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June 30, 2024

In the summer of 1894, a curious railway car plied the tracks of western Kansas, a chemical soup wafting to a sky ruled by a demon sun and chastened by moisture-devouring winds. At the helm of this experiment on wheels, owned by the Rock Island railroad, was a 32-year-old train dispatcher who had convinced railway officials and town leaders across the state that he had the secret to make it rain.

The aspiring rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, was an instant celebrity in a parched land thirsting for heroes. Rock Island officials were so confident of his ability they eventually designated three cars for his rain-making experiments, which by their count had succeeded in all of 52 attempts.

Jewell kept the concoction of chemicals he sent to the sky a closely held secret and scoffed at others who said they had achieved similar results with his method. In an 1895 letter to his hometown newspaper, the Topeka State Journal, he boasted that if only he had the necessary equipment he would “wager my life itself that I could produce rain in ten minutes in the clearest of skies.”

Jewell traversed western Kansas in his rainmaking car during the worst drought in Kansas that anybody could remember and the seventh straight year of crop failures. The drought had lasted an agonizing 20 months. The resulting economic chaos had ruined farmers and threatened the businesses, like railroads, that depended on profits from hauling and selling crops.

At Clay Center, W.I. Allen, assistant general manager of the Rock Island line, had in April sat in his private car at Clay Center, and surveyed the dry Kansas prairie.

“We will stop this thing,” Allen declared, as reported by the Kinsley Mercury. “We will send our rainmakers into southern and western Kansas, temper this heat and save the corn crop.”

But no relief was to come.

“The great Arkansas Valley, one of the richest west of the Missouri River, with its great underflow of water, is to-day a vast desolate waste,” reported the New York Times in August 1894. “Hundreds of square miles of fine crops have been burned up in less than three days, and the cornstalks are scarcely worth cutting for fodder, as all the blades will fall to pieces when handled.”

The harsh reality of agriculture beyond the 100th Meridian, which runs through Dodge City and roughly separates the arid western third of the state from its more humid majority, was already well known. John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer and director of the U.S. Geological Survey during the late 19th century, had argued that plans for settlement and development west of the line should be different because of the lack of water. Powell’s warning was ignored, according to Wallace Stegner’s 1954 book on Powell and the West, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.”

After the Civil War, a myth took hold on the Great Plains that “rain follows the plow.” This phrase, which expanded on previous notions that once broken the sod would absorb rain like a sponge, was coined in 1881 by Charles Dana Wilber, a journalist and land speculator. Simply planting lush green crops, Wilber wrote, would cool the earth and attract showers.

Many homesteaders staked their futures on the belief that simply breaking ground for crops would attract enough precipitation to allow rain beyond the 100th Meridian, and for a few years it seemed to work. Then came trials that must have seemed Biblical in nature: the locusts and the periodic droughts and terrifying twisters. The economic spasms of bust and boom continued until the Dust Bowl of the 1930s wiped just about everyone out, with southwest Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle at the center of the disaster.

The Dust Bowl was the result of severe drought, economic collapse, and poor soil conservation. It was an environmental crisis made worse by greed and bad decisions, and it prompted one of the largest migrations in American history. By 1940, some 2.5 million people had abandoned the plains states. Powell’s warning about settlement west of the 100th Meridian had proven true.

After World War II, technology provided a solution to the problem of farming in the arid West: irrigation.

In western Kansas and most of the Great Plains in the first decades of the last century, irrigation meant “flood irrigation.” It was an inefficient method of flooding cropland by diverting the flow of water from a river by way of a canal (or “ditch” as they are mostly called in the West). Ditches are still used to move water from one place to another, but by far the most water used in agriculture in western Kansas is groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. The aquifer is one of the world’s largest and lies beneath eight states, from South Dakota to Texas.

In the 1950s, it was thought the water in the aquifer was inexhaustible. More and more wells were drilled to reach the aquifer and new delivery methods, chiefly center point irrigation, revolutionized farming. But unlike surface water such as that found in a river, with a relatively quick recharge from rain and snow, the groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer is prehistoric. It is recharged on a geological time scale. Now we know the aquifer is not inexhaustible. In some places, such as beneath the community of Jetmore, north of Dodge City, the aquifer is already nearing depletion. That depletion is accelerated by climate change and continued over pumping of water.

Once the water is gone, it’s gone for the rest of our lifetimes — and because geologic recharge is so slow, several hundred or perhaps thousands of lifetimes to come. Kansas Reflector’s Allison Kite, in partnership with Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy, reported in May that despite the grim prognosis, one of the state’s locally controlled water management districts has resisted adopting meaningful water conservation methods.

Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District 3, perched just above the Oklahoma panhandle in the extreme southwest corner of Kansas, is under fire for its travel expenses, lack of a formal conversation policy and its alienation of farmers who would like to conserve water. Despite a budget of $1 million, it has spent little of it on conservation, although executive director Mark Rude argues everything the district does is in the name of conservation. But in contrast to other districts, District 3 is clearly lagging.

The state’s five groundwater management districts were established in the 1970s, according to the Kansas Geological Survey. In 2020, for example, Groundwater Management District 1 used a state law that allows for the creation of “Limited Enhanced Management Areas” to commit farmers to reduce consumption by 50% over seven years.

By 2026, according to a new state law, all districts — including District 3 — will be forced to submit reports to the Legislature and file a water conservation action plan with the state’s chief engineer.

Much of the resistance in District 3 is cultural. Locals like being in control, dislike being told what to do, and consider their legacy water rights sacred. On the district’s website you can read about how the district was organized to “provide for the stabilization of agriculture by establishing the right of local users to determine their own destiny with respect to the use of groundwater.”

Such declarations ignore the rest of us, who have a reasonable right to expect that prehistoric groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer should belong to us all. But Kansas water rights are based on the “first in time — first in right” principle, which means the earliest users are given priority.

Perhaps the thinking of District 3 officials is best represented by a couple of stunts in which thousands of gallons of Missouri River water was trucked 400 miles to southwest Kansas. The project was meant to drum up support for an aqueduct that would take water from the Missouri River in northeast Kansas to a reservoir in Utica. Since water flows downhill, and taking water to the west in Kansas is literally an uphill battle, 15 pumping stations would be required. The ground-hugging aqueduct — really, just a glorified ditch — would cost an estimated $18 billion to build and another billion a year in ongoing costs.

The Kansas aqueduct is a nutty idea, but one that has taken root among some individuals in western Kansas desperate for a solution to continue irrigation after the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. Aside from its expense and impracticality, it is a regressive idea that harkens back to the days of ditches and avoids a conversation about us having squandered the resource beneath our feet. It also ignores any objections the folks on the other side of the Missouri River, in Iowa and Missouri, might have to say about us taking water from a river we share.

The aqueduct is something our 1890s rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, might have understood. At least, he might have appreciated how desperate some folks are to believe in a solution that doesn’t really address the problem.

The problem is that agriculture in the state is unsustainable beyond the 100th Meridian without irrigation. Instead of an anomaly, the magnitude of drought that drove the Dust Bowl can be expected to occur with alarming frequency.

“Paleoclimatic data collected for western Kansas indicate a drought as severe as the Dust Bowl occurs there, on average, three to four times a century, according to a Kansas Geological Survey circular. “Based on that probability, there is a 35% chance for a severe drought year in any decade, a 70% chance within a 20-year span, and a 100% chance over the estimated 40-year working lifetime of a western Kansas farmer.”

The new law that requires District 3 to deliver a water conservation action plan was passed in response to the Kansas Water Authority saying last year that the state’s longstanding policy of simply slowing depletion was insufficient to protect the Ogallala aquifer. The law is a step toward the state taking control of water management from local districts if consumption continues to outpace conservation.

The battle over the aquifer’s decline pits good policy against powerful agricultural and political interests. Add to the mix the independence that seems woven into the cultural fabric of southwestern Kansas, and you have the ingredients for a water war that might define the region for decades to come.

But this is one war we may already have lost.

We’ve already killed the Arkansas River in western Kansas, leaving just a dry bed behind. Every other river and stream and creek in that third of the state has also vanished. The natural recharge just isn’t enough to keep water in them. Worse, climate change appears to be driving the arid zone to the east, creating an even bigger water crisis.

About a third of Kansas counties are currently in a moderate to severe drought, with some of the worst conditions in the area served by District 3, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The drought puts pressure on farmers to pump more water instead of voluntarily committing to conserve. It’s difficult to get people to do the right thing when it’s against their economic interests.

If only Jewell’s apparatus had really worked.

The rainmaking railway car was inspected in 1892 by a newspaper reporter who described the mysteries within.

“Inside the laboratory part of the car a wide shelf about two feet from the floor extends from one end to the other,” the correspondent wrote. “On this are many curious-looking bottles and boxes said to contain the chemicals from which the rain producing gases are made.”

There were also pipes, bottles, other laboratory apparatus, and a 24-cell battery. Jewell said the gases produced would rise to 8,000 feet, then condense, creating a vacuum that would be filled with moisture — and produce rain.

“There are many thinking people in Kansas who believe absolutely in Jewell’s rain-making system, and they are encouraging him in every possible way,” wrote the observer. In other quarters, however, Jewell’s work was received with skepticism, and sometimes superstition, as those who prayed for rain regarded his apparatus as the work of the devil.

Jewell died in Coffeyville in 1906, aged 44, from pneumonia.

“For two or three seasons Mr. Jewell did little else besides operating this (rainmaking) car and apparatus,” noted his obituary in the Topeka Capital, “but it was finally abandoned.”

No rainmaker, no aqueduct, and no prayer will save western Kansas from the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The best we can hope for is to reduce consumption, buy a little more time, and adjust to a changing climate and economy. It is time to heed the warning John Wesley Powell gave us so long ago — and prepare for the new Dust Bowl.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.