National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government didn't mount a serious study of tornadoes until the 1880s.

In 1884 — using information gathered from the eight-state onslaught mentioned above — Sgt. John P. Finley of the U.S. Army Signal Corps compiled 15 rules for early tornado forecasting. The meteorologically technical checklist included "increasing wind velocities" and "increasing high humidity" in certain quadrants of "a well-defined low pressure area."

Fearing mass panic, however, the Army forbade the word "tornado" from being used in official weather forecasts. According to NOAA's History of Tornado Forecasting, the ban lasted until 1938.

But the tornadoes kept coming.

In May 1896, deadly twisters cut destructive swaths across parts of the United States. In northern Texas, for instance, a cyclonic storm killed 200 people and in St. Louis, atornado killed more than 450 people, injured another 1,000 and caused millions of dollars in property damage. More killer tornadoes attacked Kansas and Illinois.

The New York Times reported that whole towns in central and western Missouri were wiped out by the St. Louis tornado. A bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis was ripped downstream and most of the small boats were sunk. "Telephone and telegraph wires were down and the cities were in total darkness all night, except for the flare from houses which had caught fire."

In the city of St. Louis, "720 street blocks were a mass of ruins and scarcely a building in the path of the storm escaped injury," the paper reported. "In East St. Louis the devastation was as great as in