DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about C. W. Post and his war on the sky.
Now, most men look up at a dry Texas sky and feel helpless. C. W.
Post looked up at that same sky and decided to fight it. Literally. Post was no ordinary man to begin with.
He was a Texas farm colonizer and a cereal foods millionaire — the kind of figure who shows up in a place like Garza County with money, vision, and apparently a very particular theory about rainfall. Somewhere along the way, Post had been reading. And what he read changed everything out here on the Caprock.
He'd come across the idea that rain often accompanies cannonading in war. Artillery fire, explosions, the whole terrible percussion of battle — and rain would follow. So Post thought: why not bring the battle here?
He figured that vertical air currents, set off by explosions, would condense the vapor already hanging in the atmosphere and bring it down as rain. And starting in 1911, he set out to prove it. These were his rain battles, and he fought them with everything he had.
His first method — and I want you to appreciate how bold this was — was to send dynamite airborne on kites. Kites. Flying dynamite over parched farmland.
That approach was, as the record puts it, dangerous, and it didn't last long. He soon replaced it by setting off explosions directly on the edge of the Caprock, letting the force of those blasts punch upward into the Texas sky. From 1911 to 1914, Post battled drought on his farms.
And here's the part that'll stop you: his experiments were said to have been forty percent effective. Not a guarantee. Not a miracle.
But forty percent. That's not nothing when your crops are burning up under a merciless sun. The whole campaign cost fifty thousand dollars — fifty thousand — which tells you something about how seriously this man took his war.
He kept fighting until he couldn't anymore. C. W.
Post battled drought on these farms until his death in 1914. And out here on the Caprock, where the sky still stretches wide and the dry spells still come, there's a marker standing on the very site where a millionaire once strapped dynamite to kites and dared the clouds to blink first.
What the marker says
Site of 1911-1914 dynamiting to produce rain, carried on by C. W. Post, Texas farm colonizer and cereal foods millionaire. After reading that rain often accompanies cannonading in war, Post planned "battles" to relieve droughts. He thought vertical air currents would condense vapor in atmosphere and cause rain. He first used dynamite airborne by kites, but soon replaced this dangerous method by setting off explosions on edge of Caprock. Post's experiments were said to have been 40% effective, and cost $50,000. He battled drought on farms until his death, 1914. (1967)