by Lee Sandlin
John Finley was big—six feet three and more than two hundred pounds. He would always have difficulty cramming himself into a uniform. (The problem grew worse as he got older and stouter.) But he was a bear of a man, extremely strong despite his corpulence; he passed the physical and made it through basic training. Still, it was only after months in the countryside, spent red-faced and huffing, loading and unloading wagons as fast as possible, that he was finally transferred to Washington City to begin his formal training as a weather observer of the lowest rung: “assistant to a noncommissioned officer in charge of a weather station.”
The Signal Corps’s Weather Bureau office was a garish anomaly in the midst of a respectable Washington City neighborhood. It was on G Street and at first glance looked like most of the houses on the block: a squat three-story hulk of drab whitewashed stucco. But its mansard roof was a bristle of eccentricity: it was jammed with windmills, rain gauges, anemometers, and weather vanes. Above it, day and night, there hung a flock of swooping, quivering kites. It looked, one observer said, “like a gigantic playhouse.”
The first things the visitor saw in the entrance hall were three enormous maps of America. They were pinned with cards displaying the last three sets of readings from the weather stations across the country. Beyond was a warren of cluttered cubbyhole offices. There was a library with more than a thousand books on meteorology (mostly in European languages, very little from the American storm war), a telegraph office strung with chaotic wiring, a maze of workrooms, file rooms, fact rooms, a cramped dining room, and rooms jammed with experimental apparatuses and floridly unlikely prototype gadgets designed to measure everything from dew point at high altitudes to the rise and fall of flooding rivers.
When Finley began at the G Street office, his job was lowly: sorting, collating, and copying the ceaseless stream of data flowing in from the weather stations. On the big table in the middle of the main workroom—which Myer had named the Fact Room—were large paper maps of the United States arranged in stacks of twelve with sheets of carbon paper between; the corpsmen would rapidly transcribe the coded figures for current temperature, pressure, wind speed, and precipitation to the maps. Another group of corpsmen and civilian meteorologists—the “computers”—would be compiling the data into usable form. The senior meteorologists used this work to compose the forecasts. Around the time that Finley started, Chief Signal Officer Myer decided to change what the forecasts were called—he may have gotten tired of being called Old Probabilities. His new name for them was “indications.” They now began with the phrase “The indications are that …” From then on the senior staffers were supposed to be called “indications officers.”
Final responsibility for the indications fell to the corps’s chief civilian expert. This was Cleveland Abbe, a meteorologist and astronomer who had years earlier gained attention for issuing pioneering daily weather forecasts in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Abbe had been one of Myer’s first hires. When Finley met him, Abbe was forty, vigorous, good-humored, and extremely quick-witted. The indications officers were amazed at how rapidly Abbe could take in a confused weather map and turn it into a lucid prediction. Abbe’s accuracy rate with the indications was, the corps estimated, around 80 percent, which they thought was astonishingly high. Abbe’s personal goal was to reach 90 percent. He thought it would probably be impossible to do any better than that.
Around G Street, Abbe was known as Acting Probabilities. The nickname caught on after Myer started spending less time in the office; he was traveling in Europe in 1878, and he fell ill with nephritis on the trip. But Abbe spent so long with the Signal Corps that ultimately he became known as Old Probabilities himself.
Early in his time at the G Street office, Finley caught Abbe’s notice. Finley was hard to miss: he was a huge, clumsy man, with a nervous, irritable manner and a boundless capacity for sustained work. Abbe questioned him closely on his studies and was impressed that he had already mastered the basic textbook used by the corps, Elias Loomis’s recently published Treatise on Meteorology. (Loomis, who had been around since the old days of the storm war, was now a professor of natural philosophy at Yale; his book was a substantial, conservative summation of the current state of meteorological knowledge.) Abbe recommended more books, and the sessions he and Finley spent in the Fact Room turned into an ongoing tutorial on advanced meteorological theory.
Abbe particularly wanted Finley to read a new book called Storms: Their Nature, Classification, and Laws, by William Blasius. Blasius was a businessman and amateur meteorologist who had been touring on the lyceum circuit since the 1850s. (Thoreau had heard him lecture and recorded that the audience was enchanted by his stories of people carried off by tornadoes but bored stiff by his science.) Abbe was hoping Finley would appreciate the extraordinary care and thoroughness of Blasius’s work, particularly on the analysis of tornado damage tracks. Finley did so; in fact he remained an admirer of Blasius for the rest of his life. “His analytical map of the storm track,” Finley would write in the 1920s, “is one of the best ever prepared and published of this class of storms.” At his first reading with Abbe in the Fact Room, he was immediately inspired to do work on that level himself.
Abbe and Finley talked endlessly about tornadoes. Neither man had ever seen one, but both were fascinated by them. Abbe was growing increasingly preoccupied with the subject; reports had gradually been filtering into the Washington City office of the exceptionally large and violent tornadoes prevalent in the prairie states and territories beyond the Mississippi. The tornadoes of the prairies were something that Blasius had considered at length in his book. He had even offered a possible reason that they might be larger and more powerful than the ones that had been documented in the East. He believed that there was compelling evidence that tornadoes were formed in the collision between large bodies of warm humid air and cold dry air. There was one place in North America where this clash was a frequent, almost daily occurrence, and that was the central prairies. The thousands of miles of flat empty land that made up the Great American Desert, where vast currents of air from Canada and the Gulf of Mexico were continuously flowing together and colliding and mingling, would be a perfect breeding ground for tornadoes.
Was Blasius right? Abbe admitted to Finley that he had no idea. For all the furies of the storm controversy, many of the basic questions about tornadoes still remained unanswered—even unasked. Abbe was doing what he could to gather the basic research. Whenever he received a report of an unusually violent tornado, he had Myer send out a corps officer to make a field report. But he was beginning to think that the corps needed a full-time tornado expert, and he was wondering if Finley might be the man.
Finley was eager for the job. So Abbe decided to arrange a tryout for him. In May 1879, news came in from Kansas of a deadly tornado outbreak. Abbe persuaded Myer to send Finley, even though he was only an army private, on his first field investigation.
The railways west of the Mississippi were still spotty, the trains were usually overpacked with travelers and cargo, and their schedules were erratic, but the journey from Washington City to the heart of the prairie was now a matter of days instead of months. Finley arrived in eastern Kansas on June 12, not two weeks after the first reports of the disaster had been sent east. He spent the rest of June and into July piecing together what had happened—riding by wagon and horseback, sometimes making his way on foot; spending nights in fleabag inns and farmers’ barns, sometimes, on rare occasions when the weather was clear, sleeping in the open. He guessed that before he was done, he had traveled at least five hundred miles.
That was still a sparsely settled country. It was scattered with a loose network of colonies, market towns, and isolated farmhouses. Much of the old prairie had been cleared and planted, but there were still trails everywhere that led out into the oceans of prairie grass and meandered off into nothingness. Complicating Finley’s mission was the weather, which had been miserably rainy all spring and continued without letup
through his stay. Ceaseless downpours made the roads like quicksand, swelled the streams into impassable torrents, and washed away the few rickety bridges. “Hardly three days,” he later wrote, “was the weather at all pleasant or conducive to good work.”
Still, he worked to reconstruct the events that had summoned him. A succession of violent thunderstorms had passed over the region on May 29 and 30. Several of the storms had spawned tornadoes. By Finley’s count, there had been thirteen distinct tornado events. The exact number, though, was a matter of interpretation, because it became clear to Finley that some of the events had involved multiple tornadoes descending from the same cloud. That, Finley knew, was already going to make his report big news to Cleveland Abbe and the other meteorologists back home. The general view at the Washington City office was that tornadoes were rare and freakish occurrences. It was an exceptional year that saw more than two or three confirmed sightings.
Finley mapped out the trail of damage that each tornado had left behind. He walked the paths himself and interviewed everybody he could find along the way who had been caught up in or had witnessed the tornado’s passage. Almost all the tornadoes, he found, had touched down in open country, and most of them had done damage to only a few isolated farms. But there was one great exception: the events in the town of Irving, Kansas, on the late afternoon of May 30.
As Finley pieced it together, a very large tornado had touched down southwest of Irving and moved rapidly through the hilly terrain toward the town. “Persons who watched its progress along this portion of its track,” Finley wrote in his report, “stated that the demoniac fury of the cloud was appalling; whirling with most frightful rapidity, the intense black column would at times seem to level the whole bluff as it disappeared from view within the huge rolling mass of darkness.” The tornado swelled up as it progressed; Finley estimated that by the time it crossed into the town itself, it was at least a half mile wide. It was moving so quickly that few people even had time to react. The destruction took only a few seconds to be accomplished, and it was total. Nothing remained but wreckage.
The funnel cloud had then passed back into the country beyond the north side of town. That was where it crossed over the new railroad bridge. This was an imposing construction of stone piers and iron spans; the two spans were 125 feet each. It had all instantly exploded into debris. “So completely twisted into shapeless ruin was the huge mass of iron rods and stringers,” Finley wrote, “that it entirely disappeared from view in a few feet of water, except several ends of some of the long rods that reached out upon the shore.”
By then the survivors were emerging from wherever they had fled to for shelter and were confronted by the ruin of their town. Within the swath of the debris trail were bodies half buried in the mud. The cries of the wounded could be heard coming from the collapsed houses and leveled storefronts. Some of the faintest cries were coming from the open country a half mile away. Rescuers began to venture into the rubble to look for the injured. But then there was a new alarm: all over town, people were suddenly yelling and pointing toward the western sky.
The storm there had broken up, and the sunlight was fanning out across the open country. It lit up an enormous gliding shape in the distance. The shape didn’t appear to be a tornado; nobody saw a funnel. None of the townspeople, in fact, had the slightest idea what it was. One witness said it was like “the broadside of an immense mountain.” From their descriptions Finley reconstructed it this way: “a cloud of inky blackness and enormous dimensions, presenting a square front of apparently two miles in width and a perpendicular height from earth to sky. It moved along slowly, but with the most inconceivable majesty of force, apparently annihilating everything within its reach.”
When it came through the town, it proved far more catastrophic than the first cloud. A newly completed stone church was “whirled into a cone-shaped mass.” Houses were torn from their foundations and spun in midair until they disintegrated. Loaded freight cars were upended on the railroad tracks. A new grain elevator burst, fell in on itself, and shed its contents across a mile of the countryside. Many people felt as though supernatural forces were at play. In houses St. Elmo’s fire danced across interior walls and over the furniture. On the streets there was a curious updraft, which, one witness said, “acted so powerfully as to apparently reduce a man’s weight about two-thirds.” Small objects floated up from the ground to hundreds of feet in the air and then were swallowed in the blackness of the cloud. The noise of the cloud was deafening, like a continuous thunder of bank after bank of artillery. As it moved through the town, some witnesses saw writhing white shapes like waterspouts perpetually dancing and dissolving before its black featureless face. It began to dissipate as it crossed out of the wreck of the town and revealed in its last seconds two vast funnel clouds swirling side by side in its interior.
What was this storm? Finley was baffled by it. He didn’t think it could be a conventional tornado. He wrote in his report that it must have been something unprecedented, some kind of freak combination of a tornado and a hurricane. Nobody he talked to had ever seen anything like it. They all pestered him with questions. This strange moving mountain: Was it something he had seen before? Was it something the federal government had studied? He wished he had an answer for them; all he could do was promise that he’d look into it.
They had other questions. Most of the townspeople were recent arrivals in Kansas. They’d never heard of tornadoes and wanted to know why they hadn’t been told about them. They asked, Finley wrote, “whether or not this region was particularly subject to this class of storms, and the frequency with which they might and would occur.” Farmers, tradesmen, and the most prosperous businessmen all wanted to know about how much danger they were in. He wrote that they all asked him, “Could the question be settled? Would it be settled by the Signal Service Bureau? Does the Signal Service Bureau pay particular attention to this class of storms, so intimately affecting our welfare? Will the bureau be able to forewarn us next spring and summer?”
But something else came to trouble him even more: the behavior of the townspeople in the aftermath. They were putting on a great show of being practical, of bustling about the streets with urgent purpose, of cleaning away the debris, repairing the wrecked buildings, and rebuilding from scratch those that had been leveled, but they still had an unmistakably haunted air, an unshakable sense of dread. Finley saw that everything seemed to freeze whenever the sky clouded over. He wrote, “The terror depicted upon the countenances of the bravest men, at the sight of a dark cloud above the horizon, was something beyond description or realization.”
For many people the aftermath was even more painful than that. The town was now filled with people who couldn’t sleep at night. They had a kind of ritual they’d perform instead. Long after sunset they’d rise up and steal out of their houses. Carrying lanterns, they’d make their way to the damage track. And there they would stand or sit until dawn on the trampled, debris-strewn ground, keeping watch, looking to the western sky, waiting for the tornado to return.
11
Premonitory Symptoms
In the early 1880s, curious flags began appearing in prominent places all over America. They were seen flying above post offices and railroad depots and weather stations—enormous expanses of canvas, bearing bright and stark symbols that could be seen for miles away. They were the Signal Corps’s new forecast flags. A flag of solid white meant fair weather, while one of solid blue meant rain; red with a large black disk at the center meant a storm; white with a black disk was a cold wave. They showed up first in the rural West, where they could be spotted at enormous distances by anyone with field glasses, but they were such an immediate success with the public that they quickly began flying from flagpoles in major cities. The flag for the cold wave was especially valuable in farm country, where advance word of a frost could mean the survival of a harvest. Railroads sometimes flew the cold-front flag from baggage cars so that every passing train could warn farmer
s in their fields if they needed to take action to save their crops. The flags were a familiar sight in America for decades; they lasted until the advent of radio forecasts in the 1920s.
They were the idea of General William Hazen, who took over as chief signal officer of the corps in 1880, after the death of the corps’s first chief, Albert Myer. Hazen was a hero of the Civil War and more recently a decorated veteran of the Indian Wars. He was a successful and influential man from an exceptionally well-connected Ohio political family. His wife was the daughter of the owner of The Washington Post. But he had a better patron than that. Right around the time that he received his appointment to the Signal Corps, his childhood friend James Garfield was elected president of the United States.
Hazen was known as a fiercely contentious man who wasted no energy in getting along with his superiors. During the Civil War, he had infuriated his old boss General Sherman by claiming credit for several of Sherman’s triumphs during the March to the Sea. He had become a celebrity during the administration of President Grant, because of his exposure of the systematic corruption of the War Department’s procurement system. His whistle-blowing testimony before Congress had led to the resignation of William Belknap, Grant’s secretary of war. In 1876, during the Indian Wars, he had feuded so ferociously and so publicly with his commanding officer that he had to be reassigned. The officer was George Armstrong Custer, and that was the only reason Hazen missed the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Hazen had no native ability as an administrator. But when he took over the Weather Bureau office on G Street, he was well liked—at first, anyway—for his determination to push the Signal Corps forward into new terrain. Unlike Myer, he was fascinated by basic scientific research. Myer had always looked for immediate results; Hazen was willing to back projects that might not bear fruit for years, if ever. He established a new work group at the Signal Corps headquarters called the Study Room, a companion to the Fact Room at the G Street offices. (There was no space left at G Street, though, so Hazen moved the Study Room out to the Signal Corps’s base in Virginia; Hazen had just had its name changed from Fort Whipple to Fort Myer.) He sought out civilian experts in meteorology from university faculties and brought them in as consultants with the widest possible brief. Some he hired outright as full-time researchers, including William Ferrel, the man who had solved the feud between Espy and Redfield. Hazen paid him to keep abreast of all the current thinking about meteorology, with the goal of someday writing an advanced textbook.