With Miss Boardman at the head of the party the Red Cross relief train left Washington Friday over the Chesapeake and Ohio, bound for Columbus.
The train comprised six express coaches, two of which were loaded with steel cots for use of the homeless. Two others were loaded with bedding and clothing supplies and two with foodstuffs of all sorts.
Hurrying to Omaha to assist in relief work in that city, Ernest P. Bicknell, of the American National Red Cross, halted in Chicago. Informed of the serious situation in Indiana and Ohio, he telegraphed to Omaha and received word that the relief work was well in hand. He then decided to go to the flood-stricken districts in Indiana and Ohio. Reaching Columbus, Mr. Bicknell had soon established Red Cross headquarters and the corps under his direction was working in closest harmony with the state flood relief committee, the Governor of Ohio and the United States army and navy relief officials.
The disaster in the Middle West was the greatest the Red Cross Society was ever called upon to deal with. The amount of suffering entailed by the flood far exceeded that of the San Francisco earthquake and fire.
RAILROADS BRAVELY HELPING
Bravely the railroads worked their way into the stricken territory. While a blizzard raged in Ohio from Cleveland to Cincinnati, with the temperature down to twenty-eight degrees above zero, the railroads—which means all the railroads in every section, the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the Erie, the Baltimore and Ohio, and their allied lines—threw into the battle thousands upon thousands of men, trainload after trainload of machinery, and money rewards as a stimulus for the repair of miles of washed-out tracks and shattered bridges. Every division superintendent of every line in the district, his assistants, usually with some high executive officer of the system in control; every man and boy able to handle a pick or shovel or crowbar, to carry his end of a girder or drag a coil of rope, was out on the job.
It was not for any selfish purpose that the roads threw this immense power into the work. Their object was to open up rail communication with the desolated cities, towns and villages and send relief trains with bread, with blankets, with medicines, doctors and nurses. It was not a race for money.
"We will carry every pound of supplies for the devastated district free over any lines" announced the Pennsylvania, and it added free passage for doctors, nurses and every other good Samaritan.
"No charge," was the echo of the New York Central, and that order went to every freight and passenger agent of the big system everywhere. The Baltimore and Ohio, the Erie, and every other line followed in an instant. The railroads helped all they could.
RELIEF FROM STATES AND INDIVIDUALS