by Lee Sandlin
Espy died on January 24, 1860. His book on moral philosophy was left unfinished; from the posthumous publication of the surviving manuscript, he appears to have gotten no further than the preface.
The last of the storm controversy was buried with Espy. America was consumed then by the run-up to the Civil War, and almost all scientific research was grinding to a halt anyway. When work resumed after the war, the issues of the controversy already looked as quaint as something from the Middle Ages. The community had moved on, because in the intervening years the long stalemate had been broken. Somebody had finally had a new idea.
This was a theory proposed by a self-taught Kentucky schoolteacher named William Ferrel and vigorously promoted by Henry at the Smithsonian. Ferrel had begun his amateur education with a close reading of the works of Isaac Newton, which some passing scholar had accidentally left behind in a dry-goods store where Ferrel shopped. From there he had rapidly progressed through the whole of meteorological theory all the way up to the storm war, and in its course he had discovered a way that the views of Espy and Redfield could be reconciled.
Ferrel’s proposal was a radical reenvisioning of the large-scale mechanisms of the atmosphere, based on the then-little-known ideas of a French mathematician named Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis. The essential idea in Coriolis’s work was that the rotation of the earth causes a slight but continuous drag and deflection in the atmosphere. Ferrel demonstrated that the Coriolis effect could explain the behavior of global prevailing winds like the trade winds at the equator and the southwest winds that dominate the middle latitudes. It also explained—or so Ferrel believed—the rotation of hurricanes and tornadoes. According to Ferrel, Espy had been right that these storms are powered by convection; but as the convection columns rise, they are deformed by the Coriolis effect from the straight-line inflowing winds that Espy imagined into the spiraling whirlwinds described by Redfield. The theories of Espy and Redfield weren’t irreconcilable opposites but two halves of the same process.
The effect of Ferrel’s ideas on the meteorological community was galvanic. More than two decades earlier, Espy had argued that Redfield’s theory of whirlwinds had to be false, unless there was “some mighty cause … of which we have no knowledge, to generate new motion in the air.” Ferrel had identified this mighty cause. The reaction among meteorologists was so strong, so immediate, and so positive that it retroactively rewrote the history of the storm war. Ferrel became the reigning genius, and Espy, Redfield, and Hare were now simply his forebears. In popular histories of American science written in the later decades of the nineteenth century, when the three combatants were mentioned at all, they were most often described as amiable colleagues working together for the common good of scientific knowledge. Any differences they may have had were too petty to be worth remembering.
Today Ferrel is generally seen as the progenitor of modern meteorology. Hare and Redfield are forgotten. Espy, if he’s remembered, is just a theatrical charlatan who got brief fame with a nonsensical theory of rainmaking. This is surely unjust—especially to Espy. After all, about the main thing, the theory of steam power, he was right. His model became the basis of the modern understanding of severe storms. Nobody talks now about “latent caloric,” but the term people do use, “convective available potential energy,” or CAPE, essentially means the same thing. And as for his theory of rainmaking: he was universally mocked for it in his lifetime, but it turned out that he was right about that, too.
8
The Finger of God
There were always fires in the northern hardwood forests. The Native Americans of that country had traditionally been careless about extinguishing their fires because they took for granted that any fire not constantly fed and tended would quickly be snuffed out by the forest itself. White hunters and trappers followed their lead and routinely built big bonfires in their camps for safety. They could sleep through the night in the deep forest knowing that the blaze and smoke would cause the innumerable predatory animals to shy away, but in the mornings they could leave their camps with the fires still smoldering and trust that the clammy dawn mists would smother the last embers.
It was a rich, green, humid country. In the late summer, when the land and the air were at their hottest and driest, the fires did sometimes burn for hours or days, but these served only to clear out the chokingly dense underbrush from beneath the tree canopy and free up the soil for fresh growth the next spring. As the farmers began arriving and cutting down the forests, they learned to appreciate the value of an extended drought, because that was the only time that they could burn off the felled trees and the pulled stumps they’d hauled away from their fields.
This is why the serious drought in the summer of 1871 at first excited no alarm. The hottest months passed with little or no rain: the forests were becoming dry and airless, and the underbrush was turning brown—for the settlers this was a great opportunity. The farmers began setting small fires along the margins of the cleared land in order to enlarge their property as painlessly as possible. In eastern Wisconsin near Green Bay, hundreds of laborers were cutting through the forest to lay tracks for a railroad, and they, too, began setting fires to save themselves work. The big logging camps scattered through the forest were accumulating huge hills of waste wood and slag, which they were sometimes torching just to gain themselves a bit of elbow room.
Everyone assumed—if they gave the question any thought at all—that the drought was bound to break as droughts always did, with the great drenching rains of autumn. But by summer’s end, with still no rain, the settlers were becoming aware that their situation was growing precarious. The scatterings of ordinary small short-lived fires—the smoldering ash pile left behind in a camp, the smoky fire in a dead tree trunk, the lightning-set flash fire through the browned underbrush in a remote glen—weren’t being extinguished as they usually were but were persisting and growing. By September most towns had formed fire patrols. The railroads assigned crews to make regular inspections of the woodlands on either side of the rail corridors: every train that passed was spewing out sparks that were setting off fires. Travelers through the Wisconsin wilderness on September nights were reporting countless small glimmers and glows in the forest depths. One resident, Father Peter Pernin of the town of Peshtigo near Green Bay, wrote in a memoir that one night at the end of September he and a young guide got lost and wandered through the woodlands. Only two sounds were audible in the darkness. One was the creaking of the treetops in the wind; the other was a strange low crackling that was coming from what Pernin described as “a tiny tongue of fire that ran along the ground, in and out, among the trunks of the trees, leaving them unscathed but devouring the dry leaves that came in its way.”
For the better part of an hour Pernin and his guide stumbled through the forest, all the while calling for help. Then Pernin began firing his rifle as a distress signal. They heard people hallooing for them in the distance. But they faced a more serious problem by the time their rescuers reached them. The tongues of fire in the underbrush, fanned by the hot dry winds, were running together and spurting up in sudden flares. “We soon found ourselves,” Pernin wrote, “in the center of a circle of fire.” But it was still small enough for the rescue party to find a way, by taking big branches and beating down one of the thinner patches of blazing brush, until Pernin and the boy could dash across.
Peshtigo was an industrial town of around fifteen hundred people. It was on the Peshtigo River, a couple of miles up from the river mouth at Green Bay. The river was about five hundred feet wide at that point, and the two sides of the town were connected by a bridge. On the northern side were the lumber mill, a woodenware factory (it made churns, tubs, and pails), a machine shop, and a sash and door factory. The southern side was mostly houses and a scattering of general stores and shops. Father Pernin’s church was on the southern side, on a dirt street around a thousand yards down from the bridge. There were a handful of Catholics in town, but his parish also included a numb
er of smaller villages along the shores of Green Bay and throughout the Wisconsin wilderness. He spent many days away from the Peshtigo church, riding through the forest or taking steamboats up and down the bay.
Pernin was fascinated by the landscape: “Trees, trees everywhere, nothing else but trees as far as you can travel from the bay, either towards the north or west … The face of the country is in general undulating, diversified by valleys overgrown with cedars and spruce trees, sandy hills covered with evergreens, and large tracts of rich land filled with the different varieties of hardwood—oak, maple, beech, ash, elm, and birch.” It was all, he called it, “a wild but majestic forest.”
At the beginning of autumn, his church at Peshtigo was in the middle of a major refurbishment. The weekend of October 7–8 he had emptied it out for the plasterers, who were supposed to start that Monday; the altar, the hangings, the tables, and the pews had been dragged into the back lot beside the cemetery grounds, while the sacks of lime and marble dust were waiting by the front steps. Pernin told the parishioners that there would be no service that weekend, and instead he’d spend it up the bay at his church in the village of Cedar River to the north. But his parishioners were nervous about his leaving and several of them urged him not to go. “There seemed to be a vague fear of some impending though unknown evil haunting the minds of many,” he wrote. He admitted that he was feeling uneasy himself. “It was rather an impression than a conviction, for, on reflecting, I saw that things looked much as usual, and arrived at the conclusion that our fears were groundless, without, however, feeling much reassured thereby.”
He certainly saw no reason to change his plans. On the afternoon of Saturday, October 7, he rode from Peshtigo to Menomonie on the river mouth, where he waited for the Dunlap, the regular steamboat making stops along the bay. The day was hot, dry, windless, and cloudless—one more in the string of the drought season. The smoke from the countless small fires along the forest margin came drifting out over the water of the bay in thick shrouds. As Pernin waited on the wharf, he heard the foghorns sounding all up and down the shore. The afternoon passed; the Dunlap was late. “It was the only time that year,” Pernin wrote, “she failed in the regularity of her trips.” Then the word spread toward sunset that the Dunlap wasn’t coming at all. It had made its usual rounds, but when it came to the river mouth, the smoke was so thick the captain decided not to risk getting any closer to land. Pernin rode back to Peshtigo.
Sunday morning he said Mass for his parishioners in his own house, before a temporary altar that he’d set up in his sitting room. Then, he later recalled, “the afternoon passed in complete inactivity.” His sense of foreboding had grown to a mood of overpowering dread. He tried to talk himself out of it: the situation, he reasoned, was really no worse than it had been over the preceding couple of weeks. It was better, in fact, since the townspeople were alive to the danger of a catastrophic fire and had already organized patrols and brigades in the event of an outbreak. And yet he couldn’t shake the conviction that nothing would work and disaster was at hand. “These two opposite sentiments,” he wrote, “plunged my faculties into a species of mental torpor.”
Around 7:00 p.m., he roused himself. He decided to take a quick ride around town. The streets were crowded; everybody was too restless to stay in. Their mood was nervous but festive; the laughter and the singing of the young people in particular, Pernin wrote, “was sufficient to make me think that I alone was a prey to anxiety, and to render me ashamed of manifesting the feeling.” But everywhere was the hanging smoke of the fires, the hot windless air, and a solemn hush seeming to thicken in the late-afternoon light.
Pernin went first to the home of a Mrs. Dress, a widow who lived on the outskirts of town. The two took a stroll around her fields. She was just as tense as he was; she’d been urging her children to take precautions, she told him, and they’d simply laughed her off. As they walked, a wind suddenly sprang up and began to buffet them in hot puffs, then it dwindled back into stillness. They were at the far edge of her property when a very strong gust swept across them and a small huddle of old dead tree trunks suddenly burst into dazzling light; it was, Pernin said, “just as if the wind had been a breath of fire, capable of kindling them into a flame by its mere contact.”
On his way home he saw that something strange was happening in the west. Above the dense low-hanging smoke that shrouded the sunset was a vast domain of clear air that was glowing a brilliant red. The silent air was becoming troubled; from the direction of the red sky there could be heard a faint muffled roar, the sound of a remote continuous tumult.
Pernin suddenly felt galvanized. He was inspired with a plan: he would dig a trench outside his house, load it with the church valuables and his own few possessions, cover it over, and then take refuge in the river. “Henceforth this became my ruling thought,” he said, “and it was entirely unaccompanied by anything like fear or perplexity. My mind seemed all at once to become perfectly tranquil.” It was then around 8:30. He set to work excavating his garden, where the soil was loose and sandy. The trench went quickly at first. But gradually the work became horribly taxing. Pernin was a vigorous man in excellent shape; he was being worn down by the heat and the gathering smoke. The atmosphere seemed to be growing heavier moment by moment. The night sky was getting brighter as the zone of bright red spread up to the zenith. The mysterious sound in the west was becoming louder, too. In between the thuds of his pickax and the shuffle of dirt in the shovel, he could hear it: “It resembled the confused noise of a number of cars and locomotives approaching a railroad station.” Meanwhile, the townspeople were passing by, as though taking in the evening air and admiring a particularly garish afterglow of sunset, barely pausing to remark that the town priest was out in front of his church, digging what looked like a grave.
The way meteorologists later reconstructed it, there was an unusually pronounced low-pressure system moving across the Great Lakes and the northern forests on October 8. It kicked up strong southwest winds across the entire region—sustained winds of thirty miles per hour, with gusts up to fifty. They were hot dry winds that could rapidly fan a small fire into a much larger one and turn a large fire into a catastrophe.
Throughout the evening of the eighth, enormous fires began springing up throughout the drought region. There were several major fires in the forests of upper Michigan, where almost no measurable rain had fallen since midsummer. In Chicago, 250 miles south of Peshtigo, there had already been one very large fire on October 7, which had destroyed several blocks of the downtown commercial district, and a number of smaller fires scattered throughout the city. Sometime during the evening of the eighth, a small fire broke out in the enormous tenement district southwest of the city core. The district was a wooden labyrinth of apartment blocks, factories, and warehouses, heaped together in gigantic, randomly interconnected edifices; the single-family houses and cottages all had livestock barns stacked to the rafters with hay and coal bins loaded for the winter. One small barn fire wasn’t seen as particularly alarming, and it went unreported for at least an hour. By the time the city fire department was aware of it, it was already burning out of control. The winds blew its sparks and flames and embers northeast toward the heart of the city. The winds were so fierce that the fire was soon leaping ahead of its main strength, where the firefighters were attempting to block it, and fresh fires were being kindled faster than they could be spotted or reported. Within hours, fire engulfed the city core and stampeded the population in a frantic race to the waters of Lake Michigan. Three hundred people died, and four square miles of the city burned.
In eastern Wisconsin, the winds by evening were intensifying to gale force. The countless small fires scattered through the woods were being fanned into a fury. They began drawing toward each other and leaping together to form large areas of sustained burning of extraordinary intensity. The worst of them was in the dense forest southwest of Peshtigo. At some point during the mid-evening this fire underwent a catastrophic
transformation.
After Pernin was satisfied with his work on the trench, he began loading it with his books and his trunks of papers and clothes. He carried over the valuables that had been taken from the church interior, the hangings and candlesticks and ornaments, and gently laid them down over his possessions, then he covered the pile up with the sandy soil. By then the sky was almost bright enough to read by, and the noise was a continuous thunder. But he couldn’t seek shelter yet; he still had to deal with the Blessed Sacrament, which he had no intention of leaving behind. (It was, after all, “object of all objects, precious, priceless, especially in the eyes of a priest.”) It was still in the temporary altar he’d arranged in his sitting room. He was so nervous and in such haste that he dropped the tabernacle, but he managed to get the Eucharist out to his wagon. Then he decided to cut his horse loose, assuming he’d have a better chance on his own.
He went back inside for the chalice. That was when he realized he had lingered too long. Something strange was happening in the interior of his house. Clouds of dazzling sparks began bursting up out of nowhere and disappearing, flashing from vases and lamps and the mantelpiece, darting from room to room like a sprite. Pernin had no idea what was happening; he had the vague thought that the air was becoming saturated by “some special gas.” He was terrified that contact with an actual fire, rather than with these spectral lights, would cause everything to explode.