“It sucked in flames from the surrounding air and drew them up through the funnel so that by the time it reached Peshtigo, it appeared as a gigantic funnel cloud of fire extending up from the burning forests to the sky,” Mr. Sandlin writes. “Its heat was so intense that everything around it instantly exploded.” A priest who survived the firestorm called the tornado “the finger of God.”

There was the double tornado that cut through Irving, Kan., in May 1879. Sgt. John P. Finley of the Army Signal Corps, who would push himself to a nervous breakdown by 1882 while recording Midwestern tornadoes, made his first detailed field report on the Irving destruction; it serves as the endpapers of Mr. Sandlin’s book. Two decades later, he writes, a struggling entrepreneur named Lyman Baum, who was working on a children’s book, came upon a grim detail in a newspaper account of the Irving disaster: “The name of one of the victims, who had been found buried face down in a mud puddle, was Dorothy Gale” — a name the author, writing as L. Frank Baum, would soon immortalize in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

There was a May 1896 tornado in St. Louis, Mo., and East St. Louis, Ill., that killed at least 250 people and cast one Weather Bureau official into ignominy when he proclaimed that Midwestern tornadoes were caused not by the clash of cold and warm air masses over thousands of miles of plains, but by deforestation. Planting trees and exploding dynamite, he explained, would have prevented the tornadoes. (The bureau quickly disavowed his remarks.)

By the turn of the 20th century, the Weather Bureau, skeptical that twisters could be predicted in any useful way and tired of the squabbling among sometimes prescient, sometimes half-baked tornado specialists, had washed its hands of tornado research, Mr. Sandlin writes; not until the Tristate Tornado of 1925, which cut a 219-mile path through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and the destruction of the dirigible Shenandoah that year in a sudden violent updraft, did the Weather Bureau get serious about extreme weather.