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 mass, and at the rate they are now proceeding it will actually be months before the débris 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 débris 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 débris, 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.