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In 1842, the U.S. government had hired its first official meteorologist, the brilliant James Pollard Espy, widely admired at home and in Europe. Espy had championed the national system of weather observers, “the only information now wanted to predict rain.” His convective theory of rainfall, which explained how storms are driven by warm, humid air rising in a column, was far ahead of its time. It earned him the Magellanic Prize of the American Philosophical Society and his nickname, “Storm King.”
But the stumble in his otherwise esteemed career was his intellectual leap to rainmaking by fire. While many people (not, for the most part, scientists) believed the loud concussions of artillery caused rain following battles and even Fourth of July celebrations, Espy thought it was the convective heat. He became convinced that cutting and burning huge tracts of forest would bring quenching storms to the arid regions. He proposed that the government maintain gigantic timber lots in a belt from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico along the western frontier. When rain was needed, or even on a regular schedule, some of the lots could be set ablaze. A long curtain of showers would form and sweep eastward across the states to the seaboard, fulfilling farmers’ crops and dreams.
Espy’s critics did not fear his plan would fail but that it would succeed—placing the power of rainfall into the hands of the federal government. The idea especially alarmed antebellum southerners. “He might enshroud us in continual clouds, and indeed, falsify the promise that the earth should be no more submerged,” argued a Kentucky senator, “and if he possesses the power of causing rain, he may also possess the power of withholding it.”
Southern congressmen managed to block Espy’s proposals for rain by controlled burn through the 1830s and ’40s. For years, they would view him as a warning symbol of government control: “I would not trust such a power to this Congress,” a South Carolina senator declared in the 1850s. Rain “is a power which none but God can rule with justice. As long as you leave it to the temptation of selfish man, it will go to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
The desperate drought of the 1890s finally convinced Congress to invest in rainmaking experiments. The only redeeming influence of the decade-long drought was that it tamped down the “rain follows the plow” theory hard-sold by the railroads and other boosters. Clearly, the construction of rail and telegraph lines was not bringing rain to the plains. John Wesley Powell said as much in his Arid Lands report, and warned that settlement was changing the water cycle in other ways: Clear-cutting forests meant more runoff and less evaporation. Irrigation diminished flows to lakes. Digging drains meant drying marshes.
Powell’s predictions for the hapless small farmers were beginning to come true, too. Nostalgically known as the Gay Nineties (Naughty Nineties in the U.K.), the 1890s were nothing but grim for Uriah Oblinger and the other farmers who’d swarmed into Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas as young men to bust sod and fulfill the nation’s destiny. Yet the belief that Americans would ultimately overcome the climate and even control it remained strong. Those who knew the least about the nascent science of meteorology seemed to believe it most fervently.
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The first champion of the theory of rain by concussion was a celebrant at the Erie Canal parties in New York. J. C. Lewis “took note of a very copious rain that immediately followed the discharge of ordnance during the celebration of the meeting of the waters of Lake Erie and the Hudson.” Writing nearly four decades later in the first year of the Civil War, Lewis pointed out that the day after the recent battle of Bull Run, rain on the battlefield “was copious all day and far into the night.”
Centuries of rainy battlefields, his witnessing of artillery fire blasting rain from the skies at the Erie Canal, and the opening hostilities of the Civil War “fully established the fact,” Lewis wrote in a 1861 letter printed in America’s first scientific journal, The American Journal of Science and Arts: “The discharge of heavy artillery at contiguous points produces such a concussion that the vapor collects and falls generally in unusual quantities the same day or the day following.”
The war slogging in the wet South did much to popularize the idea. Fighting in the godforsaken mud convinced hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers, Union and Confederate alike, that gunfire brought down torrents. Governor Joshua Chamberlain of Maine, who volunteered for the Union Army and became a brigadier general, was one of many believers who saw with their own eyes how hard rains followed hard battles. Chamberlain noted that cleansing rains followed “Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Bethesda Church, Petersburg, Five Forks,” as well as small engagements with sharp, concentrated fire. “This fact was well noticed, and is well remembered by many a poor fellow who, like myself, has been left lying, desperately wounded, after such engagements—for these rains are balm to the fever and anguish of the poor body that is promoted to the ranks of ‘casualties.’ ”
In 1871, a retired Civil War general and Chicago civil engineer named Edward Powers published his treatise War and the Weather, or the Artificial Production of Rain, in which he reviewed some two hundred battles to show that rain followed artillery barrages, usually within a day or two. Powers urged the government to “verify the truth of the theory and determine its limits and conditions.” He suggested bringing two hundred siege guns of various calibers out of retirement from the federal arsenal at Rock Island, Illinois, for two experiments: one to see if a storm could be created in clear skies, and another to see if an approaching storm could be made to deviate from its natural course.
While Powers had considerable support from the public, particularly with so many Civil War veterans on his side, many scientists were dubious. Powers seemed hopelessly behind on what nineteenth-century science knew about the workings of the atmosphere and rainfall. Government meteorologists did not believe gunpowder explosion could bring rain. The war had been fought in the wettest region of the country; rain normally fell every few days.
But, then as now, Congress was less moved by its own scientists than by the influential uninformed—particularly some of the nation’s major cattle ranchers suffering in drought. In 1890, Charles Benjamin Farwell, a U.S. senator from Illinois who owned extensive ranchlands in Texas, pushed through a bill that approved nine thousand dollars for a series of field experiments on rainmaking by concussion, to be conducted by the Department of Agriculture through its Division of Forestry. The chief of the division was the Prussian-born and -educated Bernhard Fernow, the first formally trained forester in the United States. Fernow had no faith in the project he’d been ordered to supervise. He complained that he had neither men nor means to explode ordnance into the skies, and that using the federal money as proposed by Congress “would hardly fail to be barren of results.”
His complaints and ridicule got Fernow “excused from planning or conducting” the rainmaking experiments, no doubt a relief. The project was then delegated to the assistant ag secretary, who also squirmed out. He turned the entire project over to a special agent and gave him free rein. The agent was Robert St. George Dyrenforth, who had repeatedly shared his ideas about rainmaking by concussion with Senator Farwell.
This is how Dyrenforth ended up on the Texas prairie in August 1891 with his battery and balloons. “A patent lawyer in Washington who knows more about explosives and the manner of exploding them than any other man,” observed Fernow, the forestry chief. “I strongly advise everybody to have his ark ready for the deluge.”
The night of August 9, an aging General Powers, author of War and the Weather, joined Dyrenforth in Texas. The experiments had not yet begun, but the party shot off a number of ground charges for practice. The next day, rain. Someone telegraphed Senator Farwell, who in turn alerted the newspapers, which in turn jumped on the big news: “They Made Rain,” said Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. “Heavy rain fell, extending many miles,” proclaimed the Washington Post. “Made the Heavens Leak,” reported the New York Sun.
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br /> When the real experiments began, Dyrenforth had problems on all three of his lines. The homemade mortars failed to make much of a concussion, so the men exploded dynamite and rackarock from prairie-dog holes (“not much noise”) or large, flat stones (“the concussive effect on the air was strong”). The balloons were unwieldy in the winds and the fuses too long; a ten-footer they managed to explode blew miles away before they heard the faint pop.
No rain followed the first balloon explosion. Still, Dyrenforth reported dark clouds were “seen to form in the west-southwest and rain fell from them heavily, accompanied by lightning,” as if to credit the balloon, which had blown off in the exact opposite direction. His sixty-page report to Congress often tantalizingly describes “dew on the grass” or storm clouds on the horizon with visible streaks—giving the reader a soaking sense and himself indirect credit even when there was no rain.
For ten days beginning on the morning of August 17, the sky soldiers dynamited, bombed, and shot the atmosphere; flew their kites; and exploded their balloons, all on an erratic schedule that seemed based as much on how the men were feeling (many were sick from drinking alkaline well water) as on weather and wind conditions.
The ranch saw rainfall at various times over the ten days, and Dyrenforth reported each drop with jubilation. This was a rub for the federal meteorologist George Curtis, who’d been sent to the outpost to monitor the experiment, and for the only two reporters on the scene, one from the Chicago Farm Implement News and the other from Dallas Farm and Ranch.
Farm Implement News accurately pointed out that it was the rainy season for Midland. The North American monsoon sweeps into the region between mid-June and mid-September. Even in drought, western mid-Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona get some thunderstorms and rainfall at this time of year.
In the Midland rain-concussion trials, then others in El Paso, Corpus Christi, and San Diego, Texas, Dyrenforth and his team took credit for rain already predicted by the Weather Bureau, for showers that fell considerable distance from the sites, and even for rains that commenced before any explosions: The farm journalists sometimes witnessed the pith-hats shooting up rain-swept skies.
Unfortunately, most newspapers did not have reporters on the scene. Nor did they check the weather forecasts against the boosterish special reports issued by Dyrenforth’s team. Instead, they repeated the hype and added their own. The Washington Post described the .02 inches of August 18 as a “hard rain” that fell immediately after an explosion and continued for four hours and twenty minutes. The New York Sun called it “a great success” that triggered six hours of rain over a thousand square miles. The newspaper predicted that “more than one Congressman will go to Washington this winter with a rain-making bill in his pocket.”
The Sun got that much right. The following year, Congress again ignored the advice of federal scientists and approved ten thousand dollars for additional rainmaking experiments in 1892.
In the second year, the public and press began to see how rainmaking rhetoric differed from the rainfaking reality. The end of October 1892 found the team at Fort Meyer, across the Potomac from Washington, testing several new explosives. The nocturnal explosions rained nothing but “profanity in seventeen different languages drizzling down from chamber windows” as Washingtonians protested their disturbed slumber. After the Fort Meyer preliminaries, the rainmakers moved on to San Antonio, Texas. In November the expedition established Camp Farwell at Alamo Heights just north of the city. During the week of Thanksgiving, federal troops helped attack the skies. With little or no rain by early December, it was Dyrenforth who came under attack. “The scheme has gone up like a rocket and come down like a stick,” opined the San Antonio Evening Star.
The cloudless skies in San Antonio brought an end to the government’s nineteenth-century rainmaking experiments and stuck Dyrenforth with an irresistible nickname, “Dryhenceforth.” When he wrote to U.S. agriculture secretary J. Sterling Morton to inquire about the $5,000 remaining in his budget for 1892, Morton replied that “we do not desire to cannonade the clouds any longer at government expense,” and said the unspent balance would revert to the Treasury.
Curtis, the federal meteorologist who’d been assigned to observe the Midland experiments but whose critical report was never published, blasted the government’s foray into rainmaking in a series of articles and a blunt letter to Fernow. The American public had been misled, he said, and the federal government was partly to blame. Experiments with no method, under management of one man, had been passed off as credible science. The fact that they were carried out in the name of the government, and reported as successful by so many newspapers even though they failed, gave the public a false confidence in rainmaking, Curtis warned. That left people particularly vulnerable to charlatans, who now appeared throughout the dry regions as if from the clouds themselves.
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Working in explosives, chemicals, and gases, mostly in secret, late nineteenth-century rainmakers—often known as “smell-makers” for their rank ingredients—were busiest on the long-suffering Great Plains. On balance, there seemed to be as many well-intentioned efforts as dishonest ones. Throughout Kansas and Nebraska, governments purchased tons of dynamite to try to blast down rain. In Nebraska’s northwestern panhandle, farmers formed the “Rain God Association” and raised $1,000 for gunpowder. On a hot July day, they set up a 250-mile-long cannonade of “Rain God Stations” on high peaks. They discharged all the powder at a prearranged second. No rain followed.
The era gave rise to the traveling rain man. One of the best known, Frank Melbourne, would turn out the biggest charlatan, too. Called “the Rain Wizard,” “the Australian,” or “the Irish Rainmaker,” Melbourne was born in Ireland and had lived in Australia, where he was said to have honed his rainmaking skills. He claimed he’d been forced to flee to avoid retribution for conjuring floods.
Tall and dark-bearded, Melbourne showed up in 1891 in Canton, Ohio, where his brothers were living. His rainmaking demonstrations soon became a popular public spectacle. He took bets on whether he could make it rain, fattening his purse more often than not.
Melbourne began to charge $500 for a “good rain,” one that would reach from fifty to a hundred miles in all directions. Unlike the ordnance exploders, his methods were quiet and mysterious. His “Rain Mill” involved a crank and gases, but he never let anyone see it. He toted it in plain black gripsacks, along with a large revolver “to discourage too curious spectators.” In Canton, he carried out his demonstrations in a shed, with a brother posted outside to record the bets and keep anyone from peeking in.
Melbourne came to Cheyenne, Wyoming, when twenty-three farmers pooled their money to buy a rainy day. He disappeared into a stable, covered the windows with blankets, and stuffed the cracks for total secrecy. The next day brought violent thunderstorms and the heaviest rains of the year. Farmers cheered, and so did newspaper editors: “The irrigation ditch can go,” proclaimed the Cheyenne Daily Sun. Excitable press inflated Melbourne’s reputation even as many of his attempts failed to squeeze a drop from the sky. He drew no showers for Goodland, Kansas, despite several days’ wizardry. It rained in other parts of the state, though, and he said the wind had blown his work off course. The Chicago Tribune played it like this: “Melbourne Causes the Rain to Fall. Complete Success Attends His Latest Experiments at Goodland.” It was no wonder Melbourne grew more and more popular and charged higher and higher fees, which may have helped do him in.
After a string of failures, someone figured out that the dates Melbourne selected for rainmaking were identical to those for which rain was forecast in the popular weather almanac of the day, the quirky Rev. Irl R. Hicks Almanac. In his final swirl of mystery, Melbourne was found dead in a Denver motel room in 1894. Police ruled it a suicide. But his rainmaking legacy lived on in the Great Plains. Melbourne had given Goodland a final squeeze by selling his secret formula and copies of his rainmaking machines to local businessmen.
After Melbou
rne left Goodland, three new companies—the InterState Artificial Rain Company, the Swisher Rain Company, and the Goodland Artificial Rain Company—began selling the rain throughout Kansas and beyond. A fourth Goodland rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, was the town’s young rail dispatcher. He said he’d figured out Melbourne’s method. The Rock Island Railway bankrolled Jewell’s experiments, fixing him up in his own rainmaking rail car with gas pipes sticking out the roof. Offering his services to thirsty communities and farmers for free, he was a popular figure on the plains, where he claimed credit for sixty-six rains. In the summer of 1899, Jewell struck out on his own for Los Angeles, where he had been invited to work his magic to help lift a drought. He coaxed the Californian clouds for sixty hours straight, and got nothing.
A few dry years dried up Jewell’s reputation, as it did the lesser-known rainmakers. (Here revealing the irony of the legal profession’s term “rainmaker” for those well-connected lawyers in the firm who bring in new clients and their money.)
As the century turned, good rains returned—along with a new rainmaker to dazzle Californians. Charles Hatfield would go down in history as the greatest rainmaker, or faker, of them all.
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Born aptly in the rainmaking motherland of Kansas, Charles Mallory Hatfield’s family moved to Southern California when he was a boy. He shined in his first jobs, as a sewing machine salesman, then manager of the Home Sewing Machine Company of Los Angeles. But his passion lay in the machine of the atmosphere. Hatfield read and reread classic weather texts of the day such as Elementary Meteorology by William Morris Davis. The San Diego Public Library still has his well-thumbed, underlined copies. By 1902, he was dabbling in rainmaking at his father’s ranch outside San Diego.
Hatfield said the swirling steam of a teakettle gave him the idea to climb a windmill at the ranch, heat some chemicals in a pan, and send the vapors ambling into the sky. When a heavy storm descended after his first try, Hatfield was convinced that he either had figured out the recipe for rain—or could make people believe he had. He got into professional rainmaking on a bet, when he claimed he could draw eighteen inches to Los Angeles for the winter and spring of 1904–1905. “The regular fall rarely exceeds eight or ten inches,” he added. Having studied his books and Weather Bureau reports, he likely knew better. L.A.’s annual average rainfall is fifteen inches. In times of drought, including the year Jewell was called west in 1899, the city can see as little as five. During what we now know as the El Niño cycle, L.A. can draw closer to twenty. Ending an unusually dry decade, the winter of Hatfield’s bet was such a year.
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