The Children's Blizzard (14 page)

The beginning was rough. Woodruff complained that the Signal Corps office on the top floor of the six-story Chamber of Commerce building in downtown Saint Paul was too cramped and lacked "telegraphic facilities.” The furniture was inadequate, the two staff members already on duty—longtime observer Sergeant Patrick Lyons and Private Edwin Brandenburg—were too busy with other tasks to be of much help, and worst of all, the data from other stations that Woodruff needed for making forecasts arrived chroni-cally late or not at all. A week passed and Woodruff telegraphed Greely that he was still unable to begin issuing indications. He scrambled to rent an office in room 60, across the hall from room 55, where Lyons and Brandenburg worked, and managed to install desks and shelves. Finally, on the night of October 28, Woodruff issued his first set of indications from the Saint Paul office.

The three pages of orders that Greely dictated detailing Woodruff ’s new responsibilities included clear and detailed instructions regarding his dealings with Professor Payne: Immediately after his arrival in Saint Paul, Woodruff was to set up a meeting so that Payne could brief him on “the general outline of the meteorological work performed by him” as director of the Minnesota State Weather Service and “in cooperation with the Signal Service.” The meeting went well. Payne wrote to Greely on October 22 that he was “pleased” with Woodruff and promised to help him. But relations between the two soured very quickly. By November, they had all but declared war. The conflict flared around the usual issues: power, authority, money, jealousy, rivalry, control of information. To begin with, Payne, after his initial welcome, made it very plain that as director of the Minnesota State Weather Service he considered himself to have control over the Saint Paul Signal Office, which meant that Woodruff was his subordinate. “Professor Payne had quite an idea that I was to report to him,” Woodruff wrote later, "and was quite surprised when I read him the part of my instructions, showing that there was no relation whatever except as to consulting about the establishment of stations." Even more rancorous was their fight over how weather data was to be gathered and communicated, for this directly involved Payne’s old bête noire, Western Union. The two men met to discuss the matter at Woodruff ’s office on November 14 and, as Woodruff reported to Greely, Payne “was anything but pleasant." Back in August, Payne had written Greely that Western Union might be “willing to allow” the railroads to send weather messages free of charge, and on the basis of this possibility he urged the general to authorize the opening of twenty new weather stations to improve observations and distribution of warnings in the region.

Payne’s idea was to expand the meteorological network along the rail lines and get Western Union to foot the communications bill—in essence enlisting the two most powerful and advanced technologies of the day in the cause of better forecasting. That was in August. Now in November, Payne insisted airily to Woodruff that it
didn’t matter
what Western Union charged or who had to pay—the messages
must be sent.
Woodruff countered that “as soon as the railroads sent me telegrams of the weather to be used by me in making the general predictions just so soon would the Western Union Company claim the government rates, and that if I received such messages they would be the basis of a claim against the United States.” Whereupon Payne demanded, “Is it any of your business or concern where or how messages came provided they gave you information that you could use in making indications?" “It certainly was my business,” Woodruff fired back. “I should receive no messages without knowing how they came, and none whatsoever that would in any way compromise the Government and form a basis for a claim for money." From there the men proceeded to bickering about their relations with the railroads, Payne complaining that Woodruff had gone behind his back in contacting railroad managers about distributing weather reports, and Woodruff retorting that he was under no obligation to include Payne in these negotiations. “I find thus far," Woodruff wrote Greely a week later, “that the Saint Paul and Omaha, and all the other roads do not want to have any or at least wish to have as little to do with Prof. Payne as possible. Whereas in every instance I have been cordially received. . . . The indications and cold-wave warnings are highly appreciated, and are concidered [
sic
] absolutely necessary for the use of Railroad managers, and their subordinates.” Woodruff added that the State Weather Service would certainly have received funding from the Minnesota legislature the previous winter “had not Prof. Payne been connected with it." Payne proved to be a formidable enemy. But this was just the beginning. Woodruff soon found himself fending off a flank attack from the chair of the Meteorological Committee of the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce, one Thomas Cochran Jr., a local businessman notorious for his shady practices and high-stakes lawsuits. “I find his [Cochran’s] standing as a fair and square business man is not good,” wrote Woodruff, “though he is leader of several religious organizations.” “Not good” was putting it mildly. One of Cochran’s former business partners had just accused him of a ten-thousand-dollar swindle (it later turned out that the amount was actually thirty-seven thousand dollars and Cochran was forced to repay it, but by then other lawsuits had been brought against him). It wasn’t just Cochran—the entire Meteorological Committee was boiling with scandal and fiscal impropriety. Woodruff learned of an old rumor that the Chamber of Commerce paid out $608 to the State Weather Service in 1886, though no accounting of this sum could be found. And further, Cochran and his cohorts had been circulating a penny postcard to local businesses soliciting “a contribution of $5 to the annual expenses of the Minnesota State Weather Service.” The card bore the signature of Private Brandenburg of the U.S. Signal Corps, though Brandenburg strenuously denied having anything to do with this fund-raising scheme.

In December, Greely dispatched a bluff Irish lieutenant on his staff named John C. Walshe (famous in the Corps for pummeling telegraph keys with his fist and pounding rulers to smithereens on his desk) to inspect the Saint Paul Signal office. The general promptly got another earful of dirt. Alluding to the “begging circulars” sent out by Cochran’s committee, Walshe reported that “in some way the impression has been produced that the public service here, rendered by the United States Signal Service, depends on the result of money raising by the people, and is a mercenary affair. This is to be deplored, as it distracts from the value of the Action of the Chief Signal Officer in establishing an Indications office as this point.” Walshe further noted that Western Union officials complained bitterly that Professor Payne “is continually opposing that company,” and that Saint Paul’s “very honest, painstaking and conscientious” observer Sergeant Patrick Lyons, “has complained to me that some time ago, Prof. Payne interfered very much with the working of his office." This was not at all what the sensitive, soldierly Lieutenant Woodruff had in mind when he boarded the train for Saint Paul back in October. He thought he had been summoned westward to provide an important and much-needed public service to the stock growers and ordinary citizens of the Upper Midwest, but instead he found that he had stumbled into a hornet’s nest of vicious politics, inflated egos, long-standing feuds, petty turf wars, and unscrupulous business practices. Not that Woodruff himself was blameless in his battle with Payne and the Meteorological Committee of the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce. A career soldier first and a scientist second, Woodruff made a fetish out of executing his orders punctiliously—even if it meant impeding or sacrificing the pursuit of knowledge. Like all meteorologists, Woodruff was well aware that no matter how accurate his “indications” were, they would be useless if he could not communicate them to the public in time. He knew—again like all forecasters before and since—that the more observed data he had to work with, the better his predictions would be. Yet not only did Woodruff fail to attempt to make his indications available more swiftly and more widely and to expand the network of data-gathering stations, he did everything in his power to block these avenues. The explanation was simple: He had orders from headquarters and he must follow them.

Did Woodruff thereby contribute to the tragedy of the January 12, 1888, blizzard? It’s impossible to know for sure. Had Payne gotten his way and set up the twenty new stations, had Woodruff pushed to use even the existing network to get cold wave and heavy snow warnings out faster, had he agreed with Payne that it didn’t matter where or how weather “messages” were communicated so long as they
were
communicated, lives might very well have been spared. The science of meteorology, though barely out of its infancy, was advanced enough to predict the intense cold wave that came in the wake of the storm. The technology of the day, though primitive, was sufficient to communicate that prediction all but instantaneously to wherever telegraph wires reached. The fact remains that no one in a position of authority had the imagination or the will to combine science and technology and take action.

By all available evidence, Thomas Woodruff was a fine person, scrupulous about his work, a brave soldier, and a cultivated man of the world, well traveled and well read, liked by his peers and respected by his superiors. Yet it never occurred to him that he might have done something more urgent to alert the people of the Upper Midwest that the mild calm weather of the morning of January 12 would not last. In nothing that he wrote in his official capacity as Signal Corps indications officer does he make a connection between his work and the fate of the people who froze to death or suffocated in blowing snow or lost limbs to frostbite on January 12. The letters and reports he sent back to Washington are full of his resentment of Payne, his meetings with railroad officials, his outrage at local corruption, his bewilderment at the scant public appreciation for “the value of this office and the advantages that it affords.” On several occasions he attached to these official reports clippings of articles from the local papers about the work of the indications office and his duties as a forecaster. Yet never once did he allude to the blizzard and its aftermath that occupied the front pages of every newspaper in the region for days.

Which is perhaps another way of saying that the quiet, gentlemanly Lieutenant Woodruff was very much a man of his time and place and rank. Certainly that was how he was judged by his superiors.

Saint Paul in 1888 was a city of red brick and gray granite, steel tracks and cobblestone streets, a solid, young, substantial state capital straddling the northern reaches of the great Mississippi River.

To the west, seemingly just over the lip of the bluffs, the endless prairie rolled out, innocent of a single settlement worthy of the name city, with the possible exception of brash, too-close Minneapolis. Fleets of ships crawled up the Mississippi from the older river cities to the south. Some eight hundred freight trains rumbled in and out of the mansard-roofed Union Depot each day along the eighteen rail lines that connected Saint Paul to the bursting industrial and financial hubs back east and the prairie towns that rose along the tracks like columns of smoke. Though it had already developed an incurable habit of glancing nervously at its twin up the river, Saint Paul in 1888 was still booming and proud of it. Some 175,000 citizens (an increase of 200 percent since 1880), ninety-six churches, sixty schools—you’d have to travel clear to San Francisco to find another Western city that could compare.

At the very pinnacle of Saint Paul’s boom stood railroad baron James J. Hill. In 1888 the fifty-year-old Hill was roaring ahead with the program of visionary expansion that would earn him the nickname “Empire Builder.” He had already transformed his Saint Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway Company into one of the fastest-growing lines in the country, and the following year he would fold it into the continent-spanning Great Northern Railway Company. It was Hill, more than any other individual, who populated the northern tier states by aggressively luring tens of thousands of immigrants to settle along his rail lines. It was Hill and his Great Northern that put the Pacific Northwest on the commercial map and transformed the dank timber outpost of Seattle into a center of international trade.

As Hill’s fortunes rose (he was worth an estimated $63 million at his death in 1916), so rose the fortunes of Saint Paul. The new money that Hill brought in changed the face of the city in the course of the 1880s. Downtown the grid of streets filled in with sprawling block-long commercial buildings and six-story office "towers” tricked out like European palaces and cathedrals, while up on the bluff of Summit Avenue, overlooking the city, the newly rich planted their carpenter Gothic and gloomy Romanesque mansions, some forty-six new houses built between 1882 and 1886. (Hill’s own thirty-two-room million-dollar red sandstone pile, completed three years after the blizzard, in 1891, would dwarf every other house on Summit Avenue—indeed every dwelling in the state.) The downtown Chamber of Commerce building went up on the southwest corner of Sixth and Robert in 1886 during this flush of new construction—a turreted, ornately arched and pilastered neo-Gothic affair vaguely reminiscent of London’s houses of Parliament, though on a much smaller scale. At six stories it was among the tallest buildings in the city, making its top floor an ideal location for the Signal Corps observing station. Not only did the sixth-floor windows afford a panoramic view of the sky, but from the top-floor office the observer had easy access to the instruments deployed on the roof. Signal Corps regulations were exact in this regard: With the exception of the two barometers that were to be cloistered indoors and shut up inside their wooden cases when not in use, all other instruments—the four thermometers, the rain gauge, the wind vane, and the anemometer with its four little cups for catch-ing the wind and measuring its speed—were to be set up outside, exposed to the elements (the thermometers had be protected from the sun’s rays inside an openwork box). In a bustling city like Saint Paul, a rooftop location was preferred in order to keep the instruments safe from tampering and theft and also because it was thought (mistakenly, as it turns out) that elevating the instruments would produce the best readings.