An unusually wet period heralded a farming boom on the Great Plains in the 1880s. Wheat grew in an environment that early explorers said was too marginal, too arid for it. But the world market was hot with demand for grain, and the immigrant-settlers were told that “rain followed the plow,” that cultivation itself would inexorably transform the climate. It didn’t quite work out that way.
“The Great Plains was a region on the edge,” notes scholar Julie Cartwright, “hovering from year to year and from decade to decade right on the cusp of the possibility or denial of the very stuff of life—water. Some years were good, others were desperate…”
The drought of the 1890s was desperate. It was, continues Courtwright, the first “serious drought since Euro-American settlers had pushed beyond the hundredth meridian ‘dry line.’”
Devastating for families and communities, the drought gave rise to a phenomenon of rainmaking frauds. There was, writes Courtwright, a “complicated hybrid of sincere belief in science and confidence games,” as con artists fanned out through the Plains promising to make it rain, for a fee, for people who wanted to believe.
Frank Melbourne, for one, got the town of Goodland, Kansas, to raise $500 for him in 1891, payable upon rain. He received $10 a day just to keep him from going—with the mysterious chemicals he released into the atmosphere from the privacy of a railroad car or sealed building—to Topeka.
Some seem to have believed rainmakers could deliver rain. Some religious people, with faith in other things, thought rainmakers were doing the Devil’s work. Others thought rainmakers were pretty good entertainment—Melbourne was appearing, after all, at the county fair—and anyway, what was the harm?
Melbourne’s failure to make it rain in Goodland probably changed few opinions. Those who said, “Humbug!” couldn’t prevent grandiose talk of a new contract for him: “twenty thousand dollars to produce rain in forty counties covering over a million acres.”
Putting faith in rainmakers “reflected larger insecurities about agriculture in a marginal environment,” writes Courtwright. She positions rainmakers in the optimistic belief system of settlers who thought they could transform the arid West into something like the well-watered East. They thought they could do so by plowing, by planting trees, even by laying railroad tracks and stringing telegraph wires, which, as electrical conductors, were said to cause thunderstorms.