Page 113 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

was a confidence game and not at all a scientific endeavor. Liebling described
Stingo as neatly dressed, short of stature, lively, and quick of wit, with the air of
an old military man; his habitual expression “that of a stud-poker player with one
ace showing who wants to give the impression that he has another in the hole”;
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his typical regimen a series of golden gin fizzes with egg yolk in the morning,
hard liquor at midday, and then beer and wine for the duration.
Stingo, a weaver of tall tales, claimed that as a youth in 1908 he had witnessed
a memorable but ultimately futile rainmaking extravaganza in the Lower San
Joaquin Valley. To save his wheat crop, Captain James McKittrick had invited
Egypt’s leading rainmaker, (the fictional) “Sudi Witte Pasha,” and his entourage
of twenty-two professors and holy men, and assorted cantors, priests, bell ringers,
soothsayers, dancing girls, chefs, servants, and bodyguards, to his (also fictional)
212,000-acre estate, “Rancho del McKittrick.” Their rainmaking technique con-
sisted of chants, prayers, ablutions, and dancing, lots of dancing, over the course
of three days. on the fourth day, the pasha and his crew scattered ground-up
kofu beans from ancient Persia in the fields and hosted a feast for three hundred
guests, an “orgy in Imploration for Rain,” that lasted into the fifth day. After
several more days of waiting, with no rain in sight, the formerly jolly Captain
McKittrick, who was out about $200,000 in expenses, decided to ship the pasha
and his entourage to the nearest railroad station, thence “to the outgoing Pelican
Express for Phoenix, Fort Worth and New orleans,” and finally by steamer “from
the Crescent City through the Straits of Gibraltar to the palm-waving beaches
of dear old Cairo” (12–13). Stingo was impressed by the pasha’s show but judged
his timing unfortunate in that the Fates did not deliver normal rainfall that week.
He took away from the experience the impression that an American market
might require a show with less exoticism and more displays of cold science and
impressive paraphernalia, perhaps with a spiritual note.
The colonel then related his early efforts out west in 1912, when he was the
front man or setup man for the rainmaking show of “Professor Joseph Canfield
Hatfield” (again a made-up name). To clinch a deal, Stingo (at that time working
under his given name, James A. Macdonald) would warm up a crowd of farmers
with a version of the following speech:

Rain—its abundance, its paucity—meant Life and Death to the Ancients, for from
the lands and flocks, herds, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the deer and
mountain goat they found sustenance and energized their being. All the elements
depend upon the Fall of Rain, ample but not in ruinous overplus, for very existence.
Through human history the plentitude of Rain or its lack constituted the differ-
ence between Life and Death, the Joy of Rain or existence and misery. (11)

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