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Rain of error: dry enough for you? It was for General R.G. Dyrenforth, whose bizarre attempts more than a century ago to solve Texas'' little drought problem precipitated only ridicule. (Texas Monthly reporter: the state of our state).

Article Excerpt
GENERAL R. G. DYRENFORTH SUBSCRIBED to the theory, successfully field-tested by countless twelve-year-old boys, that there is nothing wrong with the world that a little gunpowder won't fix. He was a concussionist, which meant that he believed rainfall followed great military battles and that therefore a great deal of gunfire, cannonading, and martial carrying-on could produce rain, on command, anywhere. In the drought-ridden last years of the nineteenth century, as American homesteaders pushed into the arid lands west of the ninety-eighth meridian, this was a tantalizing idea. And though the science behind concussionism was of the humours-and-vapours variety, there was little in the nascent discipline of meteorology to disprove it. "After each explosion," Dyrenforth explained in 1892 in a superbly authoritative and widely embraced piece of scientific double-talk, "the subsequent inrush of columns of air ... will, perhaps by the motion of the earth on its axis, not be just end to end or point against point, but, the columns passing each other, a whirl or whorl will be started which, widening as it extends upward, will present a vortex, whereby heavy or moisture-laden air will be drawn from afar ..." [paragraph] On the strength of such clear thinking, Dyrenforth became the first, and the last, person the U.S. government ever hired to make it rain by blowing things up. In 1891, as a special agent of the Department of Agriculture, he was charged with the task of coaxing rain from the skies above Midland, El Paso, and other Texas cities. Congress could not have found a better person for the job. Dyrenforth was a man untrammeled by such petty constraints as the scientific method. Broad-shouldered, capable, extravagantly optimistic, and relentlessly self-promoting, he saw vast possibilities where others did not. He asserted that man's dominion over the continent could be extended to the heavens and to the four winds. And with many tons of government-financed ordnance behind him, he was hard to ignore. He arrived in West Texas accompanied by boxcars filled with gunpowder, dynamite, "rackarock" explosives, cannon, mortar, and exploding kites and balloons. And in a series of loud, concussive "battles" with the reluctant sky, he detonated all of it. And it rained. Sort of.

For a brief, iridescent moment, Dyrenforth and his wildly ambitious experiments captured the imagination of Gilded Age America. While he and his team were staging weather battles across Texas in 1891 and 1892, the country watched and cheered. Newspapers carried breathless accounts of the "sky skirmishers" and "cloud compellers" who stood on the vast Texas plains and, in the media's...

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