Page 106 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Hankinside, Kansas. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that something would go
wrong. Montgomery got into legal trouble by causing a flood when he claimed to
have made rain: “It did not seem possible that a man could go about carrying, as
it were, thunder storms in one pocket and long steady rains in another, and not
fall into some sort of a complication with common folks who do not have even a
heavy dew in the whole house.” 24
Montgomery advertised that he made it rain only at night and on Sundays.
He also claimed responsibility for cool northwesterly winds in the summer, but
never charged for them. “I throw in a wind with each rain ordered,” he explained,
“the same way you get a baked potato when you order a chop. Fogs, frosts, cloudy
days, and aurora borealis extra. Earthquakes should be spoken for two days in
advance of the time needed” (735).
one morning after a particularly heavy rain, Montgomery set out to collect
$1 from every farmer in the county for his services, but he met with considerable
opposition. The first farmer somehow “knew that warn’t no artificial rain,” the
second “reckoned it was a naterel thunder-storm,” and the third demanded proof
that the shower was a Montgomery special. At a public meeting, Montgomery
addressed the skeptical farmers:

“I produced that rain myself,” said he. “It came, like all of my rains, in the night,
when your hired man can’t be put to any practical use. I saw the country needed
rain, and I went out last night while you slept and made it. Consequently today
your fields rejoice and your grateful cattle low their mellow thanksgivings from
pastures revivified and gladdened by my beneficent rain.” (735)

Following this oration, a corn farmer rose and asked Montgomery if he was
absolutely certain that it was his rain. “Every drop of it,” answered Montgomery.
“Then,” replied the guileless farmer, “you are responsible for the ten acres of my
corn which the storm washed away. I shall sue you for damages” (735). And he
did, to the tune of $400.
Adding editorially that “the science of rain-making is in its infancy” (which
it always seems to be), Harper’s noted that the business of artificial rainmaking
(or, for that matter, hurricane diversion or climate engineering) would always be
vulnerable to lawsuits that would be impossible to prevent and devastating to the
enterprise: “A rain-maker, without his umbrella, standing in the middle of a vast
Kansas prairie watching his rain pour down in torrents, and his patrons’ crops
ride gaily past on the hurrying flood and [with] no way to stop it, must be a most
melancholy spectacle” (735). It seemed that Montgomery the rainmaker had not
figured out a way to turn the rain off!

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