The Children's Blizzard (33 page)

In any case, the odds of such a violent storm striking again were extremely low. As Greely himself wrote on January 26, quelling the fears of a citizen who had inquired whether blizzards were becoming worse, “There is no reason to believe that there is any secular change in their frequency or intensity."

The only head that rolled in the wake of the storm belonged to First Lieutenant Thomas Mayhew Woodruff.

In the few months he had been forecasting the weather from Saint Paul, Woodruff had made several bitter and influential enemies—notably Professor William Payne and Thomas Cochran Jr. of the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce—who were determined to make him pay for encroaching on their turf. And in the course of that winter and spring, they succeeded. Greely, characteristically, made the situation worse by barking orders from Washington, privately offering support to both sides simultaneously and ultimately caving to superior muscle and money. Had Woodruff been a better forecaster, the general might have done more for him. But since Woodruff ’s “percentages of verifications of indications” (in other words, how often he got the forecast right) were among the lowest in the Corps that winter, Greely had little incentive to step in.

When it came down to it, Woodruff was outmaneuvered and Greely stood by and watched him swing. Neither meteorological competence nor military honor nor professional loyalty was really the issue: In the end, it was just politics as usual.

On February 14, a week after Etta Shattuck’s funeral, Greely pressed Woodruff to file a full report on his wrangle with Professor Payne and the Meteorological Committee of the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce. Woodruff ’s report, duly sent to Washington on February 17, rehearsed the whole sorry business: his turf war with Payne over the status and standing of the Saint Paul indications branch office vis-à-vis the Minnesota State Weather Service; the embezzlement charges that were being pressed against Cochran; the sloppy accounting of the Chamber of Commerce and its murky relationship with the state weather service; the “begging circulars" sent out by Cochran to solicit contributions for the support of the State Weather Service from local businesses; the resentment that railroad officials harbored against Payne, etc.

Meanwhile, Payne retaliated by complaining of Woodruff ’s failure to open additional weather stations along the railroad lines, which he had been expressly ordered to do when Greely posted him to Saint Paul. Woodruff defended his actions and questioned Payne’s judgment. Payne counterattacked. By winter’s end, a steady stream of accusation was flowing from Saint Paul to Washington. Eventually things got so ugly that Greely ordered Woodruff to complete a questionnaire about the nature of his conflict with Payne and Cochran. When he sent his answers, Woodruff insisted to Greely most forcefully that all of his communications on this matter be kept strictly confidential. “I certainly have no objec-tions to having either Prof. Payne or Mr. Cochran know my opin-ions of them either personally or officially,” Woodruff wrote, “but I should most certainly strongly protest against having my report[s] . . . submitted to either or both of them." Greely evidently disregarded this plea. In mid-April, the general instructed Woodruff to close the Saint Paul indications office and return to Washington since, as he put it, “the season of cold waves [has] substantially passed” and therefore an on-site forecaster was no longer needed. At the same time, Greely, through an underling, made Woodruff’s confidential reports and communiqués available to Professor Payne, who in turn forwarded them to the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce. On May 1, while Woodruff was packing up his office files and seeing to the storage of the furniture, the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce met to consider the charges that Woodruff had lodged against Cochran, Payne, and the state weather service. The upshot of this meeting was that Cochran and another Chamber member were delegated to travel to Washington to see Greely and discuss the matter in person. No record survives of what happened at this meeting, but the consequences speak for themselves. Immediately afterward, the secretary of war wrote to Greely to inquire whether Woodruff ’s services are of “such a nature that any injury to the service will result from his being ordered to join his regiment.” On May 8, Greely directed an assistant to write a memo to Woodruff (who was then on an eastbound train near Chicago) demanding that he immediately “investigate and make written report regarding the causes that delayed, retarded, or prevented the expected advent at stations of cold waves and other weather conditions predicted by yourself.” This report was to “em-body . . . such special facts as may have substantially come to your notice, which at the time escaped the attention of the officer making predictions, and which if noted might have materially aided in indicating approaching changes." It was surely not a coincidence that the first time Greely broached the subject of the late arrival of storm warnings came immediately after his meeting with Cochran. Not a word of criticism of Woodruff ’s forecasting skills or communication network all winter long, not a whisper of complaint over “delayed or retarded" warnings after scores of children perished in subzero temperatures on the night of January 12, no memo demanding why the order to hoist cold wave flags at Signal Corps stations in Dakota and Nebraska arrived only minutes before “the most disastrous blizzard ever known,” or in some cases afterward. Yet now that Woodruff had closed the indications office for the season (actually for good, as it turned out), an urgent message arrived telling him to report on his meteorological failings as soon as possible. Payne had been sav-aging Woodruff all winter for not seizing every means at his disposal for disseminating forecasts and warnings in a timely fashion, no matter what the cost to the government—but it wasn’t until Cochran himself turned up in Washington to do some political arm-twisting that Greely took up the cry. The “causes that delayed, retarded, or prevented” the timely arrival of forecasts and the “special facts” that “might have materially aided in indicating approaching changes” were just excuses: At the time of the blizzard, Cochran and Payne had shown precious little interest in the effect of delayed warnings on the farmers and children and teachers of the prairie region. They wanted Woodruff bounced out of the service for petty personal reasons and they were handing Greely the am-munition he needed to do their dirty work.

Woodruff ’s fall was cushioned by a new commission that conve-niently came his way. On May 23, the day after Greely reported to the secretary of war that “no injury would result from [Lieutenant Woodruff ’s] being ordered to rejoin his regiment,” Woodruff informed the adjutant general that he had been offered the position of aide-de-camp by Brigadier General Thomas H. Ruger and that he wished to take the offer, which would require him to leave the Signal Corps and rejoin his regiment. Ruger, a fellow graduate of West Point and a longtime career officer who had commanded a division at Gettsyburg and battled draft rioters in New York during the Civil War, had been headquartered at Saint Paul as commander of the Department of Dakota during the time that Woodruff was stationed there. The two men no doubt became friendly in the course of the winter and it’s possible that General Ruger, a cultivated, quiet-spoken, gentlemanly officer like Woodruff himself, extended an open invitation to join his staff if Woodruff ever found himself at loose ends.

Even though Woodruff was swiftly able to arrange an attractive fall-back position, the fact remains that he was unhappy about leaving the Signal Corps and angry at the forces that had been working behind the scenes to get him out. He may have been angry at Greely as well for failing or refusing to help. Certainly, relations between Greely and Woodruff grew noticeably stiff and formal. On the day after Woodruff left the Signal Corps after five years of service, Greely, through an underling, wrote to express his tepid gratitude for Woodruff ’s “hearty and loyal support” and to wish him “pleasant and agreeable duty in other paths of military life, where he [the general] feels certain that the soldierly qualities shown by you in connection with this service will ensure you that promotion and reward denied you in common with other line officers whose work has so materially contributed to the great success of the weather bureau.” Woodruff ’s primary concern now was with the contents of his military file, which would have a bearing on future promotions, and Greely was barely cooperative in this matter.

The general grudgingly agreed to add to Woodruff ’s file a “com-mendatory letter” signed by some of the most prominent citizens of Saint Paul attesting to the “able manner” in which Woodruff had performed his duty “in the interest of the Northwest.” But he re-tracted an earlier promise to supply Woodruff with copies of other documents in his file, stating curtly that papers he had submitted to the War Department “preclude any report on affairs at Saint Paul." Greely in short had washed his hands of Woodruff and his future in the military. As far as the general was concerned, the case was closed. Woodruff would never again forecast weather.

Meanwhile, exactly two months after the January 12 storm, the Signal Corps botched the forecast of another, even deadlier blizzard. On the morning of Monday, March 12, heavy rain changed to heavy snow over New York City and temperatures began to plummet. In the course of the day, twenty-one inches of snow piled up in the city. Winds gusted to 50 miles an hour, throwing up twenty-foot-high drifts, snapping telegraph poles, and snarling the live telegraph and telephone wires that the poles carried. Elevated trains and carriages were stopped in their tracks. By afternoon the nation’s largest and most modern metropolis was at a standstill: No vehicles moved in the streets, no communications got in or out of the city, no power flowed to buildings. Outside the city, in southern Connecticut and upstate New York, nearly four feet of snow accumulated. Tens of thousands were stranded. An estimated four hundred people died, two hundred of them in New York City. “For the first time in their lives [New Yorkers] knew what a western blizzard was,” reported the 
New York Times.
 “The city was left to run itself,” wrote the 
Tribune;
 “chaos reigned, and the proud boastful metropolis was reduced to the condition of a primitive settlement." The Signal Corps station on the top floor of New York’s nine-story Equitable Building—one of three branch offices then authorized to issue local indications, along with the Saint Paul and San Francisco offices—was closed from midnight Saturday until 5 P.M. on Sundays. The last set of indications issued Saturday night called for rain Sunday followed on Monday by “colder fresh to brisk westerly winds, fair weather.” By the time the New York station chief, Elias Dunn, and his staff reported for duty on Sunday evening, the telegraph connection to the Signal Office in Washington was dead.

So no word arrived in New York that a wild nor’easter was moving up the coast, that twenty-seven of the forty ships anchored at the Delaware Breakwater had been seriously damaged or destroyed, and that scores of other ships were sinking and running aground from Chesapeake Bay to Nantucket.

One of the men on duty at the New York Signal Corps office at the time of the storm was the redoubtable German immigrant Sergeant Francis Long, a survivor of Greely’s Arctic expedition.

Greely, who always looked out for his own, had secured Long the berth in New York. The New York press was not kind about the Corps’ failure to predict the storm, but Greely saw to it that Long kept his job through the maelstrom.

Two positive changes came about as a result of the East Coast blizzard: Signal Corps weather stations began to remain open all day on Sundays and eventually the unsightly webs of the city’s telegraph and telephone wires were taken off the streets and moved underground.

This colossal forecasting error coming hard on the heels of the January 12 blizzard was not good publicity for Greely or the Signal Corps. The weather service had become a national embarrassment.

The Corps had demonstrated conclusively that it was all but helpless in the face of meteorological disaster. But it had even less util-ity as a military organization. Army brass raged that weather now consumed so much of the division’s time and budget that the armed forces would be left without an effective communications network in time of war. Scientists wondered why Signal Corps fixtures like H.H.C. Dunwoody, an oily first lieutenant who had spent years ingratiating himself to various chief signal officers, were given free rein to gather weather proverbs (Dunwoody, with Corps spon-sorship, published an entire volume of “popular weather sayings” in 1883) while serious research was ignored, neglected, or starved of funds. There had been repeated calls in Congress and by the secretary of war to transfer the weather service from the Army to the Department of Agriculture, but so far the Signal Corps lobby had succeeded in blocking the measure. Greely himself, though well aware of the flaws of the present system, waffled on the issue of transfer.

Finally, in December 1889, President Benjamin Harrison formally recommended that the responsibility for weather forecasting and data gathering be moved from the Army Signal Corps to the Department of Agriculture, and this time both houses of Congress, having repeatedly blocked the measure in the past, swiftly agreed.

What motivated the congressional change of heart was the conviction that the transfer would make farmers happy and perhaps inspire them to put more trust in the weather service. Scant mention was made of public safety.

Congress passed the bill with little discussion in April 1890, and the president signed it into law on October 1, 1890. On July 1, 1891, General Greely ceased to have jurisdiction over the weather of the United States and the ill-fated Professor Mark W. Harrington became the first civilian chief of the new United States Weather Bureau.

Years after the blizzard, Mary Matilda Sisson of Dakota’s Douglas County told her daughter that once the snow melted that spring they found dead horses and cattle and the bodies of several men and schoolchildren on the prairie near their homestead. But despite the heartbreak, Mary remembered that “Never was spring more beautiful. The birds came back, the flowers bloomed and the grouse and prairie chickens boomed and strutted on the knoll northwest of our house." That lovely soft spring Johann Kaufmann Sr. was out mowing the tall luxuriant grass that had grown in his fields. Since his sons died, Johann had had trouble concentrating and he suffered from kidney trouble. Distracted by his pain, he was not paying attention as he worked the horse-drawn mowing machine with its treacherous five-foot-long blades back and forth through the tall grass. He accidentally ran the mower over a young boy who was visiting the farm and cut off his leg. There were bitter words and recrimina-tions from the boy’s family. It was another terrible blow for the Kaufmanns. Two years later, grief-stricken and bereft, Johann Kaufmann died.