In Ennis County Warehouse, Red Cross Area Disaster Director Ralph Carlson, who flew to the quake scene from San Francisco, looks puzzled as he surveys part of the truckload of material recovered by slidewalkers searching for clues to identity of those buried under slide.(Christopherson)
Skerritt, who’s like a quieter, shorter version of Kefauver, worked all that week and for months afterwards on the identity problem. During the first weeks, Red Cross volunteers and personnel worked around the clock to answer the flood of inquiries. There were some 3,000 of them. They felt fortunate that no scout troops turned up missing.
These queries, they painstakingly sifted, sorted, and winnowed down. With tireless persistence, they kept at it, writing to the source of each of the thousands of inquiries to find out if the missing had turned up. New inquiries kept coming in—and still do, asking about people that just plain haven’t been heard from, and their relatives, or friends have thought of the slide as a possible explanation.
Through tangible tie-ins, like postcards, letters, the use of credit cards in the area just before the quake, phone calls from the area, they finally got down to a list of those highly probable as slide victims whose bodies will never be uncovered.
Gruesome reminder? Days after the quake, these children’s shoes and clothing still lay in the dried-up streambed below the massive slide.(Christopherson)
Take the case of Roger Provost, an official at the California State Prison at Soledad, California. He had been in touch with his office up to the date of the quake. He was a methodical type. Upon leaving California, he left a planned vacation itinerary stating that the family was to proceed from Yellowstone down the Madison River (August 18, 19, 20 and 21) and to Bozeman, etc. Several cards to friends and relatives postmarked Aug. 16 at West Yellowstone, Montana, stated that the family was at a trailer campsite “on the Madison River, about 30 miles from Yellowstone.”
Another family, Robert J. Williams and wife, Coy, children Michael, 7; Steven, 11; and Christy, 3, of Idaho Falls, had told relatives they planned on fishing the Madison River. They registered as visitors at the Museum in Virginia City on August 17, 1959, and weren’t heard of again.
