a half of dollars upon the city of New Bedford, and seriously crippling an important branch of industry. St. Thomas has been devastated by a hurricane which left six thousand people homeless and strewed its coasts with wrecks. A typhoon, of terrible power, has swept along the Chinese coast, destroying everything in its course,-towns, shipping, and life. A hurricane at Halifax has inflicted a severe blow upon English shipping. The storms on the English coast have never been so severe before, nor so fruitful in maritime disasters. A tidal wave at Galveston swept off all the shipping in port. A tornado has swept through Canada, doing serious damage in Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. The island of Formosa has been nearly destroyed by an earthquake.
Add to these the unusual crop of murders and suicides in this country, the alarming increase of railroad and steamboat disasters, the monstrous villainies which have been brought to light in public offices and private corporations, the Franco-German war with its attendant horrors, and the statement of the astronomers that there has been an explosion in the sun, and that two or three comets are just now in danger of losing their tails by their proximity to that orb,-and we may be justified in assuming that the year 1871 will be known in future calendars as the Black Year.
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