The Flood on the Flat.
The flood, with a front of twenty feet high, bristling with all manner of débris, struck straight across the flat, as though the river's course had always been that way. It cut off the outer two-thirds of the city with a line as true and straight as could have been drawn by a survey. On the part over which it swept there remains standing but one building, the brewery. With this exception, not only the houses and stores, but the pavements, sidewalks and curbstones, and the earth beneath for several feet are washed away. The pavements were of cinders from the Iron Works; a bed six inches thick and as hard as stone and with a surface like macadam. Over west of the washed-out portion of the city not even the broken fragments of these pavements are left.
Aside from the few logs and timbers left by the afterwash of the flood, there is nothing remaining upon the outer edge of the flat, including two of the four long streets of the city, except the brewery mentioned before and a grand piano. The water-marks on the brewery walls show the flood reached twenty feet up its sides and it stood on a little higher ground than buildings around it at that.
Thieves Had Rifled His Safe.
Mr. Steires, who on last Friday was the wealthiest man in town, on Sunday was compelled to borrow the dress which clothed his wife. When the flood began to threaten he removed some of the most valuable papers from his safe and moved them to the upper story of the building to keep them from getting wet. When the dam burst and Conemaugh Lake came down these, of course, went with the building. He got his safe Monday, but found that thieves had been before him, they having chiseled it open and taken everything but $65 in a drawer which they overlooked. Mr. Steires said to-day: "I am terribly crippled financially, but my family were all saved and I am ready to begin over again."
Rebuilding Going On Apace.
Oklahoma is not rising more quickly than the temporary buildings of the workmen's city, which includes 5,000 men at least, and who are mingling the sounds of hammers on the buildings they are putting up for their temporary accommodation, with the crash of the buildings they are tearing down. It seemed almost a waste of energy two days ago, but the different gangs are already eating their way towards the heart of the great masses of wreckage that block the streets in every direction.
A dummy engine has already been placed in position on what was the main street, and all the large logs and rafters that the men can not move are fastened with ropes and chains, and drawn out by the engine into a clear space, where they are surrounded by smaller pieces of wood and burned. Carloads of pickaxes, shovels and barrows are arriving from Baltimore for the workmen.
First Store Opened.
The first store was opened to-day by a grocer named W.A. Kramer, whose stock, though covered with mud and still wet from the flood, has been preserved intact. So far the greater part of his things have been bought for relics. The other storekeepers are dragging out the débris in their shops and shoveling the mud from the upper stories upon inclined boards that shoot it into the street, but with all this energy it will be weeks before the streets are brought to sight again.