by Lee Sandlin
On May 22, 2011, an unusually powerful EF-5 tornado approached Joplin, Missouri. Everything about the professional response happened exactly as it was supposed to. The watch had been issued hours earlier; the warnings were going out with a lead time of more than twenty minutes; the helicopters of the local TV stations were in flight; the chase teams were hurtling down the highways, not only transmitting real-time data and video about the tornado, but stopping to warn the police on the ground that it was coming. Then the storm engulfed the city. The sky was a chaos of rapid black low-hanging clouds; wild contrary winds swept through the subdivisions and along the franchise strips; blasts of rain reduced visibility to a few feet. From everywhere came the moan of the civil-defense sirens, which seemed to have panicked and baffled the townspeople; many remained paralyzed by indecision in their front yards or by their cars in mall parking lots, unwilling to take shelter until it was too late. But then, there was for the most part nowhere to take shelter: Joplin, like most midwestern towns and cities, had been rapidly built up over the preceding decades without anything resembling storm cellars. Most new houses and businesses didn’t even have basements. People in the last few seconds before the tornado passed over them were huddling within the walk-in freezers of franchise restaurants or the storage rooms of convenience stores.
By the time the tornado crossed into the city core, it was more than a mile wide, a gigantic gaunt apparition shrouded within torrential downpours of rain. Some people didn’t realize what it was until it was directly on top of them. The inflowing winds were so fierce they scoured the bark off trees and carried trucks through the air for more than a city block. A hundred and sixty people died—which made it the single deadliest American tornado in more than sixty years. Accurate counting and identification of the remains proved difficult because some of those killed in the cannonades of flying debris had been torn apart in midair and their body parts scattered among the ruins. In the aftermath, the chaser teams glided through endless blocks of death and destruction; one estimate was that more than half the buildings in town had been damaged. The franchises of the strip malls had collapsed in on themselves; the rows of subdivisions were reduced to their foundations; the parking lots were piled high with wrecked cars, and the open fields were mountain ranges of construction debris. It was hard to think that there had been any progress at all since the time of the Tri-state Tornado.
One popular book on science in the late nineteenth century offered a novel explanation for the featureless sameness of the prairies: there were no trees or other prominences because the tornadoes continually scoured the land clean. This was a colorful theory that was hopeless nonsense; after all, on average no specific location in Tornado Alley is touched by a tornado more than once every thousand years. But then, the theory wouldn’t work even if tornadoes descended to earth with every single thunderstorm. Tornadoes simply don’t do enough damage to the land. They rarely leave lasting scars. The old rule of thumb in the wilderness days was that a windroad through the forest lasted a generation; now the traces of a tornado are obliterated in a few years or even a few months. The debris is cleared, the insurance is paid off, the houses and schools and strip malls and franchise restaurants are rebuilt; it’s a rare thing even for a monument to be left behind to record what had once happened there during a few horrible minutes one faraway spring afternoon.
The scars they leave on the collective memory are even more ephemeral. The inexorable settlement of the prairie has been built on a kind of cultural denial of its history; even at the heart of Tornado Alley the development of the land is continuing with heedless abandon. Few of the new buildings have storm cellars or any kind of shelter from violent weather. The new residents of Tornado Alley are reported to be baffled by the meaning of the tornado sirens.
The tornado chasers don’t usually show all that much interest in history, either. Names like James Espy and John Finley invariably draw a blank. But there are a few monuments here and there, and some chasers do know where to look for them. They will sometimes pay visits on idle days of high pressure and low dew point, when the wind socks hang idle in the rural airports and the skies are dotted by fair-weather cumulus. They might, for instance, drive all day off their main hunting trails on the interstates up through the forests of Wisconsin, to reach the little town of Peshtigo north of Green Bay. There is a small white church on a crooked side street near the river, amid a scattering of clapboard houses, greasy-spoon restaurants, and gas stations. The church was built on the spot where Father Pernin’s old church had once stood. Next to it is a cemetery with ancient, weather-stained stone markers. On a large green mound is a sign identifying this as the mass grave for the unidentifiable victims of the fire tornado.
In the suburbs of Oklahoma City there is another marker. It’s on the grounds of Tinker Air Force Base: a tall rectangle of polished granite on a pebbled square of ground near the airfields. This was where the old Operations Building stood—which housed the weather station where Miller and Fawbush had worked. The marker is inscribed “First Tornado Forecast.” A few of the chasers like to joke that it should read “First (and Only).”
In Irving, Kansas, there is nothing now but a few concrete foundations, a scattering of fence posts—and a solitary marker. It stands at the location of the old post office. It’s a low piece of carved stone like a crypt from a Victorian mausoleum, bearing the single word “Irving.”
Behind it stands an old-fashioned rural mailbox, like a birdhouse on a tall pole. Sometimes the chasers open up the mailbox idly to see if there’s anything inside. And sometimes there is: a scrap of paper bearing a message from another chaser. It might be the name and URL of the chaser’s video company, or the boastful news of some great tornado he’d pursued, or just some flippant insult directed at any and all rivals. Of course the chaser who found the message has to write out a reply. The message is left for the next chaser to find, or for some anonymous collector to preserve. Or maybe now and then someone finds the box stuffed full and empties all the messages onto the ground, for the wind to scatter as it wills.
A Note on Sources
Introduction: Ghost Riders
For the physics of tornadoes I’ve used Edwin Kessler, ed., Thunderstorm Morphology and Dynamics, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Readers who’d prefer to skip vector calculus should consult T. P. Grazulis’s relatively nontechnical book The Tornado: Nature’s Ultimate Windstorm (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). For the general history of tornado forecasting, I have relied heavily on two works by Marlene Bradford: “Historical Roots of Modern Tornado Forecasts and Warnings,” Weather and Forecasting 14, no. 4 (1999); and Scanning the Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001).
Prologue: The Pillar in the Storm
The story of the Cambridge whirlwind is told in Increase Mather’s book An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences: Wherein an Account Is Given of Many Remarkable and Very Memorable Events, Which Have Hapned This Last Age, Especially in New England; I’ve used the text reprinted in the nineteenth century (London: Reeves and Turner, 1890). The version of the events in Mather’s letter to the Royal Society (published in its Philosophical Transactions) varies in several details but is not essentially different.
Part I: The Thunder House
By far the clearest accounts of Franklin’s investigations are his own letters; quotations are from the texts in the volume of scientific letters and publications included in his 1838 collected works. For the electricians and the general history of electrical research in the eighteenth century, I’ve also consulted William E. Burns, Science and Technology in Colonial America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2005); Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2006). The first debates about tornadoes in North America, together with some early accounts of the windroads, are reprinted in David M. Ludlum, Early American Tornadoes, 1586–1870 (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1970). The fullest account of the 1805 tornado in southern Illinois is in John Reynolds, The Pioneer History of Illinois, Containing the Discovery in 1673, and the History of the Country to the Year 1818 (Chicago: Fergus, 1887).
Part II: The Storm War
The best analysis of the “storm war” is in James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Fleming’s main concern is with the questions the war raised about the theory and practice of science, particularly the debate about “Baconianism”; readers interested in this issue, which I have largely scanted, should immediately seek out his book. There is also a shorter and less technical account of the war in Ludlum’s Early American Tornadoes, along with good biographical sketches of the major participants. The published writings of the storm war have never been collected and are scattered among several repositories—chief among them the early volumes of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, and the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Doubtless there are others I didn’t find. Robert Hare and William Redfield often published their assorted replies and counter-replies to each other as pamphlets, which now survive in many variant forms (typically a stack of them would be bound into a one-off volume for a library or a private collector). There is a thorough survey of both the pamphlets and the journal publications by the principals in James Fleming’s book.
There has been no full biography of James Espy. The closest thing to one is the brief memoir by Mrs. L. M. Morehead, A Few Incidents in the Life of Professor James P. Espy (privately printed, 1888). Espy’s own major literary work, which has some autobiographical passages along with a vivid account of the development of his early ideas, is The Philosophy of Storms (Boston: Little and Brown, 1841). The account of the Franklin Institute derives from Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute, 1824–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). For a good general history of the lyceum movement, see Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Espy’s most detailed descriptions of his rainmaking proposals (as well as his directives for navigating in hurricanes) are in his contributions to the annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution to Congress, which were reprinted in The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, 1835–1899 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901). Espy’s ideas about artificial rain are set in a wider historical context in Clark C. Spence, The Rainmakers: American “Pluviculture” to World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980). The account of Espy in his old age is from Autobiography of Samuel D. Gross, with Sketches of His Contemporaries (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1887). His unfinished work on moral philosophy was published after his death as The Human Will: A Series of Posthumous Essays on Moral Accountability, the Legitimate Object of Punishment, and the Powers of the Will (Cincinnati: Dial, 1860). William Redfield’s life is partially told in his son’s unfinished autobiography, Recollections of John Howard Redfield (privately printed, 1900), and there is also a vivid memorial of him in Denison Olmsted, Address on the Scientific Life and Labors of William C. Redfield (New Haven, Conn.: E. Hayes, 1857). There is a biography of Robert Hare by Edgar Fahs Smith, The Life of Robert Hare: An American Chemist, 1781–1858 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1917); it is assembled almost entirely out of Hare’s professional and technical correspondence, but it does, perhaps inadvertently, offer a vivid glimpse of his personality. Hare’s fullest account of his spiritualist research is in his book Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations, Demonstrating the Existence of Spirits and Their Communion with Mortals (New York: Partridge & Brittan, 1855).
What exactly happened during the Peshtigo firestorm remains unclear. My account derives as much as possible from eyewitness testimony, primarily Peter Pernin’s memoir, The Finger of God Is There, reprinted as The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1999); as well as Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, History of the Great Fires in Chicago and the West (n.p., 1871); Alfred L. Sewell, Great Calamity! Scenes, Incidents, and Lessons of the Great Chicago Fire and the Burning of Peshtigo, Wisconsin (Chicago: Sewell, 1871); and Frank Luzerne, Through the Flames and Beyond, which was also published as The Lost City! Drama of the Fire Fiend (New York: Wells, 1872). I have also used the modern history Embers of October, by Robert W. Wells (Peshtigo, Wis.: Peshtigo Historical Society, 1995). The 1925 fire tornado is described in Noel F. Busch, Two Minutes to Noon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962). Readers interested in a modern analysis of an EF-2 tornado occurring within a major firestorm should consult Michael Fromm et al., “Violent Pyro-convective Storm Devastates Australia’s Capital,” Geophysical Research Letters 33 (2006).
Part III: Red Wind and Tornado Green
The description of the prairie is based on travelers’ accounts in the mid-nineteenth century, in particular the narratives collected in Henry Howe, ed., Historical Collections of the Great West (Cincinnati: E. Morgan, 1855), and James Hewitt, ed., Eye-Witnesses to Wagon Trains West (New York: Scribner, 1973); as well as John Hanson Beadle, The Undeveloped West; or, Five Years in the Territories (Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1873); Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1870); William Shepherd, Prairie Experiences in Handling Cattle and Sheep (London: Chapman and Hall, 1884); and Albert Deane Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1869). The best general history of the settlement of the prairie is Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1937). The account of the spread of horses through the West is from Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Ely Moore’s story of the tornado is retold in Daniel Fitzgerald, Sound and Fury: A History of Kansas Tornadoes, 1854–2008 (Dan Fitzgerald Company, 2009).
For John Finley’s life, I have depended heavily on a biographical sketch by Joseph G. Galway, “J. P. Finley: The First Severe Storms Forecaster,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, November 1985, and Finley’s own autobiographical account, dating from 1922, “Personal View of John P. Finley,” which is unpublished but can be found in the online historical archive of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Finley’s field reports and historical studies of tornadoes were published in the series Professional Papers of the Signal Service, from the U.S. Government Printing Office. He told the story of his experiences in the Philippines in “Race Development by Industrial Means Among the Moros and Pagans of the Southern Philippines,” Journal of Race Development 3, no. 3 (1913). Pershing’s opinion of Finley is quoted from Frank Everson Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1977).
The general description of the Signal Corps is based on “The Beginning of the National Weather Service: The Signal Years (1870–1891), as Viewed by Early Weather Pioneers,” an unpublished written collection edited by Gary K. Grice, in the NOAA historical archive, as well as Rebecca Robbins Raines, Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the U.S. Army Signal Corps (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1996). The specific projects pursued by the Signal Corps in those years, including Finley’s experiments in tornado prediction, are summarized in detail in the annual Reports of the Chief Signal Officer to the Secretary of War, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The early history of the Pike’s Peak weather station is described in Phyllis Smith, Weather Pioneers: The Signal Corps Station at Pikes Peak (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1993). The sketch of the Washington City headquarters derives from Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1873).
There are many contemporary accounts of the Greely expedition, of varying degrees of believability. A good modern retelling is Leonard F. Guttridge, Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition (New York: Putnam, 2000). The story of Hazen, Lincoln, and the court-martial is based on The Hazen Court-Martial: The Responsibility for the Disaster to the Lady Franklin Bay Polar Expedition Definitely Established, with Proposed Reforms in the Law and Practice of Courts-Martial (New York: Van Nostrand, 1885), which has a complete trial transcript together with a very long (and indignant) introduction by Hazen’s attorney, Thomas Jefferson Mackey. Quotations from the Allison Commission hearings are from Testimony Before the Joint Commission to Consider the Present Organizations of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department, with a View to Secure Greater Efficiency and Economy of Administration of the Public Service in Said Bureaus (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886).
The Louisville tornado is described in Keven McQueen, The Great Louisville Tornado of 1890 (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2010); the St. Louis tornado in Julian Curzon, ed., The Great Cyclone at St. Louis and East St. Louis, May 27, 1896 (St. Louis: Cyclone Publishing, 1896). Professor Henry Hazen’s views on tornadoes and tornado safety are outlined in his book The Tornado (New York: N. D. C. Hodges, 1890). For the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, I have used James B. Haynes, History of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898 (printed by the Exposition Committee, 1910), and Jess R. Peterson, Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition (Chicago: Arcadia, 2003). The story of L. Frank Baum’s inspiration for The Wizard of Oz is based on Katharine M. Rogers, L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).