The Johnstown Flood (21 page)

Not long before dark a man and two women had been seen rounding the bend upstream. They were on a raft of some sort, a barn roof most people thought it was, and they were coming on fast, the women down on their knees, the man with his arms around them and looking about for something to grab on to. That had been before the bridges went, and the men on the bridges had been hanging ropes down for the people in the river to get hold of. When the raft shot by under the first bridge, the man reached out for the rope but missed. Then he and the two women were heading for the second bridge, and everyone along the shore line was rooting for them as they watched him telling the women to try for the next rope. As they came under the second bridge, he made a lunge for the rope, got it, and was jerked violently off balance; but seeing that the women had missed, he let go and fell, back down on the raft again. The current then swept them toward the bank, where he was able to catch hold of a tree. With an immense effort he managed to pull the two women into the tree with him, but at almost the same instant a large section of the bridge upstream let go with a sudden crash. It came careening down the river, smashed into the tree, carried it away, and drowned the man and the two women.

Everyone in Bolivar had seen the whole thing and they wanted to tell exactly how it happened. Some people in the crowd said they knew the man and said his name was Young. Others said they thought the women looked like mother and daughter, and that they could be heard praying as they went by. The newspapermen wrote it all down, asking questions, taking names.

It was too dark to see much by the river, but the rush of the water could still be heard plain enough, and tiny, dim specks of light could be seen moving through the trees along the shore where men with lanterns were still watching for possible signs of life.

Johnstown was still twenty miles away. Among the newspapermen there was talk about what to do next. The tracks from Bolivar on were under water and not safe enough to take the train any farther. Most of the men decided to push on in the direction of New Florence, some by foot and some in wagons. The ride up from Pittsburgh had taken quite a long while, with conditions what they were. It was ten thirty when they had pulled into Bolivar. By the time they had slogged through the rain and dark to New Florence, it was getting on toward three in the morning.

Mud-spattered, dead-tired, cold, wringing-wet, they moved into whatever dry space there was left in the little town and began interviewing everyone who was willing to talk, which was just about everyone. Several of them got hold of wires to Pittsburgh and started filing their stories.

At that point about all they could say was that every sign was that “hundreds if not thousands” of people had been killed in “an appalling catastrophe.” They reported rumors of panic-stricken people fleeing through the woods from the scene of the disaster and of the number of people who had been seen going by in the river at New Florence (counts varied, but eighty-five seems about average). And they sent back what information they could pick up concerning the dam, a good deal of which was inaccurate. Several reporters had the dam 110 feet high and the lake as much as eight miles long and three miles wide. But they did have the name of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club by then, reported it accurately, and added that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s engineers had inspected the dam once a month, which suggests that Pitcairn was also, by then, doing some talking himself. “Investigations showed that nothing less than some convulsion of nature would tear the the barrier away and loosen the weapon of death,” one reporter put on the wire.

About four o’clock there was great excitement when a man from Johnstown, a carpenter named McCartney, and his wife came staggering out of the night. He said they had left Johnstown right after the flood struck and had been walking ever since. He told them there was hardly a building left standing in Johnstown, and, in general, substantiated the wildest of the rumors that had been circulating since the night began.

Sometime soon after four Pitcairn decided that there was no use staying in New Florence any longer. He boarded his private car, and with the passengers back on board again, his train started for Pittsburgh. It was also about the same time that several of the newspapermen decided that if the McCartneys could make it across the mountain on foot, they could too, and they set off through the woods. With luck, they figured, they could be on the hill above the city by daybreak.

It was nearly morning when the strange quiet began. Until then there had been almost no letup from the hideous sounds from below. Few people had been able to sleep, and several of the war veterans were saying it was the worst night they had ever been through.

But in the last chill hour before light, the valley seemed to hang suspended in an unearthly stillness, almost as unnerving in its way as everything else that had happened. And it was then, for the first time, that people began to realize that all those harsh, incessant noises which had been such a part of their lives—mill whistles screeching, wagons clattering over cobblestones, coal trains rumbling past day and night—had stopped, absolutely, every one of them.

About five the first dim shapes began emerging from the darkness. But even by six very little stood out in detail. There were no shadows, no clear edges to anything. Some survivors, years later, would swear it had been a bright, warm morning, with a spotless blue sky, which, after the night they had been through, it may well have seemed. But the fact is that though the rain had at last stopped, the weather on that morning of June 1 was nearly as foul as it had been the morning before. The valley looked smothered in a smoky gray film. The hills appeared to be made of some kind of soft, gray-green stuff and were just barely distinguishable from a damp, low sky that was the color of pewter. Odd patches of the valley were completely lost in low-hanging ribbons of mist, and the over-all visibility was reduced to perhaps a mile at best.

Still the view that morning would be etched sharply in the memories of everyone who took it in. Along the Frankstown Road on Green Hill some 3,000 people had gathered. On the rim of Prospect Hill and on the slopes above Kernville, Woodvale, and Cambria City the crowds were nearly as big. Chilled to the bone, hungry, many of them badly injured, hundreds without shoes or only partly clothed against the biting air, they huddled under dripping trees or stood along narrow footpaths ankle-deep in mud, straining their eyes to see and trying hard to understand.

Spread out below them was a vast sea of muck and rubble and filthy water. Nearly all of Johnstown had been destroyed. That it was even the same place was very difficult to comprehend.

There were still a few buildings standing where they had been. The Methodist Church and the B & O station, the schoolhouse on Adams Street, Alma Hall, and the Union Street School could be seen plain enough, right where they were meant to be. The Iron Company’s red-brick offices were still standing, as was Wood, Morrell & Company next door. But everywhere else there seemed nothing but bewildering desolation. The only immediately familiar parts of the landscape were the two rivers churning toward the stone bridge, both still swollen and full of debris.

From Woodvale to the bridge ran an unbroken swath of destruction that was a quarter of a mile wide in places and a good two miles long. From Locust Street over to the Little Conemaugh was open space now, an empty tract of mud, rock, and scattered wreckage, where before saloons, stores, hotels, and houses had been as thick as it had been possible to build them. Washington Street was gone except for the B & O station. Along Main, where a cluster of buildings and gutted houses still stood like a small, ravaged island, the wreckage was piled as high as the roofs of the houses.

At the eastern end of town all that remained between Jackson and Clinton was a piece of St. John’s Convent. At the corner of Jackson and Locust the blackened rafters of St. John’s Church were still smoking, and where the Quinn house had stood, fifty feet away, there was now only a jumble of rubbish.

Across the Stony Creek, Kernville had been swept clean for blocks. Virtually everything was gone, as though that whole section had been hosed down to the raw earth. The entire western end of town, near the Point, was now a broad, flooded wasteland. Every bridge was gone except the stone bridge and against it now lay a good part of what had been Johnstown in a gigantic blazing heap.

Below the stone bridge the ironworks, though still standing, looked all askew, with stacks toppled over and one of the biggest buildings caved in at the end as though it had been tramped on by an immense heel. Cambria City had been ravaged past recognition. At least two-thirds of the houses had been wiped out, and down the entire length of its main street a tremendous pile of mud and rock had been dumped.

With the light the first small groups of people who had survived the night down in the drowned city could be seen making their way across the debris, most of them heading for Green Hill, where dry ground could be reached without having to cross a river. From Alma Hall and the Union Street School they came in steady little batches, moving up and down over the incredible flotsam. Then, at the same time from Frankstown Road and other near hills, men started moving down into town. And as they came closer, the dim sweep of destruction began to take on a different look. Slowly things came into ever sharper focus.

The Morrell house could be seen with part of its side sheared off. Dr. Lowman’s house stood alone on the park, the only big house still there, but its two-story front porch had been squashed and every window punched in. Colonel Linton’s place on lower Main looked as though it had been blasted in two by dynamite, and the black span of an iron bridge was resting where the yard had been. Beyond, houses were dumped every which way, crushed, broken, split clean in half, or lying belly up in the mire, with their floor beams showing like the ribs of butchered animals.

Telephone poles, giant chunks of machinery, trees with all their bark shredded off, dead horses and pieces of dead horses, and countless human corpses were strewn everywhere. “Hands of the dead stuck out of the ruins. Dead everywhere you went, their arms stretched above their heads almost without exception—the last instinct of expiring humanity grasping at a straw,” wrote George Gibbs, one of the reporters from the
Tribune.

And now, too, all the litter of thousands of lives could be seen in sharp detail. Shattered tables and chairs, tools, toys, account books, broken dishes, chamber pots and bicycle wheels, nail kegs, bedquilts, millions of planks and shingles were thrown up in grotesque heaps ten, twenty, thirty feet high, or lay gently shifting back and forth in huge pools of water that covered much of the valley floor like a brown soup.

“It were vain to undertake to tell the world how or what we felt, when shoeless, hatless, and many of us almost naked, some bruised and broken, we stood there and looked upon that scene of death and desolation,” David Beale wrote.

The flood and the night that had followed, for all their terror and destruction and suffering, had had a certain terrible majesty. Many people had thought it was Judgment Day, God’s time of anger come at last, the Day of Reckoning. They thought that the whole world was being destroyed and not just Johnstown. It had been the “horrible tempest,” with flood and fire “come as a destruction from the Almighty.” It had been awful, but it had been God Awful.

This that lay before them now in the dismal cold was just ugly and sordid and heartbreaking; and already it was beginning to smell.

Rescue parties got to work bringing the marooned down from rooftops and went searching among the wreckage for signs of life. Men scrambled over piles of debris to get to the upstairs windows of buildings that looked as though they might fall in at any minute. They crawled across slippery, cockeyed roofs to squeeze through attic windows or groped their way down dripping back hallways where the mud was over their boot tops. It was treacherous work and slow going. Walls were still falling in and fires were breaking out.

At the stone bridge, gangs of men and boys, many of whom had been there through the night, were still working to free people trapped alive within the burning pile. Young Victor Heiser, who had succeeded in reaching solid ground after his night in a Kerville attic, had made his way down the west bank of the Stony Creek as far as the bridge, where, as he wrote later, “I joined the rescue squads, and we struggled for hours trying to release them from this funeral pyre, but our efforts were tragically hampered by the lack of axes and other tools. We could not save them all. It was horrible to watch helplessly while people, many of whom I actually knew, were being devoured in the holocaust.”

Across the whole of the valley the dead were being found in increasing numbers. And as the morning passed, more and more people came down from the hillsides to look at the bodies, to search for missing husbands and children, or just to get their bearings, if possible. They slogged through the mud, asking after a six-year-old boy “about so high,” or a wife or a father. They picked their way through mountains of rubbish, trying to find a recognizable landmark to tell them where their house or store had been, or even a suggestion of the street where they had lived. Or they stood silently staring about, a numb, blank look on their faces. Over and over, later, when the day had passed, people would talk about how expressionless everyone had looked and how there had been so few people crying.

There was some shouting back and forth among the men. People who had been separated during the night would suddenly find one another. “What strange meetings there were,” wrote one man. “People who had hardly known each other before the flood embraced one another, while those who found relations rushed into each other’s arms and cried for very gladness that they were alive. All ordinary rules of decorum and differences of religion, politics and position were forgotten.”

Lone stragglers went poking about looking for only they knew what, many of them strangely clad in whatever odd bits of clothing they had been able to lay hands on. One man, hatless and with a woman’s red shawl across his shoulders, came limping along in his stocking feet, using a piece of lath for a cane. He was looking for his wife, Mrs. Brinker, who, as he would soon discover, had survived the night inside the Methodist parsonage and who had long since given him up for dead.

People recovered some pathetic belonging or other and carried it carefully back to high ground or began building little personal piles of salvage. There was no order to what went on, no organization, and not much sense. Most people were unable even to look after themselves; they were stunned, confused, trying, as much as anything, to grasp what had happened and what was left of their lives. Where they went from there was something they were not yet ready to think about. Many of them struck off into the country, with no special destination. They just kept walking for hours, looking for food or a dry place to lie down for the night, or, very often, just trying to put as many miles as possible between themselves and the devastated city. They were afraid of the place and wanted no more part of it.

The problems to be faced immediately were enormous and critical. People were ravenously hungry, most everyone having gone twenty-four hours or more without anything to eat, and now there was virtually no food anywhere. The few provisions uncovered among the ruins were nearly all unfit for eating, and what little else people had was given to the injured and to the children. Moreover, there was no water that anyone felt was safe to drink. Thousands were homeless, hundreds were severely injured. Mrs. John Geis, for example, little Gertrude Quinn’s grandmother, had had her scalp torn off from her forehead back to the nape of her neck. Hundreds of others were dazed by lack of sleep or in a state of shock. Dozens of people, as a result of exposure, were already in the early stages of pneumonia. There was almost no dry clothing to be had and no medicines.

People had no money, except what change they may have had in their pockets at the time the water struck, and even if they did, there were no stores left at which to buy anything. There was no gas or electric light. Fires were burning in a dozen different places, and no one knew when a gas main might explode. Every telegraph and telephone line to the outside world was down. Bridges were gone, roads impassable. The railroad had been destroyed. And with the dead lying about everywhere, plus hundreds of carcasses of drowned horses, cows, pigs, dogs, cats, birds, rats, the threat of a violent epidemic was very serious indeed.

But by noon things had begun to happen, if only in a small way. Rafts had been built to cross the rivers and to get over to those buildings still surrounded by water. People on the hillsides whose houses had escaped harm and farmers from miles out in the country began coming into town bringing food, water, and clothing. At the corner of Adams and Main milk was passed out in big tinfuls. Unclaimed children were looked after. A rope bridge had been strung across the Little Conemaugh near the depot, and, most important of all as it would turn out, up at the Haws Cement Works, on the hill at the western end of the stone bridge, several bedraggled-looking newspaper correspondents had established headquarters in a coal shed and were in the process of rigging their own wire down the river to Sang Hollow.

The men had reached Johnstown about seven in the morning, and like everyone else were cold, dirty, hollow-eyed from no sleep. There remains some question as to which of them arrived first, but William Connelly, who was the Associated Press correspondent in western Pennsylvania, Harry Orr, a telegraph operator for the A.P., and Claude Wetmore, a free-lance reporter working for the New York
World,
are generally given the credit. Others kept straggling in from New Florence through the rest of the day. But until nightfall the major stories were still being filed out of the little railroad crossing on the other side of Laurel Hill.