Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

  Piddington, in his immensely popular text The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms, offered practical advice for coping with hurricanes. He included transparent storm cards, or “horn cards,” which showed the direction of wind at various points in a cyclonic circle. A mariner could match the winds he was experiencing with the winds marked on the card and thus determine where in the body of the storm his ship was located and thus how to avoid sailing toward what Piddington called “the fatal centre.” With these storm cards, Piddington wrote, “you have the hurricane in your hand.”

  It all sounded good and precise on paper, but hurricanes still came by surprise, still killed by the thousands. As one nineteenth-century captain put it, “if the centre always bore eight points from the direction of the wind; if the wind gradually increased in force as we near the centre; if the wind veered gradually in all parts of the storm; and if the centre were the only dangerous part of it, then the avoiding of a hurricane would be very simple.”

  WHAT ISAAC DID not learn much about at Fort Myer was forecasting, a black and dangerous art that only a few men in Washington were allowed to practice. Incorrect forecasts eroded the faith of a public already skeptical of the service’s prowess and worth. A few newspapers had taken to running the service’s weather forecasts opposite the often-superior forecasts of astrologers and assorted weather prophets. To help ensure that the best men got deployed to the field, the weather service gave its Fort Myer trainees a rigorous examination. The top scorers won immediate assignment as assistant observers to posts throughout the country.

  At one point the test asked each trainee to choose a scientific mission related to meteorology that each could pursue while conducting the routine work required in a weather station. The chief did not want his observers just sitting around between weather observations, a wise policy, given the sex scandals, grave robbing, and other incidents that would soon surface and further undermine the weather service’s reputation. Isaac gave a beauty queen’s answer—that he wanted to do something that would “give results beneficial to mankind.”

  Isaac scored in sixteenth position, and the service promptly assigned him to Little Rock, Arkansas. When not recording temperature and barometric pressure, he was to investigate how climate shaped the behavior of Rocky Mountain locusts, said to be swarming the countryside. To Isaac, this was the fulfillment of a dream. “I was twenty-one years old,” he wrote, “the world was before me and my enthusiasm was such that I thought I could do any thing that it was possible for man to accomplish.”

  THE STORM

  Tuesday, August 28, 1900:

  16 N, 49.3 W

  THE VORTEX GAINED definition. Rivers of air flowed toward its center. The earth’s rotation drove them to the right, but each right-veering gust imparted to the vortex a left-hand spin, just as a glancing blow on the right side of a cue ball will cause it to spin left. The arriving winds lowered pressure. As the pressure fell, air moving toward the storm gained velocity. The stronger winds drew more water vapor from the sea, which fed the clouds around the center of the vortex—releasing more heat and driving the pressure still lower.

  On Tuesday, August 28, the storm overtook a ship located about three hundred nautical miles southeast of Monday’s first sighting. The ship’s log noted winds from the south-southwest, the bottom right rim on a Piddington horn card. The wind was stronger, Force 6, twenty-five to thirty-one miles an hour.

  Guy wires whistled.

  GALVESTON

  Dirty Weather

  IT WAS WINTER. Isaac’s train passed through an austere landscape of grays and browns, the trees like upended spiders, but to him all of it was dazzling. “Something new, something of interest and beauty unfolded before my eyes all the time.” He arrived in Little Rock just before the state legislature passed a bill that resolved a long-festering controversy. Henceforth, the new law declared, the legal pronunciation was “Arkansaw.”

  Isaac’s boss assigned him responsibility for weather observations to be made at five in the morning and eleven at night. In between he was to put together bulletins for the station’s customers and collect weather dispatches cabled each day by a network of railroad agents.

  He did not find any locusts. “They evidently learned that I had been put on their trail and disappeared.” But he did find another means of filling his time.

  The University of Arkansas’s medical school was only three blocks from the station. Medicine, Isaac reasoned, would provide not only a productive way to fill his day, but also satisfy the Signal Corps’ requirement that its observers pursue a scientific endeavor related to their daily duties. He could study how weather and climate affected people, a new field and one that “could not evade me as the Rocky Mountain locusts had done.” He enrolled in the middle of the 1882–83 school year, and found his work and study schedules complemented each other. “The one gave me a rest from the other,” he wrote, “and I never became tired.”

  He graduated from medical school on March 29, 1885. Five days later General Hazen placed him in charge of a weather station at Fort Concho, Texas. The nearest town was San Angelo, whose residents described the place as hell on wheels. Hazen directed Isaac to travel by rail to Abilene, Texas, and there to catch a stagecoach for the one-hundred-mile journey to the fort. But when Isaac checked his Rand McNally Railroad Map he could not find Abilene.

  It did exist, the railroad agent assured him. It was just too new to be on any map. A cattle boom had created the town overnight.

  As the agent prepared Isaac’s tickets, he told him a story, the first of many unsettling stories Isaac would hear about the West in the days before his departure.

  The railroad had just reached Sweetwater, the agent explained, Sweetwater being another spanking-new town some thirty-five miles west of Abilene. Just a few days earlier half a dozen Chinese railroad workers had been gunned down by a group of drunken cowboys. The sheriff arrested the killers and brought them before Sweetwater’s brand-new judge, who had also opened a saloon.

  The judge considered the case, pursed his lips, opened a couple of law books just to make sure his first bone-deep feelings about the case were correct, then issued his judgment: “Gentlemen,” he ruled, “I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.”

  The judge, named Roy Bean, let the killers go.

  Isaac paid close attention to one fragment of advice. “I was told that well-dressed men often had their hats shot off their heads and their good clothes pulled from their backs.”

  In Little Rock, Isaac had become a dandy. He had adopted, wholeheartedly, the fashion then in vogue among the city’s doctors. On his rounds at Little Rock’s Charity Hospital he wore a Prince Albert brown beaver suit, silk top hat, and kid gloves. And carried a cane.

  He was twenty-three years old.

  He was as good as dead.

  When Isaac climbed aboard his westbound train, he wore a battered old suit from his last days in Tennessee. He could not bear to leave his fancy clothes behind, however. He hid them under the false floor of his trunk.

  ISAAC ARRIVED IN Abilene under a gunmetal sky, the city awash in mud and scented with horse manure and fresh-sawed lumber. He heard the torn-fabric scree of ripsaws and the sound of hammering as joists and beams went up in new buildings around town. Cowboys strolled around in high boots and spurs the size of daffodils, and wore pistols shoved into their waistbands. He had entered a territory as alien to him as anything he could have concocted in a daydream. Here before him was the West of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in which Phileas Fogg, an Isaac-like character of precision and rigor, raced across the Great Plains during the American leg of his journey around the globe.

  Isaac learned that the coach to San Angelo would not arrive until the next morning. He tried Abilene’s one hotel, but found it full. A railroad agent told him about a room for rent over a saloon.

  At the entrance, I
saac encountered a porter mopping the wooden sidewalk. The water had a red tinge to it. Perhaps joking, Isaac said, “That looks like blood.”

  “Yes sir,” the porter said casually, without breaking his rhythm. He explained that four cattlemen had gotten into a gun battle. These were not just ordinary cowboys, he said, but well-off ranchers with large herds. Now all four were dead.

  Isaac stepped past. He checked in and climbed the stairs to his room.

  “My head,” he wrote, “did not rest easy that night.”

  IN THE MORNING, things looked better. The sun was bright, the air cool and scented with bacon, coffee, and sawdust, the fragrance of a brand-new country. The landscape was amber, pierced by long black pickets of shadow. Isaac was twenty-three years old in a new country in a world where anything was possible. He was in the thick of it when everyone else back home could only read about it in the newspapers and in Jules Verne and in the thousands of dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody. Isaac was a pioneer in a new science, a prairie Dampier, at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself. Far to the north in the Bad Lands of the Dakota Territory another young man, Teddy Roosevelt of New York, was busy “pioneering” along with other East Coast blue bloods like Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, later to write The Virginian, who hoped to experience the frontier life before it disappeared. Roosevelt called this way of living “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live.”

  The stage arrived clotted with mud, then set off again in a great jangle of energy, pulled by four horses and rocking on its springs like a bark in heavy swells. The coach was scheduled to cover the one hundred miles to San Angelo by late afternoon with a team change every thirty miles, but a rain-engorged stream halted the journey. The driver told Isaac and his fellow passengers they would have to spend the night alongside the creek until the next scheduled coach could arrive from the opposite direction. The driver would then ferry the group across the creek, using a boat kept at the crossing for just such emergencies. The fresh coach would return to San Angelo.

  The sole female passenger slept in the coach; the men found places on the ground. About midnight, Isaac heard a rattlesnake. It terrified him, “in fact so much that I ran and jumped on top of the stage coach and scared the woman into hysterics.” She thought the wagon was being attacked by Indians. Isaac stayed on the roof the rest of the night.

  The Abilene-bound coach arrived the next day, as expected, and soon Isaac found himself skimming over a sea of wildflowers. Cartographers of the day called this the Great American Desert, but to Isaac it seemed they had gotten it wrong, for here was “a carpet of flowers such as words will not describe. The flowers rolled in the wind like varicolored waves.” Flowers north, south, east, and west—“the most beautiful vision in nature my eyes have ever beheld.”

  This did not last.

  THE SKY TURNED cloudless and blue, the prairie brown. The flowers died. The Concho River went dry, although underground flows somehow kept portions of the bed flush with water and fish. The weather showed itself prone to fits of violence. A tornado followed him along a road. A “blue norther” caught him in the midst of a hunting trip and dropped temperatures from hot to freezing in minutes. He experienced heat like nothing he had known before. During a visit by the freak dragon winds that periodically blistered the Texas plains he recorded a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

  One evening in mid-August he was walking toward town along his usual route, crossing the footbridge over the riverbed, when he heard a roar from somewhere far upstream. Not thunder. The roar was continuous, and got louder. He saw a carriage carrying a man and two women descend into the riverbed at a point where wagons and horsemen often crossed. An escarpment of water that Isaac estimated to be fifteen or twenty feet high appeared beyond the carriage. Isaac began to run. The water caught the carriage broadside and ripped it from the soil. Isaac reached the other side of the riverbed just as the water surged past him, the carriage tumbling like a tree stump in a spring flood. The wagon passed. Rescue was impossible.

  His heart racing, Isaac looked upstream. Men had gathered and with their bare hands were plucking fish from the water. Large fish. As Isaac walked toward the men, he saw a fish two feet long drift slowly by. He moved closer. The fish did nothing. He reached for the fish. It kept still. Isaac thrust his hands into the water, and two things happened: He caught the fish; he froze his hands.

  It was August in Texas but water had abruptly filled the riverbed and this water was the temperature of a Tennessee creek in January, so cold it paralyzed fish.

  But where had the water come from? Isaac scanned the skies for the rolling black-wool cloud typically raised by blue northers, but saw nothing.

  Days later, townsmen recovered the bodies of the carriage driver and his two female passengers.

  A week later, the mystery of the ice-water flood was solved.

  Visitors from the town of Ben Ficklin fifty miles up the Concho came to San Angelo and reported that a monstrous hailstorm had struck about ten days earlier, the day of the flood. The storm discharged stones the size of ostrich eggs that killed hundreds of cattle and fell in such volume they filled erosion gulches and piled to depths of up to three feet on level ground. The ice melted quickly.

  For Isaac, this was explanation enough. The deadly flood was the downstream flow of flash-melted hail. He wrote an article on the incident for the weather service’s Monthly Weather Review, edited by Cleveland Abbe. To Isaac’s “surprise and chagrin,” Abbe rejected the article on grounds it was too far-fetched to be believed.

  The rejection stung. Isaac had been there when the flood came through. He saw the fish. He had thrust his hands in the ice-cold water. The shock of it on that August day in Texas was embedded in his brain.

  Isaac could not let it go. Hail became a transient obsession. He tracked down reports of monster hail from all over the country. It was true, he wrote, that no one previously had reported a hailstorm so big as to produce a river of fish-paralyzing ice water, but on June 30, 1877, hailstones as large as oranges killed ponies at Yellowstone Valley, and on June 2, 1881, in White Hall, Illinois, hailstones the size of goose eggs piled to twelve inches deep, and on June 12, 1881, hailstones as large as a man’s fist fell on three counties in Iowa and piled to depths of two or three feet, and on June 16, 1882, hailstones up to seventeen inches around and weighing two pounds fell at Dubuque, Iowa.

  Which was Isaac’s loyal, obedient, oblique, three-cushion way of stating that the great Cleveland Abbe had been wrong to reject his paper. Isaac was nothing if not credible, and did not like having his credibility challenged.

  ISAAC FELL IN LOVE.

  The Signal Corps had moved his station to Abilene where Isaac began attending the city’s Baptist church, led by Pastor George W. Smith. He was struck by the beauty of the music, and more to the point, by the beauty of the young organist who produced it. The woman was Cora May Bellew, a niece of Pastor Smith’s who was living in the pastor’s house.

  “She was a beautiful, brilliant and cultured girl,” Isaac wrote. “She had more attraction for me than any woman I had ever known.”

  He wooed her, won her, and, on March 17, 1887, married her. He remained true to his belief that one’s time should be used efficiently, an ethos that Frederick Winslow Taylor soon would bring to American industry. An inefficient man, Taylor said, was like “a bird that can sing but won’t sing.”

  Isaac could sing, and did. On December 10, 1887, after just eight and a half months of marriage, Cora May gave birth to a daughter. The Clines named her Allie May.

  THE clamor TO reform the weather service continued to grow. Demand for better and more useful forecasts intensified. Until the creation of the weather service, individuals had relied on their own meteorological savvy—and assorted almanacs, crackpots, and backwoods lore—to produce their own forecasts of the weather, just as they produced their own soa
p, bread, and clothing. But America as a whole was shifting rapidly toward a consumer culture in which remote factories produced the things families needed. Now a farmer could get a daily report from the Weather Bureau. “In the past the man has been first,” Frederick Taylor wrote, “in the future the system must be first.”

  But was the system up to the task?

  The weather service needed a hero, and got one. On January 16, 1887, Gen. Adolphus W. Greely took over as chief of the Signal Corps. He was by now one of the most famous men in America, albeit famous for having barely survived the failure of his 1881 expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, which left him marooned until his rescue in July 1884 by Capt. Winfield Scott Schley of the U.S. Navy, whose daring expedition made him a celebrity as well.

  Captain Howgate, the embezzler, was still at large. Congress launched a formal investigation of the weather service. To gauge just how far the service had fallen, General Greely dispatched inspectors to weather stations around the country. In Greely’s first year, he dismissed one hundred employees for all manner of offenses, including some that suggest that weathermen of the day were not drab bureaucrats who spent their lives watching mercury rise and fall. He fired one New England observer for indulging his passion for photography on bureau time. The observer turned the office into a studio where he photographed nude young women.

  A fondness for extended fishing trips caused the head of the Rocky Mountain district to engage in some long-range forecasting. He would create a week’s worth of weather observations, then unload them at the telegraph office with instructions to the operator to send them one by one over the following week. This worked fine, apparently—a testament either to the consistent character of Rocky Mountain weather or the observer’s real forecasting savvy—until one of Greely’s inspectors dropped in without warning. Finding the office vacant, the inspector went to the telegraph office and there discovered a neat stack of timed and dated weather reports awaiting transmission.