Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  “I can hardly say,” Finley answered.

  Lowry then wound up: “How soon can you prepare the statement we have spoken of?”

  Finley, apparently soothed by the kindness of the commission, answered airily: “I dare say, as I understand the desire of the Commission is a brief note, I can prepare it in a couple of days.”

  He was then excused.

  Finley plainly didn’t realize what he had done. But Hazen understood the situation all too well: if the commission was looking for proof that the corps was badly managed, Finley’s testimony that he was forced to work seventeen hours a day was exactly what was required. It would be useless for Hazen to claim that this overload was the result of Finley’s personal obsessiveness on the subject of tornadoes. He wouldn’t have been believed, and in any case it should never have been permitted to happen no matter what the reasons were.

  Hazen knew he had to act quickly to limit the damage. At all costs, Finley must be kept from giving further testimony to the commission. There was no telling what he might say if he was encouraged to talk at length. So Hazen immediately relieved Finley of all his current duties and gave him a new job. He was made inspector of the corps’s weather stations, and a few days after his testimony he departed Washington City on an extended tour of the stations west of the Mississippi.

  General Hazen probably felt then that he’d dodged a bullet and that now he only had to wait Secretary Lincoln out. The 1884 election was bringing in a new administration: Chester A. Arthur and the Republicans were leaving; Grover Cleveland and the Democrats were coming in. Lincoln was finishing up his duties in the War Department that winter before retiring from government service. (While routinely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, he never ran; he spent the remaining decades of his life occupying highly lucrative positions in the private sector.) But, as it proved, Lincoln wasn’t yet done with General Hazen.

  That winter, Hazen’s angry private letter to the secretary about the Greely expedition had been leaked to the press. When and how exactly this happened, nobody knew, but it first saw print in the Chicago Tribune in February 1885, a few weeks before the inauguration of the new president. Everybody assumed Hazen had been the leaker, and they all took it to be a particularly cheap shot at the departing secretary. A reporter for the Washington Evening Star happened to catch up with Hazen at one of the city’s most fashionable meeting places, the lobby of a downtown hotel called the Ebbitt House. He asked Hazen about the story, and Hazen off the cuff admitted that the letter was genuine but denied that he had leaked it. The reporter immediately published Hazen’s remark. That proved to be provocation enough for Secretary Lincoln. In one of his last official acts before he left Washington City, he had Hazen court-martialed.

  General Hazen’s trial took place in the middle of March, almost immediately after Grover Cleveland’s inauguration. It was a grand affair. It was held not in some cloistered War Department meeting room but in a public room of the Ebbitt House. The hotel was then jammed with guests in town for the inaugural celebrations—reporters, politicians, lobbyists, power brokers, and visiting dignitaries. Every seat was taken when the court-martial began.

  The judge advocate prosecuting the case made it sound perfectly straightforward: General Hazen’s letter to Lincoln was grossly insubordinate, and Hazen had compounded the insubordination by making the letter public. Hazen’s attorney (he’d been permitted to bring in a civilian lawyer) replied for the defense: the letter may have been vigorously worded, but it wasn’t technically insubordinate. In fact Secretary Lincoln had always encouraged forthright debate and disagreement. Hazen had simply been expressing his honest opinion. As to the second charge: Hazen denied that he’d leaked the letter, and he had no idea who did; his lawyer broadly hinted that it could perfectly well have been Secretary Lincoln himself, just to make the general look bad.

  From such a clear-cut beginning, the trial rapidly devolved into a legalistic shambles. On the face of it, General Hazen’s defense was untenable. The letter was plainly insubordinate to the point of insolence. The problem for the prosecutor was to find a way of saying so without raising the question of whether Hazen’s charges had any merit. He wanted all discussion of Secretary Lincoln’s decision making, and in fact all discussion of the Greely expedition in general, excluded from the trial. In practice this meant he was obliged to raise a barrage of objections every time Hazen’s attorney opened his mouth. Hazen’s attorney, meanwhile, had a different tactic. He didn’t exactly mount a defense; instead, inch by inch, hour by hour, in the face of a ceaseless string of sustained objections from the other side, he set out to confuse the issues so thoroughly that nobody listening would have a clear idea what exactly Hazen had done, if he had done anything at all.

  By the second or third day of this ordeal, any practiced courtroom observer would have concluded that the entire business was a sham. The judges were probably sympathetic to Hazen, and they almost certainly had doubts about Secretary Lincoln’s conduct—and besides, Hazen’s attorney really had succeeded in muddying the waters about who might have leaked the letter. But a not-guilty verdict would have been tantamount to an indictment of Lincoln. The members of the panel therefore came to an unorthodox—in fact flagrantly illegal—solution. They took it upon themselves to rewrite the charges against Hazen so that they were watered down almost to the point of nonexistence and then found him guilty of those.

  The verdict was sent on to the new president, Grover Cleveland, for final disposition. Cleveland may have been a beginner at his job, but he seems to have understood the matter perfectly—and besides, he was determined to go lightly on Hazen anyway. It so happened that he and Hazen were longtime friends. Cleveland wrote Hazen a letter of censure so vague it was barely detectable as a rebuke. Then he officially declared the matter closed.

  12

  Violent Local Storms

  From the veranda of the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs, when the weather was right, the Signal Corps’s weather station on Pike’s Peak could be seen gleaming on a high mountain ridge. In April 1885, the hotel guests often gathered with field glasses to observe it. They were looking for signs of life. No reports had come in from the station in months; the telegraph lines had been taken out by strong storms and avalanches early that winter, and the trails had all been obliterated by unusually heavy snow. The corps’s chief observer at the Colorado Springs base had reported back to Washington City that the Pike’s Peak station was hopelessly cut off and that not even the local mountaineers were willing to attempt a relief mission.

  The Pike’s Peak station was famous. Among the more than one hundred stations the corps had then established, it was the only one to have caught the public imagination. This was partly because of its remote and exotic location, and partly because its observers had their own (officially discouraged) tradition of tale-telling. They were notorious for making up grandly theatrical stories, which they solemnly passed off to the press as scientific truth. One time an observer had claimed that his wife and children had been trapped in a cave by a blizzard and had been eaten by gigantic rats. (The observer was unmarried and childless, and the rats remained unknown to science.) Another year an observer issued an urgent warning that Pike’s Peak had erupted and that the lava flow would soon engulf Colorado Springs. But this year, without a word from the station, it seemed as though the worst had befallen it. Stories had been circulating in the local newspapers for months, and were now beginning to spread out to the national press, that the current crew of six men at the station must already be dead.

  Among the guests at the hotel that April was John Finley. It was part of his tour as inspector. He had come to Colorado Springs to inventory the base weather station in town. This had proved to be quick work. “Unserviceable property,” he remembered later, “had been accumulating at the Base for years.” He began lugging the old gear and supplies out to a vacant lot. “As fast as it was inspected,” he wrote, “I had it removed from storage and piled there.”
Then he soaked it all in kerosene and set it ablaze. He had the base station observer and his staff stand guard to protect the crowd that had gathered: the townspeople had been unaware that inventorying a military base could be so exciting.

  His next job had been to see to the relief of the Pike’s Peak station. He listened to the talk on the veranda each morning and consulted the base station observer and talked to local mountaineers. All of them told him that his assignment couldn’t be completed because an ascent of the mountain was impossible. The weather was consistently foul: day after day, the summit was continuously shrouded and enfolded by snow clouds. Most of the guests were saying that the mountain station would remain inaccessible until high summer.

  Finley was having none of it. “Notwithstanding all of the arguments presented by the mountaineers,” he wrote, “I firmly informed them that, as an Army Officer I was under positive military orders to make an inspection of the station at the Peak and ascertain the condition of the Observer in Charge and his assistants. Also I was to take important meteorological observations at the Summit and test out the station instruments.” He was particularly insistent on this point with the observer at the base station in town, who was profoundly unhappy to hear it; his orders were to accompany Finley up the mountain.

  The local mountaineers did try one more time to get Finley to reconsider. They cataloged the dangers ahead: the trails invisible beneath the snow, the streams that couldn’t be forded, the treacherous crevasses and fields where the snow might be a hundred feet deep; the whiteout storms at high altitudes, the dangers of oxygen deprivation above twelve thousand feet, the constant threat of mountain lions and other predators. All of this was capped by the impossibility of crossing a promontory called Windy Point—a place known for its catastrophic avalanches.

  Finley was unmoved. The constant presence in his thoughts was the fate of the Greely polar expedition. He was determined that he wasn’t going to fail the men of the station the way the relief missions had failed Greely. Nor was he going to let Hazen down. This was his chance to redeem himself after what had happened at the commission hearings.

  When it became obvious that Finley was going to go in any case, the mountaineers came through for him with supplies and gear. They had alpine pikes, hunting knives, and revolvers. They also had fresh instruments for the weather station: Finley had a bulky mercurial barometer fastened to his back, while the observer carried an array of thermometers. As a final preparation against the intolerable cold, both men were sewn up into several layers of gunnysacks.

  The two set off on muleback. Their mounts were white government mules that proved to be well trained and more competent at mountain climbing than the men. Finley, who had little practice with mules, was relieved to find he could give his mount free rein at any perilous or doubtful point, on the thinnest of ledges or the most fragile of iced-over streams. “I learned to deeply appreciate the wonderful knowledge of these faithful animals,” he wrote. He was awestruck at the careful way they tested each path, one hoof at a time, whenever the passage was narrow or risky.

  They spent their first night on the mountain at a halfway house with another mountaineer. The mountaineer made his living by supplying the station at the summit with firewood. That was a job that took him all summer: he could only bring the wood up the trail by burro, and each burro could only carry two four-foot sticks. The winter months he spent collecting wood for the next year when the trails were open again.

  The halfway house was a squalid and rat-infested den; the rats threw everything off the shelves and ransacked the kitchen supplies and banged at the pots and kettles. They were so agile jumping from tables to shelves that Finley became convinced they could fly, and he spent the night cowering in bed under a pile of buffalo robes, with his head covered for protection. “Sleep was out of the question while these devils were performing,” he wrote. But fortunately, “between 1 and 2 a.m. they left the shack, having ransacked every quarter in a vain search for more food, after having devoured the waste from the kitchen and table that was placed where they could easily obtain it.”

  The next morning they set out for Windy Point. They were obliged to leave the mules behind with the mountaineer and trudge up on foot. The snow grew so deep they were often wading up to their armpits. The weather became increasingly foul. Storms were cresting the mountaintop and spilling down along the slopes; there was thick fog in the ravines and a continuous pelting of rain, sleet, and snow. There were terrifying lightning displays and gigantic echoing booms and crashes of thunder. At one point they were caught in a mysteriously charged snowstorm, where every flake left a trail of cold fire through the air, and their hair and beards and fingertips were emitting endless showers of sparks; a wave of his arms, Finley wrote, “was like the sweep of flaming sword-blades.” Meanwhile, as they crept onward, they were constantly listening for avalanches, and they kept their bodies pressed flat against the rock face in hope that they would feel the warning vibration from up the slope.

  They were wholly worn out by the time they approached Windy Point. When they stopped to rest, they remained standing and leaning on their pikes, for fear that if they sank to the ground, they wouldn’t have the strength to get up again. The wind was growing stronger, and it was thickening with stinging pellets of ice; the two men were cut by the flying ice, and their cheeks and foreheads began bleeding; the blood kept freezing on their eyelids and blinding them. The observer led the way up the last stretch, desperately warning Finley not to lose his balance.

  A few yards short of the crest, Finley slipped and crashed to the ground. He didn’t have the strength to rise. The observer tried vainly to get him to his feet; that would have been tough under the best of circumstances, given Finley’s size, but in the midst of the storm, with both men exhausted, and Finley weighed down even more by the gear he was carrying, the observer found it impossible. He had to stagger on alone; he made it over the crest and down to the station, where he collapsed against the door.

  The station crew were astonished to hear the noise; they flung the door open and dragged the observer in. He was able to get out that a second man was still out there at the crest. The crew immediately went out after Finley. They barely found him in time; the furious snow had almost entirely covered him over where he lay, and wrapped in his burlap sacks, he was almost impossible to tell apart from the other boulders heaped along the mountain slope. Only his pike, which he was still clutching upright, let his rescuers spot his position. He was unconscious and half frozen; he came to himself lying on a big office table while the crew frantically rubbed his hands and feet to restore his circulation.

  Finley and the observer stayed at the station until the warm weather came in. Finley assiduously collected data from the instruments he’d lugged up the mountain, which he later proudly wrote were found to be hugely useful to Professor Ferrel, back at the Washington City office. The whole rescue mission itself, though, turned out to have been superfluous. “The station force,” he wrote, “was found in good health with plenty of food and sufficient firewood to carry them through the winter season. They were greatly surprised to hear of the big excitement of the country as to their alleged desperate situation, and wondered most of all at the successful venture we had made to reach them. The trip was looked upon as quite impossible at that season of the year.”

  Finley returned to Washington City that summer hoping—maybe even assuming—that he could get back to his tornado work and begin issuing public forecasts. But he found that General Hazen was still worried about the Allison Commission. The commission had adjourned in the spring, while Finley had been in the Far West; its members had taken no actions and had issued no report. But Hazen knew that didn’t mean anything. Government commissions ground on, according to their own logic, long after their occasions had been forgotten; Secretary Lincoln was gone from Washington City, but the Allison Commission would go on pursuing his revenge.

  There was another problem for the tornado project. Finley had p
repared a technical report summarizing his forecasting methods and results, and this had been circulated among the civilian scientific community. The response had been uniformly hostile. Finley’s claim of a near-perfect success rate was met with derision. He had arrived at it honestly: he hadn’t fudged his numbers; he had taken his forecast maps and added up his daily successes and failures. But it was his method of defining “success” that other meteorologists found preposterous.

  Finley’s mistake was sheer naïveté: he had given his positive and negative predictions equal weight. This meant that if one of his forecast zones had never seen a tornado in its recorded history, and Finley had predicted that it would not see a tornado on that day, then when there was no tornado, he counted that as a success. He justified himself this way: “It requires as much, and often more, study to say that no tornadoes will occur as to make the prediction that conditions are favorable for their development.”

  This was doubtless true, but to his critics it was comparable to predicting that the Gulf of Mexico would not dry up overnight and then taking credit for a successful forecast when the next morning it proved to still be wet. His method, according to his critics, needed to be judged primarily on his positive predictions. A reanalysis of Finley’s numbers showed that in the test period he had made one hundred positive predictions of tornadoes, and there had been only twenty-eight confirmed touchdowns—a success rate considerably worse than if he had just tossed a coin.

  Given all this, General Hazen might have been tempted to cancel Finley’s project entirely. But he had one great strength as an administrator: he was loyal to his staff. He believed that Finley was onto something. So he offered a compromise: if Finley was certain that one of his forecast zones was going to see a tornado, then the corps would issue a public warning. But Finley was not to use the word “tornado,” for fear it would cause a panic. Instead, Hazen suggested that he call it a “violent local storm.”