Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [24]
Isaac’s boss assigned him responsibility for weather observations to be made at five in the morning and eleven at night. In between he was to put together bulletins for the station’s customers and collect weather dispatches cabled each day by a network of railroad agents.
He did not find any locusts. “They evidently learned that I had been put on their trail and disappeared.” But he did find another means of filling his time.
The University of Arkansas’s medical school was only three blocks from the station. Medicine, Isaac reasoned, would provide not only a productive way to fill his day, but also satisfy the Signal Corps’ requirement that its observers pursue a scientific endeavor related to their daily duties. He could study how weather and climate affected people, a new field and one that “could not evade me as the Rocky Mountain locusts had done.” He enrolled in the middle of the 1882–83 school year, and found his work and study schedules complemented each other. “The one gave me a rest from the other,” he wrote, “and I never became tired.”
He graduated from medical school on March 29, 1885. Five days later General Hazen placed him in charge of a weather station at Fort Concho, Texas. The nearest town was San Angelo, whose residents described the place as hell on wheels. Hazen directed Isaac to travel by rail to Abilene, Texas, and there to catch a stagecoach for the one-hundred-mile journey to the fort. But when Isaac checked his Rand McNally Railroad Map he could not find Abilene.
It did exist, the railroad agent assured him. It was just too new to be on any map. A cattle boom had created the town overnight.
As the agent prepared Isaac’s tickets, he told him a story, the first of many unsettling stories Isaac would hear about the West in the days before his departure.
The railroad had just reached Sweetwater, the agent explained, Sweetwater being another spanking-new town some thirty-five miles west of Abilene. Just a few days earlier half a dozen Chinese railroad workers had been gunned down by a group of drunken cowboys. The sheriff arrested the killers and brought them before Sweetwater’s brand-new judge, who had also opened a saloon.
The judge considered the case, pursed his lips, opened a couple of law books just to make sure his first bone-deep feelings about the case were correct, then issued his judgment: “Gentlemen,” he ruled, “I have examined the laws of the United States carefully and I do not find any law which says that a white man shall be punished for killing a Chinaman.”
The judge, named Roy Bean, let the killers go.
Isaac paid close attention to one fragment of advice. “I was told that well-dressed men often had their hats shot off their heads and their good clothes pulled from their backs.”
In Little Rock, Isaac had become a dandy. He had adopted, wholeheartedly, the fashion then in vogue among the city’s doctors. On his rounds at Little Rock’s Charity Hospital he wore a Prince Albert brown beaver suit, silk top hat, and kid gloves. And carried a cane.
He was twenty-three years old.
He was as good as dead.
When Isaac climbed aboard his westbound train, he wore a battered old suit from his last days in Tennessee. He could not bear to leave his fancy clothes behind, however. He hid them under the false floor of his trunk.
ISAAC ARRIVED IN Abilene under a gunmetal sky, the city awash in mud and scented with horse manure and fresh-sawed lumber. He heard the torn-fabric scree of ripsaws and the sound of hammering as joists and beams went up in new buildings around town. Cowboys strolled around in high boots and spurs the size of daffodils, and wore pistols shoved into their waistbands. He had entered a territory as alien to him as anything he could have concocted in a daydream. Here before him was the West of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in which Phileas Fogg, an Isaac-like character of precision and rigor, raced across the Great Plains during the American leg of his journey around