History of the Johnstown Flood Part 18

Locomotives are puffing about, down into the heart of the town now, and the great whistle at the Cambria Iron Works blew for noon yesterday and to-day for the first time since the flood silenced it. To lighten the sombre aspect of the ruined area, heightened by the cold gray clouds hanging low about the hills, were acres of flame, where debris is being got rid of. Down in what was the heart of the city the soldiers have gone into camp, and little flags snap brightly in the high wind from their acres of white tents.

The relief work seems now to be pretty thoroughly organized, and thousands of men are at work under the direction of the committee. The men are in gangs of about a hundred each, under foremen, with mounted superintendents riding about overseeing the work.

The first effort, aside from that being made upon the gorge at the bridge, is in the upper part of the city and in Stony Creek Gap, where there are many houses with great heaps of debris covering and surrounding them. Three or four hundred men were set at work with ropes, chains, and axes upon each of these heaps, tearing it to pieces as rapidly as possible. Where there are only smashed houses and furniture in the heap the work is easy, but when, as in most instances, there are long logs and tree-trunks reaching in every direction through the ma.s.s, the task of getting them out is a slow and difficult one. The lighter parts of the wreck are tossed into heaps in the nearest clear s.p.a.ce and set on fire. Horses haul the logs and heavier pieces off to add them to other blazing piles. Everything of any value is carefully laid aside, but there is little of it. Even the strongest furniture is generally in little bits when found, but in one heap this morning were found two mirrors, one about six feet by eight in size, without a crack in it, and with its frame little damaged; the other one, about two feet by three in size, had a little crack at the bottom, but was otherwise all right.

Every once in a while the workmen about these wreck-heaps will stop their shouting and straining at the ropes, gather into a crowd at some one spot in the ruins, and remain idle and quiet for a little while.

Presently the group will stir itself a little, fall apart, and out of it will come six men bearing between them on a door or other improvised stretcher a vague form covered with a canvas blanket. The bearers go off along the irregular paths worn into the muddy plain, toward the different morgues, and the men go to work again.

These little groups of six, with the burden between them, are as frequent as ever. One runs across them everywhere about the place.

Sometimes they come so thick that they have to form in line at the morgue doors. The activity with which work was prosecuted brought rapidly to light the dark places within the ruins in which remained concealed those bodies that the previous desultory searching had not brought to light. Many of the disclosures might almost better have never seen the light, so heart-rending were they. A mother lay with three children clasped in her arms. So suddenly had the visitation come upon them that the little ones had plainly been s.n.a.t.c.hed up while at play, for one held a doll clutched tightly in its dead hand, and in one hand of another were three marbles. This was right opposite the First National Bank building, in the heart of the city, and near the same spot a family of five--father, mother, and three children--were found dead together. Not far off a roof was lifted up, and dropped again in horror at the sight of nine bodies beneath it. There were more bodies, or fragments of bodies, found, too, in the gorge at the bridge, and from the Cambria Iron Works the ghastly burden-bearers began to come in with the first contributions of that locality to the death list. The pa.s.sage of time is also bringing to the surface bodies that have been lying beneath the river further down, and from Nineveh bodies are continually being sent up to Morrellville, just below the iron works, for identification.

Wandering about near the ruins of Wood, Morrell & Co.'s store a messenger from Morrellville found a man who looked like the pictures of the Tennessee mountaineers in the _Century Magazine_, with an addition of woe and misery upon his gaunt, hairy face that no picture could ever indicate. He was tall and thin, and bent, and, from his appearance, abjectly poor. He was telling two strangers how he had lived right across from the store, with his wife and eight children. When the high water came and word was brought that the dam was in danger, he told his wife to get the children together and come with him. The water was deep in the streets, and the pa.s.sage to the bluff would have been difficult.

She laughed at him and told him the dam was all right. He urged her, ordered her, and did everything else but pick her up bodily and carry her out, but she would not come. Finally he set the example and dashed out, himself, through the water, calling to his wife to follow. As his feet began to touch rising ground, he saw the wall of water coming down the valley. He climbed in blind terror up the bank, helped by the rising water, and, reaching solid ground, turned just in time to see the water strike his house.

"When I turned my back," he said, "I couldn't look any longer."

Tears ran down his face as he said this. The messenger coming up just then said:--

"Your wife has been found. They got her down at Nineveh. Her brother has gone to fetch her up."

The man went away with the messenger.

"He didn't seem much rejoiced over the good news about his wife,"

remarked one of the strangers, who had yet to learn that Johnstown people speak of death and the dead only indirectly whenever possible.

It was the wife's body, not the wife, that had been found, and that the messenger was to fetch up. The bodies of this man's eight children have not yet been found. He is the only survivor of a family of ten.

Queer salvage from the flood was a cat that was taken out alive last evening. Its hair was singed off and one eye gone, but it was able to lick the hand of the man who picked it up and carried it off to keep, he said, as a relic of the flood. A white Wyandotte rooster and two hens were also dug out alive, and with dry feathers, from the centre of a heap of wrecked buildings.

The work of clearing up the site of the town has progressed so far that the outlines of some of the old streets could be faintly traced, and citizens were going about hunting up their lots. In many cases it was a difficult task, but enough old landmarks are left to make the determination of boundary lines by a new survey a comparatively easy matter.

The scenes in the morgues are disgusting in the highest degree. The embalmers are at work cutting and slashing with an apathy born of four days and nights of the work, and such as they never experienced before.

The boards on which the bodies lie are covered with mud and slime, in many instances.

Men with dynamite, blowing up the drift at the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge, people in the drift watching for bodies, people finding bodies in the ruins and carrying them away on stretchers or sheets, the bonfires of blazing debris all over the town, the soldiers with their bayonets guarding property or taking thieves into custody, the tin-starred policemen with their base ball clubs promenading the streets and around the ruins, the scenes of distress and frenzy at the relief stations, the crash of buildings as their broken remnants fall to the ground--this is the scene that goes on night and day in Johnstown, and will go on for an indefinite time. Still, people have worked so in the midst of such excitement, with the pressure of such an awful horror on their minds that they can get but little rest even when they wish to.

Men in this town are too tired to sleep. They lie down with throbbing brains that cannot stop throbbing, so that even the sense of thinking is intense agony.

The undertakers and embalmers claim that they are the busiest men in town, and that they have done more to help the city than any other workmen. The people who attend the morgues for the purpose of identifying their friends and relatives are hardly as numerous as before. Many of them are exhausted with the constant wear and tear, and many have about made up their minds that their friends are lost beyond recovery, and that there is no use looking for them any longer. Others have gone to distant parts of the State, and have abandoned Johnstown and all in it.

A little girl in a poor calico dress climbed upon the fence at the Adams Street morgue and looked wistfully at the row of coffins in the yard.

People were only admitted to the morgue in squads of ten each, and the little girl's turn had not come yet. Her name was Jennie Hoffman. She was twelve years old. She told a reporter that out of her family of fourteen the father and mother and oldest sister were lost. They were all in their home on Somerset Street when the flood came. The father reached out for a tree which went sweeping by, and was pulled out of the window and lost. The mother and children got upon the roof, and then a dash of water carried her and the eldest daughter off. A colored man on an adjoining house took off the little girls who were left--all of them under twelve years of age, except Jennie--and together they clambered over the roofs of the houses near by and escaped.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Day after day the work of reparation goes on. The city has been blotted out. Yet the reeking ruins that mark its site are teeming with life and work more vigorous than ever marked its noisy streets and panting factories. As men and money pour into Johnstown the spirit of the town greatly revives, and the people begin to take a much more favorable view of things. The one thing that is troubling people just now is the lack of ready money. There are drafts here in any quant.i.ty, but there is no money to cash them until the money in the vaults of the First National Bank has been recovered. It is known that the vaults are safe and that about $500,000 in cash is there. Of this sum $125,000 belongs to the Cambria Iron Company. It was to pay the five thousand employes of the works. The men are paid off every two weeks, and the last pay-day was to have been on the Sat.u.r.day after the fatal flood. The money was brought down to Johnstown, on the day before the flood, by the Adams Express Company, and deposited in the bank. After the water subsided, and it was discovered that the money was safe, a guard was placed around the bank and has been maintained ever since.

When the pay-day of the Cambria Iron Company does come it will be an impressive scene. The only thing comparable to it will be the roll-call after a great battle. Mothers, wives, and children will be there to claim the wages of sons, and husbands, and fathers. The men in the gloomy line will have few families to take their wages home to. The Cambria people do not propose to stand on any red-tape rules about paying the wages of their dead employes to the surviving friends and relatives. They will only try to make reasonably sure that they are paying the money to the right persons.

An a.s.sistant cashier, Thomas McGee, in the company's store saved $12,000 of the company's funds. The money was all in packages of bills in bags in the safe on the ground floor of the main building of the stores. When the water began to rise he went up on the second floor of the building, carrying the money with him. When the crash of the reservoir torrent came Mr. McGee clambered upon the roof, and just before the building tottered and fell he managed to jump on the roof of a house that went by. The house was swept near the bank. Mr. McGee jumped off and fell into the water, but struck out and managed to clamber up the bank. Then he got up on the hills and remained out all night guarding his treasure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLUMBIA, PA., UNDER THE FLOOD.]

At dawn of Thursday the stillness of the night, which had been punctured frequently by the pistol and musket shots of vigilant guards scaring off possible marauders, was permanently fractured by the arousing of gangs of laborers who had slept about wherever they could find a soft spot in the ruins, as well as in tents set up in the centre of where the town used to be. The soldiers in their camps were seen about later, and the railroad gang of several hundred men set out up the track toward where they had left off work the night before. Breakfast was cooked at hundreds of camp-fires, and about brick-kilns, and wherever else a fire could be got. At seven o'clock five thousand laborers struck pick and shovel and saw into the square miles of debris heaped over the city's site. At the same time more laborers began to arrive on trains and march through the streets in long gangs toward the place where they were needed. Those whose work was to be pulling and hauling trailed along in lines, holding to their ropes. They looked like gangs of slaves being driven to a market. By the time the forenoon was well under way, seven thousand laborers were at work in the city under the direction of one hundred foremen. There were five hundred cars and as many teams, and half a dozen portable hoisting engines, besides regular locomotives and trains of flat cars that were used in hauling off debris that could not be burned. With this force of men and appliances at work the ruined city, looked at from the bluffs, seemed to fairly swarm with life, wherever the flood had left anything to be removed. The whole lower part of the city, except just above the bridge, remained the deserted mud desert that the waters left. There was no cleaning up necessary there.

Through the upper part of the city, where the houses were simply smashed to kindling wood and piled into heaps, but not ground to pieces under the whirlpool that bore down on the rest of the city, acres of bonfires have burned all day. The stifling smoke, blown by a high wind, has made life almost unendurable, and the flames have twirled about so fiercely in the gusts as to scorch the workmen some distance away. Citizens whose houses were not damaged beyond salvation have almost got to work in clearing out their homes and trying to make them somewhere near habitable. In the poorer parts of the city often one story and a half frame cottages are seen completely surrounded by heaps of debris tossed up high above their roofs. Narrow lanes driven through the debris have given the owners entrance to their homes.

With all the work the apparent progress was small. A stranger seeing the place for the first time would never imagine that the wreck was not just as the flood left it. The enormity of the task of clearing the place grows more apparent the more the work is prosecuted, and with the force now at work the job cannot be done in less than a month. It will hardly be possible to find room for any larger force.

The railroads added largely to the bustle of the place. Long freight trains, loaded with food and clothing for the suffering, were continually coming in faster than they could be unloaded. Lumber was also arriving in great quant.i.ties, and hay and feed for the horses was heaped up high alongside the tracks. Hundreds of men were swarming over the road-bed near the Pennsylvania station, strengthening and improving the line. Work was begun on frame sheds and other temporary buildings in several places, and the rattle of hammers added its din to the shouts of the workmen and the crash of falling wreckage.

Some sort of organization is being introduced into other things about the city than the clearing away of the debris. The Post-office is established in a small brick building in the upper part of the city.

Those of the letter carriers who are alive, and a few clerks, are the working force. The reception of mail consists of one damaged street letter-box set upon a box in front of the building and guarded by a carrier, who has also to see that there is no crowding in the long lines of people waiting to get their turn at the two windows where letters and stamps are served out. A wide board, stood up on end, is lettered rudely, "Post-office Bulletin," and beneath is a slip of paper with the information that a mail will leave the city for the West during the day, and that no mail has been received. There are many touching things in these Post-office lines. It is a good place for acquaintances who lived in different parts of the city to find out whether each is alive or dead.

"You are through all right, I see," said one man in the line to an acquaintance who came up this morning.

"Yes," said the acquaintance.

"And how's your folks? They all right, too?" was the next question.

"Two of them are--them two little ones sitting on the steps there. The mother and the other three have gone down."

Such conversations as this take place every few minutes. Near the Post-office is the morgue for that part of the city, and other lines of waiting people reach out from there, anxious for a glimpse at the contents of the twenty-five coffins ranged in lines in front of the school-building, that does duty for a dead-house. Only those who have business are admitted, but the number is never a small one. Each walks along the lines of coffins, raises the cover over the face, glances in, drops the cover quickly, and pa.s.ses on. Men bearing ghastly burdens on stretchers pa.s.s frequently into the school-house, where the undertakers prepare the bodies for identification.

A little farther along is the relief headquarters for that part of the city, and the streets there are packed all day long with women and children with baskets on their arms. So great is the demand that the people have to stand in line for an hour to get their turn. A large unfinished building is turned into a storehouse for clothing, and the people throng into it empty-handed and come out with arms full of underclothing and other wearing apparel. At another building the sanitary bureau is serving out disinfectants.

The workmen upon the debris in what was the heart of the city have now reached well into the ruins and are getting to where the valuable contents of jewelry and other stores may be expected to be found, and strict watch is being kept to prevent the theft of any such articles by the workmen or others. In the ruins of the Wood, Morrell & Co. general store a large amount of goods, chiefly provisions and household utensils, has been found in fairly good order. It is piled in a heap as fast as gotten out, and the building is being pulled down.

About the worst heap of wreckage in the centre of the city is where the Cambria Library building stood, opposite the general store. This was a very substantial and handsome building and offered much obstruction to the flood. It was completely destroyed, but upon its site a ma.s.s of trees, logs, heavy beams, and other wreckage was left, knotted together into a ma.s.s only extricable by the use of the ax and saw. Two hundred men have worked at it for three days and it is not half removed yet.

The Cambria Iron Company have several acres of gravel and clay to remove from the upper end of its yard. Except for an occasional corner of some big iron machine that projects above the surface no one would ever suspect that it was not the original earth. In one place a freight car brake-wheel lies just on the surface of the ground, apparently dropped there loosely. Any one who tries to kick it aside or pick it up finds that it is still attached to its car, which is buried under a solid ma.s.s of gravel and broken rock. Several lanes have been dug through this ma.s.s down to the old railroad tracks, and two or three of the little yard engines of the iron company, resurrected with smashed smoke-stacks and other light damage, but workable yet, go puffing about hardly visible above the general level of the new-made ground.

The progress of the work upon the black and still smoking ma.s.s of charred ruins above the bridge is hardly perceptible. There is clear water for about one hundred feet back from the central arch, and a little opening before the two on each side of it. When there is a good-sized hole made before all three of these arches, through which the bulk of the water runs, it is expected that the stuff can be pulled apart and set afloat much more rapidly. Dynamiter Kirk, who is overseeing the work, used up the last one hundred pounds of the explosive early this afternoon, and had to suspend operations until the arrival of two hundred pounds more that was on the way from Pittsburgh.

The dynamite has been used in small doses for fear of damaging the bridge. Six pounds was the heaviest charge used. Even with this the stone beneath the arches of the bridge is charred and crumbling in places, and some pieces have been blown out of the heavy coping. The whole structure shakes as though with an earthquake at every discharge.

The dynamite is placed in holes drilled in logs matted into the surface of the raft, and its effect being downward, the greatest force of the explosion is upon the ma.s.s of stuff beneath the water. At the same time each charge sent up into the air, one hundred feet or more, a fountain of dirt, stones, and blackened fragments of logs, many of them large enough to be dangerous. The rattling crash of their fall upon the bridge follows hard after the heavy boom of the explosion. One of the worst and most unexpected objects with which the men on the raft have to contend is the presence in it of hundreds of miles of telegraph wire wound around almost everything there and binding the whole ma.s.s together.

No bodies have yet been brought to the surface by the operations with dynamite, but indications of several buried beneath the surface are evident. A short distance back from where the men are not at work, bodies continue to be taken out from the surface of the raft at the rate of ten or a dozen a day. The men this afternoon came across hundreds of feet of polished copper pipe, which is said to have come from a Pullman car. It was not known until then that there was a Pullman car in that part of the raft. The remnants of a vestibule car are plainly seen at a point a hundred feet away from this.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

The first thing that Johnstown people do in the morning is to go to the relief stations and get something to eat. They go carrying big baskets, and their endeavor is to get all they can. There has been a new system every day about the manner of dispensing the food and clothing to the sufferers. At first the supplies were placed where people could help themselves. Then they were placed in yards and handed to people over the fences. Then people had to get orders for what they wanted from the Citizens Committee, and their orders were filled at the different relief stations. Now the whole matter of receiving and dispensing relief supplies has been placed in the hands of the Grand Army of the Republic men. Thomas A. Stewart, commander of the Department of Pennsylvania, G.

A. R., arrived with his staff and established his headquarters in a tent near the headquarters of the Citizens Committee, and opposite the temporary post-office. Over this tent floats Commander Stewart's flag, with purple border, bearing the arms of the State of Pennsylvania. The members of his staff are: Quartermaster-General Tobin Taylor and his a.s.sistant H. J. Williams, Chaplain John W. Sayres, and W. V. Lawrence, quartermaster-general of the Ohio Department. The Grand Army men have made the Adams Street relief station a central relief station, and all the others, at Kernville, the Pennsylvania depot, Cambria City, and Jackson and Somerset Street, sub-stations. The idea is to distribute supplies to the sub-stations from the central station, and thus avoid the jam of crying and excited people at the committee's headquarters.