"Very truly, your friend and brother,
"John West.
"Bangor, Maine, March 30, 1849."
The editor of the Bangor Courier, in some cheerful remarks upon the incidents of the event, observes:
"We could not bring ourselves to believe that the market-house, in which we had our office, would be removed. We were induced to move our materials at the earnest solicitation of friends, and under their strong advice. We felt all the while as though the alarm would soon be over, and labor resumed in the old premises, and therefore a clumsy article here and another there were left, until the value of the aggregate was about two hundred dollars, the removal of which we thought we had wisely avoided. The market moved off majestically, but with gentle dalliance, until it plunged forward from the bridge into the fast receding current of the stream, when it righted with a ship-like propriety, bearing aloft a beautiful flag-staff—emblem of Liberty, erected in honor of Henry Clay, the beloved and whole-hearted patriot and orator, who in private station receives the highest attentions and sincerest regards of the American people—and sped its way onward to the ocean, until happily bethinking how many little articles it contained which would be so missed and mourned, that it settled down with a determination to proceed no further. We visited the wreck in the evening, and, fearing it might prove our last, we bore away several pamphlets and documents as prizes. At an early hour yesterday morning we paid it another visit, when, in company with our office hands, and the kind help and timely suggestions of personal friends and a few strangers, we succeeded in securing every article of value. There happened to be one case of type left in one of the racks which had ridden out the perils and roughness of the voyage without spilling a type.
"It may be a little fanciful, perhaps, but there seems to be an increased value in these articles which have once slipped from us, made the voyage of the stream, and are, at length, so unexpectedly and singularly recovered. One of our citizens—a Kennebecker, by-the-way—was particularly zealous in saving the Whig flag-staff, declaring it should long remain to bear aloft the flag of freemen.
"The whole river seems to have been an entire mass of ice, partly solid and partly porous. The sudden rise of the river excited alarm, and its sudden subsidence, at the rate of about two feet a minute, caused astonishment.
"There is in the upper side, and near the middle of Exchange street, a large cake of ice more than five feet thick. On Broad street there are ice-balls twenty-five feet in diameter, and scattered about in every direction are thousands of smaller masses.
"It will be difficult for people who did not witness it to realize that all the business part of the city was a pool in which large vessels might sail—that Exchange street, and Main street, and others lower down, were deep canals for half their length, and that Central street was a running river. But such things were, and hundreds of stores were under water! Boats were in requisition, and various contrivances were resorted to in the effort to turn an honest penny. Among them we noticed one fellow had taken the Wall street sign, and fastened it upon the stern of his boat, in order to popularize his boat and route. The scene in the vicinity of the steam-boat wharf or at the Rose Place is truly astonishing—such heaps of ice thrown in wild confusion, furnishing a capital idea of icebergs from the Northern Ocean. We advise our friends to visit these places, and to gather in some idea of the mighty power of the flood and of the process of making ice mountains.
"It is quite wonderful, considering the suddenness and extent of the rise of the water, that no more lives were lost in this vicinity. There were some families in great peril. A family living at the Point, between Brewer village and the river, were alarmed by the approach of the flood, and started, several women in the number, for higher land in the vicinity, but, before reaching it, the water was up to their armpits. They reached what was then an island, and were compelled to remain during the night. A family living near Crosby's ship-yard could not escape, and were taken off in a boat by one of the neighbors.