Reporter
Rain of Error
Dry enough for you? It was for General R.G. Dyrenforth, whose bizarre attempts more than a century ago to solve Texas' little drought problem precipitated only ridicule.
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As the days wore on in West Texas, Dyrenforth's team kept up a steady stream of breathless "specials" (press releases) about the immense explosions they had made and the rain that had followed. On August 18 they reported that, after firing their ground batteries for twelve hours and exploding a "large quantity of oxyhydrogen gas" in ten-foot-diameter balloons, rain "fell in torrents for two and a half hours." On August 25, after more ground fire, detonations, and balloon explosions, they said that several more inches of rain fell during the night. Dyrenforth and his fellow rainmakers claimed full responsibility.
And the American media gave them full credit. The Rocky Mountain News said that rain had fallen almost daily since the beginning of the experiments. In a glowing story about Dyrenforth's success, the Chicago Tribune asserted that the rainmakers had caused a "drenching shower" four times. The New York Sun even ran a poetic tribute: "I am Cloud-compelling Dyrenforth, a mighty able wight; / I can call the clouds together with a load of dynamite."
FLUSH WITH VICTORY AND BUOYED by dazzling headlines, Dyrenforth hustled back to Washington to capitalize on his successes. He berated the "scientific wiseacres" who had doubted him, insisted that his group had caused rain a dozen times, and wrote what amounted to a lengthy victory lap in the October 1891 issue of the North American Review under the title "Can We Make It Rain?" He and Farwell immediately began to lobby for more money from Congress. This time Farwell had in mind $500,000 to $1 million.
There was just one problem: Much of what Dyrenforth and his colleagues had told America, and most of what the newspapers had reported, was not true. While the big-city papers had chosen not to send reporters to cover the rainmaking, two agricultural trade papers had. The accounts in Farm Implement News and Texas Farm and Ranch of what had happened on the C Ranch completely contradicted the press releases. They formed the basis of a Scientific American story in January 1892 ridiculing Dyrenforth's experiments as "foolish fireworks" and "expensive farce." The magazine said that his reports were "in most instances grossly exaggerated and in some cases wholly destitute of truth."
What the ag reporters found when they arrived, in fact, was a group of inept scientific novices who, battling severe cases of diarrhea brought on by drinking alkaline well water, watched helplessly as their balloons caught fire or were blown miles away by high winds, their homemade mortars self-destructed, their hydrogen generators became engulfed in flames, and their kites refused to fly. While the dailies carried stories of drenching rains, the one government meteorologist on the expedition, George Curtis, was recording "inappreciable" precipitation. On August 18, when Dyrenforth claimed to have produced a torrential downpour, Curtis recorded two hundredths of an inch of water. This was the "hard rain" that the Washington Post insisted had fallen for four hours and twenty minutes. The rain Dyrenforth had reported on August 26 did fall but had in fact been predicted by the Weather Bureau.
None of this seemed to bother the rainmakers. While Dyrenforth lobbied in Washington, his team, now led by Oberlin College professor John Ellis, remained in Texas and immediately took on two new rainmaking assignments. The first was in El Paso, where the city's mayor had engaged them to shoot off their charges from the summit of Mount Franklin. This experiment was a more obvious failure. After "lots of firing" on September 18, no rain fell. According to the team's ever-optimistic report to Congress, however, "it was ascertained that soon after midnight, rain had begun to fall within a few miles of El Paso." This was to become a familiar refrain: They had caused rain to fall, but it had simply fallen elsewhere.
The second experiment was partly financed by King Ranch owner Robert Kleberg and was conducted in Corpus Christi and in the small town of San Diego, near the King Ranch headquarters in South Texas. After an inconclusive firing in Corpus because of wet weather (which did not prevent the Minneapolis Tribune from reporting a major success), the team moved to San Diego and set off a truly enormous amount of ordnance: 800 charges of dynamite, 1,500 pounds of rackarock, and 7,000 cubic feet of oxyhydrogen gas. The team reported that at four o'clock the next morning "rain was pouring down in torrents."
DYRENFORTH'S UNDOING CAME IN SAN ANTONIO in the fall of 1892. He had believed, ironically, that this instance of rainmaking would be his crowning success, the final proof needed to pry millions of dollars from Congress. Aided by his voluminous report to lawmakers in early 1892, in which, while insisting that his results were "preliminary," he clearly claimed credit for making rain, Dyrenforth had managed to extract another $10,000.
Yet criticism of his activities was mounting. Curtis, who had long since returned to Washington in disgust, published articles critical of Dyrenforth. Representative Buck Kilgore, of Texas, called the experiment a "dead failure." In a blistering commentary, the editor of the Nation said that what Dyrenforth was doing was as absurd as dispatching "the North Atlantic Squadron to melt the icebergs on the [Grand] Banks by bombarding the Gulf Stream off New York." Political cartoons depicted Dyrenforth as a charlatan. The New York Tribune suggested puckishly that, since explosions created rain, would not string orchestras, sent aloft in balloons, soothe the clouds and stop severe storms?
Undeterred, and awash in new congressional money, Dyrenforth arrived in San Antonio in November and, in front of a large crowd, proceeded to make a fool of himself. This time he was armed with forty tons of explosives. He chose a place near the Argyle Hotel in Alamo Heights for his experiment, some four miles north of downtown. In his first test, he placed a large quantity of an explosive called Rosellite in a mesquite tree about five hundred feet from the hotel. When it went off, it both obliterated the tree and broke every window in the hotel. As usual, many things went wrong. The San Antonio Daily Express noted that his mortar shells "either exploded within the guns or nearby on the ground, failing miserably to attain their objective in the skies." He blasted on for days, without result, while, according to the Express, "an ungrateful public jeered the dauntless General Dyrenforth." When it rained hard in Laredo, residents of that city sent mocking congratulations to the rainmakers. Even Edward Powers, the influential author who had started it all, publicly turned against Dyrenforth and his inept methods.
Everyone, it seemed, turned on him at once. "The scheme has gone up like a rocket and come down like a stick," reported the San Antonio Evening Star in an editorial headlined "Fakes and Fakirs." The once-fawning Washington Post wrote that "the whole hullabaloo did not lead to any more water than would furnish a canary bird with its morning bath." The Chicago Times said that the money would have been "less ridiculously employed if it were devoted to the manufacture of whistles out of pigs' tails." And the government pulled out of the experiments with breathtaking speed. Dyrenforth was soon asked to return the unspent balance of $5,000 to the U.S. Treasury.
Thus ended the government's rainmaking experiments in the nineteenth century. What it did not end, however, were private concussionist experiments, which went on for years. In 1902, in the West Texas town of Carlsbad, a man named Charles Hatfield sent up balloons loaded with sticks of dynamite to make it rain. For four years, starting in 1910, cereal magnate C. W. Post spent $50,000 on 23 Dyrenforthian rain battles at Post City, near Lubbock. He died in 1914 believing that he could "shoot up a rain" whenever he wanted to. In 1912 a series of locally financed firings were made in Wichita Falls, Anson, Hamlin, Stamford, San Angelo, and Thurber. Not until French studies during World War I proved that there was no connection between explosions and rainfall did the idea finally lose its momentum.
Dyrenforth, meanwhile, faded back into obscurity, apparently to finish out his days as a Washington, D.C., patent attorney. The next time he appeared in the headlines was at the time of his death, in 1910—and then only because of a bizarre provision in his will. He had stipulated that, to receive his bequest, his twelve-year-old grandson had to renounce Catholicism, complete high school and then an academic program at Harvard, read law at Oxford, do a full course of study at West Point and six months' service in the Army, and then attend law school in the U.S. It sounded crazy—almost as crazy as waging war against the sky.
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