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

by Erik Larson

  An observer in the Midwest turned out to be a compulsive poker player. Desperate for cash, he hocked the station’s instruments. He took his daily readings at the pawnshop.

  On January 21, 1888, while Isaac was still at Fort Concho, one of Greely’s inspectors walked into the Galveston station. At the time, it occupied the third floor of a building that served as the city’s police station and courthouse. The inspector, Lt. J. H. Weber, arrived at 1:00 P.M., and was greeted by Private E. D. Chase, the soldier then in charge. Lieutenant Weber checked the barometers with a plumb line to see if they were standing vertically. He checked whether they had enough mercury and if air had infiltrated their vacuum tubes. He reviewed the station’s wind-signal record book and its expense book, and evaluated the performance and appearance of each man assigned to the station.

  He did not like what he saw. He had not liked much of anything since the moment he arrived. Above all he did not like Private Chase.

  The barometers were filthy. Lieutenant Weber had to clean them just to read the scales. Galveston merchants and agents of the Cotton Exchange complained loudly of neglect. Noted Weber, “They hardly look at the local office for information but depend mostly upon St. Louis and New Orleans papers for weather news.” The station itself, he wrote, was in “execrable” condition. “Gentlemen should not be compelled to occupy quarters in which one would not kennel a well-bred canine.”

  The blame for this he laid entirely at the boots of Private Chase. “This man should be discharged for his miserable work while in charge here,” Lieutenant Weber wrote. “He is not fit to remain in the service.”

  AND THEN CAME Monday, March 12, 1888: The Signal Corps’s forecast for New York City predicted “colder, fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather.”

  What New York got was the Blizzard of ’88. Twenty-one inches of snow fell on the city. Two hundred New Yorkers died. Nearly four feet covered Albany. The storm killed four hundred people throughout the Northeast.

  This did not help. Not at all.

  ISAAC CLINE WAS twenty-seven years old. He had a kind smile and welcoming manner, but a backbone like a frigate’s mast and a capacity for heroic amounts of work. He was exactly the kind of man the Signal Corps saw as its salvation. In March 1889, General Greely ordered him to take over the failing Galveston station and, further, to establish the first Texas-wide weather service.

  Isaac stepped from his train into a neat, well-ordered place, with alphabet streets running east and west, numbered streets running north and south. He had grown accustomed to the stark greens and grays of the sagescape that surrounded Abilene. The sudden blue of Galveston cooled his mind. He was struck, as all visitors were, by how flat the city was, so close to sea level as to produce the illusion that ships in the Gulf were sailing on the streets.

  Avenue B, he quickly learned, was more commonly called the Strand. The Wall Street of the West. It sliced across the northern edge of the city just below the arc of wood and iron that formed the wharf front. The downtown streets were paved with flush-hammered wooden blocks and walled by knee-high curbs. Drays, sulkies, landaus, and victorias, with calash tops raised against the sun, eased along behind cautious head-down horses picking their way among the uneven seams. Each hoof struck the pavement with the thud of a mallet against wood, evoking the earscape of a building under construction. The clatter reinforced the aura of enterprise and industry.

  Where Abilene had been a rude new town still redolent of fresh-cut wood, Galveston had substance. The size of its buildings and the obvious care invested in their construction betrayed the city’s ambition to become something much bigger. Even in its hedonic infrastructure, Galveston displayed grand aspirations. The city had five hundred saloons, more than New Orleans, a city not exactly known for banking its fires. Galveston’s poshest whorehouse was situated right behind its richest men’s club, the Artillery Club, which barred women except for an annual ball and the occasional coming-out party of a member’s daughter. The city’s most disreputable block was Fat Alley, between 28th and 29th. In Galveston alcohol was blood, but one could also gamble, acquire love, and lose oneself in an opium mist.

  The city exhibited a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews, and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance. Through the Negro Longshoremen’s Association, Galveston’s black population controlled wharf labor and enjoyed a standard of living higher than almost anywhere else in the country. The immigrant influence was obvious. At the heart of town, Isaac found the Garten Verein, or Garden Club, built with money pooled by the city’s German residents, who accounted for one-third of the population. It was a large, octagonal dance pavilion with pilasters, balustrades, and a central cupola, set in a park that included a bowling green, tennis courts, even a small zoo. Women could not smoke or wear rouge or lipstick on its grounds. But they could dance. In this staunch, straight-backed time when a man could not weep and a woman could not smoke, there was always dancing.

  Galveston was too pretty, too progressive, too prosperous—entirely too hopeful—to be true. Travelers arriving by ship saw the city as a silvery fairy kingdom that might just as suddenly disappear from sight, a very different portrait from that which would present itself in the last few weeks of September 1900, when inbound passengers smelled the pyres of burning corpses a hundred miles out to sea.

  IT WAS NOT enough for Isaac to do merely what General Greely asked of him. He saw in his transfer to Galveston “great opportunities for the utilization of my recreation time.” Although his colleagues might have been inclined to ask, what recreation time?

  On August 24, 1889, his second daughter arrived. He and Cora named her Rosemary. They hired help, most likely. Everyone did. But a baby was still a baby. There were diapers but no washing machines. The nights were hard, the days tiring. As for Isaac’s work life—the Galveston office was in disarray. Isaac was under orders not just to fix it, but also to start the new Texas-wide weather service. For most men, all this would have been quite enough. But in 1893 Isaac joined the faculty of the University of Texas medical school, based in Galveston, as an instructor in medical climatology, and during the year delivered thirty lectures on topics ranging from the fundamentals of measuring barometric pressure to the role of climate in pneumonia, malaria, and yellow fever. He also enrolled in Add-Ran Male and Female College, today’s Texas Christian University, and began studying toward a doctorate in philosophy and sociology. He taught the young men’s Sunday-school class at the First Baptist Church.

  He quickly turned the Galveston office into a showpiece. On November 13, 1893, an inspector named Henry C. Bate paid a visit to the Galveston office, the first inspection since the transfer of the weather service in 1891 to the Department of Agriculture, which formally named it the Weather Bureau. Isaac, Bate wrote, “was exceedingly popular with everyone … The service has few such men in the field—none better.” Bate provided the underlining.

  By then, Isaac’s brother, Joseph, had joined the bureau. Unlike Isaac, he had drifted toward weather. He taught school in Mount Vernon, Tennessee, for twenty-five dollars a month but quit to move to Galveston to become a salesman, or “drummer,” for a printing company and quickly earned a reputation as being just about the only salesman in town who did not drink. He earned sixty dollars a month, but Galveston was a lot more expensive than Mount Vernon and he soon found he was saving less money. He joined a locomotive machine shop operated by the Gulf Colorado Railroad, but remained for less than two months. The fact Isaac hired him was evidence that for the moment the men were still close, still friends. At the time of Bate’s inspection, Joseph was twenty-two years old and earning $840 a year, his best salary yet. Bate gave him a total score of 8.8, but noted his penmanship was “somewhat difficult.”

  In his concluding remarks, Bate wrote that the Galveston force was overtaxed and badly served by headquarters. “I don’t think there is a station in the United States that gives out near the amount of information dai
ly and weekly as this, and I am quite sure there is none where the value of the Service and this information is more genuinely appreciated than here.” Yet few stations, Bate wrote, “are so poorly provided with office comforts and facilities—I hope the Chief will give this matter his favorable consideration.”

  A NEW CHIEF took over the bureau, Mark W. Harrington, the former editor of a meteorological journal. He continued Greely’s campaign to reduce public skepticism about the bureau’s ability to do much beyond simply recording changes in the weather. At the time of Harrington’s appointment, Isaac wrote, “weather forecasting was nothing more than a listing of probabilities.” Even something as basic as predicting the temperature twenty-four hours in advance was considered so likely to result in failure and public ridicule that the bureau forbade it. This prohibition frustrated Isaac Cline. He believed he understood the weather. He understood the rippling of isobars across the plains. Weather could be strange, but never so strange as to elude scientific explanation. Isaac had experienced tornadoes, hailstorms, freakish floods, and dragon winds. He understood them the way a parent comes to understand a difficult child.

  Chief Harrington gave him a chance to prove it. In September 1893, Harrington launched a competition, open to all, to find the best forecasters in the Weather Bureau. The grand prize was a coveted professor’s position in Washington. The first step required contestants to write a paper, three thousand words or less, on the topic “Weather Forecasts and How to Improve Them” and to submit this by December 1, 1893. Each contestant was to mail his paper under a false name to avoid prejudicing the three-man panel of judges, but seal his real name inside an attached envelope. Harrington received thirty entries. One came from Isaac. But Joseph, still an apprentice weatherman and nine years Isaac’s junior, also submitted an entry. The rivalry intensified.

  THE THREE JUDGES in Harrington’s contest selected the ten best papers and invited their authors to Washington for the next phase of the competition, in which the finalists would take a written examination and spend two weeks testing their forecasting skills against those of their fellow contestants.

  Harrington sent two letters to Galveston. The first arrived Christmas Day and informed Isaac that he had placed among the top ten; the second told Joseph he had failed to make the cut.

  The Galveston News applauded Isaac. “While those interested in the weather service work in Texas wish him success they would regret to see him called to other fields of duty, as his place here would be a hard one to fill.” The News made no mention of Joseph.

  Early in January 1894, Isaac went to Washington. He placed fifth in the final competition, but insisted his grade was only “three-tenths of one per cent behind the winners.” Two other contestants tied for first, one a balding, mustached man named Willis L. Moore, with whom Isaac developed a warm personal friendship. Moore and his opponent entered a runoff competition. Moore won, and received the Washington professorship.

  Joseph clearly felt hurt by his failure to place among the top ten finalists. He believed himself to be the best forecaster in the Weather Bureau and for proof cited the fact his name was first on all but one of the lists put out every six months by the bureau’s forecast verification unit, which checked each prediction for accuracy. In a later memoir, he never mentioned that Isaac also had taken the test. In fact, in all 251 pages Joseph barely mentioned Isaac at all, and then only in the most cursory way.

  It was geneology, by then. Not love.

  THE YEAR 1894 brought Isaac a third daughter, Esther Bellew, his baby. There was a bit of good news, too, for the Weather Bureau. Police at last caught up with Captain Howgate, the fugitive embezzler. It was about the only good news, however. Conflict continued to embroil the bureau. It faced a nation of skeptics, one of the most ardent being Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton, Harrington’s boss.

  Morton wanted to save money and did not think he was getting full value from the bureau’s scientists, whom he believed to be far too well paid for the little skill they demonstrated in forecasting the weather. The previous year he had launched an attack on Cleveland Abbe. In singling out the bureau’s brightest light, it was clear Morton was attacking the bureau as a whole.

  Morton’s assault began on June 16, 1893, when he wrote to Abbe asking him to prove his worth. “It seems to me that the disbursements of the Weather Bureau for scientists are altogether too extravagant.”

  To Abbe, this was a jolt. In a reply drafted the next day, Abbe wrote, “Nearly every real advance in the progress of the Weather Bureau since I entered it, January 3, 1871, has gone through the three following steps, viz., first I have suggested and urged it; next I started the work and showed how it ought to be done; finally I found the best man, or organized a system, by which the work should be carried on as a permanent feature.”

  Morton, unmoved, demanded that Abbe send him proof of all these accomplishments. Abbe sent him a thick package of reports.

  Five days later, Morton notified Chief Harrington that he had decided to slash Abbe’s annual salary by 25 percent, to $3,000 from $4,000, “with the understanding that proficiency in forecasting will be necessary for the continuance of his services and the perpetuation of his pay.” The man in charge of gauging his proficiency was to be Major Dunwoody, head of the forecast-verification unit, and one of that all-too-common category of men who feast on boot polish and see the failures of others as stepping-stones toward their own success. Dunwoody had been one of General Hazen’s most ardent critics, objecting at every opportunity to Hazen’s investment in scientific research. He would turn up again years later, in Cuba, doing his best to obstruct the efforts of Cuban meteorologists to transmit warnings about the hurricane of 1900 as it advanced through the Caribbean.

  Dunwoody was a snake, and Chief Harrington knew it. At last, Harrington lost his patience. In a letter to Morton dated April 30, 1895, Harrington wrote: “Dunwoody is a selfish intriguer and a source of discord in the Weather Bureau. I request that the President recall him.”

  Instead, Morton fired Harrington. On July 1, 1895, Morton replaced him with Isaac’s friend and fellow contestant, Willis L. Moore, only thirty-nine years old but already a veteran of nearly two decades of service within the Signal Corps and the Weather Bureau. It was an appointment that would shape in dangerous ways the bureau’s ability to respond to the 1900 storm.

  Moore tightened headquarters’ control over the bureau’s far-flung empire. He insisted on even stricter verification of forecasts. Dunwoody’s verification unit kept busy, and filed a report on each man to Moore every six months. To further sharpen the bureau’s skill, Moore insisted every observer do practice forecasts for a location outside his own territory so that on any given day a number of forecasters would try predicting the weather for the same city. This generated a lot of tension, but Moore believed tension was good. The system, he told Congress, helped explain why Weather Bureau employees had to be committed to insane asylums more often than employees of any other federal agency.

  He said this with pride.

  Moore also made himself guardian of the bureau’s moral health, and in this role claimed broad jurisdiction. Early in 1900, in the midst of rising anticigarette sentiment that condemned smoking not for killing people but for making them stupid, Moore banished cigarettes from the bureau’s weather stations. The Christian Endeavor Union of Washington promptly congratulated him. Moore, greedy for any scrap of praise, replied that he personally had dismissed bureau officials “purely on the ground that their moral character was such as to bring discredit upon the Weather service.” Smoking was a moral blight. “In several cases,” Moore crowed, “we have been compelled to take action for the reduction or removal of observers in charge of station for indolence, forgetfulness, and failure to render reports promptly, where I was satisfied that shattered physical condition and mental impairment were due to the excessive use of cigarettes. The order will be obeyed.”

  Moore never missed a chance to burnish the reputation of the
Weather Bureau or to boost his own political stature. War provided a prime opportunity. By early 1898, the nation’s bloodlust was high. The explosion of the battleship Maine, its true cause a mystery, had sent the nation tumbling irrevocably toward war with Spain. Clearly America’s most important weapon would be its Navy. “I knew,” Moore wrote, “that many armadas in olden days had been defeated, not by the enemy, but by the weather and that probably as many ships had been sent to the bottom of the sea by storms as had been destroyed by the fire of enemy fleets.”

  He reported his concerns to James Wilson, who by then had replaced Morton as secretary of agriculture. Wilson arranged a meeting between himself, Moore, and President William McKinley. Moore spread out a map of the Caribbean featuring the tracks of past hurricanes. McKinley studied the map, then turned to the secretary. “Wilson,” he said, “I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy.”

  Moore proposed the creation of a hurricane-warning service with stations in Mexico, Barbados, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. McKinley approved. He told Moore, “Get this service inaugurated at the earliest possible moment.”

  For that instant, at least, Captain Howgate was forgotten, the Blizzard of ’88 forgiven.

  The establishment of these hurricane-listening posts was too weighty a task for rank-and-file bureaucrats. Moore chose only trusted officers of the bureau. For the West Indies network, he picked Dunwoody. For the Mexican stations, he chose Isaac.