The Johnstown Horror!!! Part 44

Working on the Stone Bridge Debris.

By seven o'clock the whole valley was full of people and the scene was a most animated one. The various sections of the flooded territory were full of men busy in searching for the dead, removing and burning the debris. At eight o'clock this morning five bodies had been taken from the ma.s.s at the stone bridge. A large force of men have been working all day on this part of the wreck, but so great is the quant.i.ty of wreckage to be gone over and removed that while much work is done very slow progress is being made. The continued falling of the river renders the removal of the debris every day more arduous, and where a few days ago the timbers when loosened would float away, now they have to be moved by hand, making the work very slow.

A most welcome arrival this morning was Dr. B. Bullen of disinfectant fame. He brought with him fifty barrels more of his disinfectant. The doctor will take charge of the disinfecting of the dangerous sections of the flooded district and notably at the stone bridge. Twenty-five barrels have already been used with most favorable results. Dr. Bullen was a former resident of Johnstown and lost thirty relatives in the flood, among them three brothers-in-law, three uncles and two aunts.

Clearing the Cambria Iron Works.

The Cambria Iron Company's Works presented a busy scene to-day. At least nine hundred men are at work, and most rapid progress is being made in clearing away the wreck. It is said that the works will start up in about three weeks.

There is little change in the situation. Every one is working with the one end in view, to clear away the wreckage and give the people of Johnstown a chance to rebuild. The laborers working at the Cambria Iron Works and on the Pennsylvania Railroad seem to be making rapid progress.

This is no doubt for the reason that these men are more used to this kind of work. About ten o'clock the rain was over and the sun came out with its fierce June heat.

A number of charges of dynamite were fired during the day, and each time with good effect. The channels through to the bridge are almost clear of debris, and each charge of dynamite has loosened large quant.i.ties of the wreckage.

This is the eighth day since the demon of destruction swept down the valley of the Conemaugh, but the desolation that marks its angry flight is still visible in all its intensity and horror. The days that have been spent by weary toilers whose efforts were steeled by grief have done little to repair the devastation wrought in one short hour by the potent fury of the elements. To the watchers on the mountain side all seems yet chaos and confusion. The thousand fires that spot the valley show that the torch is being used to complete the work of annihilation where repair is impossible and the smoke curls upward. It reminds one of the peace offerings of ancient Babylon.

Uncle Sam's Men on Hand.

The corps of government engineers that arrived last night has already demonstrated the valuable a.s.sistance which it is capable of rendering in these times of emergency. With but a few hours rest, those men were up ere sunrise this morning, and by eight o'clock a pontoon bridge had been stretched across the river at Kernville. Acting in conjunction with the Pennsylvania military authorities they are pursuing their labors at various other points, and by sundown it is confidently expected that pontoon bridges will be erected at all places where the necessities of traffic demand. It is the fact, probably not generally known, that the great government of the United States owns only 500 feet of pontoon bridges, and that these are the same that were used by the federal forces in the civil war, twenty-five years ago. The bridges that are to be used at Johnstown were brought from West Point and Willet's Point, where they have been for years used in the ordinary course of instruction in the military and engineer corps.

Secret Society Relief.

The following official announcements have been made:

A Masonic relief committee has been organized and solicits aid for distressed Freemasons and their families.

WILLIAM A. DONALDSON, Chairman.

OFFICE OF SUPREME COMMANDER, KNIGHTS OF THE MYSTIC CHAIN, WILMINGTON, DEL., June 8, 1889.--In view of the great calamity that has befallen our brothers at Johnstown, Pa., and vicinity, I, H.G. Rettes, Supreme Commander, request that wherever the Order of the Knights of the Mystic Chain exists there be liberal donations made for our afflicted brothers.

Affairs at the tremendous stone bridge wreckage pile seem to have resolved themselves into a state of almost hopelessness. It is amazing the routine into which everything has fallen in this particular place.

Every morning at seven o'clock a score of Lilliputs come mechanically from huts and tents or the bare hillside, and wearily and weakly go to work clearing away this ma.s.s, and at the rate they are now proceeding it will actually be months before the debris is cleared away and the last body found. Fortunately the wind is blowing away from us or we would have olfactory evidence that what is not found is far worse than what has been exposed.

Then it may be good business and good policy to have these few workers fool around the edge of the wreckage for five or ten minutes adjusting a dynamite blast, then hastily scramble away and consume as much more time before a tremendous roar announces the ugly work is done, but the onlookers doubt it. Sometimes, when an extra large shot is used, the water, bits of wood and iron, and other shapes more fearfully suggestive, fly directly upward in a solid column at least three hundred feet high, only to fall back again in almost the same spot, to be tugged and pulled at or coaxed to float down an unwilling current that is falling so rapidly now that even this poor mode of egress will soon be shut entirely off.

The fact of the matter is simply this: They are not attempting to recover bodies at the bridge, but as one blast tears yards of stuff into flinders it is shoved indifferently into the water, be it human or brute, stone, wood or iron, to float down toward Pittsburgh or to sink to the bottom, may be a few yards from where it was pushed off from the main pile.

Up in the centre of the town the debris is piled even higher than at the stone bridge, but the work is going on fairly well. The men seem to be working more together and enter into the spirit of the thing. Besides this, horses and wagons can get at the wrecks, and it really looks as if this part of the ruins has been exaggerated, and some of the foremen there say that at the present rate of work going on through the town all the bodies that ever will be recovered will be found within the next ten days. As to the condition these bodies are in, that has become almost a matter of indifference, except as to the effect upon the health of the living.

Compared with other Calamities.

An eye-witness writes as follows:

The scene is one that cannot be described in outline--it must be told in detail to become intelligible. Never before in this country, at least, was there a disaster so stupendous, so overwhelming, so terrible in its fierce and unheralded onset and so sorrowful in its death-dealing work.

I traversed the Mill River Valley the day after the bursting of the Mill River dam. I went over Wallingford, in Connecticut, a few hours after that terrible cyclone had swept through the beautiful New England village. I stood on the broken walls of the Brooklyn Theatre and looked down upon hecatombs of dead sacrificed in that holocaust to Momus. Each of these was in itself a terrible calamity, but here is not only what was most terrible in all these, but every horrifying feature of the Mill River flood, the Wallingford cyclone and the Brooklyn Theatre fire is here magnified tenfold, nay, a hundred fold. And what is even more terrible than the scenes of devastation, the piles of dead that have been unearthed from the ruins and the mangled human bodies that still remain buried in the debris, is the simple but startling fact that this disaster ought not to have happened.

The flood was not due to the rains. This calamity is not the work of the unprovoked fury of the angry elements. This fair town and the populous valley above it, all the varied industries of this thriving city, all these precious lives are a sacrifice to the selfishness of a few men whose purses were bigger than their hearts. There would have been no flood if these rich men had not built an artificial pond in which to catch fish.

The now famous dam was only a mud bank. For years it was a constant menace to Johnstown and the Conemaugh Valley. It has long been only a question of time when the calamity that has befallen these people should befall them. It came at last because the arrogance of the purse and the pleasure-seeking selfishness of wealth were blind to the safety of a populous community.

The cause of the Johnstown disaster was wholly due to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. This club was specially chartered by the Legislature, and notwithstanding there was some opposition at the time, it was accorded the privilege of making an artificial lake and fish pond by means of an embankment. The site chosen was the old dam on South Fork Creek, about two miles above the village of South Fork, on the Conemaugh river. This dam was built by the Pennsylvania Ca.n.a.l in 1830 as a feeder to the ca.n.a.l below Johnstown. When the ca.n.a.l was finally abandoned, after pa.s.sing into the hands of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the dam was sold to a private buyer for the very reasonable sum of $700. By him it was afterwards conveyed to the Fishing and Hunting Club for $1,400. This was about twenty years ago. The club spent $22,000 in rebuilding the dam and erected a beautiful club house on the west bank of the artificial lake. Beside the club house there are from twelve to fifteen cottages, the summer residences of members of the club, all built since the acquisition of the property twenty years ago. Ten of these cottages are visible from the embankment where the break occurred.

It was a beautiful spot before the disaster, but this artificial lake in its placid beauty was a menace to the lives and property of the people in the Conemaugh Valley from its completion to its destruction.

The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was a very aristocratic and exclusive organization. Not even Tuxedo puts on more airs. It was composed of about seventy members, a baker's dozen of them Pittsburgh millionaires.

These wealthy gentlemen and their a.s.sociates never so much as recognized the existence of the common clay of South Fork, except to warn all intruders to keep off the land and water of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Their placards still stare sight-seers in the face. One of these reads:

PRIVATE PROPERTY.

ALL TRESPa.s.sERS FOUND HUNTING OR FISHING ON THESE GROUNDS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW.

Another is as follows:

PRIVATE PROPERTY.

NO FISHING OR HUNTING ON THESE PREMISES, UNDER PENALTY OF THE LAW, $100.

SOUTH FORK HUNTING AND FISHING CLUB.

Only an Earthwork.

Strenuously as the club insisted upon exacting the full penalties and extent of the law for encroachments upon its privileges, it was quite heedless of the rights of others. There probably never was in the world a case of such blind fatuity as that of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in building and maintaining its dam. From the first it must have been known to every member of the club, as it certainly was to every resident of the South Fork and Conemaugh Valleys, that if the water ever began to run over the breast of the dam the dam itself would give way. The dam was only a clay embankment. There was no masonry whatever--at least there is none visible in the break. The bottom was of brushwood and earth--some people in the South Fork valley say hay and sand. In consequence, the people below the dam who knew how it was built have always regarded it as a menace to their safety. Indeed, one man employed in its construction was discharged by the club or its contractor for protesting against the dam as insecure. His crime consisted in declaring that an embankment made in that way could not resist the force of an overflow. He was telling the simple truth, which was clear to every one except men disposed to take chances.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A Walk Through the Valley of Death.

In the following graphic narrative one of the eye-witnesses of the fearful ruin and slaughter represents himself as a guide, and if the reader will consider himself as the party whom the guide is conducting, a vivid impression of the scene of the great destruction may be obtained.

"h.e.l.lo, where on earth did you come from? And what are you doing here, anyhow? Oh! you just dropped in to see the sights, eh? Well, there are plenty of them and you won't see the like of them again if you live a century. What's that? You have been wandering around and got tangled up in the ruins and don't know where you are? Well, that's not strange. I have been lost myself a dozen times. It's a wonder you haven't got roasted by some of those huge bonfires. But here, you come with me. Let me be your guide for the afternoon and I'll put you in the way of seeing what is left of Johnstown.

"First, let's climb up this bluff just before us and we shall have a first-rate view of things. Skip across this little temporary bridge over this babbling brook and now--climb! Whew! that takes your breath, doesn't it? But it is worth the trouble. Now you see we are standing on an embankment perhaps thirty feet high. We are in the midst, too, of a lot of tents. It is here that the soldier boys are encamped. Off to one side you see the freight depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the tracks, you notice, run along on the top of this embankment. It is in that freight depot that Adjutant General Hastings has his headquarters.

We will walk over there presently, but first let's take a look at our surroundings.

Prospect Hill.

"You notice, I suppose, that this flat spreading out before us at the bottom of the embankment is inclosed on all sides by mountains. They are shaped something like a triangle and we are standing at the base. Here, let me make a rough sketch of it on the back of this envelope. It will help us out a little. There! That figure 1 is the freight depot, near which we are standing. Towering up above us are houses and up there a canvas city for refugees. There is a temporary hospital there, too, and a graveyard, where many a poor victim of the flood lies. The background is a high hill. The people here call it Prospect Hill. The flood!

Gracious! what a view the people up the hill must have had of it as it whirled, and eddied, and roared and rushed through the town, for this great flat before us was where the main portion of Johnstown stood.

[Ill.u.s.tration]