His reason for the rain, instead, was “the great increase in the absorptive power of the soil, wrought by cultivation.” Wilber explained that Nebraska’s landscape had been “pelted by the elements and trodden by millions of buffalo and other wild animals, until the naturally rich soil became as compact as a floor.” These soils could not hold rain; any drops that fell would roll away like a child’s marble lost in dust under the bed. Once the dutiful settlers broke up land with their plows, however, rainfall could seep down, then return to the atmosphere overhead. The more soil cultivated, the more moisture captured. More moisture, more evaporation. More evaporation, more rain.
“Rain follows the plow.”
The theory stuck like wet grass. The railroad boosters picked it up as a slogan, using it in promotional literature to hawk settlement in the Great Plains region well into the twentieth century.
—
Uriah took up his plow to build a house for Mattie and Baby Ella. He dug into the tough prairie grasses four inches deep, and cut strips a foot wide and up to four feet long. He hauled the heavy slabs to his home site—a gentle slope with a beautiful view and morning sun. He laid them, grass side down, into rows that would become his walls. Three rows of sod, tucked side-by-side, would create a barrier thick enough to withstand Nebraska’s constantly blowing winds. As he built up his walls, staggering the sod strips like bricks, he fretted about the recent lack of rain, and those winds.
He hoped Mattie could stand them. Moreover, the dust they sent flying. These were not the gentle evening zephyrs of Indiana. The gusts were so strong that Uriah couldn’t keep his hat on as he hauled more strips of earth. One devilish gust nearly blew him off a wall where he was perched to place his sod.
As for the dry conditions, wheat sowed a month before was barely visible. Uriah worried about his early rose potatoes. Fillmore County needed a storm, and soon.
When he finished the walls after nine days’ work, his and Mattie’s new home was about the size of a dining room in the three-story houses that had become all the rage in the East. On Easter Sunday, he wrote Mattie and Ella how he missed them, and how they’d be separated only two or three Sundays more, though adding a caution. “Ma, there will be many privations to endure.” Atop the drought and the wind, he had begun to wish he and Mattie would not have to dig quite so far down to reach water. But, as long as they were blessed with health and strength, “we will succeed by & by then we can live happily together.”
That evening, as if to answer Uriah’s prayers, a whip-crack of thunder sounded from the west. At first, the rain fell steadily. Overnight, it turned violent, stirred up by gale-force winds that knocked out telegraph service to most of Nebraska. In the morning, the rain turned to sleet. The sleet turned to snow. The gales blew it howling white.
The settlers, thinking winter was long over, had been waiting until summer to fix or finish stables. Now they could hardly stand as they ventured out to check on neighbors and livestock. The white swirls blinded their eyes. They had to shout loudly to be heard. The storm raged for eighty hours. In a wide swath across Nebraska, thousands of horses, pigs, oxen, cows, and their spring newborns froze to death. Several ranchers died, as did some hundred bison-hide hunters surprised by the storm. And so did a handful of settlers throughout Nebraska’s counties, some heartbreakingly close to home but unable to see their way out of unfamiliar drifts. Never known was the death toll among the ever-larger groups of emigrants headed in on the trails, sheltered only by wagons or tents.
The storm was among a succession of capricious weather events, including the lasting above-average rainfall, on the plains in the 1870s and ’80s. The time and the place birthed a new word: blizzard. It was thought to come from the German blitz—“lightning”—or from a similar root, the English dialect prefix bliz—“violent in action.”
News of what came to be known as the Easter Sunday Blizzard took a while to trickle out. At the Omaha Republican, newspaper editors, no doubt pressed by the railroad men, “advised against telling to the world the whole truth about the storm of 1873.” The young state was starting to overcome its maligned reputation as a desert. Emigrants were streaming in. The railroads soon would be able to complete tracks clear to California. On the plains, cities would boom. In the fields, corn and wheat would flourish. Homesteaders could finally win the rewards of their risk. The last thing Nebraska needed was bad press.
Uriah Oblinger engaged in some bowdlerization of his own. He described to Mattie the beauty of the white banks left by the storm, and assured her that, while their home was filled with snow, “it was not near as bad as I expected.”
Mattie’s brother, Sam, did not share Uriah’s optimism. He would move back home to Indiana before year’s end. Sam “seems some little discouraged since witnessing the storm,” Uriah wrote, “but there is no use of that for it is the most terrible storm ever witnessed here and may never occur again.”
—
Mattie and Ella arrived at their Nebraska home in May 1873 in “considerable of rain.” It was too wet to plant corn, Mattie wrote her family in her first letter home to Indiana. The sod house was not quite as convenient as a nice frame. And Mattie wished for floors. But she accepted it all with great humor. “I tell you in solid earnest I never enjoyed my self better,” she wrote in June. It wasn’t the novelty, but the feeling of being on her own with her husband: “every lick we strike is for our selves.”
Uriah had planted twenty-three acres of corn. Sprouting in the garden were tomatoes and cucumbers, beans and squashes, 130 cabbages, melons, beets, and the nicest early rose potatoes in the neighborhood. Mattie gushed to her parents about the rich green color of the prairie, the variety of wildflowers. “We have had an immense lot of rain here this season,” she wrote, “but I guess this has been the general complaint every where.”
Uriah and Mattie and the other settlers did not forget they were living on what was once called a Great Desert, uninhabitable until now. They truly believed they were changing the climate. “It seems as though we are destined to help make what was once called the Great American Desert blossom as the rose,” Uriah declared.
Within five years, Uriah’s farm blossomed, too, with acres of plump wheat and corn, oats and barley; a mess of hogs; cows to provide milk for what were now three daughters. For the first time in his life, Uriah was financially comfortable. Inside the sod house, Mattie made plans to plaster the walls. Outside, in the expanding orchard, the couple planted peaches, walnut, cottonwood, willow, and plum trees. The neighborhood built a school, where Ella, their first child, became champion speller.
And through it all, rain.
Along with the conviction that “rain follows the plow,” another common belief held that the mechanical trappings of settlement could shake down rain. Some Americans were convinced that rail and telegraph lines expanding to the West were triggering violent thunderstorms. The financier Jay Gould, at a time when he controlled both the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroad companies and Western Union Telegraph, made the claim that railroad and telegraph construction was expanding the nation’s rainy district by some twenty miles west a year.
In reality, dry was normal. But Mattie would never know it in the seven years she worked to build a life on the plains with Uriah and their three girls. She died in childbirth in February 1880, along with their infant son. Uriah was left with nine-year-old Ella, Stella, five, and Maggie, two.
That spring was dry: day-and-night different from the year Mattie had arrived on the plains. Uriah’s crops failed. He blamed himself as much as the lack of rain. “I hardly know how to manage,” he wrote to Mattie’s parents in the fall, asking that they take one of the children. “I feel that it is not possible or right for me to go through another season as I have this one, for I cannot do justice to myself or family this way.”
Soon the wet years ended altogether. The customary arid climate returned. Had Uriah and his fellow settlers been able to read the rings of western Nebraska’s red c
edars and ponderosa pines, they would have seen that rainfall years with twenty to thirty inches were few and far between. The annual average was closer to thirteen. Stretches with no rain were part of the cycle, too.
The late 1880s and ’90s were a time of extraordinary hardship for the settlers who’d come to farm under cool rains. The plains burned to brown once more. The shining corn leaves curled and scorched and died in the fields. Hot winds swirled. Cinch bugs swarmed. Banks foreclosed on homes and businesses. Between 1888 and 1892, half the population of western Kansas and Nebraska gave up and moved back east.
As the settlers who remained faced first hunger, then death, it was no longer easy to accept weather as providence. At the Lincoln State Journal, a young reporter named Stephen Crane decried the mercilessness: “The farmers helpless, with no weapon against this terrible and inscrutable wrath of nature, were spectators at the strangling of their hopes, their ambitions, all that they could look to from their labor. It was as if upon the massive altar of the earth, their homes and their families were being offered in sacrifice to the wrath of some blind and pitiless deity.”
Of course, the inscrutable wrath derived not from nature but from the growing national conceit that Americans were destined to bridle nature and even the rain: bringing rain to those parts of the country deemed too dry, holding it back from those too wet. This would be the paradox of American settlement, not only on the Plains, but from the arid California coastline to the vanishing swamps of Florida to the Mississippi River. Along the Mississippi, in the third-largest river basin in the world, the same federal government that doled out 160-acre homestead plots to small farmers in a land too dry for corn built levees promised to withstand floodwaters in a land too wet for cities or cotton.
In a generation, one promise would blow away in dust-filled clouds. The other would break through the levees of the Mississippi River.
—
The Mississippi flows on a long, familiar journey from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, for 2,350 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. But it is really much larger than the curving line on a U.S. map or a dark and silty steamboat passage through a Mark Twain book. The Mississippi River watershed is America’s great rainwater catchment. Wide at the top like a funnel, the watershed spreads from Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, over all or parts of thirty-one states before it gradually narrows to its spout at the Gulf of Mexico. There, the river finishes its work of spreading rain through the prairies and forests, ultimately delivering rain home to the sea.
The rain overflow of more than a million square miles of the continent, along with melt from the snow that blankets the northern plains for much of winter, pours into the catchment year after year. For millennia, the Mississippi has caught all the runoff from the broad middle of America—draining 42 percent of the United States in spring floods that inundate endless floodplains, bottomland hardwood forests, and tea-colored swamps.
Flooding is what makes the Mississippi River what it is. This is a mantra of my friend Christine Klein, a water law professor and Mississippi River author who grew up in the heart of the watershed, along the floodplain of the Missouri River just above its confluence with the Mississippi. “Without floods, the river would be just a ditch, and its floodplains arid, lifeless land.”
In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors led by Hernando de Soto, the first Europeans to travel across the Mississippi and its delta, described the landscape during spring flooding as an “inland sea.” Native people “built their houses on the high land, and where there is none, they raise mounds by hand, especially for the houses of the chiefs; with galleries around the four sides of the house where they store their food and other supplies, and here they take refuge from the great floods.”
When French settlers floated down the Mississippi into the territory they claimed and named for King Louis XIV, Louisiana, they found the fertile soils irresistible for farming, as was the river’s potential for commerce and transportation. After President Jefferson orchestrated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, giving the United States the Great Plains along with most of the Mississippi’s rainwater catchment, we spent the next century building cities in the floodplains and turning the bottomlands to cotton lands. Annual flood disasters were as predictable as drought on the plains.
At first, local leaders and farmers tried to build their own levees to deal with the inundations. The structures were no match for the floodwaters of a million square miles. So many floods drowned people and their places, it is a wonder anyone rebuilt. In 1903, floodwaters jumped the banks of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, both tributaries of the Mississippi. The waters rushed to find their floodplain, now covered by Kansas City’s central business district and neighborhoods. Twenty-two thousand people were flooded out of their homes. Sixteen of seventeen bridges spanning the lower Kansas River washed downstream. Over in Topeka, the state was just finishing its capitol building. Twelve feet of water swamped the capital city and twenty-four Topekans drowned.
In the nineteenth century, Americans still turned to God to save them from floodwaters; hung a snakeskin on the fence to break a drought; or, as we’ll learn, forked over $500 to a man called the Rain Wizard to tap his secret formula for storm. Now, hardened by tragedies like the Flood of 1903 and the Great Flood of 1913 that drowned parts of twenty states, Americans were less likely to look upon such disasters as God’s providence. As floods regularly soaked capital-infused cities from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, and wealthy cotton plantations throughout the lower watershed, faith and fear turned to determination—and audacity.
The environmental historian Donald Worster has described flood-control efforts as having a “limited, ambiguous impact on the structure of society and power,” whereas irrigation’s impact is constant and pervasive. But mass drainage and flood control fated mid-America and the wet East as profoundly as irrigation, dams, and diversions shaped the arid West—especially in the tremendous watershed that covered nearly half the nation. Sending rain to those arid regions in the West that didn’t get enough, and barricading rain from its natural catchments in the East, each side of the 100th meridian built its version of what the German-American historian Karl Wittfogel called a “hydraulic society,” faith and fate now placed in centralized government power over water.
Responding to a decade of deluge, Congress in 1917 brought the federal government into the work of flood control, agreeing to fund and bolster levees up and down the Mississippi. Existing levees would be strengthened and raised three feet above the high-water mark; new ones would be built to federal standards. Ten years later, so many local, state, and federal barricades fortified the river that it was already America’s “artificial gut”—William Faulkner’s words.
“Now in condition to prevent the destructive effects of floods,” the chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers boasted. He uttered the words one year before the dark and silty waters of the Mississippi unleashed America’s worst environmental disaster up to that time.
—
In the 1910s and ’20s, another cycle of uncommon rains returned to the plains. In fall 1926, heavy storms bedeviled much of the country. August marked the first television transmission of a weather map, beamed from the navy’s high-power radio station in Arlington, Virginia, to the Weather Bureau Office in Washington, although electronic storm and flood warnings for the masses were still a long way off.
Later that month, a monstrous low-pressure system dumped rain on Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Rain on the plains can fall in a fury, like one of the era’s most popular ads: “When it rains, it pours.”*
The huge rainstorm moved east into Iowa and Missouri, then to Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, lingering for days. Another moisture-heavy system followed, dropping more rain. Yet another was close behind. The storms sent dozens of streams and rivers over their banks and began to wash out bridges and railroads. By Christmas, flooding had left thousands homeless. Gauge readings on the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers were the
highest ever known.
As the calendar turned to 1927, storms continued to rumble over almost the entire Mississippi watershed, so incessant that rain made newspaper front pages around the country. Down in New Orleans, deluges washed out some of the biggest Mardi Gras parades of the season. “Proteus, Monarch of the Sea, with his parade less than half completed, decided the downpour was too heavy and turned his pageant back to the den,” the Times-Picayune reported.
In the spring, five epic storms swept across the Mississippi watershed, each greater than any seen in the preceding ten years. The largest hit on Good Friday in April. It soaked a hundred thousand square miles from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans broke records with 15 inches of rain in eighteen hours. (The slow-moving gullywasher Hurricane Isaac dropped 8 inches of rain on the Crescent City in a day in 2012; Hurricane Katrina, 4½ inches on the same day in 2005.)
Through late April and early May, the Mississippi’s floodwaters rose phenomenally. In two separate waves, flood crests in the newly fortified river topped all previous records—approaching sixty feet above sea level. As John M. Barry explained in his chilling history of the 1927 flood, Rising Tide, the levees, built as high as forty feet, created a man-made catastrophe far worse than any natural flood could have wrought. “These heights changed the equations of force along the river,” Barry wrote. “Without levees, even a great flood—a great ‘high water’—meant only a gradual and gentle rising and spreading of water. But if a levee towering as high as a four-story building gave way, the river could explode upon the land with the power and suddenness of a dam bursting.”
Levee by levee, the illusion of safety behind the government barricades began to crack. On April 15, the first length of levee, 1,200 feet long, collapsed just south of Cairo. Across the Delta, African American plantation workers and sharecroppers were forced to the levees to fill sandbags. Thousands of men worked desperately to save the levee at the Mounds, Mississippi, ferry landing. Held at gunpoint, black laborers had to keep filling sandbags when everyone could hear the warning roar of the water in their ears and feel the barricade shaking under their feet. No one knows how many were swept to their deaths when the Mounds levee broke. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported, “Refugees coming into Jackson last night from Greenville declare there is not the slightest doubt in their minds that several hundred negro plantation workers lost their lives in the great sweep of water.”
Rain Page 15