by Lee Sandlin
The highway was a perfect example of what frustrated Franklin about the American colonies. After more than a century, they were still nothing more than a rickety agglomeration of disparate settlements. Franklin envied the Native Americans of the Iroquois Federation, who had put aside their tribal differences and forged a military empire in the northern forests. It dismayed him that the colonists of a putatively superior civilization couldn’t do what the primitive natives had succeeded at so brilliantly.
Did he know what he wanted to do about it? If he did, he was still keeping it to himself. From the outside, he appeared to be nothing more than a public-spirited rich man who was making virtuous use of his leisure by involving himself with socially responsible projects. The convivial round of his days continued: the meetings with prominent men, the stays at country houses, the charming horseplay, the indiscreet talk about politics after too much drinking. But, deliberately or not, these were his first forays into the dangerous world of politics and practical diplomacy, and the first stirrings of the idea of independence from Great Britain—the grand venture that would occupy him for the rest of his life.
In the spring of 1754, Franklin was in Maryland. He was visiting a friend named Tasker; in his letters he usually called him “the excellent Colonel Tasker.” Tasker was a gambler and a breeder of thoroughbred horses, which was not necessarily Franklin’s usual company, but Tasker was also one of the most well-connected men in the state. The Taskers were considered the cream of the Maryland aristocracy.
Tasker invited Franklin and his son William to stay with him at Belair House, his great family estate in the hilly depths of the countryside. On their way, in the middle of a wide, richly flowing landscape of valleys and forested hills, one of the men in the party called a halt. He gestured for everyone to look down into a little vale that opened up to the side of their path. Below was a dusty road winding through the meadowlands. Moving along the road like a bustling traveler was a tight little commotion of air: a newly forming whirlwind.
The whirlwind looked, Franklin later wrote, like “a sugar-loaf”—by which he meant it resembled a funnel (that was the shape that sugar-loaves were commonly spun into). The funnel swerved off the road and came sweeping up the hillside toward them. It swelled as it approached; by the time it crested the hill, Franklin guessed, it was around forty or fifty feet high, twenty or thirty feet across at its height, “no bigger than a common barrel” at its base. It moved past them at a walking pace, with an odd, irregular bob and swerve like a spinning top.
Everyone in the party reared back—except for Franklin. He later said that he just couldn’t help himself. He had to urge his horse to a trot, and he went tagging alongside the funnel to see what it would do. He thought of how sailors were supposed to have broken up waterspouts by firing cannons at them, so he tried lashing at the whirlwind with his whip—“without any effect,” he admitted.
Then the whirlwind turned again and meandered off into the trees. Franklin followed it. He lost sight of the road. The wind was getting louder; the countless rotted leaves of the forest floor were being sucked up into the funnel in a rushing whisper. All around the funnel, the treetops in the woodland interior were bending and snapping in frantic circles. “The progressive motion of the whirl was not so swift but that a man on foot might have kept pace with it,” he later wrote, “but the circular motion was amazingly rapid.” By then, the funnel had turned into a swirling column that appeared to be made entirely out of dead leaves, which were soaring up out of sight in widening spirals. And it was still gathering strength. Franklin saw that it was now sucking up large dead boughs along with the leaves. That was when he wondered for the first time about his own safety.
By that point, Franklin guessed, he’d followed the whirl into the forest for about three-quarters of a mile. His son William, who had been trailing along behind him the whole way, came up alongside. When William saw that Franklin was hanging back, he urged his own horse forward. The funnel was roaring in the depths of the woods; William boldly pursued it for another half mile. The chase ended when the funnel emerged into the open air of an old cultivated tobacco field, and there unexpectedly melted away into nothingness.
Franklin and William, covered in sweat, their clothes spangled with countless leaves, made their bedraggled way back to the road. The air all around them was filled with a storm of leaves, billowing and drifting and soaring in the gusts. Franklin later noted that the leaves kept falling on them for miles afterward. One of the company then turned to Colonel Tasker and asked if these kinds of whirlwinds were common in Maryland.
“No, not at all common,” Tasker said. “We got this on purpose to treat Master Franklin.”
After the Revolution, the great push into the American forest began, just as Franklin had wanted. But the vast war he had envisioned never materialized. Even though there were constant skirmishes, horrific massacres, and a scattering of pitched battles, the full-scale war proved superfluous. It had in a sense already happened, out of sight of the invading colonists. Plagues had done the work of the military. Wave after wave of epidemic disease had swept over the nations of the woodlands—smallpox, measles, yellow fever—and their populations had been devastated. Many of the nations had been reduced to a tenth of the numbers they’d had a century before; some had vanished entirely.
The colonists and settlers found that endless reaches of the forest interior were deserted. Silent glades stood where there had been thriving villages, and there were empty rivers with overgrown margins of reeds that had once been heavily trafficked trading lines. The depths of the forest had returned to the pristine bird-chattering aloofness they’d had before human beings had first arrived in North America.
The hush of the landscape seemed unimaginably deep. One traveler recorded finding, in the forested hills of western Ohio, an ancient spring; from the spring was slowly trickling, drop by drop, a line of brick-red sediment that trailed down a rill to the base of a steep grassy slope. The deposit of sediment at the bottom was at least thirty feet thick. For how many undisturbed years had it been accumulating? Thousands; maybe millions. The sight left the traveler profoundly shaken. He wrote that the chronology of the world in the Bible must not have been “rightly computed.”
But there were also, here and there, signs of something currently abroad and active in the deep forest. Nobody knew what it was. Any traveler came across the tracks sooner or later. The shrouded tree canopies would be broken by a wide patch of golden sunlight; from close up it proved to be not some peaceful glade but a swath of downed and shattered trees. The settlers called them windfalls. Sometimes a windfall area would be enormous: tens of thousands of trees were downed in a band a few hundred yards wide and a couple of miles long. These trails the settlers called windroads.
Where did they come from? There were few reports from eyewitnesses. Sometimes a trapper or a trader would claim to have seen something: an impression of faraway trouble, a vague echoing roar in the distance, a black cloudy shape rampaging somewhere within the recesses of green gloom.
Did anybody make the connection between the windroads and Franklin’s landspout? Apparently not. Since Franklin’s time, there had been a few strange storms seen in the settled areas of the East Coast. But they had popped up at rare intervals and usually in remote places—one in the wilderness of upstate New York, a few years later another in the swamps of South Carolina, a third in rural New Jersey. Local newspapers and travelers’ journals contained baffled accounts of them. One storm cloud, it was said, “burst upon the earth and began with breaking limbs from trees and scattering fences … Buildings were unroofed or prostrated in the dust, while their fragments were borne with violence before the wind.” Another “came in sight over the western hills like a body of thick dark smoke or fog, wreathing and whirling in the most furious forms … Those who were directly before it saw the appearance of fire.” Another was described as “a black column from the earth to the cloud, of about thirty rods diameter, so thick that
the eye could not pervade it. It whirled with amazing velocity and a most tremendous roar—it appeared luminous and ignited, and was charged with broken pieces of fences, and huge limbs of trees, which were continually crashing against each other in the air, or tumbling to the ground.”
But these reports went publicly unconnected and unexamined. The problem was that few people were really all that interested in natural philosophy, and nobody was making any systematic study of meteorology in America. Farmers and plantation owners kept weather logs for their own benefit (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both did), but nobody had the idea of compiling them. It was true that Franklin’s writings on waterspouts and landspouts were available; he was a revered figure, and his papers and letters were already being published in imposing collected editions. But the volumes devoted to his scientific writings tended, just as they do now, to go unread.
The windroads were more easily explained by folklore. Their unknown maker gradually acquired a name: the Storm King. In the literary magazines of the Republic, there were poems and prose rhapsodies about this mysterious figure. He was imagined as a furious rider through the wilderness, an immortal dweller in the grandeur of his cloud castles—normally hidden from human eyes, but occasionally glimpsed at the heart of his traveling retinue of storm and lightning bolt.
The work of the Storm King could be seen all throughout the eastern forests, to the edge of the great expanse of empty grassland in the center of the continent. Lewis and Clark saw a long, very recent windroad as they ascended the Missouri River; they concluded it had been cut by a “hurricane.” But the most extensive windroad in America was in southern Illinois. It was one of the few that had witnesses to its creation, and so can be dated precisely: to the afternoon of June 8, 1805, when a gigantic black cloud came out of the steep hilly country of southern Missouri and crossed the Mississippi River.
On the Illinois shore was an area known as the American Bottom. This was an extraordinarily lush lowland zone. One anonymous magazine writer, twenty-five years later, described it as “the most charming alternation of prairie and woodland” that he had ever seen; he remembered “forests of grass, or cane, and of stupendous oaks and cotton woods.” But on June 8, it became what he called “a scene of unequalled grandeur and horror” as “whole forests in a moment twisted from the ground.” Trees were ripped from their roots, smashed together in midair, and pummeled into splinters. The skies were black; a weird howling, “a sound of universal distress,” came from all directions; it was a vast confusion of sky and earth in which “cattle, horses, lake, trees, houses and whatever was in the way” were carried off and dropped as wreckage.
This was, a historian wrote late in the nineteenth century, “the most violent tempest that ever visited Illinois.” He called it a hurricane and helpfully classified it as “one of those tempests of the whirlwind order.” The landscape it crossed was so densely forested and so sparsely occupied that only two or three people were reported to have been killed. But the windroad it left behind was like nothing anyone had ever seen. It was two miles wide and hundreds of miles long. It stretched from the Mississippi River across southern Illinois and into Indiana. (One account claimed it didn’t peter out until it reached Ohio.) The rule of thumb among the settlers was that a windroad lasted for about twenty years before the forest erased it. But this one blocked land passage through southern Illinois for half a century—an interminable, impassable barrier of heaped-up and rotting trees like the ancient defensive wall of an abandoned forest kingdom. Its traces could still be found in the woodlands long after the Civil War.
4
The So-Called Tornado
In the late afternoon of June 19, 1835, an unusually violent thunderstorm came up over the farm country of New Jersey. The storm was spotted by the passengers on the steamboat Napoleon, just then descending the Raritan River. One of the passengers, a college professor named Lewis Beck, later recalled that they were about six miles from the town of New Brunswick when a friend of his tugged his sleeve and pointed out the strange shape the storm clouds were taking in the northwestern sky. Beck described the clouds there as exceptionally dense and hanging very low; they were stretched out in a straight line near the horizon like a black curtain. About midway across, Beck said, one part of the cloud line “was dipping towards the earth in the form of a funnel or inverted cone, and was gradually uniting with another cone whose basis apparently rested on the surface.” Beck had never seen anything like it before, but he was a man of wide education and he knew it for the “remarkable occurrence” it was. This must be, he later wrote, “the so-called tornado.”
It was a spellbinding sight. Beck and the other passengers watched in fascination as the cloud churned across the landscape. It writhed and twisted around itself, continually breaking up and re-forming. By the time it had passed along the river—Beck estimated that it came within around a mile of the steamboat—it had assumed the appearance of “a large black column spreading wide at the top,” which reminded Beck of a volcanic explosion. This was the form it took when it struck New Brunswick.
Its appearance over the rooflines caused a panic. None of the people on the streets had any idea what it was. Many of the eyewitnesses later said that they believed it was the smoke from an enormous fire. The fire alarms were sounded. The rumor immediately spread that there were inexplicable explosions and small fires breaking out all over town. Everybody rushed into the streets to see what was happening. They were even more confused and panicked by what they found. The sky was turning black, and there were gigantic, extraordinary rushes of wind sweeping down every street of the commercial district. Entire houses were being torn apart and sent flying; heavy rafters were soaring in midair and crashing through windows; the crowds in the streets were stampeding toward shelter as an enormous wall of smoke and fume roared through the heart of town.
Then the cloud was gone; it had crossed to the far bank of the river. In New Brunswick there were dozens of serious injuries, but only four people were reported killed. The fire alarms rousing everybody into the open had doubtless saved hundreds of lives; otherwise they would have been crushed in the collapsing buildings. One eight-year-old boy was found dead, nearly decapitated by a rafter in a wrecked dry-goods store. Meanwhile, the cloud was roaring through the woodlands on the Atlantic shore, shedding the debris of the town behind it. As the tornado crossed out over the Atlantic, it scattered into a shower of hail, and the entire suspended cloud of wreckage collapsed into the ocean. Splintered planks, roof shingles, bedding, and glassware were reported to have rained down as far away as Staten Island.
The assorted gales and windstorms and hurricanes and tornadoes reported in the early days of the Republic had almost all taken place in rural and remote locations, but the New Brunswick storm had struck in the most heavily populated zone of the nation. New Brunswick stood right on the old King’s Highway, which was still, as it had been in Franklin’s time, the main thoroughfare through the Atlantic states (although since the Revolution the New Jersey stretch was generally referred to by the unroyalist name of Straight Turnpike Road). This meant that the news of the storm quickly gained a wide circulation. There were stories in the big newspapers of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City, and within a few days the news had drawn to New Brunswick an unusual crowd of tourists.
They were the nation’s leading natural philosophers—the ones who were just then inventing a new science, which they called “meteorology.”
The word had actually been around since the ancient Greeks. It’s the title of a text by Aristotle, and it roughly means “knowledge of the upper air.” But the word had preceded any actual knowledge by more than two thousand years. Aristotle had been perfectly ignorant of the upper air; his text was nothing but a compendium of Greek weather folklore mingled with some nonsensical quasi-scientific mysticism. But such was the state of scientific knowledge in the West that Aristotle had remained the standard authority on meteorology ever since. Not until the beginning of
the nineteenth century did philosophers begin a fresh and systematic study of the forms and appearances of the atmosphere. (Their inspiration wasn’t Aristotle but Franklin, who was already revered as one of the great names in the history of science.) Their starting point was a new system for classifying clouds that had been proposed in 1802 by a British amateur philosopher named Luke Howard. The terms Howard invented—“cirrus,” “cumulus,” “stratus”—had been immediately adopted all over the world; the most famous poet of the age, Goethe, had even written a poem in praise of them. (They are still the standard terms today and are vaguely believed to go back to ancient Greece.)
The New Brunswick tornado was an opportunity for all students of meteorology to see the effects of a mysterious phenomenon of the upper air firsthand, and they took full advantage of it. Professors came from Yale, from Princeton, and from the prestigious Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. For weeks after the disaster they were on the scene. As the town was burying its dead, and caring for its injured, and repairing its acres of damaged buildings, the citizens were dogged by these clusters of formally vested and hatted out-of-towners. The philosophers poked at the rubble with their walking sticks, and pulled out compasses and measuring tapes to record the patterns of fallen trees, and obliviously held conversations while blocking the work crews who were clearing away the wreckage. They interrupted the murmured condolences among mourners to ask after eyewitnesses; they triumphantly emerged from the underbrush with trinkets that had been blown miles from some lady’s private washstand. “Probably in no other instance,” wrote one of the philosophers, “have the effects of a tornado been so faithfully and skillfully traced, ascertained, and registered.”