History of the Johnstown Flood Part 8

"You look happy," said the reporter.

"Yes, sir; I've found my boy," said the man.

"Is your house gone?" asked the reporter.

"Oh, of course," answered the man. "I've lost all I've got except my little boy," and he went on his way rejoicing.

A wealthy young Philadelphian named Ogle had become engaged to a Johnstown lady, Miss Carrie Diehl. They were to be wedded in the middle of June, and were preparing for the ceremony. The lover heard of the terrible flood, but, knowing that the residence of his dear one was up in the hills, felt little fear for her safety. To make sure, however, he started for Johnstown. Near the Fourth Street morgue he met Mr. Diehl.

"Thank G.o.d! you are safe," he exclaimed, and then added: "Is Carrie well?"

"She was visiting in the valley when the wave came," was the mournful reply. Then he beckoned the young man to enter the chamber of death.

A moment later Mr. Ogle was kneeling beside the rough bier and was kissing the cold, white face. From the lifeless finger he slipped a ring and in its place put one of his own. Then he stole quietly out.

"Mamma! mamma!" cried a child. She had recognized a body that no one else could, and in a moment the corpse was ticketed, boxed, and delivered to laborers, who bore it away to join the long funeral procession.

A mother recognized a baby boy. "Keep it a few minutes," she asked the undertaker in charge. In a few moments she returned, carrying in her arms a little white casket. Then she hired two men to bear it to a cemetery. No hea.r.s.es were seen in Johnstown. Relatives recognized their dead, secured the coffins, got them carried the best way they could to the morgues, then to the graveyards. A prayer, some tears, and a few more of the dead thousands were buried in mother earth.

A frequent visitor at these horrible places was David John Lewis. All over Johnstown he rode a powerful gray horse, and to each one he met whom he knew he exclaimed: "Have you seen my sisters?" Hardly waiting for a reply, he galloped away, either to seek ingress into a morgue or to ride along the river banks. One week before Mr. Lewis was worth $60,000, his all being invested in a large commission business. After the flood he owned the horse he rode, the clothes on his back, and that was all. In the fierce wave were buried five of his near relatives, sons, and his sisters Anna, Louise, and Maggie. The latter was married, and her little boy and babe were also drowned. They were all dearly loved by the merchant, who, crazed with grief and mounted on his horse, was a conspicuous figure in the ruined city.

William Gaffney, an insurance agent, had a very pitiful duty to perform.

On his father's and wife's side he lost fourteen relatives, among them his wife and family. He had a man to take the bodies to the grave, and he himself dug graves for his wife and children, and buried them. In speaking of the matter he said: "I never thought that I could perform such a sad duty, but I had to do it, and I did it. No one has any idea of the feelings of a man who acts as undertaker, grave-digger, and pall-bearer for his own family."

The saddest sight on the river bank was Mr. Gilmore, who lost his wife and family of five children. Ever since the calamity this old man was seen on the river bank looking for his family. He insisted on the firemen playing a stream of water on the place where the house formerly stood, and where he supposed the bodies lay. The firemen, recognizing his feelings, played the stream on the place, at intervals, for several hours, and at last the rescuers got to the spot where the old man said his house formerly stood. "I know the bodies are there, and you must find them." When at last one of the men picked up a charred skull, evidently that of a child, the old man exclaimed: "That is my child.

There lies my family; go on and get the rest of them." The workmen continued, and in a few minutes they came to the remains of the mother and three other children. There was only enough of their clothing left to recognize them by.

On the floor of William Mancarro's house, groaning with pain and grief, lay Patrick Madden, a furnaceman of the Cambria Iron Company. He told of his terrible experience in a voice broken with emotion. He said: "When the Cambria Iron Company's bridge gave way I was in the house of a neighbor, Edward Garvey. We were caught through our own neglect, like a great many others, and a few minutes before the houses were struck Garvey remarked that he was a good swimmer, and could get away no matter how high the water rose. Ten minutes later I saw him and his son-in-law drowned.

"No human being could swim in that terrible torrent of debris. After the South Fork Reservoir broke I was flung out of the building, and saw, when I rose to the surface of the water, my wife hanging upon a piece of scantling. She let it go and was drowned almost within reach of my arm, and I could not help or save her. I caught a log and floated with it five or six miles, but it was knocked from under me when I went over the dam. I then caught a bale of hay and was taken out by Mr. Morenrow.

"My wife is certainly drowned, and six children. Four of them were: James Madden, twenty-three years old; John, twenty-one years; Kate, seventeen years; and Mary, nineteen years."

A spring wagon came slowly from the ruins of what was once Cambria. In it, on a board and covered by a muddy cloth, were the remains of Editor C. T. Schubert, of the Johnstown _Free Press_, German. Behind the wagon walked his friend Benjamin Gribble. Editor Schubert was one of the most popular and well-known Germans in the city. He sent his three sons to Conemaugh Borough on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon he and his wife and six other children called at Mr. Gribble's residence. They noticed the rise of the water, but not until the flood from the burst dam washed the city did they antic.i.p.ate danger. All fled from the first to the second floor. Then, as the water rose, they went to the attic, and Mr.

Schubert hastily prepared a raft, upon which all embarked. Just as the raft reached the bridge, a heavy piece of timber swept the editor beneath the surface. The raft then glided through, and all the rest were rescued. Mr. Schubert's body was found beneath a pile of broken timbers.

A pitiful sight was that of an old, gray-haired man named Norn. He was walking around among the ma.s.s of debris, looking for his family. He had just sat down to eat his supper when the crash came, and the whole family, consisting of wife and eight children, were buried beneath the collapsed house. He was carried down the river to the railroad bridge on a plank. Just at the bridge a cross-tie struck him with such force that he was shot clear upon the pier, and was safe. But he is a ma.s.s of bruises and cuts from head to foot. He refused to go to the hospital until he found the bodies of his loved ones.

CHAPTER XV.

Five days after the disaster a bird's-eye view was taken of Johnstown from the top of a precipitous mountain which almost overhangs it. The first thing that impresses the eye, wrote the observer, is the fact that the proportion of the town that remains uninjured is much smaller than it seems to be from lower-down points of view. Besides the part of the town that is utterly wiped out, there are two great swaths cut through that portion which from lower down seems almost uninjured. Beginning at Conemaugh, two miles above the railroad bridge, along the right side of the valley looking down, there is a strip of an eighth by a quarter of a mile wide, which const.i.tuted the heart of a chain of continuous towns, and which was thickly built over for the whole distance, upon which now not a solitary building stands except the gutted walls of the Wood, Morrell & Co. general store in Johnstown, and of the Gautier wire mill and Woodvale flour mill at Woodvale. Except for these buildings, the whole two-mile strip is swept clean, not only of buildings, but of everything. It is a tract of mud, rocks, and such other miscellaneous debris as might follow the workings of a huge hydraulic placer mining system in the gold regions. In Johnstown itself, besides the total destruction upon this strip, extending at the end to cover the whole lower end of the city, there is a swath branching off from the main strip above the general store and running straight to the bluff. It is three blocks wide and makes a huge "Y," with the gap through which the flood came for the base and main strip and the swaths for branches.

Between the branches there is a triangular block of buildings that are still standing, although most of them are damaged. At a point exactly opposite the corner where the branches of the "Y" meet, and distant from it by about fifty yards, is one of the freaks of the flood. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station, a square, two-story brick building, with a little cupola at the apex of its slanting roof, is apparently uninjured, but really one corner is knocked in and the whole interior is a total wreck. How it stood when everything anywhere near it was swept away is a mystery. Above the "Y"-shaped tract of ruin there is another still wider swath, bending around in Stony Creek, save on the left, where the flood surged when it was checked and thrown back by the railroad bridge. It swept things clean before it through Johnstown and made a track of ruin among the light frame houses for nearly two miles up the gap. The Roman Catholic Church was just at its upper edge. It is still standing, and from its tower the bell strikes the hours regularly as before, although everybody now is noticing that it always sounds like a funeral. n.o.body ever noticed it before, but from the upper side it can be seen that a huge hole has been knocked through the side of the building. A train of cars could be run through it. Inside the church is filled with all sorts of rubbish and ruin. A little further on is another church, which curiously ill.u.s.trates the manner in which fire and flood seemed determined to unite in completing the ruin of the city.

Just before the flood came down the valley there was a terrific explosion in this church, supposed to have been caused by natural gas.

Amid all the terrors of the flood, with the water surging thirty feet deep all around and through it, the flames blazed through the roof and tower, and its fire-stained walls arise from the debris of the flood, which covers its foundations. Its ruins are one of the most conspicuous and picturesque sights in the city.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUINS FROM SITE OF THE HURLBURT HOUSE.]

Next to Adams Street, the road most traveled in Johnstown now is the Pennsylvania Railroad track, or rather bed, across the Stony Creek, and at a culvert crossing just west of the creek. More people have been injured here since the calamity than at any other place. The railroad ties which hold the track across the culvert are big ones, and their strength has not been weakened by the flood, but between the ties and between the freight and pa.s.senger tracks there is a wide s.p.a.ce. The Pennsylvania trains from Johnstown have to stop, of course, at the eastern end of the bridge, and the thousands of people whom they daily bring to Johnstown from Pittsburgh have to get into Johnstown by walking across the track to the Pennsylvania Railroad depot, and then crossing the pontoon foot-bridge that has been built across the Stony Creek. All day long there is a black line of people going back and forth across this course. Every now and then there is a yell, a plunge, a rush of people to the culvert, a call for a doctor, and cries of "Help" from underneath the culvert. Some one, of course, has fallen between the freight and pa.s.senger tracks, or between the ties of the tracks themselves. In the night it is particularly dangerous traveling to the Pennsylvania depot this way, and people falling then have little chance of a rescue. So far at least thirty persons have fallen down the culvert, and a dozen of them, who have descended entirely to the ground, have escaped in some marvelous manner with their lives. Several Pittsburghers have had their legs and arms broken, and one man cracked his collar-bone. It is to be hoped that these accidents will keep off the flock of curiosity-seekers, in some degree at least. The presence of these crowds seriously interferes with the work of clearing up the town, and affects the residents here in even a graver manner, for though many of those coming to Johnstown to spend a day and see the ruins bring something to eat with them, many do not do so, and invade the relief stands, taking the food which is lavishly dealt out to the suffering.

Though the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge is as strong as ever, apparently, beyond the bridge, the embankment on which the track is built is washed away, and people therefore do not cross the bridge, but leave the track on the western side, and, clambering down the abutments, cross the creek on a rude foot-bridge hastily erected, and then through the yard of the Open-Hearth Works and of the railroad up to the depot.

This yard altogether is about three-quarters of a mile long, but so deceptive are distances in the valley that it does not look one-third that. The bed of this yard, three-quarters of a mile long, and about the same distance wide, is the most desolate place here. The yard itself is fringed with the crumbling ruins of the iron works and of the railroad shops. The iron works were great, high brick buildings, with steep iron roofs. The ends of these buildings were smashed in, and the roofs bend over where the flood struck them, in a curve.

But it is the bed of the yard itself that is desolate. In appearance it is a ma.s.s of stones and rocks and huge boulders, so that it seems a vast quarry hewn and uncovered by the wind. There is comparatively little debris here, all this having been washed away over to the sides of the buildings, in one or two instances filling the buildings completely.

There is no soft earth or mud on the rocks at all, this part of Johnstown being much in contrast with the great stretch of sand along the river. In some instances the dirt is washed away to such a depth that the bed-rock is uncovered.

The fury of the waters here may be gathered from this fact: piled up outside the works of the Open-Hearth Company were several heaps of ma.s.sive blooms--long, solid blocks of pig iron, weighing fifteen tons each. The blooms, though they were not carried down the river, were scattered about the yard like so many logs of wood. They will have to be piled up again by the use of a derrick. The Open-Hearth Iron Works people are making vigorous efforts to clear their buildings. The yards of the company were blazing last night with the burning debris, but it will be weeks before the company can start operations.

In the Pennsylvania Railroad yard all is activity and bustle. At the relief station, and at the headquarters of General Hastings, in the signal tower, the man who is the head of all operations there, and the directing genius of the place, is Lieutenant George Miller, of the Fifth United States Infantry. Lieutenant Miller was near here on his vacation when the flood came. He was one of the first on the spot, and was about the only man in Johnstown who showed some ability as an organizer and a disciplinarian. A reporter who groped his way across the railroad track, the foot-bridge, and the quarries and yards at reveille found Lieutenant Miller in a group of the soldiers of the Fourteenth Pennsylvania Regiment telling them just what to do.

CHAPTER XVI.

Travel was resumed up the valley of Conemaugh Creek for a few miles about five days after the flood, and a weird sight was presented to the visitor. No pen can do justice to it, yet some impressions of it must be recorded. Every one has seen the light iron beams, shafts, and rods in a factory lying in twisted, broken, and criss-cross shape after a fire has destroyed the building. In the gap above Johnstown water has picked up a four-track railroad covered with trains, freight, and pa.s.sengers, and with machine shops, a round-house, and other heavy buildings with heavy contents, and it has torn the track to pieces, twisted, turned, and crossed it as fire never could. It has tossed huge freight locomotives about like barrels, and cars like packing-boxes, torn them to pieces, and scattered them over miles of territory. It has in one place put a stream of deep water, a city block wide, between the railroad and the bluff, and in another place it has changed the course of the river as far in the other direction and left a hundred yards inland the tracks that formerly skirted the banks.

Add to this that in the midst of all this devastation, fire, with the singular fatality that has made it everywhere the companion of the flood in this catastrophe, has destroyed a train of vestibule cars that the flood had wrecked; that the pa.s.sengers who remained in the cars through the flood and until the fire were saved, while their companions who attempted to flee were overwhelmed and drowned; and that through it all one locomotive stood and still stands comparatively uninjured in the heart of this disaster, and the story of one of the most marvelous freaks of this marvelous flood is barely outlined. That locomotive stands there on its track now with its fires burning, smoke curling from the stack, and steam from its safety valve, all ready to go ahead as soon as they will build a track down to it. It is No. 1309, a fifty-four ton, eight driver, cla.s.s R, Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. George Hudson was its engineer, and Conductor Sheely had charge of its train.

They, with all the rest of the crew, escaped by flight when they saw the flood.

The wonders of this playground, where a giant force played with ma.s.ses of iron, weighing scores of tons each, as a child might play with pebbles, begins with a bridge, or a piece of a bridge, about thirty feet long, that stands high and dry upon two ordinary stone abutments at Woodvale. The part of the bridge that remains spanned the Pennsylvania tracks. The tracks are gone, the bridge is gone on either side, the river is gone to a new channel, the very earth for a hundred yards around has been sc.r.a.ped off and swept away, but this little span remains perched up there, twenty feet above everything, in the midst of a desert of ruins--the only piece of a bridge that is standing from the railroad bridge to South Forks. It is a light iron structure, and the abutments are not unusually heavy. That it should be kept there, when everything else was twisted and torn to pieces, is one other queer freak of this flood. Near by are the wrecks of two freight trains that were standing side by side when the flood caught them. The lower ends of both trains are torn to pieces, the cars tossed around in every direction, and many of them carried away. The whole of the train on the track nearest the river was smashed into kindling wood. Its locomotive is gone entirely, perhaps because this other train acted as a sort of buffer for the second one. The latter has twenty-five or thirty cars that are uninjured, apparently. They could move off as soon as that wonderful engine, No. 1309, that stands with steam up at their head, gets ready to pull out. A second look, however, shows that the track is in many places literally washed from beneath the cars. Some of the trucks also are turned half way around and standing with wheels running across the track. But the force that did this left the light wood box cars themselves unharmed. They were loaded with dressed beef and provisions.

They have been emptied to supply the hungry in Johnstown.

In front of engine 1309 and this train the water played one of its most fantastic tricks with the rails. The debris of trees, logs, planks, and every description of wreckage is heaped up in front of the engine to the headlight, and is packed in so tightly that twenty men with ropes and axes worked all day without clearing all away. The track is absolutely gone from the front of the engine clear up to beyond Conemaugh. Parts of it lie about everywhere, twisted into odd shapes, turned upside down, stacked crosswise one above the other, and in one place a section of the west track has been lifted clear over the right track, runs along there for a ways, and then twists back into its proper place. Even stranger are the tricks the water has played with the rails where they have been torn loose from the ties. The rails are steel and of the heaviest weight used. They were twisted as easily as willow branches in a spring freshet in a country brook. One rail lies in the sand in the shape of a letter "S." More are broken squarely in two. Many times rails have been broken within a few feet of a fishplate, coupling them to the next rail, and the fragments are still united by the comparatively weak plates.

Every natural law would seem to show that the first place where they should have broken was at the joints.

There is little to indicate the recent presence of a railroad in the stretch from this spot up to the upper part of Conemaugh. The little plain into which the gap widened here, and in which stood the bulk of the town, is wiped out. The river has changed its course from one side of the valley to the other. There is not the slightest indication that the central part of the plain was ever anything but a flood-washed gulch in some mountain region. At the upper end of the plain, surrounded by a desert of mud and rock, stands a fantastic collection of ruined railroad equipments. Three trains stood there when the flood swept down the valley. On the outside was a local pa.s.senger train with three cars and a locomotive. It stands there yet, the cars tilted by the was.h.i.+ng of the tracks, but comparatively uninjured. Somehow a couple more locomotives have been run into the sand bank. In the centre a freight train stood on the track, and a large collection of smashed cars has its place now. It was broken all to pieces. Inside of all was the day express, with its baggage and express cars, and at the end three vestibule cars. It was from this train that a number of pa.s.sengers--fifteen certainly, and no one knows how many more--were lost. When the alarm came most of the pa.s.sengers fled for the high ground. Many reached it; others hesitated on the way, tried to run back to the cars, and were lost. Others stayed on the cars, and, after the first rush of the flood, were rescued alive.

Some of the freight cars were loaded with lime, and this leaped over the vestibule cars and set them on fire. All three of the vestibule cars were burned down to the trucks. These and the peculiar-shaped iron frames of the vestibules are all that show where the cars stood.

The reason the flood, that twisted heavy steel rails like twigs just below, did not wipe out these three trains entirely is supposed to be that just in front of them, and between them and the flood, was the round-house, filled with engines. It was a large building, probably forty feet high to the top of the ventilators in the roof. The wave of wrath, eye-witnesses say, was so high that these ventilators were beneath it. The round-house was swept away to its very foundations, and the flood played jackstraws with the two dozen locomotives lodged in it, but it split the torrent, and a part of it went down each side of the three trains, saving them from the worst of its force. Thirty-three locomotives were in and about the round-house and the repair shops near by. Of these, twenty-six have been found, or at least traced, part of them being found scattered down into Johnstown, and one tender was found up in Stony Creek. The other seven locomotives are gone, and not a trace of them has been found up to this time. It is supposed that some of them are in the sixty acres of debris above the bridge at Johnstown. All the locomotives that remain anywhere within sight of the round-house, all except those attached to the trains, are thrown about in every direction, every side up, smashed, broken, and useless except for old iron. The tenders are all gone. Being lighter than the locomotives, they floated easier, and were quickly torn off and carried away. The engines themselves were apparently rolled over and over in whichever direction the current that had hold of them ran, and occasionally were picked up bodily and slammed down again, wheels up, or whichever way chanced to be most convenient to the flood. Most of them lie in five feet of sand and gravel, with only a part showing above the surface. Some are out in the bed of the river.

A strange but very pleasant feature of the disaster in Conemaugh itself is the comparatively small loss of life. As the townspeople figure it out, there are only thirty-eight persons there positively known to have perished besides those on the train. This was partly because the buildings in the centre of the valley were mostly stores and factories, and also because more heed appears to have been paid to the warnings that came from up the valley. At noon the workmen in the shops were notified that there was danger, and that they had better go home. At one o'clock word was given that the dam was likely to go, and that everybody must get on high ground. Few remained in the central part of the valley when the high wave came through the gap.

Dore never dreamed a weirder, ghastlier picture than night in the Conemaugh Valley since the flood desolated it. Darkness falls early from the rain-dropping, gray sky that has palled the valley ever since it became a vast bier, a charnel-house fifteen miles long. The smoke and steam from the placers of smouldering debris above the bridge aid to hasten the night. Few lights gleam out, except those of the scattered fires that still flicker fitfully in the ma.s.s of wreckage. Gas went out with the flood, and oil has been almost entirely lacking since the disaster. Candles are used in those places where people think it worth while to stay up after dark. Up on the hills around the town bright sparks gleam out like lovely stars from the few homes built so high.

Down in the valley the gloom settles over everything, making it look, from the bluffs around, like some vast death-pit, the idea of entering which brings a shudder. The gloomy effect is not relieved, but rather deepened, by the broad beams of ghastly, pale light thrown across the gulf by two or three electric lights erected around the Pennsylvania Railroad station. They dazzle the eye and make the gloom still deeper.

Time does not accustom the eyes to this ghastly scene. The flames rising and falling over the ruins look more like witches' bale-fires the longer they are looked at. The smoke-burdened depths in the valley seem deserted by every living thing, except that occasionally, prowling ghoul-like about the edges of the ma.s.s of debris, may be seen, as they cross the beams of electric light, dark figures of men who are drawn to the spot day and night, hovering over the place where some chance movement may disclose the body of a wife, mother, or daughter gone down in the wreck. They pick listlessly away at the heaps in one spot for awhile and then wander aimlessly off, only to reappear at another spot, pulling feverishly at some rags that looked like a dress, or poking a stick into some hole to feel if there is anything soft at the bottom. At one or two places the electric lights show, with exaggerated and distorted shadows, firemen in big hats and long rubber coats, standing upon the edge of the bridge, steadily holding the hose, from which two streams of water shoot far out over the ma.s.s, sparkle for a moment like silver in the pale light, and then drop downward into the blackness.

For noise, there is heavy splas.h.i.+ng of the Conemaugh over the rapids below the bridge, the petulant gasping of an unseen fire-engine, pumping water through the hose, and the even more rapid but greater puffing of the dynamo-engine that, mounted upon a flat car at one end of the bridge, furnishes electricity for the lights. There is little else heard. People who are yet about gather in little groups, and talk in low tones as they look over the dark, watchfire-beaconed gulf. Everybody in Johnstown looks over that gulf in every spare moment, day or night.

Movement about is almost impossible, for the ways are only foot-paths about the bluffs, irregular and slippery. Every night people are badly hurt by falls over bluffs, through the bridge, or down banks. Lying about under sheds in ruined buildings, and even in the open air, wherever one goes, are the forms, wrapped in blankets, of men who have no better place to sleep, resembling nothing so much as the corpses that men are seen always to be carrying about the streets in the daytime.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DeBRIS ABOVE THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD BRIDGE.]