Nurses care for Mrs. Warren Steele, 37, of Billings and other quake injured campers in the interior of Johnson Flying Service DC-3 on flight from West Yellowstone to Bozeman.(Wide World)
“As Mrs. Greene took us around, and gave the case histories, we saw what a resourceful job she and another nurse, Mrs. Fred Donegan of Vandalia, Ohio, had done in the absence of drugs, medications, and even proper bandages. We helped with the dressings we’d brought, and the medicines for pain and shock.
“We were there an hour to an hour and a half. These injured needed hospital care, and there were no plans, as yet, to get them out. They couldn’t travel by boat. So we got in our boat and went back to West Yellowstone to arrange for the injured to get from there to Bozeman and to the hospital when the helicopters did arrive.”
Slide victim Ray Painter, 46, of Odgen, Utah is carried by volunteers from helicopter to evacuation plane at West Yellowstone airstrip.(Wide World)
Reporters, photographers, and doctors all giving attention to quake victims, resting on bales of hay at West Yellowstone Airport hangar shed.(Salt Lake Tribune)
Shortly after noon, the first helicopter, a two-rotor silver Air Force H-21 from Hill Air Force Base, Utah, took its first load of four injured from the dam.
At West Yellowstone Airport, as arranged by Dr. Bayles, these injured—in sleeping bags—were immediately loaded onto the floor of a converted B18, which had brought cargo to “West,” and flown to Bozeman. There Dr. Bayles had organized a fleet of station wagons to rush them to the hospital for the care that was to save most of their lives.