Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  He heard the wind rising and knew he was out of time. He called to his dog, who refused to budge from under the bed (where he died a few minutes later). He ran back outside to the wagon. When he went to open the gate, the wind tore it out of his hand and then tore the fence away as well. The air was swarming with debris, with fierce streamers of sparks and embers, with furious trails of smoke and dust, with swift stinging clouds of burning-hot cinders. Everyone on the street was in a panic. They were hurrying in all directions, on foot and on horseback and riding wagons. Nobody could see where they were going, and they were all colliding with each other; the air was black and was so thick with smoke that it was impossible for people to keep their eyes open. The noise was deafening; Pernin remembered “the neighing of horses, falling of chimneys, crashing of uprooted trees, roaring and whistling of the wind, crackling of fire as it ran with lightning-like rapidity from house to house—all sounds were there save that of the human voice. People seemed stricken dumb by terror. They jostled each other without exchanging look, word, or counsel.”

  Pernin’s idea was to drag his wagon down to the riverbank and take shelter in the water with the Eucharist. The wind was so strong then that he found it almost impossible to keep on his feet. It was also becoming almost impossible to breathe. He stumbled and collapsed, rose and stumbled again; once he tripped over something and fell on his face; he found that the obstacle was a dead woman cradling her dead child. A few hundred yards down from his house he found his horse standing frozen with terror in the middle of the street. The horse put his head on Pernin’s shoulder; he was violently trembling. Pernin tried to coax him into coming with him, but he wouldn’t move, and his half-burned corpse was found there the next morning.

  By the time Pernin managed to drag his wagon down to the river, the buildings on either side were all on fire. The wind was growing so fierce that a storm of flame and cinders was raking across the river’s surface. Pernin had the idea of crossing the bridge to the far side to look for shelter there, but the bridge was, he later recalled, “a scene of indescribable and awful confusion.” People on both ends were trying desperately to get across to the opposite side, and the result was a frantic pileup in mid-span of crowds, wagons, and cattle. The flames were already spreading to the wooden trestles, and many people were jumping into the river. Pernin turned to the right of the bridge and looked downriver, where he knew there were shallows he might be able to wade across, but there the sawmill on his side and a company warehouse on the far side were both roaring with fire, and the river between them was being swept by the flames. He turned to the left, where the river above the dam ran deeper. That was where he shoved the wagon into the water and jumped in after it.

  He emerged from the water long enough to see that the great disaster was on them. The roaring was suddenly hushed; the smoke and cinders were sucked away, and the air around the river was clear. Along the riverbanks were crowds of people standing motionless, oblivious to the flames around them, indifferent to their own safety. Their eyes were staring, their mouths open, their tongues hanging out, their heads turned toward the sky. Pernin followed their gaze and witnessed the inconceivable.

  James Espy had been too close to the problem. He had correctly analyzed the core phenomenon: intense heat events like forest fires and volcanic eruptions do create powerful convection columns, and these can, under certain circumstances, generate rain clouds. The clouds are now known as pyrocumulus (one of the few fundamental additions to Luke Howard’s original scheme of cloud classification). Pyrocumulus clouds have been extensively documented since Espy’s time. In fact they ultimately became one of the most recognizable symbols of the modern world: the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion is a pyrocumulus cloud.

  But Espy had been unable to think through the consequences. As his friend Bache wrote in his memorial, this was his fatal limitation, particularly in his later years. “The earnest and deep convictions of the truth of his theory in all its parts, and his glowing enthusiasm in regard to it; perhaps, also, the age which he had reached, prevented Mr. Espy from passing beyond a certain point.” That “certain point” was critical. Espy had seen into the mechanism of storms with a profundity no one had ever attained before. But it never occurred to him that his beautiful mechanism of steam power could have unpredictable side effects. The heat of the strongest fires, as it turns out, can cause catastrophic instabilities in the pyrocumulus clouds they create. The intensity of the Peshtigo fire led to a series of runaway chain reactions that turned what was already a disaster into a situation of almost unearthly calamity.

  At some point during that evening, the temperature in the hottest zone outside Peshtigo spiked upward to at least fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That was hot enough to make the surrounding forest erupt by spontaneous combustion. A gigantic convection column swept upward and began drawing the surrounding air toward the heart of the fire at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour. As the flames and heat roared up the convection column, the pyrocumulus cloud formed just as Espy had predicted. But the heat was so intense and destabilizing that the cloud immediately evolved into a monstrous new form: a pyrocumulonimbus. Torrential rains began falling from the cloud, most of which immediately flashed away as steam. But their downdrafts were sufficiently stable and powerful to cause a self-sustaining thunderstorm to form, and in the midst of this storm a tornado appeared.

  The tornado roared through the heart of the fire zone to the northwest. It sucked in flames from the surrounding air and drew them up through the funnel so that by the time it reached Peshtigo, it appeared as a gigantic funnel cloud of fire extending up from the burning forests to the sky. Its heat was so intense that everything around it instantly exploded. In the town, every house was whirled upward into a spiral of sparkling fire; grain elevators vanished as though they’d been made of paper; steam locomotives in the rail yard levitated off their tracks and smashed together in midair. Around the tornado funnel there was a swirling swarm of burning debris that came raining down in firebombs and avalanches of scalding rubble. There was also something else. The survivors called them fire balloons. These were strange black spheres, each about ten feet across, that came floating out of the upper reaches of the funnel. They descended randomly on the surrounding countryside, where they exploded into fire. One witness saw a fire balloon land on a family fleeing in a horse-drawn wagon; the balloon touched down on them, burst like a soap bubble, and engulfed the wagon in flames. No one survived.

  On the riverbanks, as the funnel passed directly overhead, many people were consumed where they stood and were instantly reduced to ash. Others were found dead, apparently untouched, but with every coin in their pockets melted. Amid the thrashing chaos of people and animals in the river, those who kept their heads above water were scalded to death or suffocated, and those who went too far under drowned or succumbed to hypothermia. Pernin somehow managed to stay alive. But he looked at the funnel too long, and his eyeballs were seared. He had no idea what he was seeing and was certain it was the end of the world. In his memoirs he called it “the finger of God.”

  The fire tornado calved into two smaller funnels northeast of Peshtigo. Two trails of complete destruction stretched out on divergent paths for several miles before blending into the general ruin of the fire. Around the trails were countless birds that had burned to death in flight and the bodies of forest animals that had suffocated as they ran, because the combustion of the fire tornadoes had been so intense it had consumed all the oxygen out of the surrounding atmosphere.

  The paths of the tornadoes were easy to trace. Their heat was so intense that it melted the silicates out of the soil, fused them into molten glass in midair, and sent them raining down to the earth again. When the survivors and rescuers inspected the scene in the morning, after the worst of the fire had been doused (a gigantic rainstorm had sprung up in the wake of the tornadoes), they found that everything in the damage track—the stumps of trees, the charred foundations of houses, the sea
red ground—was all encased in glass.

  The death toll at Peshtigo is unknown but is believed to be upwards of fifteen hundred people. More than a million acres of forest burned. The fire tornado was duly reported on in the press, but most scientists were skeptical: there simply was no record of such a gigantic, monstrous freak appearing anywhere else. Nor would there be any confirmed reports for decades to come—not until September 1, 1923, when a major earthquake struck Japan. Thousands of buildings instantly collapsed, a thirty-five-foot tsunami crashed ashore, and in Tokyo, a city built almost entirely out of wood, hundreds of fires broke out within the first hour. Tens of thousands of people escaping the burning wreckage of their city took refuge in an open field along the Sumida River as the fires around them joined and swelled and an immense pyrocumulonimbus cloud bloomed directly overhead. A fire tornado—some of the survivors named it “the twisting dragon”—congealed out of the air, crossed over the open field, and in the space of a few seconds killed more than forty thousand people.

  9

  The Great American Desert

  Every summer in the West, out past the most remote of the white settlements, caravans of travelers were abroad. The Native American nations of the plains had fallen into a tough routine of subsistence. They spent the spring coaxing crops out of the semiarid land where they had their villages; in the summer they left their crops to grow or to fail while they hunted bison in the short-grass country east of the Rocky Mountains.

  Some of the caravans could be pretty raucous. There might be a couple hundred men, women, and children, along with horses, mules, dogs, wagons, sleds, and an ever-growing herd of buffalo. The women drove the wagons; the children hunted each other through the mazes of stinging grasses, while the men on horseback scattered out in wide orbits across the low undulating land. The men were scouting for bison, but they were also keeping watch for raiding parties from the other nations. This was not an especially peaceful time. The obvious focus of the hostility were the whites, but there was just as much tension among the nations themselves. Turf wars were raging between the original plains inhabitants and the waves of new exiles who had been forced from their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi by the Indian Removal Act. Then, too, the exiles were arriving with their own issues—the Sioux, for instance, had never gotten along with the Miami—and they took occupation of their new domains with their old enmities intact.

  In the summer of 1856, a Miami caravan was hunting in the vast empty terrain of the Kansas Territory. The Miami were viewed by the other nations as odd. Many of the nations traveled in gorgeous regalia, with florid dress and gaudily painted wagons; the Miami were known for their austerity. The men were in breechclouts—the flashiest among them would wear thin leather headbands—and the women had plain jerkins and very short skirts. The children usually wore nothing at all. The early white trappers and scouts often called the Miami “the naked people.”

  The Miami were dealing with the current tensions by keeping to themselves. But this particular company was unusual: there was a white person tagging along.

  His name was Ely Moore. He was there, in effect, to learn the family business. His father was an Indian commissioner—a civil servant in the federal government responsible for the welfare of the Native Americans. Moore senior’s particular brief was a group of nations originally from the Southeast: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminoles. These were the nations that had at one point been thought to be making the most successful assimilation to white culture (that is, until the whites decided to expel them anyway). They were still known as the Five Civilized Tribes.

  Ely Moore, as it happened, wasn’t much impressed with what his father considered civilized. This was one reason he took up with the Miami. Their dealings with whites were strictly practical: they wanted iron tools and farming implements, copper cookware, guns of all sorts, and rye whiskey. Toward the rest of white civilization they were indifferent. Like the majority of Native Americans, they thought the whites were insane. But they did get along with young Moore well enough. They had a reason: in those days it was said that scarcely a dozen whites west of the Mississippi could speak an Indian language, and Moore was one of them. He had gotten to be passable at the Miami tongue. He was never fluent, but the Miami appreciated his effort, and they came to consider him a friend. (This was a lucky thing for Moore, because the Miami were rumored to practice ritual cannibalism upon their enemies.)

  Day after day, the caravan had the landscape to itself. This was an unpromising terrain: it was the sparse borderland that ran along the edge of the rain shadow of the Rockies, where the short grasses were beginning to thin out and give way to sagebrush and cacti. They did come across bison here and there, though it was nothing like the country of the central grasslands, where the bison congregated in astonishing horizonless herds. Some of the herds were made up of millions of bison grazing placidly over tens of thousands of square miles of mixed grasses, but here the Miami might go a whole day and see only one solitary bison nosing at a lone squat scrub tree. In Texas, the hunters would pick off the bison casually and relentlessly, take what they needed, and abandon the rest. Here they had to be careful. When they spotted one of those huge brown moving islets, they could take a whole day to hunt it down. But this was an art the Miami had become exceptionally good at. They were already admired and envied on the plains for their skill at setting up corrals within gullies and shallow valleys and driving the bison. Sometimes, especially in late summer when the grasses were drying, they would set fires in order to stampede the bison in the right direction. That was a deadly strategy (even though it grew to be almost universal among the nations of the plains): the fires could easily race out of control, and the bison—infamous anyway for their unpredictable surges of towering violence—might thunder straight toward the hunting party or trample on furiously through the heart of the caravan. But it had often saved Miami caravans from starvation.

  There was little talking or chanting or singing during the daylight journeys, the way there tended to be with other traveling companies. But each evening after a successful hunt the Miami would set up camp and spend hours celebrating the day’s adventures. They particularly liked to encourage and mock the younger hunters for puffing up their heroic deeds. Then they retold stories about their lost life in the forests of the East. The tale-teller might chant his way through a comic epic about Wisakatchekwa, the trickster-hero who took the form of a rabbit. The stories were often about times when Wisakatchekwa was tricked himself but eluded the trap at the last second. Later they’d move on to darker stories. The Miami, like most of the nations, believed that there was another world behind the surface of this one, a world inhabited by strange demons and shape-shifters. The Miami were always worried about these beings; they were notorious for appeasing them with midnight ritual orgies. They usually kept those ceremonies to themselves, though; no whites were on record as having witnessed one (Moore decorously kept silent about whether he did).

  In a memoir written for a Kansas City newspaper fifty years afterward, Moore recalled how the languor of that summer was finally broken. The day that happened was like any other: hot, windy, and silent. Many of the scouts were surreptitiously nodding off on their horses. The land around them was a gulf of green grasses; the sky was a broken field of cumulus. The only sounds were the hiss of the wind, the drumming and creaking of the wagons, and the crunching sigh of the grasses going down beneath the wheels.

  After noon the chief called a halt. He stood by himself for a long while, staring out to the west. Moore came up behind him. To Moore there was nothing but the grasses unfurling out toward the blue-hazed horizon. But the chief was so intent it was as though he were seeing into the landscape—his gaze reaching out for hundreds of miles, to where the last of the grasses dwindled and the sagebrush took over and the land began its slow broken rise toward the mountains.

  Then the chief held up his hand. The hush seemed complete: Moore noticed that even the wind had
died down. But Moore could hear a strange new sound. It was a pervasive rustling whisper like countless sheets of paper rubbing together. Something enormous and shapeless began to stir in the grasses before the caravan. The whisper turned into a roar. A black cloud reared up into the air and swept straight toward them. Everyone ducked down and covered their heads. Some of the children cried out in terror. The cloud was a swarm of grasshoppers. They surged harmlessly above the caravan and raced toward the east.

  The chief gestured at the swarm as it receded. “They know,” he said to Moore. “Storm coming.”

  Moore looked around again. The day was calm and the sky was clear. How bad a storm could it be?

  “The devil wind,” the chief said. “Will kill us all. Maybe.”

  Moore was skeptical, but he did suddenly become uncomfortably aware of their surroundings. This was a deadly place to be caught by a storm. There was no shelter anywhere within the ring of the horizon: no bluffs, no outcrops, no stands of trees. Moore looked out again to the southwest. Along the horizon was a line of white prominences that hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier. They were the crests of storm clouds, still so remote their broken white towers seemed to be melting into the blue.

  The caravan was already at work. The scouts located a shallow ravine that might serve for the bison herd. The men were hacking at the dirt with everything handy—poles, rakes, picks—and driving stakes into the ground to form a wide openmouthed corral. The women were methodically rummaging through the wagons, organizing and lashing down all the loose gear. They were also hanging up skeins of canvas, blankets, and gutta-percha sheets as catchments for the rainwater. Moore ran from one group to the next, trying ineffectually to help, but the Miami moved seamlessly, like a well-practiced theatrical company putting on an impromptu show.

  By then the storm had swelled up to engulf the western horizon. The wind was surging and rushing all around them, in big grass-flattening sweeps. Soon the cliff wall of clouds blocked the sun, and the green landscape faded into shadow. Flickers of lightning were visible along the cliff base and around the cauliflower crests of the storm; it was still too far away for the individual strikes to be heard, but underneath the wind there was now a steady percussive grumble.