by Lee Sandlin
For the next few days, Finley talked. His scheme was for an enormous central market that would be open to everyone and where all the island’s goods could be bought and sold. He wanted it to be held in a new building, not in some arbitrary open space—a substantial building that would draw sightseers from all over Mindanao and the surrounding islands. He cajoled, persuaded, and threatened; gradually, he won some sort of grudging acquiescence from the assembled delegates.
Finley’s market took a year to build. It was a vast open-air hall of bamboo pillars and arches and woven fronds. The opening day was a triumph. Finley watched in deep satisfaction. He described the scene later: “Slaves jostled masters, hill people traded with coast people, sworn and bitter enemies forgot their feuds, timid women and children joined heartily in the excitement, new acquaintances were made, new agreements were entered into, new and strange things were purchased for loved ones, and the slave and the peon experienced the first thrills of freedom, and the quickening impulse of self-conscious control, in the possession of that which was lawfully and rightfully theirs, as the product of their own ingenuity and labor.”
Finley immediately began traveling around the islands urging everyone to adopt his market scheme. He pitched it as a solution to the old, corrupt colonial system so despised by the people of the Philippines, and, he said, it would also reduce the tensions created by the new American occupation. Several colonial administrators were interested. The American government was impressed. Finley, in recognition of his initiative, was promoted to major.
After a few years, Finley arranged what he hoped would become another Philippine tradition: a great countrywide fair, modeled on the American expositions of the 1890s. It was put on in Zamboanga in 1907. It ran five days, and it featured crafts shows, games, feats of strength, and an assortment of prizes. For years afterward, Finley was delighted to find prize certificates proudly displayed in native houses. The fair ended in a grand dance of previously warring tribes; there were, as Finley was pleased to note, no arrests.
In 1909, supreme military authority of the Philippines was assumed by the famous general John “Black Jack” Pershing. Pershing was a colonial administrator of a different type from Finley. He was contemptuous of the native populations and always on the lookout for the quickest military solution to any political problem. Pershing had once been an instructor at West Point, where he had been loathed by the cadets for his toughness and unyielding military rigidity. Behind his back they called him “Nigger Jack,” because he had once commanded a regiment of African American soldiers (the famous buffalo soldiers of the Indian Wars); the nickname had dwindled to “Black Jack,” and it stuck with him for the rest of his life.
Just as soon as Pershing assumed his post in the Philippines, he collided with Finley. He despised Finley’s market plan at first sight. Nor did he have any use for Finley himself; he considered him “an old pessimistic windbag of the most inflated variety.” Finley was, Pershing wrote, “an impossible person in every way: he is brusque, gruff, overbearing and exclusive.” Worse still, Finley, as was his habit, had taken to grossly overestimating his success. He claimed that his markets were taking in millions of pesos a year—a figure Pershing considered absurd.
They were soon at war. But Finley had gotten much better at bureaucratic politics since his old days with the Signal Corps. Pershing soon came to suspect that he was being deliberately undermined; everybody somehow had gotten the idea that Finley was solely responsible for the peace that prevailed on Mindanao. Pershing also suspected that Finley’s well-connected society wife, Julia, was bad-mouthing him in Washington’s elite circles and was also spreading rumors about him to the press.
Pershing got his chance to strike back in 1913, when Finley went to Washington. Finley was there on a curious diplomatic mission. He was acting as a representative for the Muslim community of Mindanao, and he wanted official sanction from the Islamic authorities of the West for Mindanao’s Muslims to cooperate openly with the American occupation. The mission turned out well; in fact some historians rated it as one of the few diplomatic triumphs of the Spanish-American War. But it proved to be Finley’s undoing. Pershing used Finley’s prolonged absence as an excuse to appoint a new administrator for Mindanao, and he persuaded the War Department to reassign Finley permanently to stateside duty.
Finley accepted defeat. He took the transfer. As a consolation prize he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. He worked at the War Department’s shabby warren of offices in Washington, D.C. (the construction of the Pentagon was still a couple of decades in the future). He had a hard time getting used to the city; even after a few years away, it was a Rip van Winkle experience. Its paved and cobblestoned streets were now jammed with hooting automobiles, and there were fantastic tangles of power lines and phone lines and trolley wires looming down over every intersection. Still, he resumed his old round of speech making on the virtues of the American occupation of the Philippines, and he wrote articles for American periodicals about his Mindanao market scheme. His major effort in those years was a scholarly work of ethnography on the Muslim population of Mindanao—a pioneering study that is still cited by anthropologists and historians today.
Finley was promoted to full colonel in 1916. He went on making speeches, but other than that he took no direct part in the run-up to the American intervention in the great European war. He retired from the military in April 1919 after forty years of service.
He was sixty-five then, still hale, and in need of a new career. He naturally thought of returning to meteorology, his first passion. He had never given it up entirely; during his years in the Philippines he had published an article in the Monthly Weather Review on the different Asian words for “typhoon.” But the Weather Bureau of the twentieth century was no place for him. It had lost all its old schoolboy exuberance. None of the garish characters Finley had known in his youth were still around. The last holdout had been Cleveland Abbe, who had continued with the bureau all through its civilian years (he’d long since stopped doing research on storms; instead, he had worked on improved devices for collecting weather data). Ill health had forced Abbe to take a leave of absence from the bureau in 1915, when he was seventy-seven years old, and he had died the following year.
The new bureau was a somnolent place. Its staffers were timid and colorless drones. They had not the slightest interest in new ideas. Finley had been keeping up avidly with meteorological research, and he was aware of all the exciting new developments then taking place in Europe. A group of Scandinavian scientists had come up with a dazzlingly original method of analyzing weather systems in terms of the clashing edges of air masses, which they called “warm fronts” and “cold fronts” (they’d gotten the idea during the Great War, from newspaper maps of the western front). But the U.S. Weather Bureau would have none of it: it rejected the idea of frontal analysis out of hand and would go on rejecting it for decades.
Finley decided to ignore the government bureau. Instead he tried his luck as a private meteorologist. He reconnected with some of the survivors of his old network of storm spotters, and he made new friends among amateur weather enthusiasts. Through them he got access to a wealth of meteorological records. He was able to build up an impressive private library of statistical data. With that he moved to New York City in 1920, took offices there, and opened up a company he called the National Storm Insurance Bureau.
The bureau was a great success from the start. His first clients were the big insurance companies and underwriters; later he was hired by real estate men, agricultural speculators, and maritime investors. He provided them with risk assessments for tornadoes, windstorms, and other forms of violent weather. He also became a frequent speaker at trade conventions and businessmen’s lunches, where he talked about the deficiencies of the government’s Weather Bureau and the peril of ignoring the possibility of catastrophic weather events. His message was dramatic and ominous: If nobody was studying, predicting, or issuing warnings, then what was going to happen w
hen the next great tornado came?
16
An Awful Commotion
The Weather Bureau’s national maps for the third week of March 1925 showed a large and powerful storm system forming in the Pacific Northwest and dropping down out of Canada. On March 17 the system was rolling through the Great Plains. It reached Kansas by sundown, and sometime toward morning on the eighteenth it was approaching the Oklahoma border.
That was desolate country even in the green season—flat land, a scattering of scrub trees, and nothing at the horizon but the bristling towers of the oil fields. The storms that came down from the north country had nothing to impede their cresting grandeur for hundreds of empty miles. Normally, the storms came through the plains in late spring or summer. But now and then one would arrive earlier, at the beginning of spring, when the wild blackberry bushes were just starting to flower. Such a storm was sometimes called a blackberry storm. The storm of March 1925 was the greatest blackberry storm in generations.
Back in the old days of the Signal Corps, the situation on the weather maps would have immediately led someone like Finley to raise the alarm. The atmosphere in the southern valley was unusually sultry for March; a large body of colder and drier air was moving in swiftly from Canada behind the storm; there had already been very large areas of violent thunderstorms in the northern plains. It was virtually a guarantee of dangerously severe weather around the central Mississippi valley. But the Weather Bureau’s forecast for that region on March 18 was typically cautious and tepid: mild weather in the morning, colder by evening.
Just before dawn on the eighteenth, the storm line intensified as it approached the Oklahoma border and a tornado touched down. It was a small tornado and didn’t last; it held together just long enough to destroy a gas station on a remote country road outside the small town of Dearing, Kansas. After sunrise the storm crossed through the northeast corner of Oklahoma into the Mississippi Ozarks. This was a wild and inaccessible country. If the storm left any severe damage behind that morning, it went unrecorded—hidden behind high limestone ridges, unseen within remote wooded valleys, the way storms had passed for thousands of years.
By around noon the storm had crossed most of Missouri and had reached Reynolds County, in the southeast. There it was seen by a mail carrier making rural deliveries in the hill country. The carrier was on the road leading north out of the town of Ellington when he glimpsed a strange cloud gliding swiftly through a gap between two hills. The cloud had no distinct shape and was surrounded by a shroud of fog. The mail carrier couldn’t imagine what kind of storm it was. But he did later report that he’d heard somewhere in its depths “an awful commotion.”
Across the eastern county line from Ellington in Iron County was the village of Annapolis. It was a sleepy place. Most of the townsmen worked at the lead mine and were gone all day; housewives did their shopping early; the children were in school. A stranger walking the silent streets on any ordinary afternoon would think that the place had been abandoned. Along the one commercial strip, the hours after lunch were when the clerks in the law offices and the general store could doze without fear of discovery. A customer who arrived then could count on the uninterrupted attention of any proprietor; a traveler was sure to have the corner restaurant to himself.
At around 1:15 p.m., the streets of Annapolis were enveloped in a thick, smoky fog. Several people emerged from their seclusion to find out why the day had grown so dark. They heard a mysterious sound, a gathering roar, that seemed to be coming from all directions at once.
Then every building in the center of town simultaneously exploded.
Seconds later the fog bank was gone, and a torrential rain was falling. From the wreckage of the houses and office buildings and warehouses, people were staggering out into the streets, screaming for help, collapsing helplessly, wonderingly touching the shards of wood or metal that had impaled them. Others, apparently uninjured, were standing in the midst of the soaking rubble and staring obliviously into the distance. Debris was raining down everywhere: roofs that had been torn off from houses, bricks from disintegrated walls, beams that were like tumble-weeds of splintered lumber. There were nearly a hundred houses in Annapolis, and only seven of them were still intact.
As the survivors shook free from their daze, they found themselves spellbound by an apparition: the biggest house in town, an old-style gabled mansion, was still upright and untouched in the middle of the ruin. But as they watched, they could see smoke and flames begin to flower from the roof. A party of rescuers crashed through the front door and began searching the ornate interior rooms. They found the mansion’s inhabitants on an upper floor, gathered around the sickbed of the family matriarch, all unaware of what had happened outside. The rescuers herded the family downstairs and carried the old woman out to the sodden, debris-choked street just in time.
Meanwhile, the strange fog bank was sweeping onward. It skimmed the small mining town of Leadanna and destroyed a third of the houses there. Then over the next hour it traversed the wilderness country west of the Mississippi River. The land was still largely unknown, and the storm went unobserved. But when investigators later traced out the damage track in the deep forest, they saw unmistakable signs that at the interior of the fog bank had been two gigantic funnel clouds moving side by side.
At around 2:30 in the afternoon, the storm emerged from the Missouri hill country and rapidly churned across the Mississippi to Illinois. Seventy-five minutes had passed since the storm had crossed over Annapolis, which meant that the cloud was moving at more than sixty miles an hour.
The area of Illinois on the far bank was known as Egypt. No one knew where that name had come from. One story was that a traveling preacher in the early nineteenth century had compared the lush, rolling landscape to the Land of Goshen, the paradisial region of Egypt that the Pharaoh had given as a reward to Joseph. Many people evidently agreed with him; the maps of the region were speckled by names out of Egyptian history: Thebes, Dongola, New Memphis, Karnak, Cairo.
But Egypt was a place with its own culture—generally isolated from both north and south, with its own preoccupations, customs, and slang. Drugstores were called jelly joints, and after school the kids would say they were going to go jelly. In the evenings the kids played Go, Sheepy, Go and Annie Over. They had their own ball game, where the teams would stand on either side of a barn and use brooms to knock a ball up across the roof; this was called Over the Rainbow. There were the Catholic kids and the Public kids (called that because the Protestant kids went to public school); they would stand on opposite sides of the street that divided their neighborhoods and yell insults at each other: Catlickers and Puplickers.
In early 1925, the outside world seemed particularly remote. All the talk in Egypt was of a local gang war that involved bands of bootleggers, the police, and the Ku Klux Klan. The shifting allegiances among the players were as complex and fractured as the medieval wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. In some towns the Klan had taken upon itself the job of enforcing Prohibition (many Klansmen regarded alcohol as a European and Catholic vice); they had their own jails and detention camps where they were holding bootleggers they’d arrested in house-to-house searches. The gangsters, meanwhile, controlled several Illinois counties outright and guarded them like fortresses. Everyone in the region had become used to the dread noise of gunfire in the distance. When the strange cloud came through Egypt, many people took the commotion for the sound of yet another gun battle.
The cloud reached Murphysboro, Illinois, shortly after 2:30 in the afternoon. Murphysboro was a town of around twelve thousand people. At the local school, the kids were woolgathering toward the end of a hot day of classes, just before the final bell, when the streets outside darkened with fog. Many of the kids suddenly began complaining of intense earaches. Then the kids near the windows cried out: all the buildings along the block were disintegrating, and the clouds of debris were streaming straight up like chimney smoke. Violent gusts of wind came shrieking
down the school hallways. The principal was running from room to room pounding on doors, yelling for the building to be evacuated. Some of the teachers found that their classroom doors couldn’t be budged: the air pressure in the hallways had fallen away almost to nothing. The principal and the teachers who could began herding the kids outside—directly into the heart of the storm. That was when the building caved in on itself.
The fog engulfed the town. Block after block of houses and factories and storefront buildings erupted. Water mains burst; gas lines detonated; the streets were bombarded by burning debris. In the space of a few minutes, more than 150 square blocks and ten thousand buildings were destroyed.
The cloud crossed out of Murphysboro and moved northeast through open country. The landscape was hilly and broken there. But a few people managed to get a good look—travelers on the remote roads, passengers on distant trains. They were all stunned by the sight. No one reported a funnel cloud or anything they could recognize as a tornado. The cloud was a dense black billowing ball rolling over and over on the ground, with bands of sickly yellow lightning sizzling around its circumference and vast blurred shrouds of fog spreading all around it.
Town after town, all the way across Illinois, the same events repeated. The fog appeared in the streets; the roaring rose from all directions; and the buildings were gone. In the mining town of West Frankfort, the heart of the storm passed directly over the mine entrance, and the conglomeration of buildings around the shaft—the hoist and the tipple and the feeder and the towers—all vanished in an instant. This was in the middle of the afternoon shift, and the miners deep underground had no idea what was happening. They heard a weird wind spring up within the inner chambers of the mine, and then all of a sudden every loose stave and pick and lantern and brace and ax and coal wagon rose up into the air and went hurling in a flying tumult toward the main shafts. The lights all went out, the elevators and the conveyor belts stopped, and the power lines went dead. The miners had to ascend by foot through the darkness, up a rough-hewn emergency passage, all the way back to the surface.