by Tom McCarthy
Superintendent Pitcairn was on the train. We all got out and tried to save the floating people. Taking the bell-cord, we formed a line and threw the rope out, thus saving seven persons.
We could have saved more, but many were afraid to let go the debris. It was an awful sight. The immense volume of water was roaring along, whirling over huge rocks, dashing against the banks and leaping high in the air, and this seething flood was strewn with timber, trunks of trees, parts of houses, and hundreds of human beings, cattle, and almost every animal.
The fearful peril of the living was not more awful than the horror of hundreds of distorted, bleeding corpses whirling along the avalanche of death.
We counted 107 people floating by and dead without number. A section of roof came by, on one of which were sitting a woman and a girl.
Other tales by eyewitnesses confirm the fact that the horror has never been excelled by anything of its kind in history.
Indeed, it will never perhaps be known what the real extent of the awful calamity is. Johnstown, with its former population of ten thousand or thereabouts, was almost entirely swept away when the awful floods came, and many of the villages between that point and Nineveh are things of the past so far as life is concerned. Indeed, the whole valley is a veritable Valley of the Shadow of Death.
So great was the crush of the wreckage, debris, and dead bodies at some points along the valley that dynamite had to be used, thus adding to the horror of the scene. Nineveh is twenty-three miles below Johnstown, yet a large number of the bodies found at Nineveh were those of former residents of Johnstown, who had been swept that great distance down the valley to their death. There are incidents where bodies were carried a hundred miles and there deposited.
A relation of some of the real facts, circumstances, and scenes and incidents of the terrible disaster would be considered Munchausenish by the majority of our readers, but some of them were miraculous. Here is one. S. H. Klein, a New Yorker, had a queer experience. He was at the Merchants’ Hotel, and he worked like a beaver during the trying times of Friday night and Saturday morning, aiding in the rescue of no less than sixty persons from the floating debris. Among these were the Rev. Mr. Phillips, his wife, and two children. Mr. Phillips is a stalwart man, and when the flood struck his house, he fled to the roof with his family. Presently the house floated, and the sturdy dominie placed his wife and two children on a table. Then he got under the table and, letting it rest with its precious burden on his head, arose to his feet. As the house floated down on the tide, it grazed the hotel building, and Mr. Klein and others assisted in hauling the imperiled parson and his family into an upper window of the hotel.
Here are other incidents: The story of the mishap to the day express train at Conemaugh Bridge is developing slowly through the efforts of the railway authorities to obtain definite information. Of the three hundred passengers on the train, all but eight seem to be accounted for, and it is believed that these eight are lost. They are Bessie Bryan, daughter of Mahlon Bryan of Philadelphia, and her companion, Miss Paulson of Pittsburgh; Mrs. Easley, Rev. Mr. Goodchild, and Robert Hutchinson of Newark, New Jersey; Andrew Leonard; Mrs. J. Smith; and Chris Meisel, manager of the Newark baseball club.
Miss Bryan was a delicate young woman. She was returning from a Pittsburgh wedding with Miss Paulson. They had been preceded the night before by the bridal couple, who were to be guests at the Bryan home at Germantown. They rode in the Pullman car and did not get out quickly enough. Fearing that they could not reach the hill where the other passengers took refuge, they returned toward the car, but before they had reached it, the waters caught them and carried them away.
Miss Rose Clarke, a beautiful and well-known young lady, the daughter of a very prominent citizen, had a remarkable experience.
“When the water rose,” she said,
we were all at home. It drove us from floor to floor, and we had just reached the roof when the house started. It went whirling toward the bridge, struck it, and went down. Mother, my little sister, and I all caught on another roof that was just above the water, but Father and my little brother went down with the house. Father’s face was toward us as he sank. He shouted goodbye, and that was the last. Just then my little sister lost her hold, and she followed Father and Brother. Then Mother called out that she was going to drown. I got to her and raised her head out of the water. My head rested on a saw log, and a board protected me from the other timbers. Some rescuers came running down the bridge and saw us. I made them take Mother out first, and meantime I struggled to get out of the timbers, but they closed in on me.
The more I struggled, the tighter they held me. The fire was just behind me, and I could feel its heat. By the time the men had carried Mother to the bank, the fire was so fierce they could hardly get back. When they did reach me, they could not get me out, for my foot was fast between a saw log and a piece of timber. Then they ran for tools. The fire kept sweeping on before the breeze from upstream. I had almost resigned myself to an awful death when some other men braved the fire and reached me. They began chopping and sawing. One blow of an axe cut off a drowned man’s hand. The men tied a rope around me. How they got me out finally, I scarcely know. My kneecap was almost cut off. When the current sucked my father down, he caught me by the foot; that is what dragged me so far into the timbers.
Miss Clarke and her mother are both badly injured. Some of the men who rescued the young lady were Slavs.
Miss Mamie Brown was caught in the timbers in almost the same way as Miss Clarke, near the bank. The fire was coming on toward her, and the would-be rescuers had been driven back. Finally John Schmidt braved the dangers and rescued her. Father Trautwein of St. Columbia’s Church, who witnessed Schmidt’s brave conduct, said if any man is a hero, Schmidt is that man.
As has been written, dynamite had added its horror to the sixty-acre mass of wrecked buildings, railroads, streets, and human beings that lie above the railroad bridge. A half dozen times on the afternoon of June 6, the heavy thunder of the huge cartridges was heard for miles around, and fragments of the debris flew high in the air, while at a distance the crowd looked on in dreadful sorrow at the thought of the additional mangling that the remains of the hundreds of bodies still buried in the mass were bound to undergo. There was little complaint, however, even on the part of those who have relatives or friends buried there, for the work of the past few days has shown how futile was the idea that anything but an explosive could effectually break up and remove the compact mass.
All that hundreds of men have been able to do has amounted to nothing more than a little picking around the edges. Even the dynamite is doing the work slowly. The surface of the mass about where it was used is upheaved and washed about a bit, but the actual progress is, so far as can be seen, very small. It will be a week before the gorge can be opened, even now. Meanwhile a proposition is being discussed not to open it at all but to bury it deep and by filling in to raise the level of the whole city.
There has been an unpleasant feeling between rival committees of citizens, and at a meeting held in Johnstown on Tuesday, the whole matter was settled by the resignation of Chairman Moxham of the old relief committee and the appointment in his place of J. B. Scott of Pittsburgh, who is also chairman of the local relief committee in that city. It is believed that this will be an additional guarantee to the country of fairness and impartiality in the disbursement of the funds.
Gen. Hastings has made an estimate than the number of proven deaths will reach five thousand and that the total will be eight thousand. Besides the bodies which are dug up in this city, scores are brought in daily in wagons and carts from places down the river, where they have been washed ashore. The number of the unknown increases as the passage of time increases the difficulty of identification, and Gen. Hastings’s estimate is considered extremely low. The abject destitution is now believed to be confined to Johnstown and the knots of towns immediately surrounding it
. South Fork is now in railroad communication with Altoona, and whatever is needed for people there and at Mineral Point and other adjacent places can come in from that direction until railroad and other routes can be opened up the valley from here. The towns are small, and the proportion of deaths smaller than here.
The chief labor of the living is still the burying of the dead. Their sole dependence for support is upon the charity of the country, a charity, be it said, that is proving as ready as the occasion is pressing. The immediate daily necessities of the suffering people are being met by trainloads of provisions and clothing that come in from all directions. The money available is being used to employ the idle in clearing away the debris, exhuming the dead from their hiding places, and generally in making Johnstown, to an extent, an inhabitable place once more for those of its people who have further need of homes above ground. What has been done and can be done with the money already in hand is a trifling beginning, but already the place shows the effects of the gangs of laborers who have been set to pulling down damaged buildings, removing and burning the bodies of animals and other offensive debris, and doing whatever else seemed most immediately necessary for the health and well-being of the place.
From the morgue in the Fourth Ward schoolhouse, 350 bodies have been buried, and more are taken to the Grove Hill Cemetery every hour. They are buried there singly if identified and in rows and narrow trenches, one on top of the other, if not. The scenes at the different relief agencies, where food, clothing, and provisions are given out on the order of Citizens’ Committee, are extremely interesting. These are established at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot, at Peters’ Hotel, in Adams Street, and in each of the suburbs.
At the depot, where there is a large force of police, the people were kept in files, and the relief articles were given out with some regularity, but at such a place as Kernsville in the suburbs, the relief station was in the upper story of a partly wrecked house.
The yard was filled with boxes and barrels of bread, crackers, biscuits, and bales of blankets. The people crowded outside the yard in the street, and the provisions were handed to them over the fence, while the clothing was thrown to them from the upper windows. There was apparently great destitution in Kernsville.
“I don’t care what it is only so long as it will keep me warm,” said one woman, whose ragged clothing was still damp this morning.
The stronger women pushed to the front of the fence and tried to grab the pieces of clothing which came from the windows, but the people in the house saw the game and tossed the clothing to those in the rear of the crowd. A man stood on a barrel of flour and yelled out what the piece of clothing was as it came down.
At each yell there was a universal cry of “That’s just what I want. My boy is dying. He must have that. Throw me that for my poor wife,” and the like of that. Finally the clothing was all gone, and there was some people who didn’t get any. They went away, bewailing their misfortune. The fortunate ones were gleeful.
Thousands upon thousands of dollars are being telegraphed here hourly, yes, every minute, for the relief of the bereaved. New York has come to the front nobly with over $200,000, and Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities and, indeed, nearly every town and village in the country has sent its quota of relief funds.
A word should be said right here regarding the cause of the disaster. The South Fork Fishing Club is held chiefly responsible. The broken dam shows that it was simply a pile of dirt and rubble dumped across a stream between two hills that formed the banks of the reservoir. When the water began to break through this dam, everything had to give way, causing a torrent sixty feet high to rush onward toward the doomed valley.
The dam was built many years ago to create a reservoir for use as a feeder to the Pennsylvania Canal. The builders placed in the forty-foot space at the bottom, where the creek ran, five huge pipes, each as large as a hogshead. These were covered by an arch of massive masonry and were arranged to be opened or closed by levers in a tower that was built in the center of the dam.
These five big pipes were calculated to be large enough to carry off all surplus water that could ever be poured into the lake above and which could not escape by the regular exit, which was a sluiceway around one corner of the dam at a level of eight or ten feet below the top. This sluiceway was really a new stream, the water passing off through it finding its picturesquely winding course down the hillside and running with the stream again some distance below the dam. The sluiceway and waste gates never failed to do the work for which they were designed, and there is no reason to suppose that they would have failed to do so at the present time and for the future had they been maintained as the builders contemplated.
When the Pennsylvania Canal was abandoned, the dam became useless and was neglected. The tower in which the machinery managing the waste gates is located is said to have fallen into ruin a few years ago.
The lake was then leased by the Pittsburgh Sportsman’s Association. Engineer Fulton of the Cambria Iron Company made an inspection of it and pronounced it dangerous. The association set out, they declared, to improve and strengthen it.
They did cut off two feet from the top of the dam and may have strengthened it in some respects, but either because the waste gates were so damaged that to repair them would have been an expensive job or, for the other reason mentioned, that the fish would escape by the waste gates, everyone who lives near says the gates were permanently stopped up. The present appearance of the wreck of the dam indicates the truthfulness of the story. There are remnants of the waste gate masonry, but there is no indication that they have been of any practical use for a long time.
Another awful day has come and gone, and as the work of unearthing the bodies goes bravely on, scenes and incidents have been more heartrending, if possible, than those of the previous days. It is now a pretty well-settled fact that at least twelve thousand souls were washed downward to destruction, desolation, and death. It may be more. The destruction of property is already estimated at over $30,000,000, but the returns are not yet all in by any means.
Up on the hillsides are whole camps of shrieking, crying, groaning, and moaning men, women, and children, nearly naked and almost absolutely without sustenance. Willing hands are aiding and assisting them by all means in their power, but these means are extremely limited.
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands again of dollars from the charitably disposed through the country have been sent here, and the money is being used as best it can. What is more necessary, however, are large quantities of food and clothing.
The readers of this story can best appreciate this fact when it is told that there is not a store of any consequence left in this place or, indeed, anywhere in the vicinity. The committee in charge of the financial part of the work is in despair at the enormous extent of the task before it and today issued an appeal to the official authorities and the financial organizations of the country to designate a commission to take charge of the work.
Disease consequent upon the reaction after the excitement and hardships of the past week threatens to make sad inroads into the portion of the population that still remains alive. The condition of the ruins, filled with dead bodies, menaces a still more serious situation, which is being delayed, providentially, by the continued cool weather. Danger hangs over the unhappy town from another source. The presence of nearly ten thousand laboring men, half of them gathered at random from the idle classes in other parts of the country and divided by race and other prejudices, threatens to lead to rioting and disorder beyond the power of the military now on hand to quell. Liquor has been introduced among these men surreptitiously, and trouble is feared. Very strict regulations are enforced. The whole city is surrounded by a guard of soldiers, and more troops are under orders in Pittsburgh, ready to come here at once if needed. An effort is being made to cut off, as far as possible, the means of entrance to the city, so as to keep away the crowds. The n
umber of passenger trains has been reduced to the lowest possible number, and no tickets to Johnstown are sold except upon a permit from the Relief Committee at Pittsburgh.
The feeling against the Pittsburgh association that owns the lake and dam that caused the calamity grows more intense the more the truth about the dam becomes known. The disclosure of the fact that the dam was simply a heap of dirt with loose stone facings instead of a structure of solid masonry and that the waste gates had been closed up by the association, which was printed in a Pittsburgh paper the other morning, made a sensation here and threatens to bring the matter to a head. Criminal prosecution is freely talked of, but it is thought that it will be difficult to sustain a case; even in courts as prejudiced as those in Cambria County will be against the dam owners. The men are rich and responsible, however, and the liability of civil action is generally believed to be complete. If they should be held liable in civil suits for damages, it is probable that many, if not all of them, will be financially ruined. There is an abundance of evidence that the owners were frequently warned by old residents in the neighborhood of the dam that it was becoming weaker and getting into a more dangerous condition all the time.
One fact alone as to the dam ought to convict the dam owners of negligence. The stone face that went up each side of the dam was not continued across the top. In order to maintain a wagon road there, the top of the dirt heap had merely been leveled off and left in its natural condition. It was a moral certainty that, if the water even rose so high as to go over the top of the dam, it would wash it out. With the water washing over the dirt top of the dam, the rock facing would amount to no more as a source of strength than a sheathing of cardboard. To have covered the top of the dam with a substantial course of stone capping, arched or in some other way arranged, to offer as little resistance as possible to the passage of the water would have spoiled the wagon road, but it might have saved the dam. Better opinion will no doubt prevail, and unless something new transpires later, another scene of devastation will be averted.
