DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my take on what the official marker has to say — and friend, this one is a story worth hearing. We're talkin' about the Rainmakers of 1891, right here in El Paso County. Now, somebody in the U.S.
Department of Agriculture had a theory. And you know how theories go — somebody notices something, writes it down, and before long the federal government is blowin' things up in the desert. The observation was this: many war battles had been followed by rain.
And somebody, somewhere, decided that the explosives were the cause. So why not skip the war part and just — blow something up? The agency ran with it.
During a West Texas drought in 1891, they brought the experiment to Midland first. And here's the part that'll raise your eyebrow — they had some success. Some.
That word is doin' a lot of heavy lifting, but it was enough. Enough, that is, to give El Paso's city leaders an idea. Desperate for rain — and friend, when you're desperate in a West Texas drought, desperation takes on a whole new dimension — they convinced the Department of Agriculture to come on down and try the same procedure.
Right here. So on September 18th, they hauled their equipment up to the heights of Mt. Franklin.
And they fired. Three hundred and seventy charges. Dynamite and other explosives, the marker says — three hundred and seventy of them, launched skyward from those mountain heights, rattling the earth and shaking the air and presumably frightening every living creature within ten miles.
Three hundred and seventy charges. And what did El Paso get for all that effort, all that thunder, all that federal firepower? A heavy dew.
That's it. Not a sprinkle. Not a cloud.
A heavy dew was reported. You can almost hear the silence that followed — the kind of silence that settles in after three hundred and seventy explosions, when everyone's ears are still ringing and someone has to be the one to say it out loud. The Rainmakers of 1891 gave Mt.
Franklin everything they had. Mt. Franklin gave them back the dampest morning it could manage.
Sometimes the sky just isn't impressed.
What the marker says
Working on the theory that explosives could cause rainfall because many war battles had been followed by rain, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted experiments in rainmaking. During a West Texas drought in 1891 the agency brought the experiment to Midland, with some success. Desperate for rain, El Paso city leaders convinced the Department to come here and try the same procedure. On September 18, some 370 charges of dynamite and other explosives were fired from the heights of Mt. Franklin, but no rain resulted. Only a heavy dew was reported. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986