Great American Adventure Stories

by Tom McCarthy

  And all the time, all along the valley, the work of recovering the dead goes on with undiminished vigor, and as the workmen become accustomed to the terrible scenes, they apply themselves more diligently to their duty and labor with a system that produces rapid results.

  The great number of bodies not identified seems incredible. Some of these bodies have lain in the different morgues for four days. Thousands of people from different parts of the state have seen them, yet they remain unidentified. At Nineveh they are burying all the unidentified dead, but in the morgues in this vicinity, no bodies have been buried unless they were identified. There are at present thirty unidentified bodies at the Fourth Ward schoolhouse.

  These bodies have been lying there for the past three days, and in that time at least forty thousand people have viewed them, but no one has identified them, and they have nothing in their clothing to indicate who they are. During the past twenty-four hours, sixty bodies were embalmed and taken from this place. This morning five bodies were brought in.

  But to enumerate would be too great a task, when reports of additional bodies being found are constantly coming in from all points along the valley.

  Judge Advocate Rogers of Gov. Beaver’s staff this morning decided an important question which arose by the discovery of forty barrels of whiskey in a building on Main Street. Adjt.-Gen. Hastings was disposed to confiscate it as a safeguard, according to a section in the military code which prohibited the sale of liquor within the limits of a military camp. Judge Advocate Rogers ruled that it was private property and a licensed dealer had a right to sell liquor. Besides, it was not a military camp but a posse comitatus, the militiamen doing police duty.

  Last evening employees of Lutz & Son unearthed ten barrels of beer from the cellar of a building on Main Street. The body of a man was found close beside it. The driver was bringing his capture away when Major Samuel Hastings arrested him. Adjt.-Gen. Hastings knocked in the head of a barrel and let the beer run into the street. Under orders it was all destroyed.

  “You will not be paid for the beer,” said Gen. Hastings to the owners.

  Among the bodies recovered in Kernville yesterday was that of a young woman richly attired, wearing diamond rings and a gold watch marked “J. J. L. to E. J. L.” The remains were taken to the chapel on the hill.

  It is said that many cases of fever and diphtheria and pneumonia are being concealed from the people here for fear a panic may seize the workers, and if that should happen now, probably no firm or people would attempt to touch the work here perhaps for months. Disinfectants of all kinds are being freely used by the carload, and in addition to this, a score of blazing piles in every direction shows that the purifying element of fire is being applied as rapidly as possible for the safety of the living.

  Work was resumed today in the shops of the Cambria Iron Company’s mammoth steel mill, and the repairs to the building are being made with remarkable rapidity. The damage to the buildings has been stated, but the machinery was only slightly damaged. The blast furnaces were not hurt at all and will be in operation as soon as a supply of coke can be obtained. There is some coke on hand, but it is too small an amount to begin with. The most serious loss to the firm was the destroyed papers, letters, order books, etc.

  The members of secret societies on the Conemaugh Valley fared unusually well. The junior OUAM [Order of United American Mechanics] are very strong here, having a membership of 1,200. Out of this number, only nine lives were lost. Most of them lost their homes, but all have employment and expect to be on their feet again in a short time. The committee from Pittsburgh and Allegheny established headquarters in the upper end of the town and relieved the wants of all who applied. The councils responded, not only very liberally, but promptly.

  The Independent Order of Heptasophs had a membership of eighty-five and lost but two. None of their members are in want, and the committee sent to distribute provisions and clothing have returned home. They had more than enough.

  The Independent Odd Fellows had a membership of 506 here and out of that number lost 79. The distressed members are being well cared for.

  It is not known how many of the Masonic Order are lost, although a prominent Mason says they are few, and the survivors are being royally provided for by the relief committee of that fraternity.

  A trap was laid for the crook undertaker who was robbing the bodies in the Fourth Ward morgue. A female was brought in, and before it was dressed for burial, a diamond ring was placed upon one of her fingers, and the pseudo-undertaker was assigned to take charge of the body. He was detected in the act of stealing the jewelry and was promptly arrested by the chief of police, who immediately took him to Ebensburg. The officials refuse to give the name of the man.

  About forty bodies were recovered today up to three p.m., but of these only three were recovered at the bridge.

  Chalmer L. Dick, the ghouls’ nemesis, bid goodbye to this ill-fated town last night. He will hereafter reside in Mount Pleasant.

  Already twenty barrels of embalming fluid have been consumed, aggregating eight hundred gallons. It requires from half a pint to a quart for each corpse.

  A Masonic relief committee has been organized and solicits aid for distressed Freemasons and their families. Remittances should be made by New York or Pittsburgh drafts to the order of Col. John F. Linton, treasurer, or William F. Myer, secretary. Knights of the Mystic Chain are requested to forward all subscriptions to the Supreme Recording and Corresponding Scribe, Box 321, Pittsburgh.

  Fifteen bodies were received at the Fourth Ward morgue, of which seven were unidentified, as follows: James Murray of Philadelphia; William Marshall, Johnstown; Mrs. J. J. Llewellyn, Johnstown; James Dillon, Somerset; Marion Root, Johnstown; Miss Annie McKinstry, Mrs. McKinstry, and Jessie Hipp, Johnstown. At the Pennsylvania Railroad morgue, six bodies were received and two identified as E. M. Thomas and Howard J. Roberts, cashier, First National Bank, Johnstown. At the Presbyterian Church morgue, ten bodies were received and one identified as Sheriff John Ryan of Johnstown.

  At 10:30 p.m. forty-seven bodies were discovered in a hole on the site of the Hurlbut House. They are supposed to be the bodies of guests. The number of persons who have so far registered is 20,110. The population of Johnstown and the neighborhood affected by the flood is about 35,000. The registration of 20,110 leaves almost 15,000 to be accounted for. It is not claimed that those who have not registered are dead, for many had left the town before the system of registration began, and it is safe to say that 8,000 people have left.

  Among the most interesting relics of the flood is a small gold locket found in the ruins of the Hurlbut House yesterday. The locket contains a small curl of dark brown hair and has engraved on the inside the following remarkable lines: “Lock of George Washington’s hair, cut in Philadelphia, while on his way to Yorktown—1781.” Mr. Benford, one of the proprietors of the house, says that the locket was the property of his sister, who was lost in the flood, and was presented to her by an old lady in Philadelphia, whose mother had herself cut the hair from the “father of his country,” and there is no doubt that the statement is reliable.

  Up Stony Creek Gap, above the contractors, the United States Army engineers began work yesterday under command of Capt. Sears, who is here as the personal representative of the secretary of war. The engineers, Capt. Bergland’s company from Willett’s Point and Lieut. Biddle’s company from West Point, arrived last night, having been since Tuesday on the road from New York. Early this morning they went to work to bridge Stony Creek and unloaded and launched their heavy pontoons and strung them across the streams with a rapidity and skill that astonished the natives, who had mistaken them, in their coarse, working uniforms of overall stuff, for a fresh gang of laborers. The engineers, when there are bridges enough laid, may be set at other work about town. They have a camp of their own on the outskirts of the place. There are more constables, watchmen, special policeme
n, and that sort of thing in Johnstown than in any three cities of its size in the country. Naturally there is great difficulty in equipping them. Badges were easily provided by the clipping out of stars from pieces of tin, but everyone had to look out for himself when it came to clubs. Everything goes, from a broomstick to a baseball bat. The bats are especially popular.

  “I’d like to get the job of handling your paper here,” said a young fellow to a Pittsburgh newspaperman. “You’ll have to get some newsman to do it anyhow, for your old men have gone down, and I and my partner are the only newsmen in Johnstown above ground.”

  The news-dealing business is not the only one of which something like that is true. There has been great scarcity of cooking utensils since the flood. It not only is very inconvenient to the people but tends to the waste of a great deal of food. The soldiers are growling bitterly over their commissary department. They claim that bread and cheese and coffee is about all they get to eat.

  The temporary electric lights have now been strung all along the railroad tracks and through the central part of the ruins, so that the place after dark is really quite brilliant seen from a distance, especially when to the electric display is added the red glow in the mist and smoke of huge bonfires.

  Anybody who has been telegraphing to Johnstown this week and getting no answers would understand the reason for the lack of answers if he could see the piles of telegrams that are sent out here by train from Pittsburgh. Four thousand came in one batch on Thursday. Half of them are still undelivered, and yet there is probably no place in the country where the Western Union Company is doing better work than here. The flood destroyed not only the company’s offices but the greater part of their wires in this part of the country. The office they established here is in a little shanty with no windows and only one door, which doesn’t close, and it handles an amount of outgoing matter daily that would swamp nine-tenths of the city offices in the country. Incoming business is now received in considerable quantities, but for several days so great was the pressure of outgoing business that no attempt was made to receive any dispatches.

  The whole effort of the office has been to handle press matter, and how well they have done it is shown by the amount of matter received from there that the daily papers have been publishing every day. The rush of press matter has been slacking a little now, and in a day or two, private messages will probably be going back and forth with reasonable promptness. But there will be no efficient delivery service for a long time. The old messenger boys are all drowned, and the other boys who might make messenger boys are also most of them drowned, so that the raw material for creating a service is very scant. Besides that, nobody knows nowadays where anyone else lives, and it is almost impossible to deliver private messages at all.

  The amateur and professional photographers who have overrun the town for the last few days came to grief yesterday. A good many of them were arrested by the soldiers, placed under a guard, taken down to the Stony Creek, and set to lugging logs and timber. Among those arrested were several of the newspaper photographers, and these Gen. Hastings ordered released when he heard of their arrest. The others were made to work for half a day. They were a mad and disgusted lot, and they vowed all sorts of vengeance. It does seem that some notice to the effect that photographers were not permitted in Johnstown should have been posted before the men were arrested. The photographers all had passes in regular form, but the soldiers refused to even look at these. Were not it that Gen. Hastings is a candidate for governor, the reporters expect that they would be the ones to be arrested next.

  More sightseers got through the guards at Bolivar last night and came to Johnstown on the last train. Word was telegraphed ahead, and the soldiers met them at the train, put them under arrest, kept them overnight, and this morning they were set to work in clearing up the ruins.

  The special detail of workmen who have been at work looking up safes in the ruins and seeing that they were taken care of report that none of the safes have been broken open or otherwise interfered with. The committee on valuables report that quantities of jewelry and money are being turned daily into them by people who have found them in the ruins. Often the people surrendering this stuff are evidently very poor themselves. The committee believes that, as a general thing, the people are dealing very honestly in this matter of treasure trove from the ruins.

  Three carloads of coffins were part of the load of one freight train this afternoon. Coffins already are scattered everywhere about the city. Scores of them seem to have been set down and forgotten. They are used as benches and even, it is said, as beds.

  One enterprising man has opened a shop for the sale of relics of the disaster and is doing a big business. Half the people here are relic cranks. Everything goes as a relic, from a horseshoe to a two-foot section of iron pipe. Buttons and little things like that that can easily be carried off are the most popular.

  Grandma Mary Seter, aged eighty-three years, a well-known character in Johnstown who was in the water until Saturday and who, when rescued, had her right arm so injured that amputation at the shoulder was necessary, is doing finely at the hospital, and the doctors expect to have her around again before long.

  There has not been a photographer seen about the place today. The experience of the nine who were arrested and set to work on the ruins yesterday has scared off the rest.

  Out of the twenty-five Chinamen in Johnstown, only three escaped the flood. Vice President Frank Thompson of the Pennsylvania Railroad arrived today on his special locomotive, having opened a way through from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. He is now going to push east over the main line as rapidly as possible. It is not likely that the line will be opened for three or four days yet.

  A woman made insane by the loss of her husband and all her children has been wandering about the edge of the gorge this afternoon, moaning and shrieking incessantly. She is one of several women who have been thus affected by their affliction.

  7

  The Nome Stampede

  By Samuel Hall Young

  The discovery of gold in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness lured thousands of adventurers looking for wealth and fortune on the frontier. It also brought rowdy times and the more unscrupulous types who would do anything to make money. For a preacher, the opportunities were heaven-sent.

  It was with the excitement of a veteran soldier going into a fresh battle that I teetered over the springy plank from the Rampart shore to the deck of the Yukon River steamboat. My year’s outfit of “grub and duds,” as the miners would put it, was aboard. I grasped the hand of Dr. Koonce, with whom I had just floated in an open boat down the Yukon 1,200 miles. A fine fellow—“Kooncie”! We had been camping and fishing and packing and boating together since the first of May, 1899, and it was now the middle of August. He was to stay at the new mining town of Rampart, build a church there, and learn the joyous life of a pioneer missionary.

  What a queer mix-up of men on the crowded decks of the steamboat! Wild rumors of a ridiculous sort had reached the ears of gold hunters clear up the two thousand miles of the swift and crooked Yukon to Dawson. Gold! Not snugly reposing in the frozen gravel of deep gulches and canyons cut through the high hills—where respectable and orthodox gold ought to be—but gold on the windswept, stormy, treeless, exposed coast of Seward Peninsula—the tongue that impudent young Alaska sticks out at old Asia. Gold, like yellow cornmeal in the beach sands of Bering Sea, where nobody could lawfully stake a claim but where anybody could go with shovel, pan, and rocker and gather it up. Nuggets aplenty and coarse gold—enticing shallow diggings—in the bed of Anvil Creek and other creeks and runlets in the hills and the flat tundra about Nome.

  The reports of the new “strike,” often wild and exaggerated, came as a lifesaver to weary and discouraged thousands of Klondikers, who had packed their outfits over the terrible thirty miles of the Chilcoot Pass in the fall of ’97 or the spring of ’98, sawed the lumber themse
lves in the “armstrong sawmill,” sailed their clumsy boats through the lakes, shot the rapids of the Upper Yukon, spent the summer of ’98 and the winter that followed surging here and there on “wildcat” stampedes or putting down “dry” holes on unprofitable lays, and were now eagerly snatching at this new straw, hoping to “strike it” on the Nome beach. From Dawson, Forty Mile, Eagle, Circle, Fort Yukon; from wood camps and prospectors’ tents along the Yukon; and now from Rampart, these bearded, battered, sun-blistered men came rushing aboard the steamboat.

  I had engaged a stateroom before the steamboat arrived, but when it came, a placard of the company owning the boat menaced us in the office: “All reservations cancelled. Boat overcrowded. No passengers to be taken at Rampart.”

  Of course there was a mighty howl from the Rampart men, nearly half of whom had packed up to go on the boat. I hurried to the purser, whom I knew, and showed my pass from the manager of the company.

  “Can’t help it, Doctor,” he said in a loud tone, for the benefit of the bystanders. “The boat’s past her limit now, and we’re liable for big damages if anything happens. We can’t take anybody.”

  Presently he slyly pulled my arm, and I followed him to an inner office of the store. “Get your goods aboard,” he directed. “You can spread your blankets on the floor of my office.”