Fixing the Sky (19 page)

Hatfield plied his trade along the West Coast and into Canada and Mexico. In the summer of 1906, following a drought in the Canadian Yukon and after his initial success in Los Angeles, the provincial governors became an “easy mark” for Hatfield's self-promoting efforts. They awarded him a $5,000 contract for “meteorological experiments on the Dome,” the mountain peak near Dawson. The largest mining concerns raised an additional $5,000 by private subscription. According to the contract, should Hatfield fail to produce sufficient rain to satisfy a board of seven evaluators, he was to receive only his cost of transportation and shipping to and from the Klondike and maintenance for himself and an assistant.
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These arrangements generated concerns in the Canadian Parliament a continent away in Ottawa. The Honorable George E. Foster, of North Toronto, was the most vocal: “Suppose that man Hatfield gets his apparatus to work and tinkers with the vast and delicate atmosphere of the universe; is it not possible that he may pull out a plug or slip a cog, and this machinery of the universe once started agoing wrong may go on to the complete submersion of this continent?”
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And what if damage is done across international borders?

Foster thought that the weight of scientific opinion was not in favor of Hatfield: “I believe the United States [Weather] Bureau ... and they give it as their scientific opinion that he is an unmitigated fake and that anybody who has truck with Mr. Hatfield is very close to being bereft of good common sense. But that is only [the opinion of] a weather bureau. What is a weather bureau compared with the Yukon council and the Dominion government?” (563). The parliament ultimately decided that rainmaking was indeed the business of the local Yukon council, and Hatfield found away to claim “success” for his efforts.

Hatfield was once described as “smiling, buoyant and fast talking, with a strong chin, large nose, high forehead and light blue, twinkling eyes ... a quietly dressed, slender man of middle height with square shoulders, who is crowding forty” (figure 3.4).
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By another description, he was “a man on a mission ...,
wiry, bordering on downright skinny ... the greyhound narrowness of his face ... exaggerated by a long, aquiline nose ... yet ... possessed of a quiet charisma, a patina of self-confidence that belied his unimpressive physiognomy. On occasion, when he was in full flow, his piercing blue eyes could take on the glaze of the evangelist.”
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3.4 Closely guarded to keep the inventor's secret. Charles Mallory Hatfield's rainmaking plant on the shore of Chappice Lake, Alberta: “A deck surmounted by an open tank containing chemicals.” The inset shows Hatfield. (“THE RAIN-MAKER: FIGHTING DROUGHT WITH CHEMICALS,”
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
, FEBRUARY 4, 1922)

Hatfield is remembered largely because his rainmaking activities in January 1916 coincided with a severe flood in San Diego. According to city water department records, more than 28 inches of rain fell that month, the Morena Reservoir overflowed, and the Lower Otay Dam burst, sending a wall of water into downtown San Diego that killed dozens of people, left many others homeless, and destroyed all but 2 of the city's 112 bridges. Seeking to avoid lawsuits, the city of San Diego denied its connection to Hatfield, who had a vague contract for rain enhancement, and never paid him the $10,000 he claimed was due to him. Hatfield pursued the suit against the city for two decades before it was finally dismissed, without payment, in 1938.
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But Hatfield was not ready to cease his practice, and his services were sought across the country. In 1920 he took a contract in Washington State under the sponsorship of the Commercial Club of Ephrata. Hundreds of curiosity seekers gazed from afar at his strange tower on the shore of Moses Lake, from which mysterious gases were said to emanate. Nothing happened immediately, but soon after his departure the skies opened up, releasing a deluge. Skeptics saw no connection between the cloudburst and Hatfield's earlier efforts, but the miracle man claimed the rain as his own, bearing his private brand—although he did admit that it arrived somewhat late. The
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reported: “The wonder worker himself must admit that his process is somewhat crude and unfinished when his storms wander all over the state, washing out orchards and bursting canals. Possibly some legislation may be necessary to compel the rainmaker to hog-tie his storms in the future.”
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He was back in Washington State a year later at $3,000 an inch, and collected $4,000 an inch from the United Agricultural Association of Alberta, Canada, until, after 2 inches of rain fell, he was asked to “turn off the faucets.”
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In 1922 he took his equipment to drought-stricken Naples, Italy. American papers reported that after the rains came, he was received as a hero, and the Italian government tried, unsuccessfully, to offer him 1 million lire for his secret. Two years later, the authoritative
Monthly Weather Review
informed its technically oriented readers that the rainmaker had failed in California and had folded his tower and silently left the Bakersfield area after falling well short of his goal of producing 1.5 inches of rain in a month.
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Hatfield and the U.S. Weather Bureau had never been on good terms, although he knew the local officials personally and was a heavy user of weather bureau data, maps, and forecasts. He typically took contracts in areas that had experienced lower than normal precipitation and worked in seasons when rainfall might be expected to occur. This combination ensured that the local citizenry was desperate for rain, increased the chances of getting a contract, raised the price, and bettered the odds that average or above-average rainfall—for which Hatfield could take credit—was just around the corner. In 1918 Ford Ashman Carpenter, the weather bureau station manager in San Diego and Los Angeles, looked back on several decades of attempted rainmaking in southern California. Without naming names (but clearly alluding to Hatfield), Carpenter recalled that the rainmaker “possessed a limited education” and lacked the ability to differentiate cause from effect. Using a system of “no rain, no pay” but still always collecting his expenses in advance, the rainmaker typically operated in the rainier months of January and February, after a dry autumn. Carpenter concluded that by far the most important feature of the rainmaker's work consisted of playing on the credulity of the people: “It is therefore a psychological rather than a meteorological problem, for the fundamental factors are those of the mind and not of matter.”
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It is in this sense that Hatfield served as the model for Starbuck in the Broadway play
The Rainmaker
(1955). He was even invited to its Los Angeles premiere.

In the early 1950s, more than $2 million in legal claims were filed against New York City by upstate residents for purported damage caused by the cloud-seeding efforts of Dr. Wallace E. Howell over the Catskill Mountains reservoirs. Although the lawsuits were eventually dismissed because of technicalities, an elderly raconteur and bon vivant, Colonel John R. Stingo, who often referred to himself as “the Honest Rainmaker,” was astonished that men of science at that time were becoming targets of damage suits and hard feelings, when decades earlier his own rain-inducing efforts had generated nothing but good feelings for all involved. The noted
New Yorker
columnist A. J. Liebling caught up with Stingo (whose name means literally “strong brew”) at a series of Manhattan watering holes and heard his creatively embellished, colorful, improbable, and possibly misleading stories of how in yesteryear he had lived by his wits and bet with the odds (but never with his own money) on prizefights, on the horses (when betting at the track was outlawed), and, of course, on the weather. For him, rainmaking
was a confidence game and not at all a scientific endeavor. Liebling described Stingo as neatly dressed, short of stature, lively, and quick of wit, with the air of an old military man; his habitual expression “that of a stud-poker player with one ace showing who wants to give the impression that he has another in the hole”;
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his typical regimen a series of golden gin fizzes with egg yolk in the morning, hard liquor at midday, and then beer and wine for the duration.

Stingo, a weaver of tall tales, claimed that as a youth in 1908 he had witnessed a memorable but ultimately futile rainmaking extravaganza in the Lower San Joaquin Valley. To save his wheat crop, Captain James McKittrick had invited Egypt's leading rainmaker, (the fictional) “Sudi Witte Pasha,” and his entourage of twenty-two professors and holy men, and assorted cantors, priests, bell ringers, soothsayers, dancing girls, chefs, servants, and bodyguards, to his (also fictional) 212,000-acre estate, “Rancho del McKittrick.” Their rainmaking technique consisted of chants, prayers, ablutions, and dancing, lots of dancing, over the course of three days. On the fourth day, the pasha and his crew scattered ground-up kofu beans from ancient Persia in the fields and hosted a feast for three hundred guests, an “Orgy in Imploration for Rain,” that lasted into the fifth day. After several more days of waiting, with no rain in sight, the formerly jolly Captain McKittrick, who was out about $200,000 in expenses, decided to ship the pasha and his entourage to the nearest railroad station, thence “to the outgoing Pelican Express for Phoenix, Fort Worth and New Orleans,” and finally by steamer “from the Crescent City through the Straits of Gibraltar to the palm-waving beaches of dear old Cairo” (12–13). Stingo was impressed by the pasha's show but judged his timing unfortunate in that the Fates did not deliver normal rainfall that week. He took away from the experience the impression that an American market might require a show with less exoticism and more displays of cold science and impressive paraphernalia, perhaps with a spiritual note.

The colonel then related his early efforts out west in 1912, when he was the front man or setup man for the rainmaking show of “Professor Joseph Canfield Hatfield” (again a made-up name). To clinch a deal, Stingo (at that time working under his given name, James A. Macdonald) would warm up a crowd of farmers with a version of the following speech:

Next onstage was the director of ordnance, Dr. George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who would explain how barraging the clouds with cannon and a rapid-fire Gatling gun would wring out their moisture. Then J. C. Hatfield himself, not a particularly eloquent or convincing man but a true believer in his techniques, would mumble something about how Marco Polo had returned from Cathay with an explosive yellow powder and stories of its use as a rainmaking device in ancient China. Finally, it was up to Macdonald to close the deal (or set the hook) by getting the local farm officials to sign a contract for “detonationary services” with the Hatfield Rain Precipitation Corporation, at $10,000 an inch of rain for up to 3 inches and $80,000 for a full 4 inches. Stingo confessed to Liebling, “All first-class Boob Traps must contain a real smart Ace-In-The-Hole,” and the rainmaking company's consisted of converting weather bureau tables, charts, and rainfall averages into a set of betting odds, a kind of pari-mutuel handicapping that the company estimated to be 55 percent in its favor. He then described how 5,000 people had turned out on a hot, dry afternoon to watch the team set off the ordnance show, how Hatfield climbed the mountain like an Old Testament prophet, how Sykes's spouse gathered the faithful together to pray for rain, how the guns roared and the smoke billowed, how a storm came up at midnight and drenched the valley, how the rainmakers took credit for this, and how the local populace subsequently prospered, praising Hatfield's powers and paying the rainmakers the $80,000. Macdonald's cut was $22,000. The team repeated the show, successfully, in Oregon the next summer, but business tapered off in subsequent years after the farm guild bought its own cannon (16–19).