Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (31 page)

Benjamin Wallace, the circus owner, was going out of his mind with worry. He had heard plenty of gossip and innuendo about what had happened to his circus animals, and surely he wondered about his employees, but he had no way to get out of downtown and travel the few miles to the circus headquarters and investigate. He put up a $5,000 reward for anyone who would take a boat out to the circus farm, brave the torrent, and bring back a true report of what was going on out there. He had no takers.

Early morning, across America

In the morning papers, which Ben Hecht and Chris Hagerty contributed to, an appeal from President Woodrow Wilson went out to readers across the country, asking them to help the flood sufferers:

“The terrible floods in Ohio and Indiana have assumed the proportions of a national calamity. The loss of life and the infinite suffering
involved prompt me to issue an earnest appeal to all who are able in however small a way to assist the labors of the American Red Cross to send contributions at once to the Red Cross at Washington or to the local treasurers of the Society.

“We should make this a common cause. The needs of those upon whom this sudden and overwhelming disaster has come should quicken everyone capable of sympathy and compassion to give immediate aid to those who are laboring to rescue and relieve.”

There was, in fact, a flurry of activity in the Oval Office on the 26th day of March. Wilson fired off a letter to both Senator Thomas S. Martin and U.S. State Representative John J. Fitzgerald, stating:

“I am directing the War Department to extend the necessary aid to the sufferers from the floods. May I assume that I will have your approval in seeking the subsequent authorization of Congress and the necessary funds?”

They heartily approved.

Wilson also dashed off identical letters to both the Ohio governor, James M. Cox, and Indiana's governor, Samuel M. Ralston, simply saying, “I deeply sympathize with the people of your State in the terrible disaster that has come upon them. Can the Federal Government assist in any way?”

Cox thought so and promptly replied that day with a telegram reading:

“We have asked the Secretary of War this morning for tents, supplies, rations and physicians. In the name of humanity see that this is granted at the earliest possible moment. The situation in this State is very critical. We believe that two hundred and fifty thousand people were unsheltered last night and the indications are that before night the Muskingum Valley will suffer the fate of the Miami and Scioto Valleys.”

President Wilson promptly replied. “Your telegram received. Have directed the Secretary of War immediately to comply with your request, and to use every agency of his Department to meet the needs of the situation.”

Governor Ralston didn't reply. He couldn't. He had no idea that the president had contacted him. President Wilson's telegram couldn't get through to Ralston due to the floods. While the telegram could be
transmitted almost instantly—it was the e-mail of its day—someone had to actually physically deliver the telegram from the office to the recipient, and on March 26, getting a telegram from the telegraph office to the governor's mansion was a challenging feat.

That technology was failing or not working the way everyone was accustomed to was disconcerting. At least one newspaper columnist at the time lamented that perhaps the influx of communicative devices, from telegraphs to telephones, was making the nation soft since, suddenly, going without them was sending so many people into a panic, almost suggesting that maybe the country would be better off to go back the way it had been, when nobody could reach each other and everyone was more self-reliant.

As the
Cambridge City Tribune,
the paper for Cambridge City, Indiana, lectured its readers in an April 3, 1913 editorial, “Now you know how it was to live in this country in the days when there were no railroads, no daily newspapers, no telegraph, no telephone, no furnaces, no roads, no bridges. In this age, a few days' isolation is a great hardship.”

And when telegrams could get through, they may have done more harm than good, in terms of making the public anxious.

In Zanesville, an Ohio city in the Muskingum Valley that Governor Cox worried about, a telegraph operator sent out a final message: “Entire city under water. It's coming into our office. The building next door has just collapsed and I am compelled to leave now for safety.…”

The message then abruptly ended, and an
Indianapolis Star
reporter, in relaying the contents to the readers, speculated, “It was assumed by officials here that the operator was forced to swim from his post.”

The Midwest was falling apart, and with everyone seeking higher ground, telegraph poles were in danger of becoming more useful for their height than as instruments for communication. It was extremely frustrating to Governor Cox, not just seeing his state in disarray, but not being able to procure any hard facts about what was happening. Before he bought the
Dayton Daily News
in 1898, he had been a reporter himself. One story about the governor places him on the scene of a terrible railroad accident, and while the other reporters naturally made their way to the destruction, the future governor first went to
the town's only telegraph office. In a move that would have impressed Hagerty and Hecht, he hired the telegraph operator to transmit the Bible to his newspaper. He did that, knowing that the current laws dictated that once a message began, it couldn't be interrupted by other people.

Then Cox covered the accident and wrote his article. He came back to the telegraph office, which was full of impatient and angry reporters all waiting to use the telegraph. Cox handed his article to the telegraph operator who transmitted it, allowing the future governor to scoop all of the other reporters.

But now, Cox was governor of the state and was virtually single-handedly relying on his Columbus operator, Thomas Green, and his Dayton operator, John Bell, to patch him through to others or furnish him with the scant flood information that was out there.

What Cox was hearing about Dayton was alarming. Over a hundred thousand people were estimated to have sought refuge on the second floors of buildings, many of which seemed in danger of collapsing. At the city prison, sixty prisoners were without food and water and, behind bars, were promising the superintendent that if they escaped, he and his family were as good as dead. The superintendent, probably through John Bell and the city's only working telephone line, got word out that he needed the national guard's help, and he needed it now. Three hundred people in the Algonquin Hotel were trapped, with the water up to its third story; men, women, and children stuck their heads and arms out windows, begging for rescuers to bring their boats and save them. No one did, unable to manage the currents or figuring the hotel seemed sturdy and probably fearing a riot if they brought their tiny vessel to a crowded window.

What Cox didn't know as he ran the relief efforts from the governor's office, but could imagine, were the tales of individuals who were suffering. In Dayton, John Gartley, his wife, and three young children sat on the roof of their house with nine neighbors. They had two loaves of bread and rainwater to subsist on for about thirty-six hours until they were rescued.

Also in Dayton, Marcus Furst, his wife, and nine-month-old daughter all sat on a roof. The only food that they had was a box of crackers that Marcus had retrieved, just as the floodwaters hit their kitchen.

Those crackers were hard fought, too. Furst barely got out of the kitchen alive. But he did, dashing upstairs, where his wife was nursing their baby, and at that moment Marcus realized that he wouldn't be eating any of the crackers. His wife needed them, and in return, their baby would get them. What he couldn't have realized was that they would be trapped on their roof until Saturday with nothing else for his wife to eat. For a drink, he and his wife stuck their hands into the muddy water lapping their roof and sucked on their fingers.

But that was more nourishment than Dorothy Wright, her parents, and her 96-year-old aunt Anna Caise had. They were trapped in their attic in Dayton for fifty hours with no food or water, very little ventilation, and no warm blankets or warm clothing. By the time they were rescued, they had all virtually given up hope.

In Richwood, Archer Vaughan, his wife, and their eight-year-old granddaughter sat on a bed on the second floor of the house, the water lapping up against the mattress. For the next three days, they sat there, without food and drinking the muddy water to survive. Mrs. Vaughan, meanwhile, was haunted by what had happened before they were forced to climb onto the bed.

When the water had been rushing by their house, the levels right up to the second-floor windows, Mrs. Vaughan had spotted one of her neighbors struggling against the current. As he came past the window, he screamed for help, and she had reached out toward him, missing his hand by a few inches. Later, she would learn that her worst fears were founded; he had drowned.

In Columbus, the papers told of a mother, Mrs. Fanny Turner, and her daughter, handing over some of what little food they had, on a pole, to a neighbor with a baby. Mrs. Turner and their daughter hoped the neighbor's baby would be all right, provided her mother could eat food and then nurse the infant. There was, indeed, a happy ending in that everyone lived, but Mrs. Turner, her daughter, and the neighbor were stuck on their rooftops from Tuesday until Friday night.

These were the types of people Cox, the Red Cross, and the National Guard were powerless to help.

Intermixed between the hunger and fear was boredom. The residents of the Algonquin Hotel were hungry, but the staff had collected enough rainwater so thirst wasn't a problem. So, hungry and bored,
but not fearing for their lives, a number of guests amused themselves by making fishing rods out of their room's brass curtain poles. They then attempted to fish what they could out of the swift current. Among the items they caught: boxes of cigars, panama hats, automobile tubes, ladies' hose, and boxes of handkerchiefs.

In Middletown, Ohio, John McLaughlin, a superintendent at the W. B. Oglesby Paper Company, stayed at the factory longer than the other workers and found himself trapped, alone. For the next twenty-four hours, he drank river water that he ran through a piece of felt as a filter and ate oats that he found in a stable. The 55-year-old attempted to catch a hog that floated through a window, but the hog didn't appreciate that and escaped. McLaughlin himself eventually managed to make a break from the factory in a boat.

At 10
A
.
M
., Governor James Cox did what he probably should have done the day before; but like many people of the era, any era, he hated to admit that he needed help. He fired off a telegram to the Red Cross's Mabel Boardman. His telegram read:

“Latest advices are that the situation at Dayton is very critical; more than half of the city is under water to a depth of 5 to 9 feet; horses have been drowned in the business section; the entire downtown commercial district is under water.

“At this time there is no means of knowing the extent of human loss. Piqua, Hamilton, Sidney, and Middletown also badly in need. The maximum of our military strength is being used in different parts of the State. We have appeals from some parts by telephone to the effect that women and children in the second story of their homes await rescue.

“Boats are being rushed overland by wagon, as railroad traffic in flooded districts is practically suspended.

“We greatly appreciate the interest and cooperation of the Red Cross.”

Mabel Boardman didn't need to hear any more. She immediately—or as immediately as possible in 1913—dispatched T. J. Edmonds and C. M. Hubbard, of St. Louis, who were currently working in Omaha on tornado relief, to get to Dayton as soon as possible. Not long afterward, the mystery of Bicknell's location was cleared up when a telegram arrived at the Red Cross. For the last six hours, he had been stuck at a
train station in Wellington, Ohio, far up north in the state, about 170 miles away from Dayton. He was hardly alone, of course. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were stuck, trying to get from one place to another. One story that made the rounds in papers was that of a Miss Wilkins, a nurse who traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to visit a sick sister. While there, she heard about her family—in Omaha—and how her mother had been seriously injured. She took the train to go see them but became held up for an interminably long time in the flood chaos.

And as horrific as the situation was throughout Ohio and Indiana and its surrounding states, people in Omaha were still suffering. Before Wednesday, March 26, was over, two more people had died from their injuries sustained in the tornado, and another man, Thomas Barron, 48, was reportedly despondent after the destruction and, in the privacy of a hotel room, with a gun, he ended his life.

Chapter Thirteen

Greed

The morning of March 26, New Castle, Pennsylvania

The city slowly came to a standstill. The Shenango River didn't rush onto the streets like the Miami River rushed into Dayton and other towns, but it came nonetheless. School was called off, the electric light plant was flooded, the city water had been turned off, and just as it was unfolding in communities throughout states in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, people were stuck on second stories and roofs without food and clean drinking water. It was estimated that at least one thousand homes were flooded, and police, firemen, and volunteer rescuers were manning boats and trying to help people to safety.

But some police officers had a funny way of helping people. It wouldn't become public knowledge until later, but at some point on Wednesday, a few officers apparently decided that their salary wasn't high enough.

Constable William Kerr asked resident John Standard, who lived on Mahoning Avenue, dangerously close to the river, for two dollars before allowing him on his boat.