NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART I 25 
August. There was only .04 inch of rain fell during the 39 days from 
June 21st to July 29th, inclusive. 
The precipitation charts in the National Weather Review show that 
the worst of the drouth was confined principally to Iowa, although 
parts of the adjacent states had a deficiency of rainfall during most of 
the summer. 
The following is an extract from a description of the drouth in 
Iowa, furnished by Gustavus Hinrichs, M. D., then director of the 
"Iowa Weather Service": 
"Since the middle of May Iowa has been subjected to a drouth, the 
most severe on record. Fortunately, the greater part of the state has 
been favored with rains sufficient to break the drouth temporarily 
toward the close of June. ************. 
"the drouth at IOWA CITY. 
"In thp early summer of 1886, the last good rain fell on May 13th. 
Since that time we have had no rain reaching half an inch until August 
4th. Thus we had no serviceable shower for 83 days. The total rams 
which fell in this interval were 0.02 inch during the last decade of May; 
0.41 during the first, 0.17 during the second, and 0.25 inch during the 
third decade of June. During the entire month of July we had only 
one-tenth of an inch of rain here. The total rainfall during the 83- 
days of our drouth was 0.95 inch only. The normal rainfall for this 
part of our season is 10.32 inches. Our pastures have been brown for 
a long time, and burn readily from sparks of passing trains, unless 
cropped bare by stock. Meadows yielded a good crop of most excel- 
lent hay due to early rains, but the stubble remains brown and looks 
dead. A great deal of corn is stunted and cannot yield much of a 
crop, and where no ears have formed, will yield but little fodder. 
Small grain, especially oats, are good in grain and yield fair to good, 
where sown early to be developed by the spring rains; in that case the 
straw is good too, and thus will be quite an item in this winter's feed. 
It will be seen that even here, where the drouth is extreme, there is 
not a failure of crops, because our farming operations are sufficiently 
diversified to make a total failure almost an impossibility. 
"the belt of continuous drouth. 
"A belt running diagonally from northwest to southeast through 
Iowa marked the region of greatest drouth in the state, because no 
rain fell in this belt amounting to one inch during any ten days of this 
drouth. From Marshall county a branch of this belt goes east over 
Iowa and Johnson to Scott county. Throughout this forking belt the 
drouth has been the most severe, because continuous. In area this 
comprises probably one-tenth of the entire state. The description 
given above of the drouth at Iowa City will apply more or less to all 
parts of this belt." 
In years gone by there have been many local drouths, covering a 
comparatively small area of the state and several that were general 
over this and adjacent states, but there are no authentic data at hand 
to verify the statements of the older inhabitants as to their severity. 
