The muddy torrents crashed into the Delta with more than double the force of flood-stage Niagara Falls, and inundated more than 2.3 million acres. It was more water than the entire upper Mississippi had ever carried, more than it has ever carried since. People scrambled onto the roofs of houses, then the houses washed away. They took refuge in the tops of trees, then the trees gave way. To take pressure off the levees protecting New Orleans, authorities dynamited a levee downstream in Caernarvon, Louisiana, which flooded most of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The homes and fields of the poor living to the east and south of New Orleans were sacrificed for what the city fathers considered a greater good. (The dynamiting left scars so deep that many living in the Lower Ninth Ward when Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans in 2005 insisted the levees had been dynamited once more to save the wealthier, whiter sections of the city.)
At its widest point, north of Vicksburg, the Mississippi again turned into an inland sea—one hundred miles across. Some 637,000 people, many in the Delta, were left homeless. The river and its tributaries took lives from Virginia to Oklahoma. The death toll remains unknown. Barry wrote that the government officially reported 500 dead, but a disaster expert who visited the flooded area estimated more than 1,000 perished in the state of Mississippi alone. The last of the floodwaters did not recede until autumn, leaving behind a mud-caked and barren landscape.
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was “not a natural disaster,” said Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania as he toured the destruction. As President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief conservation officer, Pinchot, a forester, had unsuccessfully tried to convince Congress and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that flood control should work in hand with nature. He, Roosevelt, and other Progressives had fought the “levees only” strategy of the Corps in favor of a varied approach that included preserving natural flood areas, building reservoirs, and reforesting vast tracts of the upper watershed.
Congress ignored the advice—just as it had ignored John Wesley Powell’s on the arid lands the century before. In fact, Powell’s Arid Lands report of 1878 had mentioned the problem of floods worsening in the East, including the Mississippi Valley, and warned: “The removal of forests and of prairie grasses is believed to facilitate the rapid discharge from the land of water from rain and melted snow, and to diminish the amount stored in the soil.”
The hydraulic society had come to believe human-made systems could best those shaped by climate, water, and land. In America’s great rainwater catchment, we settled in the floodplain, removed the great soaking grasses from the prairies, razed enormous tracts of floodabsorbing forest in the watershed, and built levees to terrifying heights.
“It’s a man-made disaster,” Gifford Pinchot concluded. The same would be said only three years later, when Americans again endured the worst environmental catastrophe up to that time.
—
On the plains, the outlier storms and floods of the 1910s and ’20s seemed to wash away memory of the drought that had seared Uriah’s generation. The heavy rains, along with rising wheat prices, war in Europe, and generous federal farm policies, created a second land boom on the plains. This time, many more hopeful farmers staked out acreage, drawn by the still-simmering Jeffersonian dream of land-based democracy and capitalism.
The second generation of sodbusters drove in on gasoline-powered tractors, pulling an array of disk plows. In 1925, Ford Motor Company’s tractor division, Fordson, rolled its 500,000th tractor off the Rouge River assembly line in Detroit. Fordsons, along with John Deere’s upstart Model Ds, helped make these farmers much more efficient than their predecessors at stripping the tough native grasses from the land.
The farmers—both homesteaders migrating in from the East and “suitcase farmers” moving in for quick profit—turned more than five million acres of grassland into golden wheat crops.
When the Depression hit and wheat prices crashed, they tore up still more of the protective grasses in hopes of a comeback on bumper crops. When prices fell yet further, the suitcase farmers bailed out. They left huge swaths of eight states bare—and left the farm families who remained to face an unprecedented ecological disaster.
During the spring and summer of 1930, drought settled on the eastern United States, shattering all previous records. Along the Mississippi River that had swelled to unimaginable heights just three years earlier, river captains wondered whether their barges would be able to make it south to New Orleans.
As the drought moved across the rest of America, its center shifted from the East to the Great Plains beginning in 1931. The Dakotas became as arid as the Sonoran Desert. As the rain dried up, intense heat set in. The mercury first climbed to 115 degrees, then to 118. In summer 1934, thermostats in Illinois pushed over 100 degrees for so long that 370 people died. Two summers later, Newsweek described the country as a “vast, simmering caldron.” More than 4,500 died from extreme heat.
Grasshoppers swarmed in buzzing black clouds like the plagues of Exodus. After gnawing the last of the anemic wheat stalks and corn nubs in the fields, they began to devour fence posts and the wash hanging on clotheslines. Farmers lost their crops to the drought, and their land, farm equipment, and homes to the banks. By 1936, farm losses reached $25 million a day. More than two million farmers were drawing relief checks.
Combined with the barren landscape, the rain-free years of the 1930s brought worse than the heartbreak and hunger of Uriah’s generation. When the swift old prairie winds met the newly stripped ground, they kicked up a novel type of storm, the likes of which had never been seen. These violent storms really did follow the plow. Rather than rain, they carried millions of pounds of dirt.
The winds that nearly blew Uriah off his sod house were back, sometimes howling through at sixty miles an hour or more. With neither the prairie grass nor the wheat crops to stand against the gales and anchor the drying soil, farmers lost the earth itself. As soils calcified, dirt started to blow off the land, turning daytime to darkness. John Riley “J.R.” Davison, born in 1927 in a tiny Oklahoma panhandle crossroads called Texhoma, was haunted by his boyhood memories of black blizzards that blocked the sun. “We watched that thing and it got closer and seemed to kindly grow. It was gettin’ closer. The ends of it would seem to sweep around. And you felt like you were surrounded. Finally, it’d just close in on you, shut off all light. You couldn’t see a thing. The first one or two that happened, people thought the end of the world had come. Scared ’em to death. Travelers comin’ down the highway didn’t know what to do. They were just hysterical.”
Sometimes, the black clouds would boil tens of thousands of feet into the sky like angry cumulonimbus, then rumble cross-country on high-altitude winds. In 1934, drought parched forty-six of the forty-eight states. A massive front that May picked up 350 million tons of earth as it swept over the plains, carried it east, and dumped 12 million pounds on Chicago. The dry storm next darkened the skies and dirtied the air in Boston, New York, Washington, and Atlanta, before moving over the sea. Ships three hundred miles out in the Atlantic Ocean reported a quarter inch of dust on their decks.
As farmers watched dirt bury their fence posts and wagons, they tried desperately to keep it out of their homes, their drinking-water wells, and the lungs of their children. Babies and the elderly were most vulnerable to an epidemic of respiratory infections including “dust pneumonia.” The number of people who died in the Dust Bowl is unknown, but with heat deaths and pneumonia combined it was in the thousands. More than 250,000 other souls packed up all they could carry and fled, like the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
The worst single day came on April 14, 1935, known as Black Sunday. A sunny day had finally dawned, drawing many people outside for picnics and Sunday drives. Midafternoon, the warm air temperatures plummeted—falling by as much as 50 degrees in a few hours. A monstrous black blizzard appeared on the northern horizon and moved in with silence and speed. Woody Guthrie was twenty-three years ol
d and living in Pampa, Texas. He watched the “freak-looking thing” bear down on the town “like the Red Sea closing in on the Israel children.” He later recounted how the day inspired him to write the song “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”:
It got so black when that thing hit, we all run into the house, and all the neighbors congregated in the different houses around over the neighborhood. We sit there in a little old room, and it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, you couldn’t see anybody in the room. You could turn on an electric light bulb, a good, strong electric light bulb in a little room and that electric light bulb hanging in the room looked just about like a cigarette burning. And that was all the light that you could get out of it.
A lot of the people in the crowd that was religious-minded, and they was up pretty well on their scriptures, and they said, “Well boys, girls, friends, and relatives, this is the end. This is the end of the world.” And everybody just said, “Well, so long, it’s been good to know you.”
The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and America’s Dust Bowl, which began just three years later, were inverse disasters, triggered by hard rains and hardly any. But they shared much in common, not least of which a bitter national wake-up from the dream of Manifest Destiny. The Jeffersonian vision of small yeoman farmers living in idyllic harmony with the land could not be realized out of harmony with the rain. Those hardest hit by the Dust Bowl were the tenant farmers who fled, and the small family farmers who stayed behind. Hardest hit by the Mississippi flood were black sharecroppers in the Delta, leading more blues to be recorded on the subjects of heavy rainfall and inundation than any other natural phenomenon. Before the floodwaters had receded, Bessie Smith was out with “Back-Water Blues” and “Muddy Water (A Mississippi Moan),” while “Blind” Lemon Jefferson recorded his album Rising High Water Blues.
People, since its raining, it has been for nights and days
People, since its raining, has been for nights and days
Thousands people stands on the hill, looking down where they used to stay.
After Uriah Oblinger found care for his three motherless girls, he sold his possessions and left Nebraska for Minnesota to be near family and find work—and hopefully, a wife. He married within about a year, brought home Ella, Stella, and Maggie, and went on to have three more daughters. Another son died in infancy.
For a while, Uriah returned to his tumbleweed ways, working for a railroad surveying company. But he missed his family. He tried taking everyone back to Fillmore County, Nebraska. His farm failed. He heard good things about Kansas. He did not succeed there. He headed to Missouri. Another farm failed.
In fact, he never again found the success he’d had with Mattie in their seven rainy years together. His final letters contain no rainbows. They recount the failing national economy; mounting personal debt and collectors calling; and suggestions to his wife, now back in Minnesota, about what additional possessions she could sell for cash: Uriah’s workbench, his planes, his pitchforks, three wagon box rods, the grain cradle, the rake.
In the end, he returned to Nebraska, where his firstborn, Ella, and her husband were making a go. His last surviving letter was to one of Mattie’s brothers: “Our crops here on the divide were almost a total failure again,” he wrote.
“We had no rain.”
* * *
* The saying was an ad rather than an adage, developed for Morton Salt. Prior to 1911, table salt had the notorious problem of caking in rainy weather. That year, Morton began adding the anticaking agent magnesium carbonate to its salt. Executives wanted to emphasize the idea that it would pour even in the damp. The original pitch, “Even in rainy weather, it flows freely,” proved clunky. “When it rains, it pours” was catchy—and made all the more so by the umbrella girl still emblazoned on Morton’s blue cylinder.
EIGHT
THE RAINMAKERS
In August 1891, Robert St. George Dyrenforth, a Washington patent attorney, arrived by train at the small Midland, Texas, station in a desolate stretch of the southern plains. He had sent ahead a freight car with a bewildering assemblage of rabble: mortars, casks, barometers, electrical conductors, seven tons of cast-iron borings, six kegs of blasting powder, eight tons of sulfuric acid, one ton of potash, five hundred pounds of manganese oxide, an apparatus for making oxygen and another for hydrogen, ten- and twenty-foot-tall muslin balloons, and supplies for building enormous kites.
Dyrenforth, his odd freight, and a small group of experts, “all of whom know a great deal, some of them having become bald-headed in their earnest search for theoretical knowledge,” joked a pundit, were met by local cattle ranchers. On mule-drawn wagons, they trekked twenty miles northwest to one of the largest cattle operations in the country, owned by a Chicago meatpacking king and spread over four arid counties.
Sporting the pith helmets and knee-high hunting boots of a Teddy Roosevelt safari, the out-of-towners struck a blushing contrast with the cattlemen in their cowboy hats and boots. But the city boys and cowboys worked together over the next week as they followed Dyrenforth’s instructions for setting up what can only be described as a series of battle lines.
Along the front line, Dyrenforth erected sixty homemade mortars about fifty yards apart. Mounted to the ground atop wagon-axle boxes, the mortars pointed to the sky at 45-degree angles. Also on this first line, Dyrenforth “made several mines or blasts by putting sticks of dynamite and rackarock into prairie-dog and badger holes,” he reported.
A half mile behind the first, Dyrenforth set up a second line consisting entirely of homemade electrical kites, each about as big as a family dinner table. He staggered the kites between the mortars. Without enough men to fly them, he tied them to “the mesquite bushes, the chapparal bushes, and the catsclaw bushes.”
On a gently sloping prairie about a half mile behind the kites, Dyrenforth set up a final line with ten- and twenty-foot-tall balloons and the hydrogen apparatus to inflate them. A photograph from the scene shows one of the pith-hat men filling a comically large balloon in the tall prairie grass, a windmill behind him. The black-and-white image conjures Dorothy’s return to Kansas and looks every bit as imagined.
But Dyrenforth was real, and so was his scheme: He planned to bomb the hell out of the skies over West Texas to try to make them rain. Not only that, it was all being bankrolled by the United States Congress.
—
When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, New Yorkers felt so triumphant that they threw the biggest series of celebrations since the Declaration of Independence. In cities and towns up and down the canal, thousands and thousands of people streamed to waterfront parties and parades or boarded festively decorated boats to join a flotilla from Buffalo to Albany and down the Hudson River to New York City. “The delight, nay, enthusiasm, of the people was at its height,” gushed one correspondent. “Such an animating, bright, beauteous, and glorious spectacle had never been seen.” And such an explosive cacophony had never been heard. The statewide celebration began on the sunny Wednesday morning of October 26. As the steamboat Seneca Chief launched into the canal at Buffalo, a gunner set off the first earsplitting blast in a lengthy salute of 32-pound cannons. The cannons had been set every ten miles along the nearly four-hundred-mile route. When the men at the second cannon heard the crack of the first, they would fire, and so on down the line all the way to Sandy Hook on the Atlantic Ocean.
Ringing out with the cannon booms were the ceremonial discharges of every gun that could be rounded up from the Battle of Lake Erie, a decisive naval victory in the War of 1812. At each town the flotilla passed, locals also set off “deafening fireworks” and artillery companies fired their own salutes. The smallest villages were determined to create celebrations as noisy and elaborate as any in the larger towns. Atop the cannonading, every town rang its church bells and held a parade with a marching band. Every canal-front party and every boat deck likewise had a band, and many families shot off their own firecrackers and musk
ets.
All day and all night, the air cracked with a racket to kill the weak-hearted and call up the dead. And when the celebratory blue skies of Wednesday turned to cold, gray dampers that washed out the Thursday parades, opinion spread that the noise had been loud enough to call the rain, too.
The belief that thundering noise could bring rain or vanquish it was as old as, well, thunder, lightning, and rain. In Europe during the Middle Ages, church bell ringers also had to scout for the severe storms that plagued those grim times. Upon sight of a black thundercloud, they would head to the steeple to set the bells clanging—not to warn villagers, but to try to break the storm. (Clutching the end of a wet rope hung from the tallest point in the village in the days before lightning rods was not the wisest way to ride out a thunderstorm. Prior to the Enlightenment, it was not uncommon for church bell ringers to be killed by lightning.)
From the time of Plutarch, rainfall also had been associated with war; the Greek essayist wrote that “extraordinary rains pretty generally fall after great battles; whether it be that some divine power thus washes and cleanses the polluted earth with showers from above, or that moist and heavy evaporations, steaming forth from the blood and corruption, thicken the air.” By the eighteenth century, storied connections between war and rain had become linked to the blasts of heavy gun and artillery fire—linked not by scientists, but by military leaders including Napoleon.
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