Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  But there was something more. Concealed within the storm was some mysterious danger worse than the thunder and lightning, more devastating than the torrential downpours. Few of the travelers saw it. They would only come across its aftermath: they’d reach a settlement or a way station they were counting on for supplies, and they’d find it in ruins, its wooden or stone or turf buildings blown up as if by gunpowder kegs. The survivors would say that something had come out of the heart of the storm and vanished again and left nothing behind but a trail of wreckage and a mad spiraling scrawl in the earth.

  One early traveler along the Platte River got a good clear look at the “sublime sight” and described it in his journal. He wrote that “a spiral abyss” seemed to form in midair. “It is very probable that if it had approached much nearer, the whole caravan would have made an ascension into the clouds.” But instead, he wrote, “the spiral column moved majestically toward the North, and alighted on the surface of the Platte. Then, another scene was exhibited to our view. The waters, agitated by its powerful action, began to turn round with a frightful noise, and were suddenly drawn up to the clouds in a spiral form. The column appeared to measure a mile in height; and such was the violence of the winds which came down in a perpendicular direction, that in the twinkling of an eye the trees were torn and uprooted, and their boughs scattered in every direction.” But it was over quickly. “What is violent does not last,” the diarist noted. “After a few minutes, the frightful visitation ceased. The column, not being able to sustain the weight at its base, was dissolved almost as quickly as it had been formed. Soon after the sun re-appeared: all was calm and we pursued our journey.”

  In the 1840s only one or two wagon trains a month attempted the prairie crossing. For the most part, they were impoverished settler families who were making a last, desperate try for subsistence living on the West Coast. But that all changed at the end of the decade, when the news broke of the gold strike in California. Overnight tens of thousands of people were westward bound. All along the Mississippi River, where there were still no bridges across its miles-wide girth, so many people, animals, and wagons were piling up at the ferry points that the wait for a crossing often lasted for days. The cities along the river, and the scattering of settlement towns inland, were puffed up by a new growth industry: supplying wagon trains for the westward crossing. Upriver towns that only a year before had been nothing more than depots for the sparse steamboat traffic were transformed into crowded, brawling river ports, shantytown mazes of taverns and dry-goods stores, wagon-makers and gambling houses, milliners and brothels. They had large commercial districts that were wholly given over to stores and livery stables and smiths for the western journey. People were buying wagons, horses, oxen, and cattle; they were stocking up sacks of beans and flour and coffee and barrels of bacon and sugar and salt; they were buying maps and hiring guides; and the more devout families were arranging passage for their own preachers.

  The wagon trains moved out from the settlement towns daily, sometimes hourly. Their lines gradually thinned out and scattered in the vast silence of the prairie. There could be anywhere between a few dozen to a couple hundred people in a typical caravan. As they traveled, they often turned into evanescent self-contained villages, with their own laws and customs, their own gossip, their own private histories. There were courtships and marriages along the trail, sometimes there were births, and often there were deaths. The great events punctuated the lulling sameness of the days. Weeks would pass with only the endless creak of the wagon wheels marking off the time. Sometimes the women would hang a bucket of cream from the frame of a wagon, and by the end of the day the rocking of the wheels had churned it into butter. Each evening as the camp was laid out on the trampled prairie grass and the fires were lit, the women would work in the cook wagons (most caravans had at least one, with its own stove and a flue poking up through the canvas roof), the men would be telling stories of the day, and the young lovers would be keeping their assignations in the distant low valleys beyond the firelight.

  The caravans gradually wore down the prairie. The main trails west were so heavily trafficked that for the first time permanent ruts were dug into the soil. It was rarer now for wagon trains to get lost (though strays still often found themselves abandoned). But the crowding of the trails brought new dangers—particularly epidemic disease. Cholera was a continual threat. A stranger might stumble into the night camp with the first symptoms of infection, and by sundown on the following day everybody in the wagon train would be dead. At the same time, the prairie in those years accumulated a curious reputation as a healthy place, a place to recuperate, a place for miraculous cures. In the early 1850s, as the first torrent of immigration to California slackened, the caravans began carrying unexpected new passengers: wagonloads of invalids, the chronically ill, people with failing lungs or withered limbs, who only bought passage out to the heart of the prairie. They would set up camps and spend days or weeks in silent recuperation, idling in their wagons or on the trampled ground as the tallgrass seethed all around them, and then head back east.

  The first permanent settlers began arriving in force before the Civil War. Most of them were there out of ideology and were only pretending to stay: driving up the voter rolls in Kansas and Missouri for the coming vote on statehood and slavery. Some were passionate abolitionists from the East who’d never imagined themselves west of the Mississippi, and they found themselves surprised and horrified by the life of the prairie. They particularly complained about the smell of the prairie grass, which got into their clothes and their drinking water and their bread dough. At night they found that the pillows in Kansas farms and rooming houses were all stuffed with dried prairie grass and they wouldn’t escape the smell in their dreams.

  After the Civil War, the drive to settle the prairies began in earnest. East of the Mississippi, in taverns and meeting houses and theaters and hotels, anywhere that advertisements were posted, there could be seen gorgeous topographical engravings of new prairie cities already being built. Most of the ads were placed by real estate speculators. They’d bought mile after mile of unoccupied land from the railroads (the government had handed it off to the railroads for free), and anyone foolish enough to purchase a plot from them would arrive to find nothing but deserted countryside scattered here and there with property stakes. The law was that ownership of a particular plot was established by the construction of a house, and a house was defined as a structure with a window, so some of the plots had lone stakes to which a little piece of glass had been glued. That was enough of a window to allow a deed to be upheld in court.

  There were other ads, too—rather more modest and trustworthy ones, from organizations known as colony companies. These companies were determined to settle the prairie not through the random, slow accretion of farmers and tradesmen but in bold decisive strokes. So they were hiring the citizenry required for a complete town and sending them out en masse. A blacksmith, a milliner, a butcher, a wheelwright, a grocer—they’d interview for twenty-five or fifty jobs in all, and the hires and their families would travel together in a single wagon train. They would arrive to find the land already bought and cleared by the company, the plots already laid out and stocked with building supplies: within a few months, a windblown expanse of prairie was set with houses, smithies, stables, a hotel, a tavern, a church, and a crossroads general store.

  The colony companies had all kinds of motives. Some of them were driven by religious passion, some by ideology; several colonies operated on principles laid down by the utopian theories of European intellectuals. There were one or two vegetarian colonies. Some were motivated by nationality or language: there were German and Swedish and Norwegian colonies where English was never heard. The first few colonies, before the Civil War, were fiercely abolitionist; the governor of Missouri, which was just as fiercely pro-slavery, not only refused them permission to settle but would not even allow them passage through his state to anywhere else.

  Once
the colonies were in place, though, they tended to lose their purity; within a decade, most of the ones that had survived were indistinguishable from the other new towns on the prairie. They shared the same remoteness, with only the outer tendrils of the railroads as lifelines. None of them had much in the way of official government. In many towns, the law enforcement, court, and jail were provided either by the colony companies or by private clubs of property owners. The federal government’s presence was almost exclusively confined to cavalry garrisons, which had been dispatched into the prairie to reclaim it from the Native Americans.

  But beginning in the 1870s, there was another odd manifestation of Federalism. A few days after any major disaster—a catastrophic flood or a prairie fire, and particularly a tornado—a stranger would appear. He was dressed in an army uniform, and he would introduce himself as an officer of the U.S. Signal Corps. Then he would politely ask the citizens to describe in detail what had just happened to their town.

  10

  The Night Watch

  John Park Finley was born into a prosperous Michigan farming family in 1854. He was raised with the expectation that he would go into the family business and run a farm, but in that era few people thought that meant he was going to spend his life weeding cornfields. Agriculture was becoming a complicated and technical affair. When Finley was sixteen, he was sent to Michigan State Agricultural College, and after he graduated at nineteen, he spent a year at the University of Michigan Law School (law was an indispensable study for the modern farmer). All the while, though, he had been forming the conviction that he wanted nothing to do with the law, with business, or with farming. He wanted to be a meteorologist. In the 1870s, this meant only one clear first choice: a career in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

  The Signal Corps had essentially been the creation of one man, an army doctor named Albert J. Myer. Myer had spent several years before the Civil War working with soldiers who’d been deafened or rendered mute by battle wounds, and through this study he had devised many methods of nonverbal signing and signaling. During the war, he had used this knowledge to organize the Signal Corps: its brief was to provide the Union army with methods of communicating on the battlefield. By the time the war was over, Myer—who had turned himself into a skilled manipulator of the federal bureaucracy—had managed to extend the Signal Corps’s duties to include building, maintaining, and operating the nation’s large networks of military telegraph systems.

  With peacetime, Congress and the military establishment considered the Signal Corps’s usefulness to be at an end. They intended to dissolve the corps and fold its functions back into the regular army and turn over its telegraph networks to private companies. Myer had no intention of allowing that to happen. He began casting about for a large peacetime project the corps could take on in order to justify its continued existence. Toward the end of the 1860s, he hit upon the idea of creating a national weather service.

  Congress had already debated a similar idea several times. There was a lot of pressure then for a national weather bureau. Much of the pressure came from the railroad companies, which had become major players in the American economy in the years after the Civil War: by the 1870s they in effect had a controlling interest in the federal government. Weather was a continuing and major factor in the efficient operation of the railroad system, and the industry wanted reliable data for everywhere its trains ran.

  Congress first asked the Smithsonian to resume its ambitious prewar program of weather projects. But Joseph Henry, who was still the Smithsonian’s director, informed Congress that he would have to refuse. There were several reasons. The spotters recruited by James Espy had dropped out of sight during the war, and many of them—particularly in the South—never got back in touch. Then, too, the Smithsonian’s own weather offices had been severely damaged. In January 1865, a spark in a defective chimney had started a fire in an upper floor that had consumed several galleries and archives, including much of the Smithsonian’s weather records. And then there was another factor: the economy was wildly unstable in the boom years after the war, and the Smithsonian’s endowment and portfolio had taken several major hits. With the repairs to the building expected to consume the Smithsonian’s budget for the next few years, such an ambitious project as a national weather service was simply out of the question. Henry suggested Congress try the Department of War.

  This was what gave Myer his opportunity. In 1870, after years of tireless lobbying, he succeeded in getting Congress to approve legislation mandating that the Signal Corps create and maintain a national weather bureau. It wasn’t going to be a small-time operation. Myer got not only the authority to build and staff weather stations around the country, and the Smithsonian’s old priority access to the national telegraph system, but also a discretionary budget to approach colleges and universities and hire consulting professors and other experts—anybody in the country who’d made a specialty of meteorology.

  By the early 1870s, the first national forecasts were streaming out from the Signal Corps’s Washington City office. They rapidly became absorbed into the routine of American daily life. In Washington City they were posted at the War Department, the Capitol, the National Observatory, and the Smithsonian; the corps had runners going out three times a day to keep them updated. (The old map at the Smithsonian had been taken down during the Civil War.) Forecasts for the rest of the country were produced by the Washington City office—the forecasters there were called computers—and were transmitted by telegraph to the regional weather offices, where they were distributed for display at local post offices and railroad stations. The corps also sent the forecasts to local chambers of commerce, agricultural associations, merchants’ exchanges, and boards of trade. In many towns they were displayed in the windows of newspaper offices. In luxury hotels, they would be posted on an announcement board in the lobby; commercial travelers and tourists formed the casual habit of checking them on their way into breakfast.

  The forecasts were known then as probabilities. This was because they invariably began with the phrase “It is probable that …” Around Washington City, Myer himself became known as Old Probabilities. The data for the probabilities derived partly from volunteer observers but mostly from the new weather stations. There were more than a hundred stations scattered around the country, each staffed with a Signal Corps officer—known as an observer—and one or more assistants. They transmitted a stream of weather readings three times a day, as well as any reports of special or extreme conditions. Some of those conditions could be dramatic, even catastrophic: the Chicago weather station sent in reports during the 1871 fire, up to the moment when the flames consumed the station itself.

  Myer found another way to make the Signal Corps essential to the government. The perpetual uproar of the economy in those years was causing waves of booms and busts; the reckless overexpansion of the railroad networks led to collapses that almost took out the entire country. In 1877 there was a nationwide railroad strike. Myer ordered the weather stations to observe the strikers along with the weather and to send coded reports on local unrest to Washington City. He passed these reports on not to his superiors but to President Rutherford B. Hayes himself (Hayes and Myer, as it happened, were childhood friends). Throughout the crisis, Hayes was discreetly kept advised on what cities were in turmoil or had quieted down, what regions were calm despite hysterical press reports of chaos, and what was most useful to the president—which local militias were proving ineffective or were actively going over to the strikers. That summer, when Hayes broke the strike by sending waves of federal troops around the country, his actions were specifically directed by the reports he’d received from Myer and the weather stations. If nothing else, Myer had insured that the Signal Corps would go on getting appropriations for years.

  By the late 1870s the corps was known as the army’s elite force. It had only five hundred officers and enlisted men and a waiting list more than a thousand names long. Not very many applicants were actually interested in
the weather; the corps had become a fast track to the highest echelons of the military establishment. When John Finley of Michigan enlisted in the army and applied for the Signal Corps, he knew it wouldn’t be easy. But he also knew that connections trumped regulations every time. He’d gotten excellent grades at college and law school, and when he arrived in Washington City in March 1877, he brought along certificates from both, but he also came with a sheaf of letters of recommendation his family had obtained for him from prominent Michigan businessmen and politicians who had heavy dealings with the federal government. He was initially told that he would have to wait for two years for a spot in the corps. He responded by handing over the letters. Six weeks later, he was advised that his application had been accepted and he was to report to the Signal Corps’s training school at Fort Whipple, Virginia.

  Fort Whipple was a spartan installation on a lush country estate. The estate had once belonged to Robert E. Lee; part of the grounds had been turned into the Arlington National Cemetery. The fort was on a hilltop with a commanding view—perfect for the cadets to practice their craft. Along with the basics of military drill, the cadets had to master hand signaling and signaling with flags, and they also had several hours a day of instruction in telegraphy (it took years before a telegraph operator was considered fully proficient). They also had to learn how to build and maintain telegraph lines. At that time, the Signal Corps was responsible for several thousand miles of lines, mostly in parts of the country where the commercial telegraph companies wouldn’t go—the battle zones of the Indian Wars in particular, but also regions that were still too sparsely settled to make commercial telegraphy profitable. The cadets learned to set up what the corps called “flying wires”—temporary lines used on battlefields. The residents of rural Virginia got to know the sight of the cadets crashing around the countryside with their poles and lines, sending test messages back and forth over several miles of woods and fields, then disassembling their work and hurrying on.