Hatfield the Rainmaker
By Thomas W. Patterson
http://bit.ly/1EFOIs6

The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Winter 1970, Volume 16, Number 4
Linda Freischlag, Editorial Assistant

[snip]

Oh Mister Hatfield, you've been good to us:
You've made it rain in ways promiscuous!

From Saugus down to San Diego's Bay
They bless you for the rains of yesterday.
But Mister Hatfield, listen now;
Make us this vow:
Oh, please, kind sir, don't let it rain on Monday!

And other doings full of fun and glee
For New Year's Day are planned abundantly
From Saugus down to San Diego's Bay
And they will bless you on tomorrow's day,
Great moistener, if you will listen now
And make this vow:
Oh, please, kind sir, don't let it rain on Monday!*

* At the conclusion of the drouth-ridden year 1904 the citizens of the Los Angeles area, who had raised money to hire him, were sing­ing praises of the rainmaker Charley Hatfield, their savior. He had achieved success. The rains had come—and come—and come. As the New Year approached, however, an ugly thought crept into the minds of some o/ the populace. What if Charley Hatfield made it rain on the day of that stupendous event, the Tournament of Roses Parade? This anon­ymous piece of doggerel, appealing to him for charity on Monday, January 2, the date of the parade, appeared in several newspapers. Evidently the plea was heard. Although it rained earlier in the day and still sprinkled where Charley was working five miles from the parade, no rain fell during the procession.

I. WHOSE DISCIPLE?

The best remembered facts about Hatfield The Rainmaker are that when he ministered to the sky it rained tor­rents and when he tried to collect $10,000 from the City of San Diego the mayor and council welshed.

There will always be room for a query: Was the rain really a coinci­dence? Did he really believe what he claimed, or was he a fellow with a knowing wink?

Some wrote delightedly that he was a scoundrel. Others, especially David Starr Jordan, wrote as though they thought him a cruel fraud against whom the public needed protection.

Nobody ever got behind his mask, and, in fact it may never have been a mask. The actual record of Hatfield's activities explodes some commonly held truths, but the strangest facts and coincidences persist. The record makes no real headway against the legend.

Charles Mallory Hatfield got into the public's attention when the Los Angeles Times on February 2, 1904, misspelling his name, said:

Charles Hadfield, expert rain manufacturer, has been sent out by a number of South Spring Street merchants to bring down the recreant showers. For the consideration of $50 Hadfield has planted his instruments in the foothill district near Pasadena and with a new process of chemical evaporation promises abundant moisture in five days. The magician holds himself responsible for the abundant rain in San Diego County late last spring, and says he has tried 17 times, scoring only one fail­ure. Barnett & Gude, H. E. Memory, H. G. Ackley and others stand sponsor to this com­mander of nature.

It was no credulous account, but rain­makers were a discredited lot. They had had their vogue in the Midwest in the 1880's and 1890's. The ancient world had known a theory that noxious fumes, such as the stench of bodies after a major battle, caused rain. After artil­lery became a significant part of war, Benvenuto Cellini wrote of explosions causing rain. This theory lasted several centuries and explained, to the satisfac­tion of some, the storm that handicapped the Spanish Armada and the mud at Waterloo. It was Americanized after the Civil War by a man named Edward Powers,who wrote War and The Weather contending that most of the Civil War battles caused rain. Then there was a belief that prairie fires caused rain and that the Chicago fire drenched itself, although tardily.

Congress, pressed by influential senators who owned Western land and hoped there might be something to it, spent over $20,000 testing the explosion theory by some spectacular Texas balloon busting and cannonading, supervised by a flamboyant character named Robert St. George Dyrenforth. The explosion theory faded out after that, but the fume theory returned. A whole school of rainmakers practiced in the Midwest, each with a secret formula.

The biggest names among the fume men were those of Frank Melbourne, known as the Australian Wizard, and G. B. Jewell, who operated originally under auspices of the Rock Island Rail­road and practiced from a specially equipped boxcar. These men never oper­ated in California, but in 1899 one of Jewell's disciples sought a rainmaking contract at Pasadena. In 1900 another persuaded a group of San Diegans to pay the cost of sending aloft the fumes of zinc dissolved in sulphuric acid, and this was described as the great Jewell's secret formula.

There had been three terrible years of drouth at the end of the century, drying up irrigation canals in the Central Valley and leaving Southern California as brown in winter as in summer. Now, in January 1904, no rain had fallen since early December and precious little since the previous spring. Matters were so bad that Catholic and Protestant churches appealed through the newspapers for a day of prayer for rain on Sunday, January 31.

In the brown Los Angeles hinterland no one was far removed from the tra­ditional grazing economy. Jotham Bixby, the big cattleman of Long Beach, com­plained in the public prints: "This is the first time since 1872 that we have not had any green grass at this time of year." Those who looked far ahead were talking, quietly as yet, about a prepos­terously long aqueduct from Owens River Valley, but for the present there was water in the city mains, as far as they reached.

Hatfield set up shop two days after the day of prayer. In another two days there was rain in the northern part of the state, but forecaster George E. Franklin of the Los Angeles office of the U. S. Weather Bureau predicted there would be none for Los Angeles. He was wrong. At 6 o'clock that evening it started raining heavily, continuing off and on for the rest of the night and most of the following week. It rained well over an inch downtown, more in the foothills.

Franklin explained that it was the tail-end of the Northern California storm that had come over the Tehachapi. Still there was the coincidence that it had followed quickly after Hatfield's pre­sumed activity.

The newspapers had almost forgotten the prayers as a possible cause. All of them saw fit to mention Hatfield and his manipulations, but the Herald left no bases uncovered, saying:

In answer to the prayers of the church, as a result of Rainmaker Hatfield's manipulation or from natural causes, rain began falling last evening....