Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  —JEFFERSON to JAMES MADISON, December 1796

  The effects of drought are beyond anything known here since 1755. There will not be 10,000 hogsheads of tobacco made in the State. If it should rain plentifully within a week, the corn in rich lands may form nubbings; all the old field corn is past recovery, and will not yield a single ear. This constitutes the bulk of our crop; there will be no fodder. The potatoes are generally dead.

  —JEFFERSON to ALBERT GALLATIN, August 1806

  We are suffering here, both in the gathered and the growing crop. The lowness of the river, and great quantity of produce brought to Milton this year, render it almost impossible to get our crops to market…. Everything is in distress for the want of rain.

  —JEFFERSON to JAMES MONROE, May 1811

  We are here laboring under the most extreme drought ever remembered at this season. We have had but one rain to lay the dust in two months. That was a good one, but was three weeks ago. Corn is but a few inches high & dying. Oats will not yield their seed. Of wheat the hard winter & fly leave us about ⅔ of an ordinary crop so that, in the lotteries of human life, you see that even farming is but a gamble.

  —JEFFERSON to JAMES MONROE, June 1813

  Perfectly elegant yet usually dry, Jefferson’s cisterns are unfilled symbols of his ambition for the spread of family farms westward and throughout the young nation’s vast interior. Jefferson had an almost religious vision for the cultivation of America’s lands beyond the Blue Ridge, and considered the advance of independent farms the most important task facing the first generation of U.S. citizens. Self-reliant farmers would tame the wilderness; build the nation’s economy and democratic principles; and make Americans a “tranquil, healthy and independent” people. He believed it despite early reports of desert conditions coming in from the West.

  Jefferson never regretted building on the little mountain that enchanted his boyhood. Despite all the hardships, history deemed the selection exceedingly original, and impressive to every visitor during his lifetime and centuries later. In 1816, one of those visitors, U.S. Attorney General Richard Rush, made the pilgrimage to what he called the mecca of Monticello to visit now-aging Jefferson, an old friend of his father. He would marvel that the fog never rose to the top of the mountain, where Jefferson, “in genius, in elevation, in the habits and enjoyments of his life…is wonderfully lifted above most mortals.”

  “If it had not been called Monticello,” Rush wrote, “I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.”

  It was a telling characterization. Mount Olympus had its gate of clouds. And Jove is Jupiter—king of the gods in ancient Roman mythology who was also god of the sky, rain, thunder, and lightning. In his role as rainmaker: Jupiter Pluvius.

  Pluvius personified—With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!—Jefferson’s relationship with rain is also America’s. His careful weather logs reflect the quest of the scientific mind—the mind that invented practical gadgets and developed a philosophy so rational that “the American experiment would prove that men can be governed by reason and reason alone.” Yet he held a certain defiance for the reality of climate. With the same audacity that draws us to develop in the wettest areas or farm the driest, to put our homes in floodplains or in the path of hurricanes, Jefferson chose to build a home with poetic views rather than potable water. He was devoted to his vision that small yeoman farmers would build the country’s wild interior and its economy—before he knew whether they would have enough rainfall to farm. In too many years, they would not.

  —

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, most Americans still lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1801 inaugural address after he was elected third president of the United States, Jefferson expressed his vision for “a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land…advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” Two years later, he sold Congress on his plan to fund an expedition all the way to the “Western Ocean.”

  When Jefferson sent Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the economic potential of the West and its life, waters, and lands, he made a special climatic appeal. His official instructions emphasized that they should observe and record “climate as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion of rainy, cloudy and clear days, by lightning, hail, snow, ice, by the access & recess of frost, by the winds prevailing at different seasons, the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flowers, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles or insects.”

  In summer 1804, Lewis and Clark topped a Nebraska hill to their first wide-angle view of America’s great, grassy middle. Clark noted a “bound less” and “parched” prairie. Seventy-five years later, even Walt Whitman could not adequately describe the treeless, windswept prairies between the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains: “One wants new words in writing about these plains, and all the inland American West—the terms, far, large, vast, &c., are insufficient.”

  From the Mississippi River west to the Rockies and from Canada’s Saskatchewan River to what is now northern Texas, endless prairie grasses bent in ceaseless winds. On the eastern side, which might see twenty inches of rainfall in a good year, lush grasses could grow higher than a wagon. In the West, tougher, shorter grasses muscling their way up through gravelly sands saw ten inches at best. Either way, the region seemed no place to settle. Native Americans lived well on the plains; they did not depend on capricious rainfall, but instead followed the bison.

  In July 1804, Clark had complained of “the wind Blustering and hard from the South all day which blowed the clouds of Sand in Such a manner that I could not complete my p[l]an in the tent.” The following month, too, “the wind blew hard and raised Sands…in such Clouds that we could scarcely [see].” A heat wave seared so harshly that Captain Lewis’s eager black dog, a Newfoundland named Seaman, became too fatigued to walk.

  Just a few years behind Lewis and Clark, in 1806 and 1807, a young military officer with an aristocratic face named Zebulon Montgomery Pike Jr. led an expedition to explore the southern portion of the Louisiana Purchase and find the headwaters of the Red River. His report referred not to a Great Plain, but a Great American Desert. Settlement was out of the question. The problem wasn’t Indians, but the cotton-mouth dry:

  But here a barren soil, parched and dried up for eight months in the year, presents neither moisture nor nutrition sufficient, to nourish the timber. These vast plains of the western hemisphere, may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa; for I saw in my route in various places, tracts of many leagues, where the wind had thrown up the sand, in all the fanciful forms of the ocean’s rolling waves, and on which not a speck of vegetable matter existed…But from these immense prairies may arise one great advantage to the United States…The restriction of our population to some certain limits.

  If Pike’s wasn’t a bleak enough admonition, another army officer, Stephen Harriman Long, offered an even drearier one ten years later. Long led the first scientific exploration up Nebraska’s Platte River in 1821, a trip so harsh that he and his men had to kill, roast, and eat their own horses to survive it. He described the Great Plains from Nebraska to Oklahoma as so parched they were “unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by people depending on agriculture.

  “The traveller who shall at any time have traversed its desolate sands will, we think, join us in the wish that this region may forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison and the jackal.”

  Pike’s and Long’s antiexpansionist wishes were not to be. For in the late 1860s, rain began to pound the plains, beading up and running off the hard crust. As the ground soaked in new life, the once-desolate sands turned colors—from drab dust to gorgeous green. Now a long humid cycle brought above-average rainfall to the Great American Desert. The name, in fact, disap
peared from maps by the 1880s.

  The showers kept coming, year after year. And so did the settlers, many of them families. They came to be called sodbusters for their prairie-breaking work. Atop the promising climate, they were lured by cheap land made available by the federal government, now hard-selling Jefferson’s vision of a nation of independent yeoman farmers.

  For years, southern states had successfully fended off western settlement incentives in Congress. But secession assured their passage. Western boosters pushed the first Homestead Act through in 1862. Anyone willing to head west, build a home, and grow crops could have 160 acres all his or her own. (Single women and widows were eligible for the land, priced at a dollar and twenty-five cents an acre.)

  While 160 acres may have been sufficient for an eastern farmer, it was not as good as it sounded for small farmers on the dry plains, where scarce natural vegetation also made raising livestock difficult. In 1878, Major John Wesley Powell, the adventuresome, one-armed Civil War hero who headed the U.S. Geological Survey, warned Congress in his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region that scant rainfall made the needs of small farmers in the West entirely different from those in the East. A line down the middle of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, the 100th meridian, divided lands with enough rainfall for small farms—twenty inches was the conventional wisdom—from those where farmers should instead organize communally, around watersheds.

  Truth was, much of the arid federal land being doled out to hopeful settlers would simply not support small farms. Even in what Powell called the “Sub-humid Region,” along the 100th meridian itself, farmers might thrive some years, but then face “disastrous droughts.”

  Congressmen didn’t buy it. Powell’s warnings were not welcome in a nation bent on expansion. The environmental historian Donald Worster, eminent chronicler of the water empire of the American West, said western congressmen in particular saw Powell’s ideas as radical, with “too much planning, too much regulation, too much community control. This is not the American way.”

  Through the 1870s and early ’80s, thousands of homesteaders rushed to Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and beyond. They replaced ashen clumps of sagebrush with leafy cornfields. They earned record crop prices. They sent elatedly for relatives back east. They did not know these rain-filled years were outliers: sheer meteorological coincidence.

  Historians have always pointed to land as the basis for Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a nation, realized through yeoman farmers one patch of soil at a time. But it was not land that left his vision unfulfilled. To the west, lack of rain would be the spoiler.

  SEVEN

  RAIN FOLLOWS THE PLOW

  In his love letters to Mattie, and later, in those signed “Your Affectionate Husband,” Uriah Oblinger would often write of rain.

  A Union veteran with a wiry beard and high cheekbones, Uriah first journeyed from his home in Onward, Indiana, to the West in 1866, “in quest of a peaceful and permanent home” for himself and Mattie. Hard rains soaked his campsites and slowed his progress. His horses strained and his wagon wheels caught in the thick mud glutting the trail. Not long after he’d crossed from Iowa into Missouri on the Turkey River ferry, one protesting wheel popped a kingbolt, forcing him to retreat for repairs and lose a day in a forsaken-looking town.

  Great deluges scared the colts, chilled his bones, and made his piles all the more miserable. Yet, wretched as it could be, Uriah was convinced that rain was a gift from God, sent to endow the soils and fill the young nation with small farms. This was as clear as the rainbow that had greeted him at the Mississippi River and its great limestone gates of western promise:

  “Sun rose beautiful amid the grand old Mississippi bluffs,” he wrote to Mattie on the night before he crossed the Mississippi River. “A beautiful Rainbow at Sunrise sprinkling some with Sun shining bright…”

  Uriah’s initial ramblings failed to produce a peaceful and permanent home. He and Mattie married back in Indiana in 1869 despite her father’s reservations about her tumbleweed of a correspondent. After three harvests on a rented farm, Uriah journeyed west once more, this time with his brothers-in-law, to stake homesteads in Nebraska.

  Again, rain soaked him. In Illinois, he and Mattie’s brothers steered their wagon team through downpours, camped in storms, and at one point passed fountainheads bubbling so vigorously “all we had to do to get water was hold our bucket und[er] and let it fill without lab[o]r.”

  One September morning, Uriah sat upon his provision box in a most welcome ray of sun, and wrote of all-night rainfall in a letter to Mattie and his newborn girl, Ella.

  “Is it raining at your house last night and this morning?”

  He wanted not one cloud of sorrow to dim their happiness.

  —

  During their journey, Uriah and his brothers-in-law met many fellow emigrants in wagons, often at river crossings awaiting a ferry. By the time they reached Nebraska in October 1872, it seemed that every other young man in the East had the same notion to settle in the five-year-old state. They had to forge well beyond the city of Lincoln to find what they hoped would be unclaimed acreage. About seventy miles past, down south toward the Kansas border, Uriah chose what he thought was the perfect 160-acre claim. The prairie land had a creek at the corner, with plenty of water for stock. Half the land had already been homesteaded, by an unfortunate young man who’d broken his back and could no longer tend it. But by the time Uriah was able to return to the Land Office in Lincoln, someone else had already staked the property.

  Uriah was down to his last few dollars. He felt hungry all the time, and so seemed his old horse, Nellie. Her ribs poked out, he wrote to Mattie. He traded his wagon for one not so nice, and his shotgun as well, for the cash he needed to set out again. Searching the treeless, flat prairie for a stake, he convinced himself that a creek wasn’t so important; in fact, it would get in the way of the plow. He and Mattie would dig a deep well and haul water up in buckets with a crank-and-rope windlass.

  Fillmore County, Nebraska, after all, lay in the heart of what would come to be called the Rainwater Basin. In times of rain, 4,000 playa lakes, or shallow wetlands, would fill out across 100,000 acres of grassland, then percolate exceedingly slowly into an ancient aquifer, now known as the Ogallala, which sat undiscovered until the invention of the diesel-powered water pump. (When the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado pushed his men into the High Plains from New Spain in the sixteenth century to search for the Seven Cities of Gold, they went near mad with thirst—never knowing of that vast freshwater sea beneath their feet.)

  To be sure, Fillmore County farmers still prayed for rain. Dust continued to blow across Nebraska, fierce as the battles Uriah had seen in the cavalry. But this was no desert. Recurrent great storms were proof of that. Just as they were proof that settling this once-desolate land was all part of God’s plan.

  In New York, the artist John Gast had just finished his allegorical painting American Progress. An enormous, creamy-skinned beauty in a diaphanous gown floats westward across the prairie. She is the goddess America, schoolbook in her right hand, a stream of telegraph wires in her left, leading the nation to its manifest destiny of a fully civilized continent. Nineteenth-century settlers held an abiding belief in Manifest Destiny; that they had been specially chosen by God to advance America and the agrarian dream. Gast’s beauty brings light and progress from the East. Ahead of her, storm clouds darken the western horizon, where frightened natives and bison flee. Behind her, the mighty Mississippi carries busy ships, and trains chug forward—every means of transportation possible to move the new nation west.

  Gast’s painting would be widely distributed in promotional literature urging frontier settlement, and in prints that hung on the walls of homesteaders. Uriah was not likely to have seen it by that spring when, his claim secured, he wrote to Mattie that she should begin preparations for her journey to Nebraska.

  The country was settling fast. One hundred and sixty acres belonged
to them, and soon, Uriah would harvest corn to sell for train fare. “Surely the hand of Providence must be in this,” said Uriah. “It seems this desert as it has been termed so long has been specially reserved for the poor of our land to find a place to dwell in and where they can find a home.”

  —

  As settlers began to push farther and farther west across Nebraska and Kansas, a curious phenomenon occurred. The rain seemed to follow like an obedient hound.

  When settlement moved beyond the 98th meridian, so did the rain, as if the two were linked. Could it be? A cause-and-effect notion swirled first as superstition. Then, it caught hold among the homesteaders. Surely this was more proof of His providence, and their destiny to settle the continent through to the Pacific Ocean.

  Railroad bosses loved the theory. They launched propaganda campaigns that claimed settlement was turning the Great American Desert into a “rain belt.” Town boosters, the federal government, and even some scientists—though many men of science tried to warn that it was hokum—jumped on the bandwagon. At the just-established University of Nebraska, one pair of scientists legitimized the theory with an explanation. Samuel Aughey was a natural sciences professor and the state’s geologist; Charles Dana Wilber served in the university’s Department of Geology and Mineralogy. Both men also worked as advisers to the railroads, which could not stretch their tracks from the eastern cities to the West Coast without boomtowns in between.

  Aughey reported on several “facts of nature” to prove rain was increasing on the plains: much taller grasses than those observed by Lewis and Clark in 1804; newly bubbling spring-fed creeks bone dry since ’64; and most important, ten years’ worth of greater rainfall than that recorded in the decade prior.

  If the idea of a long-term climate cycle occurred to Aughey, he did not share it.