The Children's Blizzard (13 page)

Somehow in this seething atmosphere Woodruff managed to escape all but the mildest slaps and the faintest whispers of error or misconduct. Now and then Woodruff failed to fill out one of the in-numerable military forms properly or promptly enough, and he got into a bit of hot water after reporting some malicious gossip that he had heard while inspecting the Chicago Signal Corps station. On one occasion the chief signal officer thundered that his “serious error of judgment” in transcribing the barometric pressure of Salt Lake City spoiled not only “the original chart . . . but an entire day’s work of the printed charts.” Compared to Greely’s routine blasts threatening to sack, transfer, discipline, and/or arrest errant or insubordinate Signal officers, this was very mild indeed. But Woodruff ’s turn would come.

The fact that violent commotions continued unabated in the Signal Corps after Greely assumed control in 1887 upon General Hazen’s death was a grave disappointment inside Grover Cleveland’s War Department, for Greely had been appointed expressly to restore order. Indeed, the forty-three-year-old Brigadier General Adolphus Washington Greely looked like the answer to the prayers of those who had despaired of the Corps during the riotous Hazen years. A lifetime soldier, Greely had enlisted as a sixteen-year-old private in the Union Army at the start of the Civil War and moved up steadily through the ranks of the Signal Corps over two decades.

He was an ambitious, hard-driving, punctilious officer given to fits of peevish displeasure. His superiors admired and rewarded him for feats like stringing eleven hundred miles of new telegraph lines through harsh, treeless south Texas terrain infested with bandits and hostile Indians and for aggressively recruiting observers for the growing network of Signal Corps weather stations. But it was tragedy and terrible failure that made Greely famous.

On July 17, 1884, First Lieutenant Greely became a national hero when he returned from Greenland—barely alive—with the five survivors of his doomed Arctic expedition. With the financial support and encouragement of the nefarious Howgate—one of Greely’s bo-som friends—Greely and twenty-four men had set out for the Arctic in the summer of 1881, with the overt scientific mission of conduct-ing research and setting up meteorological stations as part of the First International Polar Year (declared for 1882–83). But like all Arctic explorers before and after, Greely really had his heart set on attaining the pole itself or at least planting the American flag on the "farthest north.” This was duly attained when, on May 15, 1882, his second lieutenant, James B. Lockwood, set the Stars and Stripes and a self-recording spirit thermometer in a nine-foot rock pile in western Greenland at a latitude of 83° 24'N, four miles closer to the North Pole than any white explorer had ventured before.

Almost everything else about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was a disaster. In 1882 and again in 1883, supply ships failed to reach Greely’s camp at Fort Conger on the east coast of Ellesmere Island (northwest of Greenland)—one ship sank with all the provisions; the other, encountering thick ice, returned home with its full cargo of relief supplies. The expedition’s orders, drawn up in the comfort of Washington, D.C., specified that in the event that the relief ships never showed up, Greely was to move the party south by September 1, 1883—and on August 9 that’s exactly what he insisted on doing, despite the fact that nearly every other member of the crew vehemently objected to leaving the comparatively safe and well-supplied camp at Fort Conger. In the best of circumstances, Greely, when crossed, could be a waspish martinet: He was a dogmatic, stubborn, uncompromising commander who led not by natural authority or earned devotion, but by rigid enforcement of rules and orders. But the rigors of the Arctic brought out his worst. By the time he gave the order to break camp at Fort Conger, most of his men hated him to the point of violence. But they had no choice: Since Greely controlled the supplies, it was either obey or die. After nearly two nightmarish months on drifting pack ice, with winter fast closing in, the party made camp on the desolate wastes of Cape Sabine, some two hundred miles to the south.

“Madness,”
one of the men scrawled in his diary. They had lost several of their boats and much food on the trek south—and there was no resupply cache and no big game to hunt. As the dark frigid months dragged on, they ate their belts and boots and trousers—and then they ate the clothing of the men who died. They ate the filthy oil-tanned covers of their sleeping bags, warming them in a nauseating stew of lichen and seal skin. Finally, in desperation, some of the survivors were reduced to dragging the corpses of the dead out of their shallow ice graves and carving off strips of flesh to swallow in secrecy. In the course of that grim winter and spring, the party’s third winter inside the Arctic, eighteen men died—of starvation, of exposure, of suicide, and in one case of a military execu-tion that Greely had ordered as a punishment for stealing food and insubordination. As they starved and froze and watched their comrades die, the men cursed Greely, privately to each other and in their diaries. “This man (I cannot call him a gentleman) comes among us like a serpent in Eden and creates eternal hatred toward himself,” one member of the expedition hissed in his diary. “To die is easy, very easy,” one of Greely’s men scrawled in his diary as life ebbed away; “it is only hard to strive, to endure, to live." By the time U.S. Navy Commander Winfield Scott Schley reached Cape Sabine on June 22, 1884, only Greely and six of the crew were still alive. “He was unable to stand alone and was almost helpless,” wrote Schley of Greely’s condition; “all pain of hunger had ceased; his appearance was wild, his hair long and matted, his face and hands covered with sooty, thick dirt; his form wasted almost to a skeleton; his feet and hands were swollen, his eyes were sunken and his body barely covered with dirty and almost worn out garments which had not been changed for six or eight months." One of the six surviving crew members—Corporal Joseph Elison—died a few days later on board Schley’s rescue ship after both his legs were amputated. Elison had already lost most of his fingers and both feet to frostbite. He weighed seventy-eight pounds.

Secretary of the Navy William Chandler and General Hazen were on hand to welcome the six survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition when Schley’s ship the
Thetis
steamed into Portsmouth Harbor August 2, 1884. Despite the sensational rumors of canni-balism that dominated the press coverage of the rescue, Greely was accorded the full hero treatment—the military promotion (to captain soon after his return, despite the bitter opposition of Robert Todd Lincoln, who as secretary of war had done everything in his power to thwart the expedition and the rescue efforts); the book deal (
Three Years of Arctic Service
was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1886); and, upon Hazen’s death, the appointment by President Grover Cleveland to the post of acting chief signal officer, which entailed an automatic promotion to brigadier-general.

Greely prided himself on being the first member of the military to rise from volunteer private to the rank of general.

As chief signal officer, Greely moved swiftly to try to clean up the messes left behind by Hazen. After perusing the reports on field stations filed by Signal Corps inspectors (among them Woodruff, who made an extended inspection tour of New England and the Midwest in the summer of 1887), Greely learned just how bad things had gotten. One New England observer was taking nude photos of young women in the weather station. An observer in the Rockies routinely fabricated a week’s worth of observations ahead of time and took them to the local telegraph office with instructions to send them off one day at a time so he could spend the week fishing. Yet another observer was forced to hock all the weather instruments in order to pay his poker debts: He made his observations at the appropriate times at the local pawn shop. The observers in New Orleans were extorting regular payments from the local cotton exchanges in return for weather data. Woodruff reported that a sergeant in the Chicago office was convinced that a private had been sent out from Washington to “keep a spy on him.” Another observer was, in Greely’s words, “foisting useless instruments of his own invention upon this service at an extravagant price.” In his first year as chief signal officer, Greely fired a hundred Signal Corps employees.

Greely authorized the experimental indications office in Saint Paul during this flush of reforming zeal, though his choice of Saint Paul as the location had less to do with reform than with politics and pressure from local interests. Indeed, Greely had been lobbied hard that summer by the five prominent businessmen who constituted the “meteorological committee” of the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce. On August 13, 1887, these gentlemen sent Greely a letter strongly recommending that an indications office be opened in their city (and
not
in Chicago, as Greely himself desired) in order to enhance the timeliness and accuracy of cold wave and heavy snow warnings. About two weeks later, a second and even more urgent request arrived on Greely’s desk under the firm, clear signature of one Professor William Wallace Payne, and Payne then followed up his letter with a personal visit to Washington, D.C. This clinched the deal. It’s unclear what Greely knew about the character, accomplishments, and aspirations of William Wallace Payne before the business about the indications office—but by the end of that winter he was to know much more than he wanted to about all three.

Payne, a man of “genius and enthusiasm” in the words of one contemporary, was a formidable figure in Minnesota intellectual circles with his finger in many scientific pies. Weather was one of them. Timekeeping another. Hired in 1871 as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the fledgling Carleton College in Northfield, south of Saint Paul, Payne persuaded the Carleton trustees to build the first astronomical observatory in Minnesota.

Payne then acquired at his own expense a three-inch Fauth transit circle by which he could measure the positions and motions of the stars and planets and two state-of-the-art Howard & Company clocks. Thus equipped he could determine the time more precisely than anyone in Minnesota—indeed, more precisely than just about anyone anywhere in America. This was a matter of no small importance in a country that was rapidly reinventing itself as an industrial and financial giant.

Payne himself strung the wire that connected the readings of his Howard clocks to the nation’s telegraphic network and thus put his observatory—and Carleton College—on the map as an official time service. For years the local railroads set their clocks by the signal sent out by Professor Payne, and starting in September 1881, Payne also relayed the signal for the daily time ball drop in downtown Saint Paul by which residents set their watches (the New Year’s Eve ball drop over New York City’s Times Square is a vestige of this practice). A fierce rivalry developed between Payne and the U.S. Naval Observatory, which also provided a daily time signal.

Not only did Payne pride himself that
his
time was more accurate than Navy time, but he railed against the Naval Observatory for contracting with Western Union Telegraph Company to transmit its time signal around the country. Payne considered Western Union to be greedy, monopolistic, and inefficient, and he never lost an opportunity to blacken the company’s name and thwart their increasing control of telegraphy. During the winter of the blizzard, Payne’s private campaign against Western Union would figure in his bitter conflict with Lieutenant Woodruff.

With an observatory at his disposal, it was easy for Payne to add meteorological observations to his other scientific endeavors, and in November 1881 he started taking official thrice-daily readings for the Signal Corps (the chief signal officer decreed that these observations be synchronized to Eastern time, with the first observation made at 7 A.M., the second at 3 P.M., and the third at 10 P.M., which meant that observers on the West Coast never got a decent night’s sleep). Two years later, Payne became director of the Minnesota State Weather Service—the newly organized Minnesota branch of a largely voluntary state-level network set up for the purpose of gathering weather data, disseminating warnings, and reporting to farmers on conditions affecting their crops. It was in this capacity that he wrote to Greely on August 25, 1887, about the need for an indications officer in Saint Paul.

Greely endorsed Payne’s proposal and, for a bureaucrat, acted on it with amazing speed. Within a matter of weeks he had selected Woodruff for the post and he had a member of his staff fire off a letter ordering the lieutenant to “proceed to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and establish in that city, not later than October 20, 1887, an office for the purpose of making weather indications for north western states.” The orders stated explicitly that this new office was being established “for the purpose of better serving the stock-growing and other interests in the northwest and with a view of furnishing the information to the public more promptly.” Stock-growers first, the public second.

Woodruff was on the road inspecting Signal Corps offices when word of his transfer arrived, and he hurried back to Washington at the end of August to consult with Greely about his new responsibilities. Before departing, he took a ten-day leave to vacation at Nonquitt Beach near New Bedford, Massachusetts, presumably with his wife and four-year-old daughter. It’s unclear whether Woodruff brought his family with him to what he later called the "outpost” of Saint Paul, but it seems unlikely. As the sole forecaster for a region larger than New York and New England combined, he would be working for the next six months from nine in the morning to midnight six days a week (with a five-hour dinner break between the afternoon and nighttime observations) with no leave—not a schedule conducive to family life. Even Greely expressed concern that Woodruff would find this relentless routine to be “confining.” “It is desired,” Greely wrote in his characteristic stiff formal style, “that you shall reduce it [your work] to such an extent that its continuance during the winter will not be detrimen-tal to your general health.” Woodruff departed for Saint Paul on October 13 and arrived two days later.