The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado Part 1

The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado.

by Logan Marshall.

CHAPTER I

THE GREATEST CATACLYSM IN AMERICAN HISTORY

THE UNCONTROLLABLE FORCES OF NATURE--THE DEVASTATION OF OMAHA--THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD--A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD--THE TRAGEDY OF DEATH AND SUFFERING--THE SYMPATHY OF NATIONS--THE COURAGE OF THE STRICKEN--MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES.

Man is still the plaything of Nature. He boasts loudly of conquering it; the earth gives a little s.h.i.+ver and his cities collapse like the house of cards a child sets up. A French panegyrist said of our own Franklin: "He s.n.a.t.c.hed the scepter from tyrants and the lightning from the skies,"

but the lightning strikes man dead and consumes his home. He thinks he has mastered the ocean, but the records of Lloyds refute him. He declares his independence of the winds upon the ocean, and the winds upon the land touch his proud constructions and they are wrecks.

He imprisons the waters behind a dam and fetters the current of the rivers with bridges; they bestir themselves and the fetters snap, his towns are washed away and thousands of dead bodies float down the angry torrents. He burrows into the skin of the earth for treasure, and a thousand men find a living grave. Man has extorted many secrets from Nature; he can make a little use of a few of its forces; but he is impotent before its power.

Thus we pause to reflect upon the most staggering and tragic cataclysm of Nature that has been visited upon our country since first our forefathers won it from the Indian--the unprecedented succession of tornadoes, floods, storms and blizzards, which in March, 1913, devastated vast areas of territory in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and a dozen other states, and which were followed fast by the ravages of fire, famine and disease.

THE DEVASTATION OF OMAHA

The terrible suddenness and irresistible power of such catastrophes make them an object of overwhelming fear. The evening of Easter Sunday in Omaha was doubtless as placid and uneventful as a thousand predecessors, until an appalling roar and increasing darkness announced to the initiated the approach of a tornado, and in a few minutes forty-seven city blocks were leveled to the ground. The fairest and best built part of the city could no more withstand this awful force than the weakest hovels. Twelve hundred buildings were destroyed, most of them homes, but among them many churches and school houses. The just and the unjust fared alike in this riot of destruction and then the tornado rushed on to find other objects on which to wreck its force in Council Bluffs and elsewhere. It left in its wake many fires, but fortunately also a heavy rain, while later a deep fall of snow covered up the scene of its awful destruction.

THE TERROR OF THE FLOOD

With the rest of the country, fair Dayton sorrowed for Omaha. Two days later Omaha, bowed and almost broken by her own misfortune, looked with sympathy across to Dayton, whose woe was even greater. A thousand communities in the United States read the story and in their own sense of security sent eager proffers of a.s.sistance to the striken districts.

And not one of them has a.s.surance that it may not be next. There is no sure definition of the course of the earthquake, the path of the wind, the time and place of the storm-cloud. Science has its limitations. Only the Infinite is master of these forces.

In the legal parlance of the practice of torts such occurrences as these are known as "acts of G.o.d." Theologians who attempt to solve the mysteries of Providence have found in such occasions the evidence of Divine wrath and warning to the smitten people. But to seek the reason and to know the purpose, if there be purpose in it, is not necessary.

The fact is enough. It challenges, staggers, calls a halt, compels men and women to think--and even to pray.

But the flood did not confine itself to Dayton. It laid its watery hand of death and destruction over a whole tier of states from the Great Lakes to New England, and over the vast area to the southward which is veined by the Ohio River and its tributaries, and extending from the Mississippi Valley almost to the Atlantic seaboard. And as this awful deluge drained from the land into Nature's watercourses the demons of death and devastation danced attendance on its mad rush that laid waste the borderlands of the Mississippi River from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

A VIVID PICTURE OF THE FLOOD

Those who have never seen a great flood do not know the meaning of the Scriptural phrase, "the abomination of desolation."

An explosion, a railroad wreck, even a fire--these are bad enough in their pictorial effect of shattered ruins and confusion. But for giving one an oppressive sense of death-like misery, there is nothing equal to a flood.

I do not speak now of the loss of life, which is unspeakably dreadful, but of the scenic effect of the disaster. It just grips and benumbs you with its awfulness.

In the flat country of the Middle West there is less likelihood of swift, complete destruction than in narrow valleys, like those of Johnstown and Austin in Pennsylvania. But the effect is, if anything, more gruesome.

After the crest has pa.s.sed there are miles and miles of inundated land, with only trees and half-submerged buildings and floating wreckage to break the monotony; just a vast lake of yellow, muddy water, swirling and boiling as it seeks to find its level.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CITIES AND TOWNS INCLOSED BY THE HEAVY BLACK DOTTED LINES WERE THE CHIEF SUFFERERS BY THE SWEEP OF WATERS]

The scene in a town is particularly ghastly. How ghastly it is, you would have realized if you could have gone with the writer into the flooded districts of Ohio and Indiana, traveling from point to point in automobiles and motor boats, penetrating to the heart of the flood in boats even before the waters receded, and afterwards on foot. The upper floors of houses not torn from their foundations look all right, but it fairly makes you sick to see the waves of turbid water lapping at second floor sills, with tangled tree branches and broken furniture floating about. It seems horrible--it is horrible--to think of that yellow flood pouring into pleasant rooms where a few hours before the family sat in peace and fancied security--roaring over the threshold, swirling higher and higher against the walls, setting the cherished household treasures astray, driving the furniture hither and thither, drowning out cheerful rooms in darkness and death.

If anything can be worse than this, it is the scenes when the waters recede. The shade trees that stood in the streets so trim and beautiful are all bedraggled and bent, their branches festooned with floating wreckage and all manner of offensive things, their leaves sodden, their trunks caked with mud. The streets are seas of yellow ooze. Garden fences and hedges are twisted or torn away. Reeking heaps of indescribable refuse lie moldering where there were smooth lawns and bright flower beds. The houses that stand are all smeared with the dirt that shows the height of the flood.

But inside those houses--that is the dreadful thing. The rooms that the water filled are like damp caves. Mud lies thick on the floors, the walls are streaked with slime, and the paper hangs down in dismal festoons. Some pictures may remain hanging, but they are all twisted and tarnished. The furniture is a tumbled ma.s.s of confusion and filth. But the worst is the reek of decay and death about the place.

THE TRAGEDY OF DEATH AND SUFFERING

But there is something greater in its tragedy than all this--something greater than a great region where splendid cities, towns and humble villages alike are without resource--something greater than a region of broken dams and embankments and of placid rivers gone mad in flood, bridgeless, uncontrollable, widened into lakes, into seas. It is the hundreds of dead who died a hideous death, and the hundreds of thousands of living who are left helpless and homeless, and all but hopeless.

Just for one moment think--we in our warm, comfortable houses, comfortably clad, safe, smiling and happy--of the half million of our fellow creatures out yonder s.h.i.+vering and trembling and dying, in the grasp of the "destruction that wasteth at noonday," swiftly pursued by "the pestilence which walketh in darkness." The leaping terror of the flames climaxes the terror of the harrowing day and the helpless, hopeless night of agony and sorrow and despair.

Think of the men, women, children and the little babies crushed and mangled amid the wreck of shattered homes--but yesterday as beautiful and bright as ours--the pallid faces of hundreds floating as corpses in the stately streets turned into rus.h.i.+ng rivers by the relentless floods--brothers and sisters of ours, freezing and starving in homes turned suddenly into broken rafts and battered houseboats amid the muddy deluge, while the pitying stars look down at night upon thousands, wet, weeping, s.h.i.+vering, hungry, helpless and homeless, with the host of their unrecognized and unburied dead, in this frightful holocaust of fire and flood and pestilence.

Think of the region where people are huddled s.h.i.+vering on hills or housetops, watching the swelling waters; where practically every convenience, means of communication, comfort, appliance of civilization has been wiped out or stopped; where there is little to eat and no way of getting food save from the country beyond the waters; where millionaire and pauper, Orville Wright and humble scrub-woman, stand shoulder to shoulder in the bread-line that winds towards the relief stations, all alike dependent for once on charity for the barest sustenance.

THE SYMPATHY OF NATIONS

These are the tragedies that touch our hearts. These are the tragedies that have brought messages of condolence from King George of England, from the King of Italy, from the Shah of Persia and from other monarchs of Europe. These are the tragedies that impelled a widow in a small town in Ma.s.sachusetts, in sending her mite for the relief of the unfortunate, to write: "Just one year ago, when the ill-fated t.i.tanic deprived me of my all, the Red Cross Society lost not a moment in coming to my aid."

These are tragedies, too, that have prompted wage-earners all over the country to contribute to the relief of the flood sufferers a part of their own means of support that could ill be spared--soiled and worn bills and silver pieces laid down with unspoken sympathy by men and women and children, too, who wanted nothing said about it and turned and went out to face the struggle for existence again. These people did not think twice about whether they should help those in greater necessity than their own. They had been helping one another all their lives, and it seemed not so much a duty as a natural thing to do to respond to the call from the West, where people had lost their lives and others were homeless and suffering.

THE COURAGE OF THE STRICKEN

This spirit of helpfulness is a fine thing. But even finer was the spirit of self-help. Secretary Garrison's telegram to President Wilson from the flooded districts that the people in the towns and cities affected had the situation well in hand and that very little emergency a.s.sistance was needed, was a splendid testimonial to the courage and the resourcefulness of the people of the Middle West and the admirable cheerfulness which they exhibited during the trying days that followed the beginning of the calamity. There was not a whimper, but on the contrary there was a spirit of optimism that must prove to be most stimulating to the rest of the country.

MEN THAT SHOWED THEMSELVES HEROES

But perhaps the finest thing of all is the memory of the heroes that showed themselves. When death and disaster, in the form of flood and fire, swept Dayton, John H. Patterson arose with the tide to the level of events. Patterson is the man, more than any other, who brought cosmos out of chaos. When the flood was rising and n.o.body knew what the result would be, John H. Patterson began to wire for motor boats. He did not ask, he demanded. And the motor boats came. Patterson took all of the carpenters from the National Cash Register--one hundred and fifty skilled woodworkers--and set them to work making flat boats. The entire force of the great inst.i.tution was at the disposal of the people who needed help. And not a man or a woman was docked or dropped from the payroll. Everybody had time and a third.

As for John H. Patterson himself, he worked in three s.h.i.+fts of eight hours each; and for forty-eight hours he practically neither slept nor ate. And then, by way of rest, he took a Turkish bath and a horseback ride, and forty winks, and was again on the job--this man of seventy, who has known how to breathe and how to think and who carries with him the body of a wrestler and the lavish heart of youth!

There were many other heroes--too many to mention here--but we cannot forget John A. Bell, the telephone operator who was driven to the roof of the building, where with emergency instruments he cut in on one of the wires, and for two days and nights, in the driving rain, without food or drink or dry clothing, kept the outside world informed as to what was going on and the needs of the sufferers. What Bell endured during those long hours was enough to kill the heart in a very strong man. Yet his greeting to Governor c.o.x, over the crippled wire Thursday morning, was: "Good morning, Governor. The sun is s.h.i.+ning in Dayton."

Could anything be finer! Men with such spirit are great men, and the spirit that was in John H. Patterson and John A. Bell is the same spirit that was in John Jacob Astor, and Archie b.u.t.t, and George B. Harris, and Charles M. Hayes, and the band of musicians on the t.i.tanic that played in water waist deep.

As I stood amid the slimy ruins of Dayton the day after the waters receded, Brigadier-General Wood said to me, "There go Patterson and Bell. Would you like to shake hands with them?" And I said, "Just now I would rather shake hands with those two men than own the National Cash Register Company."

The Storms By Chester Firkins

And you are still the Master. We have reared Cities and citadels of seeming might, But in the pa.s.sing of a single night You rend them unto ruin. We who feared Nor flood nor wind nor wreckage fire-seared, We shudder helpless in the thunder-light; The garners cherished and the souls endeared Emptied and sudden-slaughtered in our sight.

You, whom the Cave Man battled, whom we call Nature, because we know no better name, G.o.ddess of gentleness and torture-flame, Still are you despot; still are we the thrall; Still we can only wait what Fate may fall From your wild pinions that no man can tame.

Nor gold or gain, nor battlement or wall Shall guard us from the primal flood and flame.