Do you want relief in the form of
rain to put out the fires? There was a man who actually produced rain from 1902
to the great depression of the 1930s for places from Medicine Hat, Alberta to
San Diego to Los Angeles to break droughts. Even though he left this earth 60
years ago, we can still learn about this man and his amazing practices.
Here is
where all of it began. On July 15,1875
in the town of Fort Scott, Kansas from a Quaker family, a boy who would
eventually make rain for Southern California from the 1900s to 1930 was born.
Stephen and Marie Hatfield welcomed Charles Hatfield on a week that lightning
struck and rain fell in a way that turned dusty streets into rivers ending a 2
year drought that plagued Kansas from 1874 to 1875. This must have been an
interesting week to have the rainmaker to be born on.
Hatfield's
father Stephen, was a salesman with the Singer Sewing Company before Charles
was born and when the Hatfield's moved to Fort Scott, Stephen start his own
sewing machine agency in the town and then sold it and then used the money to
build a house for their family.
The
Hatfield's moved to Minneapolis when Hatfield was five where the Hatfield's had
four boys which only two of them survived infancy, Paul and Joel. Then they
moved to the booming 16,000 people town called San Diego, California in 1890.
The Hatfield's purchased a forty acre olive ranch in rural San Diego county and
had three lots where they built houses. Unfortunately, when the Hatfield's
arrived, San Diego was already in decline, because the larger town farther
north, called Los Angeles with 50,395 people was more popular with better rail
connections than San Diego. Before the end of the year, they followed the
migration up north to the Cahuenga Valley (now Hollywood), where they were one
of the first families to live there, with a house on a ten-acre apricot farm. Then
they quickly sold the house and apricot farm finding that farming was at the
mercy of the weather in that area and moved to South Pasadena and then to
Pasadena.
In Los
Angeles, Charles left school at the end of ninth grade to follow his dad's
advice by working for the Robert B.
Moorhead Agency selling New Home Sewing Machines. His father insisted that all
his sons learn the trade to follow in his footsteps.
When he was
not working, Hatfield was quiet in nature and you would have found him at the
Los Angeles Public Library reading about his main obsession: people's attempt
to control nature. The reason he was interested in this subject was that his
family lived on a farm and had olive crops that when drought came would suffer.
He never forgot about the drought talk in Los Angeles and as a boy in San
Diego, Minneapolis, and Kansas in the early and mid 1890's.
When
Hatfield was 26 years old, he began his rain making experiments when he visited
his father's San Diego County olive ranch in 1902. One of his rainmaking
experiments at the ranch was in April of that year, atop a windmill some 30
feet high above the ground, where he set up several metal pans which he poured
a mixture of chemicals and water into. According to the Rain Wizard book,
"He placed an electrical heater beneath the pan and then watched as a thin
wisp of vapor rose into the air. People who passed by, the rising gas was
unnoticeable other than its overpowering stench. He spent most of the morning stirring
chemicals and replacing them when necessary and waited for the result. Before
long, a misty fog began to fill the valley and by noon a light drizzle started
to fall. After the sky cleared, Hatfield checked the rain gauge and he was surprised
at what he saw. 3/100's of an inch of rain had fallen."
His father
thought that Hatfield's interest in rainmaking was a waste of time. He
encouraged Hatfield to continue working as a sewing machine salesman. His mom,
though, took quiet pride in his endeavors and sensed that he was destined for
greater things. Hatfield continued to work on his rainmaking experiments at the
ranch until there was a serious need for rain in the town of Los Angeles in the
winter of 1904. There was a bad drought in Los Angeles. According to the
Pacific Rural Press, "The drought is seriously retarding plowing and
seeding. Feeding is becoming very scarce, and although there is a fair supply
of last season's hay in most places, the long continued use of dry feed has
seriously affected cattle. The water supply is failing rapidly, owing to the
heavy irrigation of orchards." By the end of January, the local clergyman
declared January 31st 1904 a day to pray
for rain.
Two days
later, Hatfield and his brother Paul headed with their horse drawn wagon with
their materials to the hills northeast of Los Angeles, where they built a tower
similar to the tower at the ranch. People bet a prize of $50 dollars to
Hatfield if he could make it rain. After
it rained when he returned to Los Angeles, Hatfield said, "When I started
out...conditions were extremely unfavorable for me..At 7:30 Thursday night the
rain began, and at 10:30 o'clock there set a heavy downpour, which continued
until 2'o clock Friday morning..Friday morning at 11:30 the rain began again
and continued in showers until 8:30 o'clock at night." He was humble enough to share credit for the
downpour with the preachers who prayed for rain on January 31st. He said,
"I don't claim full credit for the downpour, but I do say that I was
responsible for holding the storm in Southern California as long as it stayed.
He received his $50 prize for sending rain on Los Angeles and returned to
selling sewing machines and waited for a need to break a dry spell.
This rain
producing frustrated George Franklin of the U.S. Weather Bureau in Los Angeles
because he predicted that the rain would miss the city. Despite that, the
businessmen in Los Angeles who paid Hatfield were satisfied. They cheered
saying "Long live Rainmaker Hatfield, and may he reign longer!!
They loved
him so much that they wanted him to come back to produce more rain for Los
Angeles. He answered their plea and produced 18.22 inches of rain from January to
March 1905. There was a break in the rain which the people demanded so that
Pasadena could hold the annual Roses Parade (Rose Bowl Parade) on January 2,
1905. The Los Angeles Examiner praised
him saying,
His name is
Hatfield-Just simply Hatfield! The only
name that Californians speak; Oh, Mister Hatfield, Here's to you, Hatfield- God
bless you for that thankful heavenly leak!
After he
produced the rain, Hatfield received a $1,000 prize for producing the rain.
Raining in Los Angeles was called Hatfielding and the umbrellas were sold as
"Genuine 'Hatfield' Umbrellas."
After this, he produced rain for Dawson City, Canada in 1906 and then
moved back to Los Angeles. As the 1900s rolled on, he told reporters that he
had deals in the works: "ridding London of its fog, irrigating the Sahara,
and breaking droughts in South Africa", which none of these became a
reality which made people think he was deceiving people.
His big day
finally came in 1915 when he was asked to produce rain for San Diego for the
Panama California Exposition so that San Diego would be shown as a green oasis
with abundant water. On January 4th 1916, the dam keeper at Morena Reservoir
said that a light rain began to fall at the reservoir. There was already rain
on New Year's Eve and all the areas reservoirs benefited from the rain. Morena
Reservoir only received 0.13 inches of rain while Los Angeles received 2
inches. What does this rain have to do with Hatfield, isn't God the one who
sends the rain? Yes he is. What this has to do with Hatfield was that he was
asked to produce rain for Morena Reservoir.
Hatfield, if
he could produce rain and fill Morena Reservoir to overflowing, would be
awarded $10,000 dollars. On the journey to the reservoir with his brother Joel,
instead of the usual single chest of chemicals, he brought two. That morning on
January 4th, behind the black tar paper, he tended his pans of chemicals on the
windmill tower similar to the other ones he built.
The local
newspapers were filled with speculation about what Hatfield was doing in the
San Diego Mountains. Some curious people even made the trek to the reservoir to
see what Hatfield was doing and they heard explosions and rockets launched into
the air. One said he saw Hatfield looking skyward waving his arms on the tower
while he muttered a strange language, as if he was striking a deal with the
heavens.
Things got
stranger when the light rain turned into a downpour lasting for days. By
January 10th, it was as if someone turned the heavenly faucet on San Diego. "Rather
than relaxing, Hatfield increases his efforts to produce rain, his cloud
attracting chemicals belching out more smelly fumes than ever before."
according to the Rain Wizard book. One reporter said that "Hatfield worked
day and night 24/7 and received quite a drenching himself."
Fortunately,
the skies cleared, very briefly for two days, with blue sky. Then on Friday,
January 14th, a wall of dark gray clouds approached San Diego from the Pacific
Ocean. By Saturday, everyone was thinking about Hatfield. Was he responsible
for the heavy rain?. Councilman Benbough though "He's hoping that it
continues to rain so hard that Hatfield will have to build an ark."
Unfortunately,
that serious of a flood was not out of the question. The skies continued to
produce rain, so much that runoff was flowing from hillsides into all the areas
reservoirs, including the Upper Otay and the Lower Otay Reservoirs east of
Chula Vista. The Lower Otay rose five inches in eight hours. The Sweetwater
Reservoir east of San Diego was rising a half an inch a day. At Morena
Reservoir, Hatfield telephoned to report that "seventeen and a half inches
of rain fell in five days, and that beats any similar record for this place
that I have been able to find."
The people
in San Diego were tired of the endless rain. The San Diego Evening Tribune
suggested, "If Hatfield made it rain, he can make a lot of money by
stopping it." Their request was not
answered. According to the book, "By 2:00am on Monday, January 17th, the
city was consumed by chaos as runoff entered dry gullies, canyons, and washes.
Raging torrents now made their way to the city's reservoirs. The San Diego River, usually just a trickle,
breached its banks and stretched a mile across side to side.
Hillsides
collapsed and roadways gave way. Cars were abandoned in the deep mud, and canoes
and rowboats now were the main transportation across town. Houses were swept
off their foundations and flowed down the river into the ocean. All its bridges
that linked the city to other parts of the area were washed out. It was a huge
mess!! San Diego was cut off from the rest of the United States, the rest of
the world.
Unfortunately,
Hatfield was unaware of the havoc that was visiting the city. He then said on
the telephone that the rain was just a warm up of what he had planned."
You could have said, Wake up Hatfield!!,
There is massive flooding happening in San Diego and not just in San Diego, but
in Mexico. In the town of Ensenada, 83 miles south of San Diego, according to a
Union reporter, "they had really heavy rain which poured in record
breaking amounts in the memory of its oldest settler. It felt like a full fifty
inches!" It made what San Diego was going through look like a mist of
rain.
During
January 25th through the 31st, It was eventful. There was good news and bad
news. The good news was that Lower Otay Reservoir finally spilled over for the
first time in their history. The bad news was that the reservoir's dam
collapsed and killed 50 people. Everything from houses to trees and the Tijuana
hot springs hotel in Mexico swept away in the flood waters downstream of the
dam.
In San Diego, it was
like a miniature Venice with its main street Broadway having water five feet
deep. At Morena Reservoir, there was a nonstop rain pummeling on the lake and
the dam keeper struggled against the wind to maneuver a rowboat to the outlet
tower to open the gates of the dam to release water from the reservoir.
Millions of gallons of water was flowing into the lake and they saw that five
billion gallons of water flowed into the reservoir on January 26th. It was
spilling over four feet deep at the spillway. According to the San Diego Union Tribune in
the Rain promised, flood followed
in 1916 article, At the end of the rainfall, "28 inches
of rain fell in the whole month of January at Morena Reservoir, 7.56 inches
fell in San Diego, and a heavy 36 inches fell at Lake Cuyamaca in the
Mountains."
On January
31st, the dam keeper Maggie Swanson received a call from someone who wanted to
lynch the Hatfield boys. When the Hatfield boys left their work area at Morena
as they headed west from the mountains to San Diego, they could see why.
"Everything was gone. The road was gone and the bridges were gone."
In San Diego, the people were wondering if Morena reservoir spilled over and
fulfilled the contract. Frankly, it didn't matter because they would threaten
to sue Hatfield for causing damages to the city. The City Attorney Cosgrove
looked for ways to avoid paying Hatfield.
Fortunately,
despite the damages done to San Diego because of the flooding, the town now had
five years worth of water supply if no rain fell for the rest of the season.
Hatfield felt assured that the city would pay him for producing rainfall and
even offered to produce rain again for Morena reservoir to prove that the heavy
rains were caused by his chemical assault and not nature. But still, Cosgrove
refused to pay Hatfield anything. Hatfield, in his complaint, explained his
process "I remind the council that I told them I did not claim to produce
rain from a cloudless sky, but to convert a light one into a heavy one...Therefore,
my contract..implied..that all natural rains coming to Morena during my
operations were so much my credit." The case dragged into 1917 whether
Hatfield would get paid. After all this, the judge ruled in favor of the city
council which said that the storms were acts of God.
Hatfield,
after all this, didn't stop producing rain. He produced rain in Medicine Hat,
Alberta to break a five year drought in 1919. In July and August 1922, He began
experiencing with "something he had never done before." In Sand
Canyon in the edge of the Mojave Desert, he set up a six foot tower four
thousand feet off the ground. When he first started on July 26th it was a sunny
day with clear blue skies and after he did his experiment, on Thursday, clouds
began to form and for the next three days it showered and on Sunday there was
immense rainfall which Hatfield said was one of the "greatest rainfalls
ever known." "Legend has it, that it rained forty inches in three
hours" according to the California: An Illustrated History book. He then
stopped two forest fires two years in a row with his rain producing skills in
Honduras.
After his
trip to Honduras in 1931, Hatfield's wife, Maybelle, divorced him. During his
whole career in rainmaking, the newspapers never mentioned his wife and the
relationship was already over for quite some time because she was jealous
because she was not in the newspaper. Unfortunately for him, his career was
coming to an end too, with the construction of the 700 foot Hoover Dam
beginning in 1931 and completed in 1936 on the Colorado River (Today, if Hatfield was still living, they
might ask him to produce rain to fill the lake behind Hoover Dam, Lake Mead to
end the drought) guaranteeing the Southwest a reliable source of water.
Rainmaking became a relic of the past with farmers favoring irrigation for
their fields.
Hatfield
returned to selling sewing machines and got remarried to a friend from his
school days, Martha McLain in 1937. Hatfield lived 21 more years until he died
in 1958 at age 82 in Pearblossom, California. He was one of the most successful
rainmakers who ever lived.
During and
after his life, people made plays about him such as the Rainmaker by N. Richard
Nash in 1954. Other people started to do cloud seeding such as Vincent Schaefer
in 1946 when he scattered dry ice into the clouds in Schenectady, New York
which produced snow. Cloud seeding is still done in the United States and
around the world in countries such as the UAE and China.
I was
inspired to write about Charles Hatfield because I was amazed to hear about all
his rain experiments and how he was successful in producing rain for San Diego
, Los Angeles, and the Mojave Desert. It gave me inspiration to research how to
produce rain during our droughts in California and the West and the fires that
have been going on.
Even though
Hatfield was able to produce rain for various towns, God is the one who is able
to control the weather and sustain the universe. The Scriptures say in the book
of Job that "God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things
that we cannot comprehend. For to the snow he says 'Fall on the earth,'
likewise to the downpour, his mighty downpour. He seals up the hand of every
man, that all men whom he made may know it...By the breath of God ice is given,
and the broad waters are frozen fast. He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
the cloud scatter his lightning. They turn around and around by his guidance,
to accomplish all that he commands them on the face of the inhabitable
world. Job 37:5-7, 10-12 ESV.
Bibliograhy:
The Rain
Wizard: The Amazing, Mysterious, and True Life of Charles Mallory Hatfield by
Larry Dane Brimner.
Wonders of
Weather by Francis Nankin. Page 72-Rain on Demand. This is where I first heard
about Charles Hatfield.
California:
An Illustrated History by T.H. Watkins. Chapter 19-The New Rainmakers. Page 385
"Charles
Hatfield." Wikipedia
wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hatfield
I hope that
you enjoyed my article about Charles Hatfield and I hope that you learned more
about him and what he did. Thank You for reading my post and God bless!!
