
































Microsoft Word - 1) Giacomelli .docx


History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

15 

 

 

 

Unsettling Gilded-Age Science: 
Vernacular Climatology and Meteorology in the “Middle Border” 

 
 

Joseph Giacomelli 
jng53@cornell.edu 
Cornell University 

 

 

 

 

Introduction 

 

During the Gilded Age, in the states and territories of the interior United States, Euro-Americans 
interested in establishing weather and climate observation networks faced numerous obstacles. 
Securing funding ranked high among them. In 1882, for example, Francis Nipher helped introduce 
a bill before the Missouri State Legislature seeking several thousand dollars of funding for the 
Missouri Weather Service. “Consideration of this bill,” Nipher later wrote, “furnished an occasion 
for mirth to some members of that body; but failed to occasion any interest.” The Saint Louis 
resident found the rejection “so depressing” that he made “no further attempt…in that direction.” 
Yet Nipher did succeed in expanding the Missouri Weather Service, thanks in large part to a 
growing network of volunteer observers – weather aficionados who recorded rainfall and 
temperature data to be collected in reports such as an 1892 study titled “Missouri Rainfall.” 
According to Nipher, the “patience and self-denial” of volunteer observers allowed his weather 
service to overcome the indifference of state legislators.1   

State weather services similar to Nipher’s proliferated across the Great Plains and Midwest 
during the 1870s and 1880s. These regional or meso-scale networks shared many characteristics 
with the national and transnational data collection networks analyzed by scholars such as James 
Rodger Fleming, Jamie Pietruska, and Paul Edwards. Like members of the Smithsonian-based 
initiatives described by Fleming, members of regional weather bureaus perceived their work as 
contributing to a “system” of “increasing complexity and abstraction” to be used by scientists in 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
1 Francis E. Nipher, “Report on Missouri Rainfall, with Averages for Ten Years ending December 1887,” Transactions 
of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, Vol. 5, 1886-1891 (St. Louis, MO: R.P. Studley and Co., 1892), 383. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

16 

support of “theoretical, polemical, and practical objectives.”2 Like the imperial meteorological 
networks examined by Pietruska, local networks helped “undergird agricultural improvement, 
capitalism, and the civilizing mission of American science.”3 And, like the institution-builders in 
Paul Edwards’s work, they participated in the “messy and incomplete” transition toward more 
standardized data collection frameworks.4 Yet the idiosyncrasies of these local networks merit 
closer examination. The inner workings of organizations such as Nipher’s highlight eddies amid 
the seemingly inexorable currents of nineteenth-century science: the shift from settler ecologies 
and folklore to data-based epistemologies, and the drive to separate positivist “pure science” from 
the murky realms of boosterism and cultural politics.5  

As scholars including Philipp Lehmann and Simon Naylor have observed, nineteenth-
century data collection efforts did not give rise to stable and certain scientific paradigms. Lehmann 
has pointed out how attempts to standardize meteorological and climatic data ushered in a “period 
of reevaluation and uncertainty with regard to the future trajectory of the discipline” of 
climatology.6 Similarly, Naylor has pointed out that vast troves of numbers such as those compiled 
by Nipher created more questions than answers.7 By examining vernacular meteorology and 
climatology8 in the “middle border” region,9 I hope to reveal some of the tensions shaping the 
construction of Gilded-Age American science. Climate theorists from Kansas, Iowa, and other 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
2 James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800-1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 
xxi-xxii, see also Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33-
41. 
3 Jamie Pietruska, “Hurricanes, Crops, and Capital: The Meteorological Infrastructure of American Empire in the West 
Indies,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (Oct 2016): 432. 
4 Paul Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21 (2006): 230. 
5 For “pure science” in the Gilded Age, see Paul Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century 
America,” Isis 100 (2009): 723. See also Lucier, “The Origins of Pure and Applied Science in Gilded Age America,” 
Isis 103 (2012).  
6 Philipp Lehmann, “Whither Climatology? Bruckner’s Climate Oscillations, Data Debates, and Dynamic 
Climatology,” History of Meteorology 15 (2015): 51.  
7 In his study of provincial meteorology in Cornwall, Naylor has argued that mass-scale meteorological data collection 
gave rise to “very real concerns in the late 1860s about how to turn continuous records into numerical results useful 
to science and government.” See Simon Naylor, “Nationalizing Provincializing Weather: Meteorology in Nineteenth-
Century Corwall,” British Journal for this History of Science 39 (2006): 419. 
8 My aim in using the expansive and admittedly nebulous category of “vernacular science” is to highlight the 
unevenness of late-nineteenth century scientific bureaucratization, professionalization, systematization, centralization, 
and standardization. As Kathleen Pandora has argued, “vernacular discursive forms” of science serve as a kind of 
“intellectual commons” where “social and theoretical comment can circulate without regard for scientific property.” 
See Katherine Pandora, “Knowledge Held in Common: Tales of Luther Burbank and Science in the American 
Vernacular,” Isis 92 (September 2001): 492. For another elaboration of the concept of “vernacular science,” see Helen 
Tilley, “Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; or, Is the History of Science Ready for the 
World?” Isis 101 (March 2010), especially FN 4. Tilley’s notion of vernacular science emphasizes “native” 
knowledge, and she also outlines how different scholars have employed the term.  
9 The geographical area of focus for this article is not just the Great Plains but a broader, vaguely defined region some 
nineteenth-century Americans termed the “middle border,” which included the prairie states as well as much of the 
West. Author Hamlin Garland popularized the term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Hamlin 
Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: McMillan, 1917). For a recent discussion of the “middle border,” 
see Aaron Sachs, Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (New Haven: Yale University 
Press, 2013), 210-211. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

17 

states attempted to derive meteo-climatic knowledge from sprawling sets of data collected by 
observers. They sought to answer a range of questions, especially the pressing, politically charged 
issue of whether Euro-American settlement could modify climatic conditions through agriculture, 
afforestation, deforestation, and other means.10 In doing so, they fused naturalistic beliefs with 
quantitative methods and probabilistic paradigms with experiential and experimental modes of 
apprehending the natural world.  

Conevery Bolton Valenčius has revealed the ubiquity of “everyday science” in early 
America.  In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, she demonstrates how Antebellum-
Era “natural inquiry,” folklore, and other forms of knowledge sometimes dismissed as “derivative 
and inconsequential” comprised the “unrecognized bedrock” of the Gilded-Age “explosion of 
invention, innovation, engineering, and institution-building.”11 This article seeks to extend 
Valenčius’s periodization by showing that vernacular science did not just set the groundwork for 
later developments. In the late nineteenth-century United States, boundaries between types of 
knowledge remained porous and contested. I aim to explore the dialectic between the quotidian 
settler perceptions analyzed by Valenčius and the institutional science chronicled by Fleming.12  

“Middle border” boosters and newspapermen sometimes deployed, debated, and 
questioned expansive data sets. “Men of science,” meanwhile, used anecdote and folklore as 
starting points in deriving hypotheses to explain climatic and meteorological changes. They 
melded naturalistic wisdom and emerging techno-scientific methods, sometimes seeking 
legitimacy from their use of local and experiential knowledge.13 In order to convey the breadth 
and depth of Gilded-Age meteo-climatic debates, this article draws from newspapers, amateur 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
10 During the Gilded Age, boosters, land speculators, and railroad agents argued that tree plantations and newly planted 
crops could transform the climate of the Intermountain West and Great Plains, creating a utopia for yeoman farmers. 
Some scientists, surveyors, and bureaucrats concurred, while others expressed doubts about the ability of forest culture 
and agriculture to modify weather patterns. For many Euro-Americans, belief in anthropogenic climate change served 
as a litmus test for faith in American capitalism and Manifest Destiny. For an example of a source arguing in favor of 
human-induced climate change, see Charles Dana Wilber, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the 
Northwest (Omaha: Daily Republican Print, 1881). For an example of a “middle border” author arguing against 
climatic changes, see Edgar Guild, “Western Kansas: Its Geology, Climate, Natural History, etc.” Kansas City Review 
of Science and Industry 3 (December 1879). 
11 Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2013), see 177 for “bedrock,” 17 for “natural inquiry,” 10 for “derivative” and “everyday science.” 
12 See Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and their Land (New 
York: Basic Books, 2002) and Fleming, Meteorology in America. In her study on folklore and meteorological 
knowledge in Switzerland, Sarah Strauss argues that “folklore, as well as individual practice, is embedded into the 
scientific process.” See Strauss, “Weather Wise: Speaking Folklore to Science in Leukerbad,” in Strauss and Benjamin 
Orlove, eds, Weather, Climate, Culture (New York: Berg, 2003), 52-53. 
13 For “men of science” deriving inspiration from folklore and anecdote, see John Hay, “Atmospheric Absorption and 
its Effect upon Agriculture,” Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting 1890 of the Kansas State Board of 
Agriculture (Topeka, 1890), and Harvey Culbertson, “Meteorology,” Annual Report of the Nebraska State 
Horticultural Society 1885 (Lincoln: State Journal Company, 1887). For a study on the complex meaning of the term 
“professional” in the Gilded Age, see Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist.” Lucier argues that late nineteenth-
century “men of science” sought to distinguish themselves from “professionals” tainted by economic dealings. I am 
not taking issue with Lucier’s point. By using “professional” in this context, I am using the current meaning of the 
term to refer to climatic and meteorological thinkers who earned salaries for their scientific endeavors.    



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

18 

weather reports, and local and regional agro-scientific societies, as well as the papers and writings 
of experts and semi-trained polymaths. Exponents of vernacular meteorology and climatology did 
not create a discrete branch of knowledge; instead, they operated within a network of mutually 
influencing epistemologies.14 Indeed, the diffuse nature of data collection projects and the 
popularization of scientific discourse reveal the inadequacy of the category “vernacular science.” 
In some ways, all Gilded-Age science was vernacular. 

  I depict vernacular climatology and meteorology not as fixed categories but as a series of 
negotiations between academics, bureaucrats, technocrats, volunteer observers, agriculturalists, 
newspapermen, and others. These figures contested the legitimacy of newly produced scientific 
knowledge. They appropriated climatic and meteorological theories to serve their interests, which 
ranged from agricultural boosterism to institution-building to the settling of personal squabbles. 
Relocating meteorology and climatology to the “middle border” highlights the unsettled nature of 
Gilded-Age scientific cultures.  

 

Gustavus Hinrichs, Mercurial Polymath 

 

Gustavus Hinrichs, the founder and head of the Iowa State Weather Service, stood at the 
intersection of the often contradictory intellectual currents shaping Great Plains meteo-climatic 
science. At times, he upheld the work of “practical” men over that of institutional scientists, railed 
against the dogma of empiricism, and advanced boosterish, promotional climatology. But at other 
times, he policed the borders of science, issuing vehement denunciations of anyone straying 
beyond the bounds of “real science.” Hinrichs also issued seemingly conflicting statements about 
human-induced climate change and about the role of statistical uncertainty in climate science.15 
Aside from occasional credits for coining the term “derecho” (a large, straight-line windstorm), he 
has received little attention from historians of climatology and meteorology.16 A mercurial and 
paradoxical figure, Hinrichs offers a glimpse into contentious Gilded-Age debates over who 
qualified as legitimate creators of climatic and meteorological knowledge. His work merits closer 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
14 In Victorian Popularizers of Knowledge: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2007), Bernard Lightman offers a nuanced interpretation of the relationship between popular and elite science: 
“Popular culture can actively produce its own indigenous science, or can transform the products of elite culture in the 
process of appropriating them” (14).  
15 For Hinrichs’s defense of “real science,” see Hinrichs,“Faith and Science,” Lecture delivered by Prof. Gustavus 
Hinrichs before the students of the [Iowa] State University, undated, likely 1867, G. Hinrichs papers, Box 1, University 
of Iowa Library. University Archives, RG. 99.0039. For Hinrichs’s skepticism, see Hinrichs, “Rainfall and Timber in 
Iowa,” Transactions of the Iowa State Horticultural Society for 1879 (Des Moines: F.M. Mills, State Printer, 1880), 
199-200.  
16 See Stephen F. Corfidi, Michael C. Coniglio, Ariel E. Cohen and Corey M. Mead, “A proposed revision to the 
definition of ‘derecho,’” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 97.6 (June 2016). W.P. Palmer’s piece on 
Hinrichs surveys his contributions to chemistry and offers some details about his life, but does not explore his 
philosophy of science or delve into his climatic and meteorological work. See “Dissent at the University of Iowa: 
Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs – Chemist and Polymath,” Chemistry 16, 6 (2007). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

19 

examination because, despite its idiosyncrasies, it is representative of “middle-border” knowledge-
making. By fusing experiential and statistical evidence, Hinrichs managed to cope with the 
seemingly intractable problems facing Gilded-Age climate theorists: burgeoning but incomplete 
and unreliable data sets, multiplicities of contradicting climatic hypotheses, and growing, but 
occasionally hostile and alienating bureaucracies.  

Hinrichs was born in 1836 in Lunden, a city then located in Denmark, and immigrated to 
the United States in 1861 because of political turmoil surrounding Prussian unification. First 
settling in Davenport, he then moved to Iowa City in 1863 to work as a professor at the State 
University of Iowa, where he taught foreign languages and physical sciences. A polymath, 
Hinrichs conducted research in minerology, meteorology, medicine, geology, physics, and 
chemistry, earning some renown for his work on periodic laws.17 In 1875, Hinrichs established the 
Iowa State Weather Service and later took pride in having organized what he termed “the first 
State Weather Service of America.”18 His weather service operated continuously until 1889, when 
Hinrichs moved to Saint Louis and his network was supplanted by the rival Iowa Weather and 
Crop Service, an organization affiliated with the US Weather Bureau.19  

A mixture of personal, utilitarian, and theoretical goals motivated Hinrichs’s efforts to 
develop the Iowa State Weather Service. Hinrichs envisioned his weather service and data-
gathering network as a project undertaken by the people of Iowa, for the people of Iowa. By 
collecting temperature, wind, and rainfall statistics, he argued, the weather service would “secure 
a faithful record of the conditions on which Iowa’s prosperity depends and will continue to 
depend.”20 In his Biennial Reports, Hinrichs stressed the importance of producing meteo-climatic 
information of immediate use to agriculturalists and others working in his adoptive state. While 
long-term climatic observations would inform the ongoing process of farming-based settlement, 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
17 For biographical information on Hinrichs, see the obituary by Charles Keyes in the Iowa Academy of Science 30, 
1923, 28-31. G. Hinrichs papers, Box 1, biography folder, University of Iowa Library, University Archives, RG. 
99.0039. 
18 Gustavus Hinrichs, Rainfall Laws Deduced from Twenty Years of Observation, Published by the authority of the 
Secretary of Agriculture (Washington, DC: Weather Bureau, 1893), 77.  
19 Hinrichs moved to St. Louis in 1889 and began teaching at Washington University. In his Sixth Biennial Report of 
the Central Station of the Iowa Weather Service (Des Moines: G.H. Ragsdale, State Printer, 1889), Hinrichs criticized 
the Weather Bureau for its poor scientific practices and its efforts to undermine his project. In one of his first reports, 
J.R. Sage, the head of the Weather Bureau-affiliated Iowa Weather and Crop Service, fired back against Hinrichs’s 
organization, citing the “defect in its management” and explaining how the Iowa general assembly changed its support 
from Hinrichs to his rivals. Annual Report of the Iowa Weather and Crop Service in Co-Operation with the U.S. 
Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau, for the Meteorological Year 1890 (Des Moines: G.H. Ragsdale, State 
Printer, 1891), 6-7. 
20 Gustavus Hinrichs, “A Few Facts About the Iowa Weather Service,” Feb 2, 1888, Gustavus Hinrichs papers, Box 
3, University of Iowa Library, University Archives, RG99.0039. Although Hinrichs’s institutional home, the State 
University of Iowa (later renamed the University of Iowa, not to be confused with Iowa State University in Ames), 
predated the Morrill Act of 1862, his utilitarian outlook fits the guiding ethos of the new land grant schools. Hinrichs’s 
emphasis on usable knowledge also mirrors the approach of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century “field stations” 
chronicled by Jeremy Vetter in his book Field Life: Science in the American West During the Railroad Era (Pittsburgh: 
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).  Vetter writes that the “raison d’être of the station was often to satisfy a perceived 
demand for useful knowledge” (280). Like the biological surveys and agricultural field stations described by Vetter, 
Hinrichs’s network helped bridge “experiential and cosmopolitan knowledge” (155).  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

20 

short-term meteorological studies would help Iowans understand, cope with, and potentially 
predict destructive storms and tornadoes.21 Hinrichs’s 1877 report offered a rousing defense of the 
Iowa State Weather Service. Data collected by his network, he claimed, had “conclusively 
demonstrated” the “intimate relation between the percentage surface covered with timber and the 
distribution of rainfall as to amount, frequency, and intensity, as well as the distribution of 
fertilizing thunder-storms.” Hinrichs viewed weather patterns as dynamic and susceptible to 
human influences – mostly afforestation and deforestation – so he believed Weather Service 
“results” should “form the basis of rational legislation…having for its object the increase of 
healthfulness and fertility of entire regions of our State.”22 In other instances, however, Hinrichs 
characterized the data supporting theories of human climatic influences as “apparently 
contradictory.” But he presented these doubts and contradictions as proof that his Weather Service 
should continue to carry out its work “by extended observation and reduction.”23 

Hinrichs constructed climatology as both a utilitarian endeavor and as a noble, esoteric 
science driven by curiosity for the unknown. He fused Valenčius’s “everyday science” with the 
“pure science” described by Paul Lucier, seeking immediate material rewards while also 
uncovering mysteries and raising new questions about the sources of environmental and climatic 
changes.24 Rainfall Laws Deduced from Twenty Years of Observation, published in 1893, 
represents the culmination of Hinrichs’s work in Iowa and his efforts to meld citizen science and 
practical knowledge with complex statistical methods. In this work, Hinrichs outlined a series of 
logarithmic equations for determining the relative agricultural utility of rainfall events. His 
experiences working in his “large garden” near the “bluffs of the Iowa River” piqued his interest 
in juxtaposing the success of agricultural endeavors with rainfall statistics provided by volunteer 
observers. Noting the inadequacy of simple precipitation totals and the influence of evaporation 
and runoff, Hinrichs wrote that the “thrashing [sic] machine seemed to be entirely independent of 
my rain gauge.” As an alternative to simple rainfall numbers, Hinrichs devised a series of “laws” 
and parameters that would transform meteorological statistics into dynamic tools in the service of 
agriculture. Categories such as “total utilizable rains” and “total useless or damaging rains” would 
facilitate efforts to assess crop prospects. It is unclear whether Hinrichs’s efforts succeeded in 
rendering multitudes of new weather statistics more useful and legible to farmers. Still, Rainfall 
Laws highlights Hinrichs’s belief that climatic laws and meteorological statistics would only beget 
uncertainty unless paired with material, quotidian realities.25     

Although the US Weather Bureau published Hinrichs’s statistical tome, the Iowan had a 
contentious relationship with the Washington, DC-based scientific establishment. In 1891, the 
civilian U.S. Department of Agriculture took over the U.S. Army Signal Service’s weather 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
21 Since Hinrichs viewed meteorological and climatological research as intertwined, I use the term meteo-climatic to 
characterize his work.   
22 Gustavus Hinrichs, “Second Annual Report of the Iowa State Weather Service,” Printed as Appendix to the Report 
of the Iowa State Agricultural Society for the year 1877, 624.  
23 Gustavus Hinrichs, “Rainfall and Timber in Iowa,” 199-200. 
24 Lucier, “The Origins of Pure and Applied Science.” 
25 Hinrichs, Rainfall Laws, see 17 for “large garden,” 13 for “thrashing machine,” and 15 for “total utilizable.”  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

21 

reporting network. The national network had been growing throughout the course of the 1870s and 
1880s, sometimes collaborating with local and state-based organizations such as Hinrichs’s. In 
Iowa, however, scientific and personal conflicts prevented smooth cooperation. George E. Curtis, 
a prominent federal bureaucrat and meteo-climatic theorist, published a scathing review of Rainfall 
Laws, calling various portions of the book “obscure” and “unnecessary.” Curtis also took issue 
with Hinrichs’s probabilistic approach to statistics, climate, and meteorology. 26 Hinrichs cast 
similar aspersions upon the work of the “national weather bureau” and defended his choice to 
establish an independent state weather service in Iowa. As if their “indifferent, if not hostile” 
attitude toward the Iowa State Weather Service was not bad enough, Hinrichs wrote, the US Army 
Signal Corps, the Weather Bureau, and the Smithsonian Institution also carried out shoddy meteo-
climatic science. In an 1887 report, he admonished the national weather bureaucracy for 
emphasizing “the production of so-called indications and probabilities” to “the detriment of real 
climatological study.” The Iowan added that he hoped “a broader, a more scientific spirit” would 
“in time prevail in the management of the national weather service.”27   

The conflict between Hinrichs and national institutions may have arisen from his 
sometimes pugnacious personality. During his time at the State University of Iowa, Hinrichs 
clashed with administrators and fellow professors. In a decade-long effort to have the polymath 
dismissed, other faculty members at the university presented lists of grievances against Hinrichs 
to the Board of Regents. They claimed that Hinrichs belittled his colleagues “in his classrooms, on 
the street, at home, and abroad” even “to the extent of using profane language.” Other disputes 
centered on Hinrichs’s purportedly excessive salary and his supposed appropriation of university 
equipment, including an “electric lantern” and a “heliostat.”28 Though his colleagues succeeded in 
having Hinrichs dismissed from the Collegiate Faculty in 1886, students and several local 
newspapers came to Hinrichs’s defense. The Iowa City Post, for example, decried the “most 
desperate and dastardly assaults upon the good name of Dr. Hinrichs.” The climate theorist 
lamented his dismissal, saying that he was “neither invited nor allowed to defend” himself.29 In 
the decades following his firing, many Iowans and others sought to rehabilitate Hinrichs. A 1923 
obituary indicates that his allies and admirers to some extent succeeded in reclaiming the 
polymath’s reputation. Its author, Charles Keyes, enumerated Hinrichs’s scientific achievements 
in climatology, chemistry, and crystallography, while adding that the Iowan had been “coldly 
received” in his home state but had garnered “loud applaudits everywhere throughout intellectual 
Europe.”30 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
26 See George E. Curtis, “Review of Rainfall Laws, Deduced from Twenty Years’ Observation,” The American 
Meteorological Journal 10 (Apr 1894). For a study on the politics of probability and prediction in turn-of-the-century 
American meteorology, see Jamie L. Pietruska, “US Weather Bureau Chief Willis Moore and the Reimagination of 
Uncertainty in Long-Range Forecasting,” Environment and History 17 (2011). 
27 See Hinrichs, “Fifth Biennial,” 5.  
28 See Daily Register July 6, 1875, Hinrichs Papers, Box 1, and “Documents Relating to the Dismissal of Dr. Gustavus 
Hinrichs,” Hinrichs Papers, Box 1.  
29 “Documents Relating to…,” Hinrichs papers, Box 1. 
30 Keyes, Iowa Academy of Science 30 (1923).  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

22 

Hinrichs’s personal squabbles notwithstanding, disagreement over the proper scale for 
conducting meteo-climatic research drove his clash with national scientific institutions. As 
Phaedra Daipha has argued, “the relative ease with which a wide variety of data could be collected 
intensified jurisdictional wars…over the merit of local weather versus local atmospheric systems, 
observation versus speculation, reportage of unusual weather versus global atmospheric 
systems.”31 James Bergman has chronicled one such struggle over scale in his recent study on the 
Blue Hill (Massachusetts) Meteorological Observatory. Bergman demonstrates that late 
nineteenth-century efforts to centralize and “scale up” observation networks often raised new 
questions about the relationship between lay knowledge, local beliefs, and “universal” scientific 
knowledge.32  

In the Great Plains, some scale-based “jurisdictional wars” centered on extreme weather 
events. Hinrichs had a special interest in “destructive great storms,” and especially tornadoes. In 
an 1889 article, he published a map showing all recorded tornado tracks in Iowa between 1875 and 
1888, asking government scientists to “stop the manufacture of dire tornadoes” – in other words, 
to cease issuing exaggerated reports about tornado dangers in Iowa.33 Only local experience, he 
argued, would allow for a proper tracking and warning system. After describing a system of 
“weather flags” meant to communicate barometric changes to the community, Hinrichs stated, “It 
is of supreme importance that our people should learn to help themselves, and not vainly rely upon 
a distant power which even at best cannot reach them until too late. Weather telegrams are of 
greatest possible value, but only as aids to properly organized local work.”34 New technologies, he 
insisted, would be effective only if implemented on a state scale and in conjunction with local 
knowledge. As to the question of whether Iowa “is big enough for a weather service,” Hinrichs 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
31 Phaedra Daipha, “Weathering Risk: Uncertainty, Weather Forecasting, and Expertise,” Sociology Compass 6 
(2012): 18. For scale and climatology, see also Deborah Coen, “Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan,” 
Osiris 26 (2011). 
32 James Bergman, “Knowing their Place: The Blue Hill Observatory and the Value of Local Knowledge in an Era of 
Synoptic Weather Forecasting, 1884-1894,” Science in Context 29 (2016).   
33 For “destructive great storms,” see Hinrichs, “Second Annual Report,” 655. See also Hinrichs, “Tornadoes and 
Derechos.” American Meteorological Journal Vol 5, No. 9 (Jan 1889). For a history of tornado forecasting and 
warning, see Marlene Bradford, “Historical Roots of Modern Tornado Forecasts and Warnings” Weather and 
Forecasting 14 (August 1999).  
34 Gustavus Hinrichs, “First Biennial Report of the Central Station of the Iowa Weather Service,” (Des Moines: F.M. 
Mills, State Printer, 1880), 22-23. Jeremy Vetter’s case study on early twentieth-century Kansas analyzes the influence 
of telegraphs on amateur weather observation networks. See Vetter, “Lay Observers, Telegraph Lines, and Kansas 
Weather: The Field Network as a Mode of Knowledge Production,” Science in Context 24 (June 2011). Vetter 
develops the concept of the “field network” – a “mode of knowledge production in modern science that has linked 
together geographically dispersed lay people whose activities are coordinated and directed from a central location” 
(259). He focuses on the “top-down coercive authority exerted by [US Weather] Bureau staff over subordinate 
collaborators” (275). Technologies such as the telegraph, Vetter argues, helped make weather observation networks 
ever more centralized and hierarchical. Earlier organizations such as Hinrichs’s shared many characteristics with the 
networks described by Vetter. Back in the 1870s and 1880s, however, local observation networks still struggled to 
incorporate telegraphy and other novel technologies into their quotidian scientific practice. As shown by Hinrichs’s 
quote, the advent of telegraphy did not immediately give rise to large-scale systematization and national or regional-
scale centralization. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

23 

answered, “indeed it is,” because it was far bigger than “England, Portugal, Switzerland,” each of 
which had separate, state-supported weather services.35  

Though he invoked other nation-states to legitimize his work, Hinrichs and his weather 
service cannot be cast as simple vehicles for state-driven modernization and centralization. 
National weather prediction systems and all-explaining theories of storm formation and climatic 
changes did not inspire Hinrichs so much as the task of keeping a “faithful exposition of the actual 
conditions of the weather in Iowa, so that our Weather Reports will continue to be of value long 
after views and theories shall have passed away.” Hinrichs sought to “simplify and systematize” 
institutions and flows of information. In 1870, he founded the American Scientific Monthly, and 
stated that the journal would act as “an exponent” of “modern science,” “the spirit which is 
fashioning this age.”36 Yet he espoused a capacious brand of modern science, one that included 
polymaths and resisted the hardening of discrete disciplines.37 Perhaps Hinrichs’s expansive 
interests made it hard for him to find a niche in the growing national scientific bureaucracy and 
meteo-climatic network. The friction between the Iowa State Weather Service and the American 
scientific establishment also underscores Pietruska’s interpretation of center-periphery theory. 
Without flattening hierarchies of scientific infrastructure, Pietruska demonstrates the constant 
contestation and renegotiation of centers and peripheries.38 Data did not simply flow from the 
interior to nodes of knowledge production on the eastern seaboard and then, reconstituted as 
“science,” trickle back to the peripheries.39 

While resisting encroachment from the national metropole, Hinrichs created his own center 
of calculation in Iowa City.40 His house in Iowa City served as the “Central Station” of the data 
collection network.41 Hinrichs’s home featured a three-story tower, its top two floors dedicated to 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
35 Hinrichs, “Second Annual Report,” 623. 
36 For “simplify and systematize,” see “First Annual Report,” 22. For “modern science” see Gustavus Hinrichs, 
American Scientific Monthly, Edited and published by Prof. Gustavus Hinrichs. Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1870), State 
Historical Society of Iowa (Q1.A8), 3.   
37 David Cahan describes the solidification of scientific titles and designations in nineteenth-century science in 
“Looking at Nineteenth-Century Science: An Introduction,” in David Cahan, ed., From Natural Philosophy to the 
Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4; see 
also “Institutions and Communities,” in Cahan, From Natural Philosophy…, 297. Along with “full-time devotion to 
and pay for scientific work” and “advanced well-defined educational credentials,” Cahan views the university as the 
“principal institutional setting for science.” It is noteworthy that even though Hinrichs worked for the State University 
of Iowa, his weather service remained somewhat independent from the university’s institutional umbrella. This 
separation, I argue, reveals the persistence of popular and amateur science in an era of institutionalization.   
38 Pietruska, “Hurricanes, Crops, Capital,” 410. 
39 See Ralph R. Hamerla, An American Scientist on the Research Frontier: Edward Morley, Community, and Radical 
Ideas in Nineteenth-Century Science (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Press, 2006), 2, and Naylor, “Nationalizing 
Provincial Science,” 409. 
40 The concept of “center of calculation” is from Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and 
Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 
41 Hinrichs’s home was built in 1879. See handwritten note on 1909 photograph of Hinrichs’s house in University of 
Iowa archives, Hinrichs Papers, photographs file. Before his house was built, Hinrichs used another observatory on 
Church and Clinton Streets in Iowa City. See Ray Wolf’s “Brief History of Gustavus Hinrichs, Discoverer of the 
Derecho” http://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/hinrichs/hinrichs.htm  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

24 

the Weather Service, and a rooftop balcony complete with weathervane, thermometer, hygrometer, 
and rain gauge (see Figure 1).  

 

 
Fig. 1. Central Station of the Iowa State Weather Service, Iowa City. From Hinrichs, Second Biennial 

Report of the Central Station of the Iowa Weather Service (1882). 

 

Though Hinrichs conducted his own observations, his most arduous task was managing his 
network of volunteer observers. By 1877, Hinrichs wrote, he could count on “eighty-seven 
volunteer observers representing as many Stations.” I was unable to find archival evidence about 
these citizen scientists, their views on science, climate, weather, and politics, or about the nature 
of their relationship with the weather service’s founder. But the fact that Hinrichs termed each 
observer a “station” indicates that he accorded some measure of respect and gratitude to the 
volunteers upon whom he depended. The Weather Service’s second annual report (1877) included 
a map showing the location of each volunteer observation station (see Figure 2).  

 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

25 

 
Fig. 2. Stations of the Iowa State Weather Service. From Hinrichs, Second Annual Report of the Iowa 

State Weather Service (1877) 

 

In his reports and articles, Hinrichs offered a glimpse into the challenge of creating an 
imagined community of science over such an expansive territory.42 He described Iowa as a settler 
society marked by transience: “In our comparatively new State people change residence more 
frequently than in older states.” Volunteer observers dropped out because of death, disease, or 
“neglect.”43 Adding insult to injury, he complained, the national Weather Bureau “attempted to 
estrange our volunteers” during the 1880s.44 Despite these difficulties, volunteers provided 
Hinrichs with a flood of data. The polymath lamented the dearth of “clerical help” and spent long 
hours mailing, copying, and “office printing.” In 1878 alone, he claimed, “44,502 copies were 
made from 166 stencils.”45 Creating tables, maps, and reports from data provided by volunteers 
presented another herculean task. “It should be remembered,” Hinrichs wrote, “that in this work 
there is no cessation; every day brings its load of facts and data which have to be properly 
classified, recorded and disposed of.”46 Hinrichs created a system of forms intended to facilitate 
correspondence with observers and ease the translation of data from the field into charts and 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
42 David Cahan discusses the formation of “imagined communities of science” in the nineteenth century. See David 
Cahan, “Introduction” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences, 11.  
43 Hinrichs, “First Biennial Report,” 6.  
44 Hinrichs, “Sixth Biennial Report,” 5.  
45 Hinrichs, “First Biennial Report,” 24. 
46 Hinrichs, “Second Biennial Report of the Central Station of the Iowa Weather Service” (Des Moines: F.M. Mills, 
State Printer, 1882), 31. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

26 

eventually maps.47 The cartographic process, however, remained tedious. For example, an 1883 
series of maps correlating timber areas with rainfall averages contained a staggering 26,082 rainfall 
measurements.48 The work proved so onerous that Hinrichs wondered if it would be “imprudent” 
for him to continue his “personal sacrifice” and “expenditure of labor and money.”49   

Despite his rhetoric about advancing “modern science,” Hinrichs sometimes agonized that 
his work might be “thoroughly useless.”50 With the popularization of science across the United 
States, new journals and meteo-climatic theories proliferated, creating a cacophony of voices.51 
The contributions of the Iowa State Weather Service risked being lost in this chaotic scientific 
cauldron. Hinrichs reassured himself and his volunteers with the hope that “every true observation 
made by any of our observers at any station in Iowa will…constitute an additional link in the chain 
which binds the past to the future.”52 Since Hinrichs found hope in the notion of a growing web of 
meteo-climatic knowledge, he may have been reassured to find that in 1893, Corydon P. Cronk of 
the Maryland State Weather Service cited the contributions of his weather service: “In the state of 
Iowa it has been conclusively proven, by the records of the State Weather Service, that the annual 
rainfall is more evenly distributed throughout the year in the more heavily wooded portions of the 
state.” Bolstered by data from Iowa, Cronk made strident claims about forests’ influence on 
climate patterns. He even speculated that afforestation and reforestation might offer “protection 
from the tornado” by preventing the “overheating of the earth’s surface” and thus diminishing the 
“energy of these storms and…lessen[ing] the frequency of tornadoes.”53 Cronk likely derived his 
inferences from cartographic series created by Hinrichs (see Figure 3), perhaps the map series that 
required over 26,000 observations. Yet his claims maintained none of the uncertainties and 
qualifications that appeared in Hinrichs’s work.  

 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
47 Hinrichs, “Second Annual Report,” 622. 
48 Gustavus Hinrichs, Notes on Cloud Forms and the Climate of Iowa, Central Station, I.W.S. (Iowa Weather Service), 
1883. 
49 Hinrichs, “Second Annual Report,” 625. Though the state of Iowa provided some financial support after 1878, 
Hinrichs shouldered much of the weather service’s financial burden himself. See Wolf, “Brief History of Gustavus 
Hinrichs.” 
50 For “thoroughly useless,” see Hinrichs, “Third Biennial Report of the Central Station of the Iowa Weather Service” 
(Des Moines: George E. Roberts, State Printer, 1883), 5. 
51 For an overview of the dramatic rise of popular science in the Gilded-Age United States, see Rebecca Edwards, 
New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 151-169. Citing 
magazines such as Popular Science Monthly, Scientific American, and Science, Edwards argues that “America became 
a nation of scientific enthusiasts” (160).  
52 Hinrichs, “Third Biennial Report,” 5. Hinrichs’s doubt over his work’s significance underscores the historian Jeremy 
Vetter’s argument about the paradoxical nature of scientific universalism. “The desire to attain knowledge that can be 
applied to all times and places,” he writes, “has been an overriding ambition of modern science.” But the drive to 
create universalist knowledge “has not always worked to produce pragmatically useful and environmentally 
sustainable knowledge on the ground in particular places.” See Vetter, Field Life, 338. Hinrichs and his network show 
that the modern drive to create universally applicable knowledge both created and relied upon cryptic, uncertain forms 
of local knowledge.       
53 C. (Corydon) P. Cronk, “Influence of Forests on Climate and Agriculture,” Maryland State Weather Service Monthly 
Report 3, 6 (US Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau, October 1893), 57-58. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

27 

 

 
Fig. 3. Hinrichs, Second Annual Report of the Iowa State Weather Service (1877), 624. Cronk may have 

been referring to these maps (or to similar map series made by Hinrichs) in his 1893 article. Hinrichs 
wrote that the “distribution of the shading expressing the amount of rainfall (in inches) shows a close 
relation to the distribution of the shading marking the percentage of the surface covered with timber.” 

Thus, he argued, the maps “furnish abundant material support” for the theory that society could influence 
climatic patterns through afforestation and deforestation. 

 

Though the Iowan did pronounce that he had “conclusively demonstrated” forest influences on 
climate, he often followed his statements with calls for further research. Cronk’s use of Hinrichs’s 
research offers a glimpse into the circuitous networks of knowledge circulation in the Gilded-Age 
United States. The diffusion of information and its interpretations was not one-way: climate theory 
sometimes flowed from West to East along with data. And the re-use and re-framing of information 
at each center of calculation created layer upon layer of uncertainty.    

 

Syncretic Science  

 

Historians have sometimes characterized theories of local and regional forest-climatic influences 
as “mythological conceptions,” as the last vestiges of naturalistic, folkloric, and pseudo-scientific 
paradigms.54 Yet Gilded-Age climatological and meteorological writings from the “middle 
border” offer more evidence of continuity and syncretism than of a straightforward transition from 
naturalistic beliefs to data-derived scientific knowledge. As David Livingstone and Charles 
Withers have observed, nineteenth-century scientific thinkers inhabited multiple spaces and 
“operated different moral and epistemic economies.”55 Cronk, Hinrichs, and others employed both 
quantitative and anecdotal, observational evidence. After invoking Hinrichs’s statistical studies, 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
54 Paul Travis, “Changing Climate in Kansas: A Late 19th-Century Myth.” Kansas History Vol. 1, No.1 (Spring 1978): 
50. 
55 Charles Withers and David Livingstone, “Thinking Geographically About Nineteenth-Century Science” in Withers 
and Livingstone, eds, Geographies of Nineteenth Century Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 5.  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

28 

for example, Cronk remarked, “The traveler who now crosses the continent through the states of 
Iowa, Kansas, or Nebraska will see the strong belts of forest trees which the laws of the states have 
compelled the owners of land to plant. The results have been marked. The rainfall is more evenly 
distributed.”56 Cronk and Hinrichs appealed to agriculturalists and potential volunteer observers 
while also attempting to elucidate complex natural laws. They employed different lexicons to 
engage with different audiences in seeking financial, institutional, and moral support. Despite – 
and at times because of – their syncretic approach, Hinrichs and his contemporaries took part in 
“boundary work,” the strategic practice of attempting to exclude other authorities from the 
scientific realm.57 Some proved adept at a peculiar juggling act: policing the boundaries of science 
while also working to “translate” between different ways of knowing.58 

In addition to polymaths and institution-builders such as Hinrichs, other Euro-Americans 
engaged in a vigorous debate over the proper parameters of meteo-climatic science. S.L. Dosher, 
a Manistee, Michigan, based observer for the national Weather Bureau, found fault with the 
persistence of naturalistic impressions in climatological studies. In 1893, Dosher penned a letter 
to the American Meteorological Journal, a periodical that published contributions from prominent 
government scientists as well as Hinrichs and similar figures. Vague impressions drawn from hazy 
memories, Dosher insisted, could only give rise to fallacious climatic theories. “Whenever there 
occurs a period of extreme heat, a long wet spell or dry spell or even a period of exceedingly fine 
weather,” he wrote, “people will always claim that no such weather ever occurred before.” Dosher 
alleged that such misconceptions engendered the “general opinion prevailing that the climate of 
our country is changing, especially with reference to the winters, which, it is often claimed, are 
growing milder.” Dosher found no evidence of climatic change, anthropogenic or otherwise, in the 
records of multiple Weather Bureau stations.59  

Some “middle border” climate theorists shared Dosher’s belief that only data collection 
could offer definitive solutions to scientific quandaries. In 1878, for example, the Kansan Isaac 
Noyes expressed his belief that efforts to collect “daily facts” would “enlighten mankind with the 
mysteries that preside over the natural phenomena that govern the weather.” Quantitative 
triumphalism, however, did not always foster consensus on the contentious question of human-
induced climatic changes. Unlike Dosher, Noyes allowed for the possibility of climatic changes 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
56 Cronk, “Influence of Forests,” 58. Cronk may be referring to the federal Timber Culture Act of 1873 or to state-
sponsored afforestation initiatives such as the Arbor Day movement.   
57 See Thomas Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 
1999), 15-18. Gieryn identifies three types of boundary work. My main concern here is with the category he terms 
“exclusion” – the exclusion of certain figures, methods, and practices as unscientific.  
58 For “translation,” see Tilley, “Global Histories, Vernacular Science…,” 112, 117. As Sara B. Pritchard has argued, 
boundary work “has the potential to be generative and empowering, sometimes even counter-hegemonic.” See 
Pritchard, “Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies: Promises, Challenges, and 
Contributions,” in New Natures, eds. Pritchard, Finn Arne Jorgensen, Dolly Jorgensen (Pittsburgh: University of 
Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 13. 
59 Letter from S.L. Dosher, American Meteorological Journal 9, 10 (Feb 1893). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

29 

and supported the notion that society could influence weather patterns.60 The decade and a half 
that elapsed between the publication of Noyes and Dosher’s pieces cannot entirely explain this 
difference of opinion, as Hinrichs and many others employed data-based approaches to support 
theories of anthropogenic climate change well into the 1890s.61  

Like Dosher, some Great Plains climate theorists sought to purge climate discourse of what 
one Iowa horticulturalist termed “moonshine notions.”62 At the same time, climate-related 
newspaper stories such as the Topeka Daily Tribune’s 1879 “Bogus Science Against Experience 
and Common Sense” show that some Great Plains Euro-Americans valued “practical knowledge” 
over “science.”63 Much of this hostility toward high science and its exponents originated in 
suspicion of Eastern elites, a resentment that would find political expression in the Populist Party 
of the 1890s.64 But a broad cross-section of Gilded-Age scientific thinkers attempted to incorporate 
folkloric beliefs within quantitative methodologies such as those employed by scientists in eastern 
metropoles. Some Great Plains polymaths, horticulturists, newspapermen, and university “men of 
science” seemed to take their cue from John Trowbridge.  

An Easterner and professor of physics at Harvard, Trowbridge authored an 1872 Popular 
Science Monthly piece arguing that “great fires” have “with some probability of truth…an 
influence upon the production of rain.” He derived his hypotheses from folkloric notions about 
rainstorms following fires and admonished colleagues who dismissed folk beliefs out of hand: 
“The attitude of scientific men in regard to so-called popular fallacies and superstitions is not, in 
general, a praiseworthy one. A belief needs only to be widespread among the people at large to be 
denounced.” Trowbridge conducted a series of electrical experiments in his laboratory in an effort 
to simulate the effect of fires on atmospheric conditions. Though unable to rule out uncertainties 
arising from his methods, he found that the experiments affirmed naturalistic impressions about 
large-scale fires triggering rainstorms.65 As a proponent of laboratory experiments, Trowbridge 
participated in an ongoing debate about the relationship among natural philosophy, pure science, 
applied science, and engineering. The historian of science Ronald Kline has highlighted the fluid, 
	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
60 Isaac P. Noyes, “A New View of the Weather Question,” The Kansas City Review of Science and Industry 2 (July 
1878), see 218-219 for “weather mystery,” 227 for a discussion of climate change.  
61 Hinrichs, Rainfall Laws; for another 1890s source using measurements to endorse climatic influences, see “Influence 
of Groves on the Moisture Content of the Air” by L.C. Corbett (West Virginia University, Morgantown, VW), The 
Forester 3, 4 (April 1, 1897). 
62 For a description of forest-climate influence theories as “moonshine notions,” see Mr. Foster’s remarks in 
“Discussion of Meteorology,” Transactions of the Iowa State Horticultural Society for 1879 (Des Moines: F.M. Mills, 
State Printer, 1880), 486.  
63 Weekly Tribune (Topeka, KS), Mar 27, 1879, Kansas State Historical Society, Rain and Rainfall Clippings.  
64 See, for example, Mr. Holton’s remarks quoted in Wilber, Great Valleys and Prairies, 81. Holton voiced his disdain 
for “philosophers” and “a certain class of scientists,” experts who disputed theories of human-induced climatic 
improvement. For a recent study on Populism, see Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and 
Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 
65 John Trowbridge, “Great Fires and Rain-Storms,” The Popular Science Monthly (December 1872), 206, 211. The 
Great Chicago Fire, Peshtigo fire, and other massive conflagrations of the early 1870s spurred an interest in 
investigating the role of fires in shaping weather patterns. See also Jonathan Periam, “Forest Tree Planting, as a Means 
of Wealth,” Transactions of the Illinois State Horticultural Society for 1871 (Chicago: Reade, Brewster, & Co., 1872), 
34-35. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

30 

ever-evolving meaning of each of these fields.66 On the one hand, contestation over the boundaries 
of emerging disciplines gave rise to purity discourses: efforts to expunge purportedly illegitimate 
epistemologies. On the other hand, it created openings for people such as Trowbridge to draw from 
folklore and popular impressions.   

Trowbridge used popular beliefs and anecdotes only as a starting point, as a means of 
devising a hypothesis to be tested in a laboratory. Some “middle border” climate writers, by 
contrast, considered evidence drawn from experience and observation alongside evidence obtained 
by measurement.67 In the work of J.L. Budd, a member of the Iowa Board of Forestry, experiential 
evidence filled gaps and voids in the statistical record. Budd presented a paper titled “Possible 
Modification of Our Prairie Climate” to the 1887 meeting of the American Forestry Congress in 
Illinois. His presentation aimed to find explanations for recent crop failures in Iowa. “Ordinary 
meteorological tables,” he argued, “are not sufficiently detailed to throw light on the influence of 
the weather on agricultural and horticultural crops.” Making no apparent reference to the efforts 
of his fellow Iowan Hinrichs, Budd described Iowa’s statistical record as too brief to reveal 
anything more than “probable causes for known effects.” He relied on the evidence of personal 
experience for proof of these “probable causes.” Ironically, Budd’s experiences and observations 
prompted him to identify plowing as the cause of Iowa’s agricultural and climatic troubles. Since 
vast swaths of the state’s land had been “turned with the plow,” winds “from all westerly points 
now literally pass over a dry heated soil in a dry period, which drinks up with hungry avidity the 
moisture of the air.” According to the Iowan, “methodical forestry planting” could act as a 
“complete or partial remedy” for the “climatic troubles” created by plowing. The crux of Budd’s 
argument – the causal factor at the core of the purported “modification” of climate – originated 
from naturalistic impression and observation. In the absence of empirical evidence, he relied on 
his own experience on the land to prove plowed soil’s ability to draw moisture from passing air 
masses. For Budd, experience and anecdote served to infuse some certainty into the probabilistic 
frameworks of statistical climatology.68 

Great Plains climate theorists invoked popular impression and the weight of experience for 
varying purposes, sometimes to endorse theories of human influence on climate and sometimes to 
cast doubt on such notions. In 1878, for example, William Tompkins of the Larned Press (Kansas) 
cited anecdotal evidence of dew formation to show climatic continuity. The newspaper claimed 
that dew formed with as much frequency in 1873, when Native Americans still “roamed over the 
land,” as in succeeding years, after Euro-Americans had plowed thousands of acres of soil near 
Larned.69 As shown by Tompkins’s piece, the eclectic range of Gilded-Age climate discourse 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
66 Ronald Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science:’ Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the 
United States, 1880-1945,” Isis 86 (1995): 194-198. 
67 For a classic study on the politics and implications associated with invoking the “evidence of experience,” see Joan 
Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991). 
68 J.L. Budd, (Iowa Board of Forestry), “Possible Modification of Our Prairie Climate,” Sixth Annual Meeting of the 
American Forestry Congress, (Springfield, IL: State Register Book and Job Print, 1887) 20-22. 
69 Larned Press (Kansas), Aug 8, 1878. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

31 

cannot be distilled into a simple dichotomy: folkloric proponents of climatic improvement or 
desiccation versus quantitative modernizers who refuted climate change theses.  

Perhaps no figure better reflects the syncretic character of Great Plains meteo-climatic 
science than Frank H. Snow. Snow’s views on climate mirrored Budd’s theories more than those 
of his fellow Kansan Tompkins. A polymath with interests ranging from entomology to botany to 
meteorology, Snow published a series of articles on climate and climatic change between the 1870s 
and 1890s. Though his career in some ways paralleled Hinrichs’s, Snow proved more adept at 
climbing institutional hierarchies than his contemporary from Iowa. He began teaching 
mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Kansas in 1866 and ascended to the position 
of chancellor in 1890. Like Hinrichs, Snow earned greatest renown outside the fields of 
meteorology and climatology, garnering recognition for his discovery of a fungus useful in 
combatting chinch bugs, a scourge on agriculture.70 Snow’s wide-ranging interests informed his 
approach to meteo-climatic questions: he employed different methodologies and sought to 
reconcile experiential evidence with statistical records. In 1873, Snow trumpeted the “self-
registering instruments” and “automatic [apparatuses]” employed by the University of Kansas’s 
meteorological station. Although he supplemented data from the university observation station 
with numbers from Smithsonian Institution observers, Snow believed that 50 years of weather 
records would be necessary to determine the accuracy of climate change hypotheses. In the absence 
of such statistics, Snow made recourse to popular sentiments. He viewed naturalistic impressions 
as a stopgap but implied that they carried inherent weight and authenticity, especially when 
attributed to the “oldest residents of Kansas.”71  

Snow believed that Euro-American settlement had increased rainfall amounts in Kansas 
through a variety of means, ranging from plowing to prairie fire prevention to the replacement of 
“short buffalo grass” with “longer and heavier grasses.”72 Lacking statistical proof for increases in 
annual rainfall, Snow offered experiential evidence that human agency had rendered his state’s 
climate more equable. In an 1871 letter to his fellow Kansan C.C. Hutchinson, Snow argued that 
“it certainly would be legitimate to cite the evidence of many of our ‘old settlers’ to the fact that 
the rain fall is more evenly distributed now than ten years ago, coming at shorter intervals and 
more gently, and that single storms, or showers, extend more hours than formerly.” “This belief,” 
Snow added, “I have often heard from our most intelligent citizens.”73 For a primarily agricultural 
society such as 1870s Kansas, rainfall distribution mattered nearly as much as annual rainfall 
totals. As Hinrichs observed in Rainfall Laws, brief and violent rainfall events could cause more 
harm than good. The allure of reliable climates could act as a strong enticement for prospective 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
70 For biographical information on Snow, see F.H. Snow file 2/6/6 and finding aid, Spencer Library, University of 
Kansas. 
71 Frank H. Snow, “Climate of Kansas.” Report Submitted to Alfred Gray, Secretary State Agricultural Society, 
January 1st, 1873, see 1 for “instruments” and “apparatus” and 8 for “oldest residents.” Snow alluded only to the 
memories of the oldest Euro-American residents, entirely eliding Native American experience and knowledge.  
72 Snow, “Climate of Kansas,” 7-8. 
73 A letter from F.H. Snow is cited by Clinton Carter Hutchinson’s Resources of Kansas: Fifteen Years Experience 
(Topeka, KS: published by the author, 1871), 37. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

32 

settlers, and Kansans such as Snow had an interest in attracting more emigrants and development 
to their state. Indeed, it is telling that Hutchinson published Snow’s assessments in Resources of 
Kansas, a document meant to attract agricultural settlers. He may have been more willing to 
gesture toward settler perceptions in a general audience publication than in a more formal scientific 
publication. Yet Snow cannot be dismissed as a booster-scientist or mere huckster. In an 1885 
piece, Snow tempered optimistic expectations for human-induced climatic improvement. He 
described society’s influences on climate as “local oscillations” and voiced his skepticism about 
the notion that Euro-American settlement would transform semi-arid regions such as Western 
Kansas.74  

In the same 1885 article, Snow identified a frustrating aspect of data-driven climatology. 
He lamented that the US Army Signal Corps had used incomplete records to question possible 
climatic changes in the Great Plains. Snow seemed to grasp some of the problems at the core of 
Gilded-Age meteo-climatic science: quantification created an unquenchable thirst for ever more 
data while sets of numbers could be deployed to prove any number of theories. Faced with these 
obstacles, theorists such as Snow created a holistic form of meteo-climatic science that included 
folklore, anecdote, and experience. The fusion of quantitative and qualitative methods allowed 
Snow and some of his contemporaries to cope with the uncertainty inherent to meteorology and 
climatology.75 

By the 1890s, however, Snow began to change his approach. He presented a paper at the 
1895 annual meeting of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture titled “Periodicity of Kansas 
Rainfall and Possibilities of Storage of Excess Rainfall.” After 27 years of consistent observation 
and measurement at his station in Lawrence, Kansas, Snow claimed to have found a regular, seven-
year repeating pattern of dry and wet periods. In this instance, Snow argued that “the common 
people failed to recognize the periodicity of rainfall” before remarking that “Eastern 
meteorologists have called attention to a similar periodicity.”76 His shift away from folkloric and 
experiential evidence attests to the changing nature of Great Plains vernacular science. 
Impressionistic evidence continued to shape meteo-climatic discourse long after the turn of the 
century. Yet it took on an ever more peripheral role, underscoring the crystallization of scientific 
disciplines and the standardization and quantification of meteorology and climatology in the early 
twentieth century.  

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
74 F.H. Snow, “Is the Rainfall of Kansas Increasing?” Kansas City Review of Science and Industry 8. (Kansas City: 
Press of Ramsey, Millet, and Hudson, 1885), 458.   
75 For a discussion of “regimes of high uncertainty” in meteorology, see Daipha, “Weathering Risk,” 15-16. 
76 F.H. Snow, “Periodicity of Kansas Rainfall and Possibilities of Storage of Excess Rainfall,” Ninth Biennial Report 
of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture (Topeka: Edwin H. Snow, State Printer, 1895), 338-339. Perhaps because of 
its biblical undertones, the notion of seven-year cyclicality resonated with Great Plains climate theorists during the 
1890s. The severe droughts of the late 1880s and early 1890s, which followed a series of wet years, may also have 
helped give rise to cyclical climate theories. For another example of a Kansan espousing theories of seven-year 
climatic cycles, see E.C. (Edward Charles) Murphy, “Is the Rainfall in Kansas Increasing?” Transactions of the 
Kansas Academy of Science, Vol. 13 (Topeka: Press of the Hamilton Printing Company, 1893), 19. See Lehmann, 
“Wither Climatology” for a study of repeating patterns and oscillations in turn-of-the-century climatology.  



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

33 

Snow’s 1895 presentation also bore the hallmarks of turn-of-the-century Progressivism: 
concerns with utilitarian efficiency and careful resource management. Building reservoirs, he 
wrote, would allow Kansas to store rainfall from wet years “in such a way as to be of service in 
the following months or seasons when the precipitation is below average.” Snow speculated that 
these storage reservoirs might also “increase the humidity of the atmosphere” and “reduce to an 
injurious minimum” damaging hot winds.77 Hinrichs and Cronk’s reports certainly prefigured 
Snow’s Progressive turn toward efficiency. But the Kansan’s later work reflects a shift away from 
sweeping efforts to induce and catalog climatic changes and toward a potentially systematized 
management of climatic variability. Snow never implemented his reservoir construction plan, and 
his theory of seven-year cycles did not gain much traction beyond the Great Plains. Still, his shift 
away from experiential vernacular science reflects the increasing, if incomplete, marginalization 
of folkloric climate discourse around the turn of the century.  

 

Conclusion 

 

Snow’s adoption of Progressive utilitarianism shows that “middle border” scientific syncretism 
involved more than just the fusion of quantitative and qualitative methods. Other intellectual 
currents shaped Gilded-Age meteo-climatic science. Medical geography and enviro-climatic 
determinism, for example, found their way into Snow’s work.78 In an 1876 essay on “Climate and 
Brains” published by the Kansas Academy of Science, M.V.B. Knox invoked Snow’s climatic 
expertise: “It has been suggested by Prof. F.H. Snow, that the general dryness of the atmosphere 
in Kansas may prove favorable to brain-workers.” Knox also explained how countries located in 
areas with propitious climates, especially those located in Northern Europe, had surpassed other 
areas in terms of cultural productions.79 According to Knox and Snow’s logic, only Euro-
Americans benefited from Kansas’s salubrious climate, or else Native American inhabitants of the 
state would have eclipsed them in intelligence. In some instances, as in Snow and Hinrichs’s work, 
medical geography appeared alongside theories of human-induced climate improvement. Hinrichs, 
a cautious proponent of forest-induced climate improvement, cited the influence of changing 
climates on “the state of health of the body and mind” as a rationale for supporting “special 
institutions for…accurate observation,” such as his own Iowa State Weather Service.80 Yet 
Hinrichs’s stance vis-a-vis climatic influences on society differed from those of Knox and Snow. 
His theories of climatic dynamism and his support of complex climate improvement theses 
prevented him from endorsing simplistic and deterministic climate theories. 

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
77 Snow, “Periodicity,” 339-340. 
78 For a discussion of geographies of health in the late nineteenth-century West, see Gregg Mitman, “Geographies of 
Hope: Mining the Frontiers of Health in Denver and Beyond.” Osiris 19 (2004). 
79 M.V.B. Knox, “Climate and Brains,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 5 (Topeka, Kansas: George 
W. Martin, Publishing House, 1877), 5-9. 
80 Hinrichs, “First Biennial Report,” 5. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
	
  

34 

Though not all Gilded-Age vernacular scientists endorsed them, deterministic climate 
theories such as Knox’s proliferated throughout Gilded-Age culture. In The Mississippi Valley, a 
triumphal and expansionist book intended for popular audiences, J.W. Foster echoed Knox by 
writing that “however much he boasts of his dominion over matter, [man] is the creature of 
climate.”81 By depicting Euro-Americans as the sole beneficiaries of climatic influences, writings 
including Knox and Foster’s served to legitimize capitalist expansionism as well as the 
dispossession and genocide of Native Americans. The political and cultural implications of 
climatic determinism underscore the imbrication of science and politics in the Gilded Age. As 
David Singerman has argued, in the late nineteenth century United States, increasing numbers of 
people realized that “scientific knowledge, far from being the inevitable ally of accountability and 
good governance, could just as easily be deployed to obfuscate and confuse, and thereby to wrest 
control of social and economic power.”82  

In a sense, the syncretic and eclectic character of Gilded-Age climate science may have 
facilitated the strategic obfuscation described by Singerman. In another sense, perhaps, it may have 
flattened social hierarchies and allowed more people to participate in the contestation and 
production of scientific knowledge. Throughout this piece, I have tried to emphasize continuity, 
the persistence of experiential, anecdotal science, as well as the messiness and false dawns that 
marked local, participatory data collection projects such as Hinrichs’s. Yet the project of 
“relocating meteorology” in the Gilded-Age “middle border” remains incomplete. Even embattled 
and sometimes reviled figures such as Hinrichs wielded far more influence than volunteer 
observers. The voices of Hinrichs and his rivals still dominate those of farmers, agriculturalists, 
and others who contributed to the project of vernacular science as much as bureaucrats and 
polymaths. At the same time, however, the writings of figures such as Hinrichs and Snow offer a 
fleeting glimpse into an intricate scientific universe that has largely gone unrecorded.  

 

Acknowledgements 

 

I would like to thank Angelo Caglioti, Martin Mahony, and two anonymous reviewers for their 
helpful comments. Sarah Bellemare, Sara Pritchard, and Aaron Sachs provided support and advice 
on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for the financial support of Cornell University’s 
History Department, Cornell University’s American Studies Program, the American 
Meteorological Society, the Forest History Society, the New York State Library, the Cornell 
Institute for Social Sciences, and the American Geographical Society Library.   

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
81 J.W. Foster, The Mississippi Valley (Chicago: S.C. Griggs and Company, 1869), xi, see also 356-357. 
82 David Singerman, “Science, Commodities, and Corruption in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and 
Progressive Era 15 (2016): 290. 


