The Children's Blizzard (12 page)

Indications for 24 hours commencing at 7 AM today. For Saint Paul, Minneapolis and vicinity: Warmer weather with snow, fresh southerly winds becoming variable. For Minnesota: Warmer with snow fresh to high southerly winds becoming variable. For Dakota: Snow, warmer, followed in the western portion by colder weather, fresh to high winds generally becoming northerly. The snow will drift heavily in Minnesota and Dakota during the day and tonight; the winds will generally shift to high colder northerly during the afternoon and night.

Woodruff had decided not to issue a cold wave warning. Instructions from Acting Chief Signal Officer Brigadier General Adolphus W. Greely were extremely clear in this regard. “The exact meaning of the term ‘cold wave,’” Greely had written, “implies that the temperature will fall below forty-five (45) degrees, and that in twenty-four hours an abnormal fall of fifteen, or more, degrees will occur." Woodruff himself was something of an expert on cold waves, having written a pamphlet on the subject back in 1885, shortly after he had been detailed for Signal Corps duty. As he well knew, the overwhelming majority of cold waves that hit the Upper Midwest originated east of the Rockies and swept east or southeast down from Montana.

Temperatures would plunge first in Helena, then Bismarck and Deadwood in the western reaches of Dakota Territory, then Huron and Yankton in southern Dakota and so on until the cold air reached his own forecast office in Saint Paul. But after studying the 10 P.M. (Eastern time) observations telegraphed from Signal Corps stations to the west, Woodruff concluded that a cold wave warning was not warranted for the next day. Caution was called for, not alarm, especially given how tenuous his position in Saint Paul was. Greely himself had sent Woodruff west to open the office in Saint Paul as part of an experiment in decentralizing the government weather service.

Though he had only been forecasting from Saint Paul since October, already Woodruff had issued many more cold wave warnings than his counterparts at the Signal Corps headquarters in Washington had issued the previous year. Better not to cry wolf.

At a few minutes before midnight of January 11, 1888, Woodruff handed the slip of tissue paper with the indications for the twelfth to Sergeant McAdie and instructed him to encode the message and then transmit it by telegraph to the Saint Paul Western Union office, from which it would be distributed to the Office of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington; to the Saint Paul District Telegraph Company; to the Associated Press and the major newspapers in Minneapolis and Saint Paul; to the Signal Corps observers in Milwaukee, Bismarck, Rapid City, and Fort Custer; and to Private Brandenburg of the Minnesota State Weather Service, who would see that it was distributed to sixty-seven volunteer observers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. This was the routine routing procedure for the midnight indications.

Entrusting an officer at a branch office with the task of forecasting the weather was, as both Woodruff and Greely well knew, a bold and radical move. Since 1870, when the Army’s Signal Corps first took charge of the nation’s weather, all forecasting for the United States had been done by a select handful of “indications officers" working at the Signal Office on G Street near the War Department in Washington, D.C. No matter whether it was a nor’easter bearing down on the New England coast or a persistent series of squalls threatening to flood the Mississippi, all forecasts—initially called "probabilities,” then altered to “indications” in 1876—were made in the same circuitous way: Observations were telegraphed to Washington headquarters, maps were drawn and predictions made by the small team of civilian and military meteorologists (most of them commissioned line officers with a few months’ training in physics, math, and telegraphy), and the forecasts were then telegraphed back to the field stations as well as to newspapers and railroads. But in the autumn of 1887, under pressure from a group of Saint Paul businessmen worried about the economic consequences of yet another severe winter, Greely agreed to break with Signal Corps tradition and open a branch office in Saint Paul. As Greely wrote later, “The great advantages of knowing sixteen to twenty-four hours in advance that the temperature will fall quickly, apply not only to manifold business interests, but affect the comfort of thousands, and at times the health and life of hundreds.” By Greely’s estimate, an indications officer in Saint Paul would be able to issue cold wave warnings “from two to five hours” earlier than was possible from Washington.

Assigning the post to Thomas Woodruff was an interesting if somewhat risky move on Greely’s part, riskier than the general realized at the time. A handsome well-groomed man with close-cropped fair hair parted in the middle, a bristling Teddy Roosevelt mustache, and a fine prominent nose, Woodruff was a military type more common in the late nineteenth century than in the early twenty-first—an officer and a gentleman. The fact that he was also a weather forecaster was less a matter of personal inclination or talent than a quirk of government bureaucracy and circumstance.

Since the Signal Corps suffered from a chronic shortage of officers capable of or interested in observing and predicting the weather, General William B. Hazen, Greely’s predecessor as chief signal officer, had started tapping officers from other branches of the Army for Signal duty, generally detailing lieutenants from the artillery, infantry, and cavalry. Relieved temporarily of their other military responsibilities, the lieutenants were dispatched to Fort Myer (near the capital on a site adjoining Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia) for a training course in signaling, electricity, telegraphy, and the basics of physics, math, and meteorology. They were issued sabers and taught to ride horses. They learned how to send messages at all hours and in all weather by flag and torch. They were shouted at and addressed as “fish.” They took apart telegraph transmitters to see what made the “click” and put them back together. They were supposed to master the craft of tapping out Morse code. Six months later they emerged as Signal officers. Those select few who showed particular aptitude for the vagaries of forecasting became indications officers.

This was the path that Thomas Woodruff followed starting on February 6, 1883, when General Hazen ordered him to leave his regiment at Fort Keogh on the dry plains of eastern Montana and report to Washington, D.C., for Signal duty.

By this point, Woodruff already had over a decade of strenuous military service under his belt. Like his father before him, he had attended West Point, where he was nicknamed Tim (nicknaming entering plebes is an old West Point tradition) and graduated fifteenth in a class of forty. Immediately after graduation, he signed up with the Fifth Infantry and traveled out to Fort Wallace, Kansas, to join his company. Though he had grown up in Buffalo, New York, and Washington, D.C., with all the comforts and privileges of old Yan-kee families, the young Thomas Woodruff took to the West at once.

For most of his twenties he was on frontier duty fighting “hostile Indians” in Kansas, Montana, and Dakota Territory. In 1876 and again in 1877, Woodruff requested permission to leave safe survey-ing posts with the Corps of Engineers so he could fight under Colonel (later General) Nelson Appleton Miles in his ruthless campaigns against the remnants of the once great tribes of the Plains—the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Kiowa, and the Comanche. Woodruff was continually in the field during the autumn of 1877 when Colonel Miles pursued Chief Joseph and his band of Nez Perce hold-outs for fourteen hundred miles across Montana. He fought in the five-day skirmish that ended in the capture of the heroic chief (“The Red Napoleon,” as the press called him) on October 5, 1877, and he was present when Chief Joseph spoke his famous words of surrender to General Miles: “I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. . . . You might as well expect the rivers to run backwards as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases." Despite his bravery in the field, Woodruff harbored no illusions about the glory of combat. He was well aware of the toll these bloody campaigns took on the U.S. military. “These wars are not welcome to the Army,” he wrote later. “An Indian campaign means to officer and soldier, toil and hardship, hunger and thirst, heat and cold, imminent danger, perhaps sudden death; or if a man fall wounded, certain torture from which death is a happy release." During the Snow Winter of 1880–81, Woodruff was with Major Guido Ilges fighting the Sioux in Montana. He battled Sitting Bull and his warriors near the Missouri River in the fierce engagement of January 2, 1881. Three Indian villages were destroyed and some 324 prisoners taken (Sitting Bull not among them). It was during that legendary winter that Woodruff recorded a temperature of 63 below zero on his spirit thermometer.

The Indian wars and the extreme weather of the West turned Woodruff into a hardened professional soldier—but the rigors of frontier duty also, rather incongruously, brought out his artistic side. This veteran of some of the most brutal campaigns of the Plains prided himself on his wide reading in literature, history, biography, metaphysics, ethics, and law, and on his accomplishments as a passionate amateur of the gentle arts. “I am very fond of the arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture,” Woodruff wrote Greely before he left for Saint Paul. “I have made many sketches from nature in water colors; and also made topographical field sketches, and maps.” During his “spare moments” in Indian fighting and survey-ing, Woodruff made “a large and quite a complete collection of the flora of the ‘Staked Plains’ [dry mesa country in northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico], and also a large entomological collection.” He published a series of articles describing the Yellowstone Valley and the Bad Lands of Montana in the
Boston Traveller
and an essay on “Our Indian Question” in the
Journal of the Military Service
Institution
in which he argued that the United States government’s Indian policy was “inconsistent with itself, false in theory, ruinous and cruel in practice, and has in its continued use the ultimate extinction of the Indian race.” “Under the banners of civilization and Christianity there have been committed wrongs against the Indian that must cause the most hardened man to blush with shame," wrote Woodruff in 1881, sounding a note that would be repeated again and again over the next century.

Whenever he was granted leaves from military service, Woodruff traveled to Europe. And yet he invariably cut those leaves short in order to rejoin his regiment in its relentless pursuit of “hostile Indians” across Montana and the Dakotas. Though he was convinced that these Indian wars were unjust and unwise, Woodruff did his duty without question. The words
honor, honorable, honor-loving, courage, coolness, duty, value, trust, responsibility, justice, character, honest,
and
proper
recur in his writings and correspondence. “Having been educated for the Military profession my desire is to excel in every thing pertaining thereto,” he wrote Greely. Woodruff was an officer who evinced and demanded the utmost respect for military discipline, yet he was not embarrassed to set up his easel at the edge of camp as the evening light turned golden or to wander through the Texas scrub, basket and secateurs in hand, gathering samples of switchgrass
(Panicum virgatum)
and blue grama grass
(Bouteloua gracilis)
and the starry yellow flowers of the
Zinnia grandiflora
that bloomed miraculously out of the thin, arid soil. Soldierly and sensitive. Gentlemanly and daring.

And
quiet
—that’s another word that comrades used to describe Lieutenant Woodruff.

On April 19, 1882, when he was thirty-three years old, Woodruff married Annie Sampson of Cincinnati and obtained a six-month leave from military duties. The newlyweds immediately embarked on an extended tour through England and the Continent, after which Woodruff rejoined his regiment in Fort Keogh, Montana, his wife presumably returning to Cincinnati to live with her parents. The following May, about a month after their first wedding anniversary, Annie Woodruff gave birth to a daughter they named Elizabeth. By then, fortunately, domestic arrangements were considerably easier for the couple since Woodruff had been summoned to Washington in February to report for Signal duty.

When his only child was born on May 9, 1883, Woodruff was enrolled in the officers’ training course at Fort Myer, practically within sight of his boyhood home. The following summer he qualified as an indications officer and for the next three years he and his family lived peacefully in Washington, D.C., the lieutenant reporting to work in the Indications Room at the Office of the Chief Signal Officer on G Street while Mrs. Woodruff saw to the duties of running a household and raising a daughter.

"Meteorology has ever been an apple of contention,” observed Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian Institution’s first director, “as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who have attempted to study them." Contention reached a pitch of violence and nastiness inside the Signal Corps during the period of Woodruff ’s service in the 1880s. Vicious gossip and interoffice backstabbing were rife; charges of incompetence and fiscal impropriety rained down from Congress while Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln (the president’s son) loudly demanded investigations into the raging scandals; Signal officers routinely aired their grievances in the press; military old-timers railed that the chief civilian forecaster, Cleveland Abbe, known affectionately as “Old Probs,” had been brought in over the heads of Army indications officers; civilian employees fumed over the endless snarls of military red tape. All this was bad enough. But there was worse. The chief financial manager of the Signal Corps, a dashing, philandering English-born captain named Henry W. Howgate, was arrested in 1881 for embezzling nearly a quarter of a million dollars (half of which he supposedly spent on prostitutes).

Howgate, having conded when he was released from prison for a single day to visit his daughter, was still at large when Woodruff reported for Signal duty in 1883.